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From the annual transaction volume of Double 11 to the word "explosive buying" has become a stereotype of Chinese tourists by the Japanese, from the rise of domestic products to live broadcast sales, Chinese seemingly growing strong consumption power has become an important social phenomenon that cannot be ignored in recent years, which has repeatedly aroused heated discussions. At the beginning of 2019, an online article entitled "Monthly salary of 10,000 but can't afford cherries" was screened, and "cherry freedom" became a yardstick for the urban middle class to measure their own consumption level, and then a series of "XX freedom" appeared, suggesting the seemingly endless desire of Chinese consumers to consume. But in the last two or three years, people are reflecting more on the issue of consumption.
In this year's book Making the Consumer, French scholar Antoine Galluzzo talks about the rise of the commodity economy in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, revealing the social, economic and cultural impact of the world's transition from an agrarian or productive society to a consumer society. At a recent book sharing meeting, Ma Ling, professor of Fudan University School of Journalism, doctoral supervisor and book reviewer, and Liang Jie, a lecturer at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, discussed various consumer myths around the book.
Only when the mass consumer emerges does the consumer society be established
According to Ma Ling's observation, there are three main critical theories about consumer society: one is a theory centered on the concept of Baudrillard's "Consumer Society", and has a pessimistic and critical attitude towards consumerism; The other group of views is more positive, pointing out from the perspective of material culture, civilization and technological development that human beings are in parallel with consumption and commodities is an inevitable stage of social development; A third school that is currently on the rise focuses on the subjective initiative of the individual, arguing that people empower themselves and express themselves through consumption. She believes that "Making the Consumer" presents many of these theories in condensed language in a book of more than 200 pages, and is a primer on consumer society theory that she would recommend to her students.
Goods, trade and consumption have existed since ancient times – when Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, geographical discoveries greatly contributed to the formation of a European-dominated global trade network; Historians of the Ming Dynasty have also noted that the late Ming Dynasty was a period of developed commodity economy, and art historian Kruger used Wen Zhenheng's "Long Things" written by Wen Zhenheng, the great-grandson of Wen Zhenming, as an example to analyze how the artifacts appreciated by the literati of the Ming Dynasty were consumed and became an indispensable part of the elegant life. Why, then, did the conditions that constitute the so-called consumer society not mature until the 19th century? Why do consumers need to be "made"?
Liang Jie pointed out that a fundamental difference between the former consumer society and the consumer society is that before the industrial revolution in the 19th century, the living standards of the vast majority of people in the world were maintained at the level of food and clothing for a long time. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the face of the world changed dramatically by the Industrial Revolution, which brought about a demand-side revolution that increased production efficiency and triggered a supply-side revolution. The headline "Making Consumers" captures precisely this historic turning point, when people began to have a "consumer" way of thinking, and mass consumers emerged, further immersed in consumer society, and began to be controlled by various consumer symbols.
Ma Ling reminds readers that although commodities have always accompanied human beings since the formation of the social division of labor, consumer society is a special concept, which refers to the social form of relative overproduction and the need to encourage consumption in order to stimulate production. The consumer society is different from the previous production society, in which people pay attention to the physical characteristics, use value and practical value of goods, while people in the consumer society pay attention to the symbolic value, cultural spiritual characteristics and image value of goods.
In the former consumer society, in addition to the fact that consumers were mostly upper-class people, there were also some other characteristics. First of all, the regional differences of commodity culture are obvious, taking "Changwu Zhi" as an example, Ma Ling believes that it is not so much a book praising commodity society as a book that criticizes commodity society and the Ming Dynasty version of "Style" - Wen Zhenheng sneered at the fashionable things that were popular on the market at that time, believing that reverence for antiquity and simplicity were the pursuit of true literati.
