Teodor NEGRU, Culture and Capitalism.

Genealogy of Consumer Culture

Culture and Capitalism. Genealogy of Consumer Culture

Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, Al. I. Cuza University of Iai B-dul Carol I, 11, Iai 700506, Romania theonegru@yahoo.com Abstract. Within the context of todays world overwhelmed by the increasing importance of capitalism, the need to analyse the relationship between man and capital in order to better understand the transformations culture has been undergoing. This endeavour relies on the idea that many concepts and phenomena whose presence in our lives is increasingly felt, and which are defining for what we call postmodernism, have originated in the modern times. The capital is an illustrative example to this purpose: it was discovered during the modern era at the time of the emergence of the production process and underlay all transformations of later modernism. The growth of capital circulation speed has resulted in leaving aside its relationship with production and in its being rerethought from the viewpoint of mans desires. Thus, the transition has been made from the becoming being paradigm, theorised by the modernists, to the concept of volatile being, whose effects are being experimented in postmodernism. Keywords: capitalism, desire, (post-) Fordism, meta-narrative, (post-)modernism, volatile being

Teodor NEGRU

CAPITALISM AND MODERNITY What makes us speak about capitalism is neither a chance nor ephemeral presence in our lives, but the impossibility of its absence from any self-evident reflection on the condition of the present man. Man capital relationship become part of contemporary mans fate, not only in the sense of diversifying the possibilities to satisfy needs or to transform relationships between people under market economy circumstances, but deeper than that, in the sense that it influences mans most authentic means of expression, i.e. culture. The relationship man capital is not a recent one, it belongs to the modern era not only in its origin but also as discursive configuration, to the extent in which this entire era relied on the force of mutations generated by
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capital and on its capacity to create a new world apart from the principles of traditional world. Paradoxically, it is still the emergence of capital in mans life that connects to the demise of the modern era as the development of the process resulted in the unexpected dismantling of the epistemic scaffolding on which it had been built up. Within this context, the dissolution of modernity does not appear anymore as a moment we can locate historically or that can be attributed to a specific author, but as a process extending from the discovery of capital as a production drive and as a means to objectivate peoples desires to the discovery of the unconscious as the inner representation of this desire flow. Thought in this way, the dissolution of modernity connect to the cancellation of mans representation as a rational agent, perfectly selfaware, empowered with the means of the knowledge of and dominance over the natural world. Producing a new outlook on man, where man is regarded as not only led by reason but by unconscious urges and whose capacity to know is rather perspectival than absolute, is equally connected to theorising the capital-unconscious nexus in the Western culture. This is the point where we can start to discuss the shift from modern knowledge outline following the model of series, of being linked with one another and of becoming (Foucault, 1989) to the postmodern knowledge interested in what cannot be known, hence, uncontrollable, in discontinuous, catastrophic, unverifiable, paradoxical evolutions (Lyotard, 1993). The change of the paradigm of knowledge is also due to the shift from the concept of a becoming being to the one of a volatile being that radicalizes the scientific and philosophic discourse. Similarly, we can explain how, in the political context, the disastrous consequences of the emancipation programmes Communism and Nazism were avoided. In their attempt to suppress the capital and its entities, i.e. private property and money, from mans life claiming to create a new man such programmes have manages to place themselves outside the principles of humanity. Thus, the contemporary era, also called postmodernity, seems characterised by the pre-eminence of some forces created by man, while following their own logic tend to escape mans control. Phenomena such as capital, technology, the unconscious, or power, were discovered by modernity, it is only now that they are intensely effective. Hence, the need to approach such phenomena in their dynamics, that is from their evolution marked by inherent discontinuities.
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METANARRATIVES OF CAPITALISM The dawn of the theory of political economics marks not only the discovery of market relationships and the way in which capital controls the production phenomenon. It also marks a new stage in the understanding of the human being. As noted by Michel Foucault, political economy describes man in a way, which had been ruled out from the formal anthropological discourse. This is about the discovery of the biological side of the human being, i.e. the orientation toward the focus on satisfying and managing mans physiological needs rather than toward theorising his metaphysical needs. Man is becomes thus the topic within a new category which is the Biological Life, which makes man a being belonging to the natural world (Darwin) and subject to the material conditioning similar to the other living beings. The revelation of the finitude of the world we live in during the great geographical discoveries era is doubled by the revelation of the finitude of the human being.
Homo oeconomicus is not the human being who represents its own needs to himself, and the objects capable of satisfying them; he is the human being who spends, wears out, and wastes his life in evading the imminence of death. He is a finite being: and just as, since Kant, the question of finitude has become more fundamental than the analysis of representations (the later bow being necessarily a derivation to the former), since Ricardo, economics has rested, in a more or less explicit fashion, upon an anthropology that attempts to assign concrete forms of finitude. Eighteen century economics stood in relation to a mathesis as to a general science of all possible orders; nineteenth century economics will be referred to an anthropology as to a discourse on man's natural finitude. (Foucault, 1989: 280)

