Arendt and Baudrillard: pedagogy in the consumer society
Trevor Norris explores the contribution of Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard to our appreciation of the consumer society and education.
We are, as it seems, considering not only how a city, but also a luxurious city, comes into being… Let’s look at a feverish city…This healthy one isn’t adequate any more, but must already be gorged with a bulky mass of things. Republic Book II, 372e-373b
We can’t let the terrorists stop us from shopping. George Bush, September 2001.
The twentieth century philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard are rarely connected, yet there are significant areas of overlap regarding their account of consumerism and our consumers’ society. Both explain the recent trend of making what is private become public: Baudrillard describes this as making the private ‘explicit,’ while Arendt outlines the modern ascent of the activities of the private realm or oikos into the public realm. Secondly, both observe that human relations have been altered and are increasingly mediated by objects. For Baudrillard this entails an eclipse of reality, while for Arendt it entails a loss of the polis and life in the public realm. Hannah Arendt opens The Human Condition with a description of Sputnik, an exemplar for all that is wrong and dangerous in modernity. The passengers on this “earth-born object made by man”[5] would be the first to fully inhabit a realm entirely of human creation, in which humans were released from the confines of the human condition of earthly existence to fully enter the realm of the human artifice. For Arendt, this event, a “rebellion against human existence as it has been given”[6], indicates the magnitude of our worldly alienation. This rebellion means the loss of the polis and erosion of speech, in which we “adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful,” and “move in a world where speech has lost its power.”[7] Jean Baudrillard points towards similar recent events: the proliferation of signs combined with the separation of the sign from the object leaves humans inhabiting a symbolic realm entirely of their own making, entailing an “eclipse of the real”. Just as we come to inhabit the realm of the human artifice, so too do we dwell in the realm of signs, symbols, and simulations. Baudrillard’s original work in semiotics will provide a new analysis of consumer society, and help explain how communication structures and sign systems can preserve consumer society long after speech has been drained of its power and meaning.