Consumed, as in: Baudrillard's Twelve Days of Christmas (part one of ¿three?)
consumption as: wasted wastage; as profusion (in piles); as conspicuous miracle
In the previous post, I tried to convey a sense of pervasive deflation, the exhausting hissing of electrified inflatable Santa Clauses, the feeling I have of being absolutely mastered by a cultural force that pulls me in and seeps into my mood. Interestingly, a few friend-readers said that this resonates with how they feel at this time of year. It’s a deeply cultural and conjunctural experience, too: friends of mine who are in Japan, say, report none of these symptoms, and feel able to quietly continue working. For me (as a sidebar) this shows how important cultural factors are in individual mental health as well as collective atmospheres: these things we do (or don’t do) around one another, they add up, they take a toll.
Having felt my way into it about a post’s worth, how can I think my way around my alienation? Why is it like this? To paraphrase David Shrigley: ‘what the hell are we doing?’ To add Betty Martin to this: ‘who is this for?’
Of everyone I’ve read, only Baudrillard really skewers what might actually be going on here. I’m not sure if I have the energy to follow through on all twelve days of Baudrillard Christmas. However, what follows is some fast and loose riffing on some key ideas from his Consumer Society, re-cast here in a way that helps me understand what might be going on, and (I hope), might help you de-deflate and make it through.
1) consumed, as in – as potlatch (in excess, beyond need, with festive destructivenes)
Christmas has become, by and large, a festival of consumption. We think about consumption in two fundamentally mistaken ways, Baudrillard argues. Supposedly, consumption is ‘what we get’ when the correct price triggers a confluence between what’s on offer, and what we want or need. With Christmas shopping, we go to the mall to find (out) what our loved ones ‘want’ for Christmas (a new vibrating vape, Godzilla Lego), or we ‘go get’ what they need (more socks, new underpants, aero bicycle helmet). In the conventional frame, shopping is about trawling the market looking for the price we can afford and are willing to pay, and if ‘the price is right’, and it’s ‘what they want’, we get it for them. Look around your Christmas tree, and look around at people’s Christmas trees, and tell me how much of this is actually true in 2024.
We’re barking up the wrong Christmas tree here, Baudrillard reckons. Consumption is something that is excessive, competitive, lavish, and destructive.
Consumption is wastage. In looking toward needs, wants and utility, we are avoiding the wastage, a wastage that is ontological, as well as an intrinsic part of human cultures, clearly visible in a huge array of mad cultural practices we can see across the anthropological record. Potlatch is but a conspicuous instance of ‘sumptuary, useless, inordinate expenditure’ (46) attending and shadowing all consumption. Consumption is not about wants and needs (although it involves us in them), it is ‘spectacular squandering’, fantastic damage1. Consumption is wastage. If you look at again at what’s around the contemporary Christmas tree, and what’s in the bin by Boxing Day, to me at least, Baudrillard’s account makes much better sense2.
At the same time, Baudrillard argues that the consumer society features one tragic structural difference. This partly accounts for some of our bad feeling and alienation. Primitive feasting, however destructive, was the perpetuating centre of a whole and intact culture, within which it performed a suite of crucial symbolic-collective reparative purposes3. Industrial modernity and capitalism introduces a rift, yanking the practice out of the symbolic-creative context in which it made sense. For us, this means that, although consumption continues – and continues to be just as depleting of resources and demanding of our time and energy – it has no meaning or reparative power. It can’t bind or transcend or fill us up, it wastes us, and it’s just a spur to even more consumption. All this consumption is just wasted wastage: it cannot ‘mean’, or heal, or bring community back, but it’s no less subject to the perennial intensification of social acceleration, no less commanding of our obligation and finitude. At Christmas, we are inextricably entangled in a set of practices we still engage in, although they do not and cannot ‘fill up our cup’; so please fill up my cup.
2) consumed, as in: in piles, as profusion
The second thing Baudrillard might ask us to notice is how we ‘pile up’ presents: around the Christmas tree, of course, but also in shops. In book shops at this time of year the piles give me eye piles and mind piles just glancing at them: I feel intimidated by their sheer height, weakbottomed by their mass and scale, and so sad about the imbalance between all that human effort drawn into the totality of the editorial process, and the pitiful attentional prospects of all of us, as an audience, to possibly be able to absorb all this text, all these texts.