Moreover, the beginning of political economy coincides with the rethinking of social order, where the social status is no longer given be noble descent, but according to the new bourgeois principles, by everyones ability to accomplish themselves in society. Hence, the main value becomes labour, which is no longer regarded as an ignominious activity belonging to an inferior class, but it becomes the means, according to Adam Smith, David Ricardo or Jean-Baptiste Say, of making and growing capital as it gives value to goods and prices of products are set accordingly. Thus, the discursive domain undergoes a mutation, i.e. a shift from the idea of wealth to the concept of capital seen as a dynamic representation of a persons fortune. In order to grow, capital needs to be invested,
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transformed into production and not just spent. Therefore, the owner of capital should have certain skills to manipulate it, to know where to place it. Thus, managing capital becomes a responsibility of those who own it. Consequently, it is highly recommended that the owner of capital adopt a certain sobriety in their conduct as: Capitals are increased by parsimony and diminished by prodigality and misconduct (Smith, 1998: 199). This does not mean that classical economists recommend restraining from everything that is necessary to living, in a manner similar to Puritan asceticism, which is criticised as such an attitude would lead to reducing production, hence to diminishing the capital. They rather recommend a productive consumption oriented toward capital (Smith) or value growth (Say). Distinguishing between productive and unproductive consumption, the idea that it becomes a part of the capital-making process i.e. an important component of the capitalist system is outlined. Consumption is not merely the end of production, but a means ensuring the steadiness of capital level, which can also multiply. Part of this consumption is art, influenced by custom and fashion, principles which extend their domination over our judgments concerning beauty of every kind (Smith, 1853: 281). Beyond this first attempt at explaining the aesthetic principles by resorting to the market economics principles, which is still within the boundaries of classical thinking on art, presently other ideas are being outlined. Such ideas will be defining for the capitalist system. The confidence in the individual capacities to produce and grow capital suggests the idea that man can overcome the social status he was born with. Free enterprise further suggests the idea of a human being who can be modelled (Bildung) by society or, if one considers the autonomous will the individual is endowed with, by the very person in question. This is how emancipation becomes imperative for someone living in an increasingly flexible society, from the point of view of social order. The revelation of the finitude continues along the revelation of the rights a man has and which no one is entitled to violate, which transfers the issue of the safety of mans life from the metaphysical to the political field. Hoping for progress, the right to emancipation, organising society on the principles of individualism, which have enjoyed the support of the increasingly important role capital has played in mans life are the coordinates whence Western capitalism emerged. The confidence in the liberating capacity of the capitalist society was shaken by Karl Marx to whom capitalism offers an illusion the illusion
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that by working harder or by producing more, we will be happier. The classical economic theory formulated by Smith, Ricardo or Say, says Marx, may be valid for the capital owner, but not for the worker, meaning not for those who is actually involved in the production cycle. The latter is but valued as a part of the process of capital growth, and not as a human being. By means of his labour, he determines the growth of capital, which he does not own, but which is able to buy more labour, thus enslaving others.
The worker produces capital, capital produces him hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle. To the man who is nothing more than a worker and to him as a worker his human qualities only exist insofar as they exist for capital alien to him. (Marx, 1961: 185)

