Contemporary Interpretation Of Baudrillard’s Symbolic Consumption Theory

With the advent of the technological era of mass production,technology has quietly changed the way people live.Capital society has also undergone a transformation from a traditional production-based society to a contemporary consumption-based society.A serious consequence of this is that at some point in time,production far exceeds demand,and the backlog of excess labor becomes a cyclical problem of "how to consume".In order to regain the value of the surplus,the capitalists began to create a series of illusions of demand to stimulate consumption.This led to an increasing share of consumption in everyday life.It can be said that an era of consumption has arrived.Baudrillard,as one of the most representative Western Marxists,has expanded a new field of study in Marxist philosophy by examining the various alienation phenomena arising from the current consumer society from the perspective of semiotics,starting from real life.The theory of symbolic consumption has become a hot topic for many scholars.Baudrillard absorbed the ideas of scholars such as Roland Barthes and Lefebvre and creatively proposed the theory of symbolic consumption in his early works such as The System of Things,The Consumer Society and Critique of Symbolic Political Economy.He argued that in the consumer society,things appear in the form of abundance,complete sets and series,released from the previous traditional production link and gradually abandoned the use value,using the symbolic value to put on the veil of symbolic status and identity.Capitalists opened up new frontiers in the realm of consumption for the purpose of proliferation.Aesthetics and art were incorporated into the field of consumption,and new forms of mass media,advertising,the body,and kitsch were used to launch an all-out assault on consumers.In this new environment,individual desires and personalities are liberated,and things gradually take control of human daily life and ideology.Capital has designed commodities into various coded symbols,and through the creation of a myth of consumption,it has stifled the status of the individual subject,so that people are oppressed and enslaved by the symbols and gradually lose themselves in them.He believes that the key to eradicating this phenomenon lies in the use of symbolic exchange to bring back the essence of human beings.A non-productive,reductive way of reclaiming the right to respond,thus breaking the one-way,unequal circular logic of capital.This pessimistic,nihilistic negative response leads him down a path that departs from Marxist theory.However,it is undeniable that Baudrillard’s research path is realistic and a systematic genealogy of the development logic of consumer society,injecting a new energy into the critique and reflection of the developmental features of Western capitalism and alerting every participating consumer individual in consumer society.At the same time,Baudrillard’s theory of symbolic consumption also provides new inspiration and ideas for the development and construction of China’s current social consumption culture,which is of great theoretical significance and practical value for creating a healthy and harmonious consumption environment and constructing a scientific view of consumption in the new era.