Consumerism
- Analyse the rise
- Discuss the links between consumerism and out unconscious desires.
Sigmund Freud
Edmund Bernays
Consumerism as social control
2002 Adam Curtis – Century of Self (film)
1999 Naomi Klein – No Logo
Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939)
- New theory of human nature
- Psycoanalysis
- Hidden Primitive sexual forces and animal instincts which need controlling.
(Ego, Id, the unconscious)
We only understand a very small part about our identity.
Freud’s Model of Personality Structure**
Our awareness of ourselves is just the tip of the EGO
The unconscious is made of 3 parts: The ID, Ego and Superego
- The id is where base animalistic desires are located and repressed.
- Freud argued that these desires and instincts inform or drive everything we do.
- When you sleep all the unconscious desires start to come out within dreams.
1930 – Civilisation and Discontent (theory)
- Human instincts are not compatible with the well being of community.
- We can’t act upon instinctual desires; we have a tendency to be violent.
- We are repressed by society.
- We do not get chance to act on these desires, we are constantly frustrated.
- Translates into anxiety and any other conditions in which we displace our feelings onto other things.
- Pleasure Principles – If you satiate one of these desires you momentarily feel happy for a brief period, you are docile and you don’t feel like you need to be violent or aggressive.
- WW1 – 1914-1918: An indication for Freud about his theory of humanity, this is how we should expect society to act, expect it to happen when people are suppressed, this is a release point on a global scale.
Edward Bernays (Nephew)
- He channeled the ideas of Freud into a discipline, public relations now.
- Employed as a Propagandist in the War.
- Taking an understand of repressed desires and relating it to consumerism, if you can attach some feeling to a consumer product you could make people want, desire or ‘need’ them.
- Took the understanding from Freud and applied it to the buying and selling of products. People will feel happy after purchasing. This creates a demand for consumer goods.
- Set up company advising business on how they could improve.
- Public Relations is what he called this discipline.
- Cigarettes were his main point of call initially; cigarettes were viewed negatively regarding cultured young ladies, so he organised a big PR stunt on Easter Day in New York in 1929, debutants part of the parade. Bernay’s paid them all to smoke at a specific moment spontaneously.
- He said they were suffragettes and were lighting up ‘torches of freedom.’
- Represented desirability and independence.
- It then became very popular amongst young women because they believed it had connotations of freedom, independence and attractiveness.
- He attached instinctual desires to products that are totally irrational.
- Politicians and the government started to take notice.
- Celebrity endorsements. Linking a celebrity to a product makes you think about being successful, wealthy, desirable.
Prime ministers background is in public relations.
Fordism
- Production models
- Higher wages
- Spent on consumer goods
- It proliferates the world with things
- The model T Ford Cars increased in price but decrease in production time.
- Theres only a certain amount of things someone can buy, due to money or rationality
Manufacturers now have to distinguish between their product and another and makes theirs seem more desirable.
A common technique is to try and give a product an individual identity.
In 1909 Bernays was one of the first people to sell cars on the basis of masculine, sexual potency.
He cemented the link between cars and male sexual presence.
image of car with countryside and large house in the background
The car becomes a secondary image and what is really being sold is the access to the upperclass life style. Unconscious hidden desire, they begin to promise they will suppress desires.
A need to a desire culture is what we now live in.
The idea of self gets replaced with consumer self
The hidden persuaders by Vance Packard
There are 8 common techniques that companies use to create a rational desire for their products.
- Selling emotional security
- Selling reassurance of worth
- Selling Ego Gratification
- Selling creative outlets
- Selling Love Objects
- Selling Sense of Power
- Selling a sense of roots
- Selling Immortality
1920
- A new elite is needed to manage the bewildered herd.
- Walter Lippmann argues that a new elite is needed to manage the people to manufacture consent.
- The political class has no idea how to manage its citizens.
- Educated elite to advise governments on how to control and manage citizens.
- Lippmann, Bernays and others decided they should be the people doing research int what people want and what they desire.
- The idea of consumerism is employed as a mechanism to control citizens.
- If you can create a system that makes people think that their needs are being satiated, albeit irrationally, then people will become docile and happy, as though they have a stake in the world and they are successful.
- Creating money for businesses and making people happy.
Communism could overthrow consumerism
Overproduction, stock market crash, capitalism
Capitalism is a system that depends on creating profit upon profit
Wall Street Crash - Great depression - mass unemployment
If big businesses are uncontrolled society can be destroyed.
The ‘New Deal’ Roosevelt
- Regulate markets
- Put limits on profits
- 1933-36
- Increase taxation of big business to give to poorer people in society.
- Creating controlled industries such as farming where the government would have total control.
- The government intervened and gave a fairer plan
Worlds Fair, over a mile long
- Bernay’s pioneered this
- Celebration about America and everything that makes it great and unique
- The amount of commodities that you can buy, constantly reinforced that you are a free citizen because you can buy an object if you want.
- The Futurama - look at building.
- American democracy is freeing you
- Big business really knows whats good for the country rather than politicians.
- Worlds fair is giant propaganda for businesses
- Democracity
Conclusion
- Consumerism is an ideological project
- We believe that through consumption our desires can be met so that we are suppressed and our violent desires are not revealed.
- The Consumer Self
- The legacy of Bernays/PR can be felt in all aspects in the 21st century
- The conflicts between alternative models of social organisation continue to this day.
- To what extent are our lives ‘free’ under the Western Consumerist System?
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