The cause of this estrangement of the worker from his labour is that during the production process there occurs a radical transformation of use value into exchange value, whose maximisation will be pursued by the capitalist in order to increase his capital. A different connotation of the word estrangement relates to the worker creating a material world, a world heavily relying on objects and technological products, where he does not recognise himself as a creator of (as he owns none of these products) therefore such world becomes even hostile. In capitalism, mans status is uncertain, as he is likely to turn into an object among other objects. What Marx discovers behind this fully optimistic vision of the political economics theory hides a different reality and a different logic trying to hide the actual social relationships. Capital not only creates a social cleavage between those who own the capital and those who actually work to make it grow, but it also creates the instruments necessary to justify such inequity. Such instruments will be further found in the theoretical constructs and cultural products of this society. Marxs overturning the Platonism is not necessarily done by proclaiming the triumph of matter over spirit, but by the idea that the Truth, Good, or Justice no longer underlies the discourse, but a social class trying to defend its dominant position. Even with Plato, it was possible for those deceiving to generate a discourse, but such discourse was a logically contradictory one. To Marx, generating a logical, coherent discourse becomes perfectly valid, but one hiding unspoken goals or which would serve to imposing the dominance of a group of people who do not have other merit than the fact of being born with a silver spoon in their mouth. The truth no longer comes from Maieutics or from its adequacy to facts, but it should be restored by means
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of a social revolution meant to bring the working class to power. The danger of alienation, the fight against all types of dominance and the awareness of class consciousness (as a kind of estrangement from the ideal of individualism) backed by the lack of confidence in the liberating strength of capital are the other coordinates whence Western capitalism emerged. DETERRITORIALIZATION OF CAPITAL The liberal-progressive and the Marxist meta-narratives were the fundamentals of capitalism manifesting their consequences during the later stages of its development. Nonetheless, the more and more accelerated circulation of capital entailed the transformation of the epistemic transformations so that neither metanarrative came off victorious, as both failed in the face of the rhetoric of consumerism. The new must accompanying the launch of capitalism in the modern times was innovation, whether at the economic, aesthetic, or political level, which in turn encouraged the plurality of discourses, classified in the beginning as formal or informal, dominant or marginal. From the economic point of view, the industrial stage of capitalism was concerned with organising labour with a view to carrying out mass production, oriented on efficient expenditure, growth of labourers productivity, and innovation of production means. Taylorism and Fordism, the two doctrines that lay the bases of Organised Capitalism (Lash and Urry) allowed for the increase speed of capital rotation. An accelerated production, resulting from either rationalising the business organisation or segmenting the production line, determined the dawn of a new era of social relationships, an era of cultural experience and attitude toward consumption with consequences unprecedented during the traditional era.
What was special about Ford (and what ultimately separates Fordism form Taylorism) was his vision, his explicit recognition that mass production meant mass consumption, a new system of the reproduction of labour power, a new politics of labour control and management, a new aesthetics and psychology, in short, a new kind of rationalized, modernist, and populist democratic society.(Harvey, 2004: 125-126)

