Baudrillard: Needs and Pleasure

In order to prove the untruth of the correspondence between need and object or pleasure and consumption, Baudrillard locates the objects of consumption outside of the sphere of need and pleasure. Instead, Baudrillard writes, they act in a system of signs; objects act as a language system. The consumption of objects acts as a differentiating social signifier that confer status on the consumer individual. In doing so they “play exactly the same role as the set of distinguishing values played in previous times: the foundation of group morality (16).”

Advertising and commercials incessantly seek to locate desire onto consumer objects. Consumption rests on the scheme of broken and renewed promises, where desire is alternatively gratified and frustrated. The dislocation produced by ceaseless advertising creates the liminal space of desire. Here objects “serve as a fluid and unconscious field of signification (44).”

Dispelling the assumed connection between pleasure and consumption Baudrillard writes:

“Consumer behavior, which appears to be focused and directed at the object and at pleasure, in fact responds to quite different objectives: the metaphoric or displaced expression of desire and the production of a code of social values through the use of differentiating signs (46).”

In fact consumption is “group morality” which is imposed on the individual. It is a social function and a “system of communication.” It is therefore a system of constraint on the individual’s pleasure.