A Study On Baudrillard’s Theory Of Consumer Society

Baudrillard’s book written in 1970,the Consumer Society,puts forward that the domination over human by the object has evolved into a kind of " motivation control of chain significance among commodities",The subject in the research is not a "thing" but a "person" as the consumer,who is surrounded by the abundance in material.There is "a bunch of meaning" produced in the consumer psychology,which suggests that people are limitlessly and continuosly forced to consume.The result is a gradual loss of self-awareness and subjectivity.In addition,the code control on consumers aims to adhere to the code meaning on objects.Symbolic consumption is a symbol of social class,which reflects an encoding effect of symbols.For example,by obtaining some kind of "symbol",which represents "power" and "status",a person can obtain the certain kind of "power" or"status".However,the consumption is also a process of manipulation and slavery over him.Baudrillard also discovered that the consumption in contemporary society is communication system among different codes,the symbol encoding value actually determines the difference of people’s social class and even differentiation.In addition,this paper also describes the role of mass media advertising on people’s consumption behaviors as well as the new consumption patterns generated under the new media tide.In this paper,as people are surrounded by the abundance in material,there are three consumption illusions: "the abundance illusion,"free illusion" and "equality illusion".Furthermore,the author puts forward that the production crisis is inevitable in a consumer society.Facing despair,Marx is different from Baudrillard in their salvation roads.