This era identified with the imperialistic stage of capitalism is characterised by the encouragement of the capital expansion to all field, i.e., of the increasingly accelerated exchange in our economic, social, and
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cultural life. Economy is dominated by what Joseph Schumpeter would call a creative destruction, meaning leaving behind what is regarded as classic and obsolete, and re-orienting the producer toward creating new products which would meet the more and more diverse needs of the consumer. At the basis of this parting with tradition lay two processes, which some authors consider contradictory: on one hand, there is the development of the values of the class newly emerged due to engaging faster and faster the capital in the production circuit. On the other hand, there is the standout of the artistic vision seeking artistic purity as a means of escaping the dayin day-out routine. The former would be, according to Daniel Bell, the consequence of imposing rationality on all fields of human activity, manifested as the drive and configuration of the social according to the principles of efficiency, utility, and pragmatism. Such a conduct also relied on the Protestant morals urging to accumulating and not to irrationally spending the profit. Further more, this outlook on life regarded labour as mans duty to society. On the other hand, the artistic life, constantly seeking the authenticity of the human being, is oriented toward liberating from all the constraints imposed by the bourgeois lifestyle. Experimenting with novelty, broadening daily experiences or exploring other cultures or mentalities became thus the new aesthetic principles. At first sight, the two new projects are antagonistic: the avant-garde fights against all canons while trying to leave behind the idea of a dominant, unique cultural code. Whereas the bourgeois outlook, the conservative one, prefers values such as efficiency, rationality, functionality, with a view to managing the creation of the new within a traditional framework, far away form artists excesses and extravagance. Actually, both follow the same logic of the capital at the time of the escape from the traditional world by constant innovation. The trend of a divergent movement within capitalism was theorised by post-structuralism, which transforms capital into a force exterior to man, endowed with its own logic, developing according to its own interests and tending, in its expansion, to contain the whole range of human activities. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari noticed, in their work Anti-Oedipus, the existence of both a positive and a negative attitude toward capitalism as an institutional system. On one hand, capitalism has the merit of having rethought the social, aesthetic, economic, and political values from a perspective that brings all these elements within a new space based on exchange and interaction. This is also the reason why the capitalist system transforms all traditional institutions i.e. family, church, state, consumption, etc. into more flexible and more functional systems. On
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the other hand, this deterritorialization is performed on behalf of recoding all flows from the perspective of capital, meaning the perspective of the logic of the quantity according to which the new achievements are evaluated and control. While transforming everything into exchange value by subjecting to market laws, capitalism records an alienating movement that contradicts its disposition to liberate from everything that means values of tradition. Similarly, Jean-Franois Lyotard in his Libidinal Economy describes the capitalist system as being marked by two drives: one of death and the other of pleasure. The death drive is represented by the consequence of capitalism to cancel all qualitative differences among realities and to assess them from the quantitative point of view against a common measurement. The erotic disposition of capital is represented by its creating a system where energies are freed, conquering new spaces and testing new opportunities of being. The post-structuralist discourse, which considers capitalist contradictions as being its constitutive parts, as they are generated by the way capital, engages the cultural, social, and economic life, represents the acknowledgement of a new situation the capital is in. The finding we start from now is that industrialisation was not merely a technological process, but equally a social and cultural one. It stated in the economic field by increasing productivity and ended, consequently, with the transformation of society by valuing the consumption experience. Both phenomena mass production and mass consumption have been possible due to the gradual liberation of the capital flow from the traditionally economic, cultural, and social constraints. The acceleration of capital was determined, as Daniel Bell pointed out, by the decrease of price of so-called luxury products so that they may become affordable to the middle class, as well as by the flexibility of granting credits, as bankers found in the middle class a significant means for valuing and circulating available capital.
Mass consumption which began in 1920s was made possible by revolutions in technology, principally the application of electrical energy to household tasks (washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and the like), and by three social inventions: mass production on assembly line, which made a cheap automobile possible; the development of marketing, which rationalized the art of identifying different kinds of buying groups and whetting consumer appetites; and the spread of instalment buying, which, more than any social device, broke down the old Protestant fear of debt. (Bell, 1976: 64)
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In the consumption-dominated world, man finds himself surrounded more by objects and less by people. These artefacts, as Baudrillard (2002) noticed, are organised within a hierarchy of values, and their consumption means exactly the acquisition of the new value which transfers itself to the one using them. In the world of objects, the classical social relationships are less intense, and everything becomes functional yet depthless. Similarly to the objects of consumption society, woks of arts, by means of reproducing techniques, lose their connection with the cultural tradition becoming thus mere ornamental objects assessed from the viewpoint of their being useful and entertaining (Benjamin, 1969). The reproduction of artistic works down to their bordering on kitsch means that art is definitely subject to market values. In the new context, culture alters its educational status becoming thus anti-culture, inspired from the every-day world and from all these objects that surround us and make our life joyful. The new aesthetic experience is the consumption pleasuredom accessible to all. Hence, one leaves behind the old artistic ideals, regarded as elitist, in favour of a culture which can be experienced by all and which can be found dayin-day-out. It is the time of what Fredric Jameson called the explosion of culture described as:
a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself can be said to have become cultural in some original and yet untheorized sense. (Jameson, 1991: 48)

To the same extent, the triumph of consumerism means the increased relevance of capital in all human activities, achieving thus the integration of the entire planet earth into what Peter Sloterdijk (2005) called the inner mundane space of capital. The shift from taking work and production for the final point of capitalism to taking consumption for its final point actually stands for a new vision of capital where this is now related to desire. VOLATILISATION OF THE BEING The discovery of the unconscious as an active force eluding the control of reason, which influences mans activity, is the second revelation of modernity that led to its end. The unconscious suggests that desires and needs theorised by political economics are manifestations of primary
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drives, which are more constitutive to man than has ever been thought. If political economics was the one to have opened the way of researching man as a finite being, by topicalising the unconscious one discovers the depths of this finite being, which can be only indirectly known via their external manifestations. In addition, it has been discovered that man is driven in life by a pleasure principle, a fact acknowledge by the consumption and not rational ideals, that when follow would rather estrange man from his nature and subjects him to neurosis. And last but not least, the theory of the unconscious underlines the idea of flow, of a permanent sequence of desires whose satisfaction is not a qualitative, but a quantitative issue. The idea of an exterior flow crisscrossing the world and aiming at satisfying our pleasures and desires is doubled by the idea of an interior flow generating such pleasures and desires. This likeness made the possibility to correlate capital, the one flooding social, economic, and cultural life to the unconscious, underlying all human interests. Thus, the ideologies of desire (Jameson, 1991), the post-structuralist theories have come into being, explaining that the success of capitalism does not rely on the proliferation of the production modes and on the creation of mass production but on its intensification along with the intensification of mans desires. Desire as a constituent of reality is no longer regarded, dialectically, as a lack, as something that needs to be satisfied or, otherwise, it may generate new desires. Desire becomes now an efficient principle feeding all the dimensions of the human being.
Si le dsir, il produit du rel. Si le dsir est producteur, il ne peut l'etre qu'en ralit, et le ralit. () Le dsir ne manque de rien, il ne manque pas de son object. C'est plutot le sujet qui manque au dsir, ou le dsir qui manque de sujet fixe; il n'y a de sujet fixe que par le rpression. Le dsir et son object ne font qu'un, c'est la machine, en tant que machine de machine. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1998: 34)

