[Chapter]

I should like to conclude this discussion of the various levels of the relationship to objects as an operative system with some attempt to define `consumption'. It is to consumption, after all, that all aspects of practice in this area tend at present to lead.

Just so long as it is freed once and for all from its current meaning, that of a mechanism for satisfying needs, consumption may indeed be deemed a defining mode of our industrial civilization. For consumption is surely not that passive process of absorption and appropriation which is contrasted to the supposedly active mode of production, thus counterposing two oversimplified patterns of behaviour (and of alienation). It has to be made clear from the outset that consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system.

It has to be made clear that objects and material goods are not in fact the object of consumption -- they are the object merely of needs and of the satisfaction of needs. From time immemorial people have bought, possessed, enjoyed and spent, but this does not mean that they were `consuming'. The festivals of `primitive' peoples, the largesse of the feudal lord, the luxury of the nineteenth-century bourgeois -- none of these amounted to consumption. And if we are justified in using this term to describe present-day society, it is not because we now eat more or better, not because we absorb more images and messages, and not because we have more appliances and gadgets at our disposal. Neither the volume of goods nor the
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satisfaction of needs serves properly to define the notion of consumption, for these are simply the preconditions of consumption.

Consumption is not a material practice, nor is it a phenomenology of `affluence'. It is not defined by the nourishment we take in, nor by the clothes we clothe ourselves with, nor by the car we use, nor by the oral and visual matter of the images and messages we receive. It is defined, rather, by the organization of all these things into a signifying fabric: consumption is the virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent discourse. If it has any meaning at all, consumption means an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs.

Traditional symbolic objects (tools, furniture, the house itself) were the mediators of a real relationship or a directly experienced situation, and their substance and form bore the clear imprint of the conscious or unconscious dynamic of that relationship. They were thus not arbitrary. Although they were bound by connotations -- pregnant, freighted with connotations -- they remained living objects on account of their inward and transitive orientation with respect to human actions, whether collective or individual. Such objects are not consumed. To become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign. That is to say: it must become external, in a sense, to a relationship that it now merely signifies. It is thus arbitrary -- and not inconsistent with that concrete relationship: it derives its consistency, and hence its meaning, from an abstract and systematic relationship to all other sign-objects. Only in this context can it be `personalized', can it become part of a series, and so on; only thus can it be consumed, never in its materiality, but in its difference.

This conversion of the object to the systematic status of a sign implies the simultaneous transformation of the human relationship into a relationship of consumption -- of consuming and being consumed. In and through objects this relationship is at once consummated and abolished; [176] the object becomes its inescapable mediation -- and, before long, the sign that replaces it altogether.
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So what is consummated and consumed is never the object but the relationship itself, signified yet absent, simultaneously included and excluded; it is the idea of the relationship that is consumed in the series of objects that displays it.

The relationship is no longer directly experienced: it has become abstract, been abolished, been transformed into a sign-object, and thus consumed.

This status of the relationship/object is governed at every level by the imperatives of production. The whole apparatus of advertising suggests that the living relationship, with its contradictions, must not be allowed to disturb the `rational' order of production, and that it should be consumed like everything else. It must be `personalized' so that it can be incorporated into the system. Here we rediscover, in its most extreme expression, the formal logic of the commodity as analysed by Marx: just as needs, feelings, culture, knowledge -- in short, all the properly human faculties -- are integrated as commodities into the order of production, and take on material form as productive forces so that they can be sold, so likewise all desires, projects and demands, all passions and all relationships, are now abstracted (or materialized) as signs and as objects to be bought and consumed. Take the couple, for example, whose objective raison d'être is now the consumption of objects -- including the objects that formerly symbolized the relationship. [177]

The beginning of Georges Perec's novel Les choses is instructive in this context:

The eye, at first, would glide over the gray rug of a long corridor, high and narrow. The wall would be cabinets, whose copper fittings would gleam. Three engravings ... would lead to a leather curtain, hanging from large rings of black-veined wood, that a simple gesture would suffice to slide back.... It would be a living room, about twenty-one feet long and nine feet wide. On the left, in a sort of alcove, a large couch of worn black leather would be flanked by two book cases in pale wild-cherry wood, on which books would be piled helter-skelter. Above the divan a nautical chart would run the whole length of the wall panel. Beyond a little low table, under a silk prayer rug attached to the wall with three copper nails with large heads, and balancing
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the leather hanging, another divan, perpendicular to the first, upholstered in light brown velvet would lead to a small piece of furniture on high legs, lacquered in dark red, with three shelves that would hold bric-à-brac; agates and stone eggs, snuffboxes, jade ashtrays.... Farther on ... small boxes and records, next to a closed phonograph of which only four machine-turned steel knobs would be visible.... [178]

Despite the thick mellow nostalgia that envelops this `interior', it is clear that nothing in it has the slightest symbolic value any longer. One need only compare this description with any description of an interior by Balzac to see that no human relationship has left its imprint on these things: everything in Perec's décor is a sign, and purely a sign. Nothing has presence, nothing has a history -- even though everything is laden with references: Oriental, Scottish, Early American, etc. The only thing all these objects have is their uniqueness: they are abstract in their difference, which is their mode of referentiality, and enter into combination with one another precisely by virtue of that abstractness. We are indubitably in the realm of consumption. [179]