In the 2010s, ‘China scale’ and drone photography gave us a new visual perspective on the pile, the rhythmicity and ‘unexpected beauty of China’s bicycle graveyards’. But since the 1970s, any visit to a container port discloses the scale and scope of the piled piles, the profusion of profusions, the pile up of stacked cans. This, in turn, hides/ boxes the uncanny buoyancy of the ocean, its planetary ability to carry this load for us, the engineered willingness of steel and diesel engines to bear and plough the mass for the masses.
We tend not to visit container ports around Christmas time. Instead, there are the new and growing cultural practice of whole suburban streets that, in some enaction of mimetic desire-rivalry, at some moment and for some reason become those streets where every house competes to festoon itself with piles of inflatable Santas, with a profusion of flashing lights: for perfectly 3S ‘coverage’, check this YouTube video, read by an AI, telling you were you can go in Melbourne to see the lights. Children love this, I think, not because it’s Santa, but because for once the culture is winking back at them, it shows its colour, the fun moment the usually morbid spiral of workaday piles: piles of washing, piles of dirty dishes, piles of un-answered emails.
If unboxing is YouTube’s most popular category, consider the pile this Christmas, and the moment before the wasted wastage when everything is still in its box, still has its shrink wrap gloss, still has all its potential, is not yet destroyed. The twinkle twinkle before the wastage kicks off. At heart here, Baudrillard urges, there is the flickering and evanescent promise of ‘something more’, something beyond the ‘is that all there is’ of when wastage is finally wasted, once the humdrum re-asserts itself, when the hurly burly’s done, when the routine returns, full of all the piles of refuse, all that which does not glitter, the shit piles of our banal existence4. As with wastage, this conveys something to me that gets me much closer to what my culture involves me in, when it pulls me into Christmas’ force field.
consumed, as in: as miracle, dominated by magical thinking’s ‘omnipotence of thoughts’
Christmas is a miracle. We don’t even need Hollywood to keep telling us this, although it does. Christmas is the one time of the year in which the ‘conspicuous miracle’ is made manifest, placing it alongside alongside ‘conspicuous consumption’.
Surely a place where we can see the conspicuous miracle at work is in the shopping mall, between the workaday Santa and ‘his’ suburban children. I never disabused my children of the miracle of Christmas. However, twelve years and three kids deep, I haven’t had one of my three who was truly taken in by the spectacle. What they managed instead – on behalf of their own enchantment and the culture – was more magical. Somehow, all three of my children had an ability to know very well that the shopping mall Santa outside K Mart was ‘not the real Santa’. They also had a ‘shh’ ability to know that the real Santa is not real, and they knew to hide this discreetly from younger kids so as to not disappoint them. Children uphold the miracle of Christmas – for younger children. In doing this, like so many others, my kids also showed a sense for willing the miracle of Christmas. This is very hard to convey in words, but, as enchantment, it’s probably transpersonal, perhaps slightly paranormal, and becomes inaccessible to most adults – except via children, which is why we all rely on them to ‘activate’ the miracle of Christmas in us, for us. As we adults live in the disenchanted world of dirty piles, so we outsource the enchantment to those in the culture who can be its living avatars. We say Christmas is for children, but we actually give it to them so they can give it to us, the glimmer of a lost joy.
– except in consumption (to come full spiral). When we adults partake in the profusion that precedes the wasting of the wastage, and experience this as the affluence of the consumer society, a magical thinking is activated inside us, and enchantment is reborn. To say this is regression to an infantile state, although it is this too, still doesn’t quite capture it. Again, Baudrillard is right there, holding my hand through this.
There is a miracle in affluence, personated by Santa Claus in our culture, in which the omnipotence of our thoughts is allowed free reign (or free reindeer). In the clutch of this magical thinking, Santa Claus is omnipotent5, and so are our wishes: like capitalism, he delivers the goods. With just one sack and sleigh? It’s a miracle.