Consequently, desire becomes a transcending principle and renders void the subject, evaluated now from the perspective of its corporal nature like a desiring-machine. In this case, the encoding modality for this energy is at stake. It is pervaded by incontrollable intensities, it circulates incessantly and it objectivates itself in the most unexpected shapes, generating thus new desires and feelings. The task of such encoding is assigned to capitalism, which transforms this flow of impulses into an on-going
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exchange process affecting everyone. In this on-going exchange, what matters and renders the system intense is the quantity of exchanged products the more the products, the higher the intensity, and implicitly the greater the pleasure. Hence, capitalism encodes the flow of desires in a quantitative language, but with a view to satisfying these unconscious impulses.
We must grasp the fact the system of capital is not the site of the occultation of an alleged use-value which would be anterior to it this is the romanticism of alienation. Christianity but primarily that it is in a sense more than capital, more ancient, more extended; and then that these so-called abstract signs, susceptible to provisional measurement and calculation, are in themselves libidinal. (Lyotard, 1993: 78-79)

The goal of this re-thinking of the economy from the point of view of desire is to assume as a task for any theory trying to penetrate the logic of capital, the liberating libidinal energy from the forces likely to slow down its. To modernity, the mark of the capital-dominated world was becoming: similarly to the capital, which can neither grow, not survive without circulating, the capitalist world can exist but in an on-going expansion, meaning by creating new production means, new products, and equally significant, new desires (representing the drive of this expansion). But the intensity of the becoming has increased along with the expansion of mass production, engaging social values and relationships, cultural signs, marginal voices, transforming consumption into hyper consumption (Lipovetsky, 2007). The result of this increasingly accelerated movement was this tearing off the old systems and entering a new era whose main process is not the becoming one but the volatilising one.
The first major consequence has been to accentuate volatility and ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, labour processes, ideas and ideologies, values and established practices. The sense that all that is solid melts into air has rarely been more pervasive (which probably accounts for the volume of writing on that theme in recent years). (Harvey, 2004: 285-286)

The becoming being was severed from the volatile being, the one which has no long a ground (not even becoming proper), the one dismissing the traditional categories of temporality and spatiality, as it does
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not need such experiences, the one which does not imply a certain dialectics, as it has no roots and that does not happen with a view to a grand finale, the one having no history as it does not imply continuity of a precedent, the one not calling for a dominant code as the circumstances of its emergence, knowledge, and assessment have a local and contingent character. The becoming of modernism turned into the volatility of postmodernism. This difference is also proven by the manner reality is understood. Modernists understood the world as being in a permanent movement, but this movement was subjected to deterministic laws, which could be rendered in mathematical formulae. In postmodernism, the world discovers itself as being uncertain, unpredictable, subject to risks that can hardly be forecast. Hence, the necessity of a
new language of variables, parameters, models, stochastic process, algorithms, heuristics, minimax and other terms which are being adopted by the social sciences. Yet the type of mathematics that is influential here is not the deterministic calculus of classical mechanics, but a calculus of probabilities. (Bell, 1976: 98)