As Perec's novel continues, we get a sense of how a system of sign-objects of this kind functions: far from symbolizing the relationship, what these objects actually describe, from the externality of their continual `referring', is the relationship's emptiness, which is discernible at every moment in the lack of existence that each of the partners has for the other. Jérôme and Sylvie do not exist as a couple: their sole reality is as `Jérôme-and-Sylvie -- as a pure complicity surfacing within the system of objects that signifies it. Nor can it be said that objects are an automatic substitute for the relationship that is lacking, that they serve to fill a void: on the contrary, they describe this void, the locus of the relationship, pursuant to a process which is a way of not living the relationship while at the
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same time (save in cases of complete regression) exposing it to the light of the possibility of its being lived. Thus the relationship is not sucked into the absolute positivity of objects but articulated with those objects as with so many solid points in a chain of signifiers -- except that here the signifying configuration of objects is usually impoverished, schematic and closed, and deals only with the idea of a relationship, not with a relationship that can be lived. Leather couch, phonograph, bric-a-brac, jade ashtrays: it is the idea of the relationship that is signified in these objects, that is `consumed' in them and hence abolished as anything to be directly experienced.

This implies that consumption may be defined as a total idealist practice of a systematic kind which goes way beyond relations to objects and interpersonal relations and extends to every level of history, communication and culture. Thus the demand for culture is a living demand, but it is only the idea of the collector's edition or the colour lithograph in the dining-room that is actually consumed. The demand for revolution is likewise a living demand, but so long as it is not actualized in practice it will be consumed as the idea of Revolution. As an idea the Revolution is indeed eternal, and must needs remain eternally consumable just like any other idea -- all ideas, even the most contradictory, being capable of coexistence as signs in the idealist logic of consumption. The Revolution is therefore signified by a combinatorial terminology, a vocabulary of unmediated terms, in which it appears as already realized -- and by which it is indeed `consumed'. [180]

Similarly, objects of consumption constitute an idealist lexicon of signs wherein the will to live itself is discernible in an ever-receding materiality. Once again Perec's book makes the point:

It sometimes seemed to them that a whole life could go harmoniously by between these book-lined walls, among these objects so perfectly domesticated that the two of them would end up believing that they had been forever
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created for their own use alone.... But they would not feel themselves tied down by them; on certain days they would go looking for adventure. Nothing they planned would be impossible. [181]

But note the conditional in this last sentence -- and indeed, the novel goes on to give this prediction the lie: there are no more projects -- only objects. Not that the project has disappeared, exactly: it is just that its `realization' as a sign embodied in the object is taken as satisfaction enough. The object of consumption is thus the precise form of the project's self-renunciation.

This explains why THERE ARE NO LIMITS TO CONSUMPTION. If consumption were indeed what it is naïvely assumed to be, namely a process of absorption or devouring, a saturation point would inevitably be reached. If consumption were indeed tied to the realm of needs, some sort of progress towards satisfaction would presumably occur. We know very well, however, that nothing of the kind happens: people simply want to consume more and more. This compulsion is attributable neither to some psychological determinism (`once a drunk always a drunk', and so forth) nor to the pressure of some simple desire for prestige. That consumption seems irrepressible is due, rather, to the fact that it is indeed a total idealist practice which no longer has anything to do (beyond a certain threshold) either with the satisfaction of needs or with the reality principle. Its dynamism derives from the ever-disappointed project now implicit in objects. Thus embedded in unmediated form in the object, the project transfers its existential dynamic to the systematic and limitless acquisition of consumption's sign-objects. This means that consumption must henceforward either keep surpassing itself or keep repeating itself merely in order to remain what it is -- namely, a reason for living. The very will to live, fragmented, disappointed, signified, is condemned to repeat itself and repeatedly abolish itself in a succession of objects. In this context all attempts to `moderate' consumption or to devise a grid of needs capable of normalizing it attest to nothing but a naïve or grotesque moralism.
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The systematic and limitless process of consumption arises from the disappointed demand for totality that underlies the project of life. In their ideality sign-objects are all equivalent and may multiply infinitely; indeed, they must multiply in order at every moment to make up for a reality that is absent. Consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack.

Conclusion: Towards a Definition of Consumption

Note from page 200: 1. [Translator's note: The author here and in the ensuing discussion exploits the fact that French has only one word (consommer) for both `consume' and `consummate'. I have therefore been obliged to use the two English words, or to paraphrase, in order to retain all the resonances of the text.]

Note from page 201: 2. In the United States married couples have even been encouraged to get new wedding rings every year, and to make their relationship `meaningful' by buying gifts `together'.

Note from page 202: 3. Georges Perec, Les choses, une histoire des années soixante (Paris: Julliard, 1965), p. 12 [English translation by Helen R. Lane: Things: A Story of the Sixties (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 11-12).

Note from page 202: 4. In the Perec `interior' we are dealing with objects made transcendent by fashion, not with the `serial' objects of mass production. Total cultural constraint -- cultural terrorism -- reigns here. But this makes no difference to the system of consumption itself.

Note from page 203: 5. Consumed, that is, and at the same time consummated -- hence also destroyed. To say that the revolution is consumed/consummated in the idea of the Revolution means that the revolution is both fulfilled (formally) and abolished in that idea; and what is presented as already realized is thenceforward consumable in an unmediated manner, [Translator's note: On `consume'/`consummate', see note 1 above.]

Note from page 204: 6. Les chases, French edition, p. 15 [English trans., pp. 15-16].