Abstract
This chapter discusses the semiotic imaginary of consumerism (ImCon), its logic and characteristics, in comparison with symbolic imaginaries; it is defined as a regime of signification composed of signs as social signifiers and based on imagery and the irrational. The social logics of consumption (consumption of social signification through commodity-signs) and commodification (production of sign-values), and a theory on the commodity-sign (as elemental form of consumerism), are presented. Consumerism and the ImCon are analyzed through the idea of dream, focusing on consumption dreams: the social representations that, being mass-produced following the logic of advertising, determine and colonize desires and irrational factors, and signify the social subject as a consumer. Finally, the chapter discusses how the ImCon and its dreams colonize subjectivity, and its effects.
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Notes
- 1.
W. D. Scott quoted in Ewen (1976, p. 31).
- 2.
Bell (1976) wrote that “In modern society, the axial principle is functional rationality” (p. 11).
- 3.
Accordingly, Caro (1993/2002, p. 9) named such system as “neocapitalism of the commodity/sign”.
- 4.
A language in the Saussurean sense: it consists of a system of arbitrary signs that derive their meaning from their position in relation to other terms in the system, never by absolute, intrinsic, or essential value (Pawlett, 2008).
- 5.
Or, as Goldman (1992, p. i) put it: “advertisements are an ideal site for observing how the logic of the commodity form expresses itself culturally and socially”.
- 6.
For example, in the famed beginning of such ethics and logic (of both consumption and advertising), cigarettes were sold as “torches of freedom” for women (see Curtis, 2002; Ewen, 1976), as phallic signs; and Marlboro, long before the association with manliness (the Marlboro Man in the “world of Marlboro”), was initially sold as a woman’s cigarette that was “mild as May”.
- 7.
A combination of both forms (promise and fright) is indeed common.
- 8.
Put differently, the advertising imaginary comes to constitute “the core of the established social imaginary in force in the consumerist capitalist societies we live in” (Caro, 2007, p. 133).
- 9.
As the Webster Dictionary tells us, identikit is “a set of images containing a wide variety of facial features, such as noses, hairlines, chins, etc. on transparencies which can be overlayed in combinations to build up a picture of a person”.
- 10.
“As a 1991 cover of Cosmopolitan declared: ‘By changing the way you look … you can create a new you!’” (Goodman, 2004).
- 11.
“The ‘society of consumers’ is a kind of society which (to recall the (…) term coined by Louis Althusser) ‘interpellates’ its members (that is, addresses them, hails, calls out to, appeals to, questions, but also interrupts and ‘breaks in upon’ them) primarily in their capacity of consumers” (Bauman, 2007, p. 52).
- 12.
I will return to this point in the next chapter.
- 13.
According to them, that is how the consumer-subject “dares to be different” in a “copycat world”.
- 14.
In this (Jungian) sense, identity is by definition an unconscious process, for it requires unconscious non-differentiation between the subject and the object with which he identifies.
- 15.
“Within the personal branding movement, people and their careers are marketed as brands complete with promises of performance, specialized designs, and tag lines for success” (Lair et al., 2005, p. 307). That is, people commodify and sell themselves as consumption dreams….
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Xavier, M. (2018). The ImCon as a Semiotic Imaginary: Consumption Dreams and the Subject as Consumer. In: Subjectivity, the Unconscious and Consumerism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96824-7_4
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