OUGD601 | Packaging Research - 'The Consumer Society, Myths and Structures' by Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard, Jean, 'The Consumer Society, Myths and Structures'.  Sage Publications Ltd; 1 edition. 14th March 1998.

Part I, The Formal Liturgy Of The Object - Chapter 1: Profusion. page. 25 to 30

• Fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species. 
• Human age of affluence are surrounded not by much other humans, in pervious ages by objects. 
• The manipulation of goods and messages. 
• The celebration of the object in advertising and the hundreds if daily messages from age mass media; from minor proliferation of vaguely obsessional gadgetry to the symbolic psychodramas fuelled by the nocturnal objects which come to haunt us even in our dreams. 
• The two concepts 'environment' and 'ambience'.
• We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession. We who watch as civilisations it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which outlived age generation of human beings. 
• Objects are neither a flora nor a fauna. Impression of a proliferating vegetation. 
• We have attempted to describe 'fauna and flora', which man has produced and which comes back to encircle and invade him as it might in a bad science fiction novel. 
• 'That they are the product of a human activity' 
• 1. Profusion and the Package
•  Profusion, piling high and the most striking descriptive feature. 
• Their abundance of canned foods and clothing, of foodstuffs and ready-made garments, are like primal landscape, the geometrical locus of abundance. 
• Through a great collective metaphor - by virtue of its very excess - image of the gift. 
• Abundance, objects are organised in packages and collections. 
• 'for consumer to choose among, but presented also to create in him a psychological chain reaction, as he pursues them, inventories them and grasps them as a total category. 
• Few objects are offered alone, without a context of objects which 'speaks' them. This changes the consumer's relation to the object: he no longer relates to a particular object in its specific utility, but to a set of objects in its total signification. 
• The shopwindow, the advertisement, the manufacturer and the brand name, which play a crucial role, impose a coherent, collective vision, as though they were an almost  indissociable totality. 'Chain signifiers'. 
• It is evident that objects are never offered for consumption in absolute disorder. 
• The Drugstore - Drugstore is more representative of modern consumption, gaining access to everyday consumer goods. It is culturalized. 
• General package of consumables. 
• Drugstore presents the subtle recital of consumption, the whole 'art' of which consists in playing on the ambiguity of the sign in objects, and sublimating their status as things of use and as commodities in a play upon 'ambience'.
• Generalised geo-culture. Drugstore is to modernise itself to the point of introducing 'grey matter'. 
• We are at the point where consumption is laying hold of the whole of life. 
• In the phenomenology of consumption, this is general 'air-conditioning' of life, goods, objects, services, behaviour and social relations represents the perfect 'consummated. 
• The stage of an evolution which runs from affluence pure and simple. Interconnected networks of objects. Finally to the systematic atmospherics built into those cities if the future that are our drugstores. 
• We are here at the heart of consumption as total organisation of everyday life, total homogenisation, where everything is taken over and superseded in the ease and translucidity if an abstract 'happiness', defined solely by the resolution of tensions.
• Work, leisure, nature and culture: all these things which were once disperse, which once generated anxiety and complexity in real life, in our 'anarchic towns and cities', all these sundered activities, these activities which where were more or less irreducible one to another, are now. Climatized and homogenised in the same sweeping vista of perpetual shopping. 
• Controlled, lubricated, consumed faecality has passed into things; its seeps everywhere into the distinctness of things and social relations. 
• Chapter 2 - The Miraculous Status of Consumption page. 31
• The beneficiary of the consumer miracle also sets in place a whole array of sham objects, of characteristic signs of happiness, and then waits (waits desperately, a moralist would say) for happiness to alight. 
• Consumption is governed by a form of magical thinking; daily life is governed by mentality. 
• 'Affluence' is, in effect, merely the accumulation of the sign of happiness. 
• Anticipated reflection of the potential Great Satisfaction, of the Total Affluence, the last Jubilation of the definitive beneficiaries of the miracle. 
• In everyday practice, the blessings of consumption are not experienced as resulting from work or from a production process; they are experienced as a miracle.