This volatilisation process had its roots, as we have already seen, in the more and more accelerated changes occurred in economy. The shift from the capital-labour relationship to the capital-desires ones meant leaving behind the Fordist economic principles in favour or some new principles corresponding to an economy characterised by volatile markets. By and large, what was called Post-Fordism (Harvey, 2004), Disorganised Capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1987), Post-Industrial Society (Bell, 1976), Late Capitalism (Jameson, 1991) represents the gateway to a new stage of capitalism, which focuses on flexibility (the ability to adjust fast to continuously changing market, including by introducing new technologies or relocating production units in other areas of more favourable to business development); it also focuses on the importance of granting impalpable goods (e.g. information, education, know-how, the growth of services sector at the expense of classical economy based on consumption goods), on the mobility of capital (the ability of capital to move faster and faster in a world where border have disappeared, and so has the power of nation-states, weakened by the increasing power of large corporations) and, last but not least, on specialisation (whether it refers to a clearer division of labour or to the capacity of production to become increasingly customised). The volatile market economy is subject to uncertainties of all
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kinds, successive crises, riskier speculations, as well as to fast moneymaking, to fast implementing innovations or to concentrating capital in order to solve stringent problems (e.g. cure for some diseases, environmental protection, etc.). Changes occurred in the economic life due to the increased capital circulation have been felt in all aspects of social and cultural life. Thus, we can speak of a disappearance of the classical categories of time and space. The new technologies, means of communication, mass media or the development of faster and faster cars have all led to shortening the time to react to these increasingly fast changes on the market and to rendering void the distances in a world considered now as a global village (McLuhan, 1989), which has become flatter (Friedman). If the classical political economics, as Michel Foucault acknowledged, discovers that man as a finite being living in a finite time, the postmodernist economics renders void even the idea of time, transforming mans finitude in an ephemeral existence, lacking consistency. As to geographical space, this is reconfigured from the perspective of the interest capital manifests for various areas of the world. In fact, volatilisation has been felt at the level of the entire reality by its transformation into simulacrum. The beginning of this transformation coincides, not by chance, with the birth of consumerism and has continued throughout the development of the post-industrial era. The Situationists were the first to consider the society dominated by publicity, mass media and mass products as a society of spectacle where individuals are controlled by fabricating desires, which are to be satisfied via consumption. Taking further this conception, Baudrillard speaks of a hyper-reality generated by the more and more intensive consumption, which dismisses the genuine reality or heralds the end of the distinction reality appearance. The process of volatilisation of the real continues from its volatilisation by means of media technologies to fixing its volatile condition by means of regarding simulacrum as the only existing reality. To Deleuze (1968), simulacrum is not preceded by a real referent to which it refers back, but reality is a simulacrum to the extent that it is seen as the sum total of some possibilities which can be actualised by means of simulation, imagination or copying. The dismissal of the traditional framework of reality has had cultural consequences in the changes of the role played by cultural creations in the life of the contemporary man. The collapse between culture and economics determined the research of the former to be carried out starting from the
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transformations undergone by the consumption process over the latest decades. Hence, we can asset that we have shifted from a consumption of standardized or mass products to a consumption of customized products bearing the mark of personal style. Here, too, the process of volatilization has created effects. The dialectics value of use vs. value of exchange Marx wrote about was rendered void by bringing into the foreground the signvalue of goods (Baudrillard, 2002), as a symbol of prestige and social standing offered by the products consumed. This in turn has disappeared leaving room to a type of consumption that bears the mark of individualisation and subjectivisation.
We would rather want objects designed for living than objects of ostentatious display, we buy one thing or another not to boast about, to display a social status, but to satisfy our emotions, body, senses, aesthetics, relations, and sanitation and ludic needs, and entertainment as well. The goods on the markets which to begin with function as symbols of the status appear now more and more obviously as services to the person. From things we expect not to classify us in relation with the others but to allow us more independence and mobility, to challenge sensations, to make us live through experiences, to improve the quality of our lives, to preserve us young and healthy. (Lipovetsky, 2007: 33)

Aesthetisation of everyday life, the importance granted to life style and the personalisation and stylisation of the objects consumed as well become the new coordinates of consumption culture. The experience of volatilisation of the being, with all its radical transformations and with increasing intensity, is now caught in the flow of our cultural products, which bear the mark of a decentred subject who builds reality around their desires exacerbated by the market economy. Therefore, with respect to consumption culture we can say that it is the reflection of the unique experience or at least the most intense experience we feel in a world bent to produce more the inhuman, as a means of expressing what is authentic to the human being.
Acknowledgements. This paper was made within the project Developing the Innovation Capacity and Improving the Impact of Research through Post-doctoral Programmes, supported by the Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resources Development, under the number POSDRU/89/1.5/S/49944.

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