Second, the legitimacy of consumption is still being questioned in many places. In Amsterdam, for example, which was highly prosperous by the bourgeois revolution in the 17th century, although new bourgeois families enjoyed goods from all over the world, such as Chinese porcelain, Turkish carpets, and Italian lemons, as Simon Sharma pointed out in his book The Dilemma of Affluence, this luxury material enjoyment was incompatible with the Protestant ethic and thus created an ideological contradiction. For this reason, a very important theme of still life painting "The Void of All Things" appeared in the Netherlands at that time, in which skeletons, flies, butterflies or disappearing flowers appeared in parallel with global goods, as a warning to the viewer that wealth is a passing cloud.
The behavior of female consumers attracts disproportionate attention
The phenomenon of class segmentation by the rich through conspicuous consumption has a long history, but in Ma Ling's view, "people without money consume luxury goods, which is a very important issue in consumer society." Flaubert's Madame Bovary contributes to the case of Emma, an ordinary townswoman who was guided by a Parisian fashion magazine to consume, so much so that she was so indebted that she committed suicide. But it needs to be admitted that the vanity of upward comparison is "human common sense" and a powerful driving force for consumption, and throughout history, various prohibitions on luxury in Western society have always existed in name only, including the admiration of the burgher class for high society and the downward imitation of the aristocracy (such as the "hate the sky" high heels trend led by the 15th century Venetian high-end geisha), "the power of money can break through the aristocratic hierarchy." ”
Ma Ling believes that the stratification theory of consumer society prompts us to see people's subtle mentality in the face of conspicuous consumption: "The highest realm is completely without comparison, and it is the middle-class or even below the middle-class group that needs to be compared and competed, which is the real main army of luxury consumption." Compared with the people who earn 200,000 per month, I think that the people with a monthly income of 10,000 may be the main force of luxury consumption. Therefore, the significance of the critical theory of consumerism is to remind us of the illusion of identity and identity separation by using the identity symbols created by consumption.
In his book, Galluzo emphasizes the importance of goods as a symbol in the formation of identity and the definition of social status, and advertising is very successful in creating symbols and enhancing the attractiveness of goods. Liang Jie pointed out that academics have formed two diametrically opposed views on the impact of advertising on the market. One group believes that the purpose of advertising is to promote competition, different goods are introduced to consumers through advertising, the more fully the information is disseminated, the fiercer the competition, and consumers can enjoy more benefits from market competition; The other group criticizes advertising as stifling competition. Coca-Cola, for example, although it is already a household name global brand, still has to place a lot of advertising at major sports events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup to exclude other competitors and maintain a monopoly position.
"Now it seems that advertising is becoming more and more prominent, and more and more people are treating attention as a scarce resource and trying to monopolize it." Liang Jie laughed at himself, he was not very convinced of Baudrillard's views when he read his works twenty years ago, does advertising really have so much control and influence? "But now [his theory] is getting more and more correct, today is indeed Baudrillard's time, and the role of attention control and symbolic attraction of advertising in the modern economy is very amazing."
When discussing consumerism, it's also worth noting that the behavior of female consumers attracts disproportionate attention. For many gender-conscious people, consumerism, which encourages women to pay attention to and invest in their appearance, is increasingly seen as a "trap born under the guise of emancipating women." Ma Ling said that women have been victims of fashion for most of history, and because women have a lower status in the past, many times they have been commodified themselves.
Examples of women "serving in American service" (note: a new Internet term referring to women who spend a lot of money and energy to maintain beauty in order to meet the public aesthetic and social requirements for women's appearance) are everywhere, and even female monarchs are not immune: in an era of beauty such as the "bee waist in the hand", Queen Elizabeth I of England is proud to have surpassed a lady of the Medici family with her 14-inch waist. "If a female king cannot avoid [appearance competition], we can imagine the destruction of women by such a consumer fashion."
It is also worth noting that gender liberation can also fall into the trap of consumerism. Beginning in the 19th century, feminist pioneers such as George Sand broke the shackles of gender norms and began to smoke, ride, and wear men's clothing, and by the beginning of the 20th century, a new group of women called "flappers" appeared, but they were also unknowingly symbolized and became new fashion models, leading a new round of women's fashion trends. "It's really hard for [women] to escape the trap of consumerism, wherever there is an opportunity, commoditized and capital follows."