Outside of Christmas time, we transfer this omnipotence over to surveillance capitalism and the logistics of fulfilment society: our phones know us better than we know ourselves, and they feed us feed, content us with content, deliver the buzz when buzzfeed fails to feed. For Baudrillard, technology is a broader and more technically reliable-plausible instance of the magical thinking we all partake of when we experience the affluence of the goods society – here condensed to its seasonal n-th point in the phantasmic person of Santa Claus. Children know he’s not real, in a way we don’t: we who inflate Santa Clauses on our lawns; we who will our wishes rein deer on us like mana from heaven6.
when we Anglos get ‘mad wasted’ drinking, we’re just bringing to the surface something covered over by Anglocapitalism’s bizarre preoccupation with needs, wants, and utility, all of which are exist, but are not what consumption is.
full quote pull quote: “The caricature of the magnificent dress which the star wears for just one evening are the ‘disposable panties’ which, 80 per cent viscose and 20 per cent nonwoven acrylic, can be put on in the morning and thrown away at night, and need no washing. Above all, this sublime, de luxe wastage highlighted by the mass media merely replicates, on the cultural level, a much more fundamental and systematic wastage which, for its part, is integrated directly into economic processes, a functional, bureaucratic wastage produced by the production system as it produces material goods, a wastage built into them and, therefore, obligatorily consumed as one of the qualities and dimensions of objects of consumption: their fragility, their built-in obsolescence, their condemnation to transience. What is produced today is not produced for its use-value or its possible durability, but rather with an eye to its death, and the increase in the speed with which that death comes about is equalled only by the speed of price rises” (46).
Check the following, from here:
To publicly recognize class structure and status
To pass on a family’s rights and privileges or inheritance. Such rights include:
Rights to land, property, fishing holes, berry patches, hunting grounds, and beach fronts.
The right to specific dances, songs, stories, and the right to display animal crest designs of a family’s clan.
The right to wear, use, and display certain regalia and objects that indicate leadership: hats, blankets, dance aprons, carved benches, shield-shaped copper plaques, masks, painted housefronts, and carved posts.
To celebrate marriages, the naming of babies, and the passing on of chief titles, names held within a family, and names that indicate leadership
To honor important people who have passed on
To comfort those who have lost a loved one
To celebrate the opening of ceremonial bighouses and raising of carved poles
To recognize the lineage of a family and renew the community’s ties to the ancestors
To celebrate the people’s relationship to the animal spirits and to give thanks
To restore one’s reputation in the community after a humiliation
Pull quote full quote: “Profusion, piling high are clearly the most striking descriptive features. The big department stores, with their abundance of canned foods and clothing, of foodstuffs and ready-made garments, are like the primal landscape, the geometrical locus of abundance. But every street, with its cluttered, glittering shop-windows (the least scarce commodity here being light, without which the merchandise would be merely what it is), their displays of cooked meats, and indeed the entire alimentary and vestimentary feast, all stimulate magical salivation. There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity, the maternal, luxurious sense of being already in the Land of Cockaigne. Our markets, major shopping thoroughfares and superstores also mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity. These are our Valleys of Canaan where, in place of milk and honey, streams of neon flow down over ketchup and plastic. But no matter! We find here the fervid hope that there should be not enough, but too much - and too much for everyone: by buying a piece of this land, you acquire the crumbling pyramid of oysters, meats, pears or tinned asparagus. You buy the part for the whole. And this metonymic, repetitive discourse of consumable matter, of the commodity, becomes once again, through a great collective metaphor – by virtue of its very excess – the image of the gift, and of that inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterizes the feast” (26).
He *knows* when you’ve been sleeping, he *knows* if you’re awake…
pull quote full quote: “Affluence, the last Jubilation of the definitive beneficiaries of the miracle, from whose insane hope daily banality draws its sustenance. These lesser satisfactions are as yet only exorcistic practices, means of calling down or summoning up total Well-being or Bliss.
In everyday practice, the blessings of consumption are not experienced as resulting from work or from a production process; they are experienced as a miracle. There is, admittedly, a difference between the Melanesian native and the viewer settling down in front of his TV set, turning the switch and waiting for images from the whole world to come down to him: the fact is that the images generally obey, whereas planes never condescend to land by magical command. But this technical success is not sufficient to show that our conduct is realistic and the natives' behaviour imaginary. For the same psychical economy ensures on the one hand that the natives' confidence in magic is never destroyed (if the process fails to work, it is because they have not performed the necessary acts) and on the other that the miracle of TV is perpetually brought off, without ceasing to be a miracle - this latter by the grace of technology, which wipes out, so far as the consumer 's consciousness is concerned, the very principle of social reality, the long social process of production which leads to the consumption of images. And does this so well that the TV viewer, like the native, experiences the appropriation as a capturing in a mode of miraculous efficacy” (31-2).