Liang Jie took the "Haidian mother" and "Shunyi mother" that have been hotly discussed in the past two years as examples to analyze the invisible pressure imposed on women in China and even the entire East Asian society - the "Haidian mother" who can cultivate children into talents is particularly insufficient, and the "Shunyi mother" who can not only chicken and baby, but also maintain an elegant temperament is even better. "There's no end in sight of the involution, and at the end of the day, everyone has to try to pretend to be effortless," he said, "For women today, it's still important to recognize the key and think about the direction you want to choose." ”
China is still far from a consumer society, but it is time to rethink consumerism
Frank Trentman, a historian at the University of London, argues in Commodity Empire, first published in 2016, that although consumption levels in Chinese doubled in the 90s, savings tripled, and the engine that drove China's economy was investment rather than consumption; What's more, the institutional reforms that began in the '90s left private households burdened with increasing costs of health care, education, and housing, which limited Chinese's spending power. Between 2006 and 2016, households' contribution to GDP fell from 42 percent to less than 35 percent, twice as much as in China in the United States and about 50 percent in the rest of Asia. So Trentman argues that China is a budget-conscious anxious consumer, not a consumerist.
Liang Jie pointed out that consumption and savings are the two major parts of personal financial arrangements, and a clear trend across East Asia is the higher savings rate. Although some staggering luxury consumption phenomena have attracted widespread attention in recent years, on the whole, Chinese consumption is not high, especially in cultural consumption such as movies, dramas, and books, and there is still a big gap from the consumer society. Compared with consumption, Chinese prefers to save and enter economic activities by means of savings investment. Ma Ling analyzed that the reason why British and American countries strongly entered the consumer society in the sixties of the last century was because the liberal system was superimposed on social welfare, and the growth of social safety nets gave people the confidence to consume. After the neoliberal reforms of the eighties, welfare cuts increased the burden of spending on housing, education, and health care, which inevitably adversely affected the maintenance of a "society of abundance." This is the warning given to us by Western society.
Ma Ling believes that although China may not be a consumer society, it is time to reflect on consumerism - our reflection and critique of consumer society is, do we really need so many things? How do we deal with the environmental problems caused by excess material production and consumption? "Western reflections on consumer society have been implemented into some concrete actions, such as second-hand goods and the sharing economy. China may only have this kind of bud in big cities at the moment, but if it is considered for environmental reasons, it should be a feasible direction. She said.
Liang Jie pointed out that the core of the academic discussion on environmental protection is the "discount rate", that is, the extent to which we can restrain our material desires and tolerate the decline in living standards for the well-being of future generations, and introduce corresponding policies for this purpose. "This is a question that is still being discussed in academia, and I don't have a clear answer, but I call for everyone's attention to it." Liang Jie said that in recent years, the disasters caused by extreme weather have made more and more people realize that environmental protection is not a written or national leader's issue, but an issue closely related to each of us, and it deserves our attention as well as other important social issues.
Ma Ling was inspired by the Hungarian philosopher Lukács, who believed that we should be liberated from our obsession with the market – that a socialist economy is not a goal, but merely a prerequisite for human evolution to a stage of renewal. The implication of this view is to remind us that when society reaches a certain material level, spiritual pursuit is something more worth pursuing. From this point of view, while reflecting on the materialistic desire of the consumer society, we should also pay attention to spiritual needs other than material needs. Liang Jie found that even if some consumers are now engaged in cultural consumption (such as watching exhibitions), their main purpose is to post pictures and show off, "This kind of conspicuous consumption is not productive, and you yourself do not really feel happy." If we can reduce these conspicuous consumption and truly invest in cultural consumption, it will be a positive phenomenon for both individuals and society as a whole. ”
"As a consumer, maybe there should be a change in philosophy. One of the problems of our time is not that there are not enough choices, but that there are so many choices that we are dazzled. People are always oscillating back and forth between abstinence and indulgence, and finding a reasonable position in the middle is the best. Ma Ling said.