Is Baudrillard responsible for the pessimistic interpretation of consumerism that is so prevalent in literary circles...

No one pays attention to people in literary and academic circles other than other nerds. Get your head out of your ass boot licker.

Intellectual dishonesty like this is precisely why we need someone to challenge it.

what is there to challenge?

Nobody cares about literary circles

Champagne socialists will talk about being anti consumerist while typing on their iPhones, sipping espresso and buy funko pop figurines, it doesn't matter

What a blindingly stupid question to ask. There is something to challenge in every single intellectual stance, and the more ground a stance has in the intellectual playing field, the more worthwhile it is to challenge it. Though, I can understand the ignorance on this to an extent, since the "anti-" prefix serves to distract from this point in a subtle way. It connotes the notion that the stance is a challenge against another stance only and not its own stance.

Anti-consumerism should be challenged like any other stance. The terminology employed in its defense should be defined and examined for accuracy, its proponents should be psychoanalyzed, their values should come into question, effects of their adoption should be measured.

No one might care about literary circles, but they do care about highly articulate authors who have an advanced take on social and political issues (and especially when those takes are controversial ones), and all highly articulate authors emerge from some literary circle somewhere.

>If not, what book would you trace anti-consumerism to?
the soul

You literally havent said anything. What is your critique of anti-consumerism?

Consumerism seems hard to defend, ethically, especially now with environmental awareness etc. People still do it, even though you won't find any/many intellectuals arguing in favor of it. It's like cheating, smoking and alcoholism.

>What is your critique of anti-consumerism?
I don't have one yet, it's why I'm looking for reading material on the subject.

>Consumerism seems hard to defend, ethically,
Okay, that doesn't make it invalid though, or a lack of critique of anti-consumerism fine.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

#
>I don't have one yet
So basically you are an anti-intellectual contrarian bootlicker that wants to find some literal who daddy to defend your cucked position (because you have nothing to say for yourself) to fight against the postmodern neomarxist boogiemen who are running rampant in literary circles

You're unbelievably retarded. Yes, I'm anti-intellectual, hence why I'm looking for books to read, refraining from positing my own thoughts on the matter until I'm read up on it, and think no intellectual stance should go unchallenged by opposing intellectual stances.

If you mean consumerism as in attachment to the things that you consume, the Buddha was one of the earliest and most influential critics of this.

If you mean the modern social phenomenon, the Frankfurt School's account is the most influential.

Marx wasn't around to see the rise of consumerism.

Anti-consumerism is the necessary conclusion of living in a society whilst having an IQ above 105

Anyone in particular to start with? Benjamin maybe?

THIS USER POSTS IN /R/CHAPOTRAPHOUSE

Here's a documentary on the history of consumerist propaganda that's an excellent starting point for sources of critique. It's long, but lucid.

youtube.com/watch?v=4005-wuPSkE

It's much later, but most people read Marcuse's One Dimensional Man on this. The original source of a lot of these ideas is the chapter on The Culture Industry in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Has anyone ever seen someone use the word 'bootlicker' while not being attached to the Overton window of acceptable political disourse. It sure is convenient that you arrived at a 'radical revolutionary' position that you're allowed to make little groups for at your university and not get in trouble. You can even buy a Che guevera shirt and wear it around to signal how subversive you are and...absolutely nobody will get mad at you

Are you stupid? Have you ever left your house and met normies? All of their lives are consumer-friendly.

>And has there been any author who explored anti-consumerism as a reactionary / nihilistic movement?
try commercials like you see on television or talking to most normal people who live a consumerist lifestyle and enjoy it

>the average person on the street can articulate and critique theory like a well-established published author, scholar, and philosopher can
What the fuck am I reading?

You live in a bubble
This is demonstrated by your assumption that 1) anti-consumerism is running rampant and the de facto default stance and 2) everyone but you is retarded

Leave your home!

If you don't have book recommendations, stay out of the thread. People like you are ruining this board.

Pot calling he kettle black
>What are some books that tell me to be a consumer drone
You don't need books to do that you dip

You're as bad as the drones for not wanting any intellectual discourse to continue against your favor.

Everybody is anti-consumerism, except when it comes to those commodities they enjoy.

We’re all hypocrites. I consider myself to be anti-consumerism, but I consume like mad. I like to buy books, I like to go out to eat, I like to live in a nice home. See, I just don’t like the trashy consumerism as practiced by others— MY consumerism is just dandy

There is no intellectual discourse to have because it is a retarded position.

Burger. Punk.

>well-established published author, scholar, and philosopher
lol
turn on your TV
tons of highly paid proffesionals will blast the pro consumerism position at your face all day long

To consume is the act of the final man, to create is the act of the uber man.

Simulation and virtualizing our products is the only escape. Buy ebooks.

And this isn't? Just look at how consumption is being condemned there. Want to know how life grows? Not by starving itself, but by consuming. To live is to consume.

This radicalism has been prevalent on forums for decades. Since Baudrillard wrote that book, I'm guessing. There is something clearly fundamentally absurd about anti-consumerism and it is left unaddressed. Salespeople and average people being narrow-minded doesn't mean it is a problem to market and sell goods to people in all contexts.

there is a difference between mass consumerism and consumption lmao

The difference is arbitrary. The former is concerned with the political matter, but the political matter is informed by the philosophical matter, which the latter is concerned with. Whether we're talking about 5 people consuming things, or 5 million people consuming things, anti-consumerists are still taking a philosophical stance against the process of consumption when they criticize people for wanting things and businessmen for giving people what they want. I assume that anti-consumerists don't even realize they are doing this, considering I never see them offer any valid alternatives to consumerism in their criticisms.

The production of capital is in a runaway feedback loop. Take the Landpill.

Actually consumerism is much worse than the superficial denouncements usually applied, those are just the usual bullshit in academia, trendy shit repeated everywhere that no one actually understands or thinks deeper upon.

Thanks for the on topic book recs.

You think that popular academic writers can change the behaviour of entire markets of consumers and corporations if they're "well-established" and "highly articulate"?
As other anons have said, whether or not anti-consumerism is popular in academic circles has no bearing on the level of consumerism in society as a whole.

faggot

>You think that popular academic writers can change the behaviour of entire markets of consumers and corporations if they're "well-established" and "highly articulate"?
Yes. These markets and corporations came into existence in part by the writers who theorized the principles they were founded on.

>As other anons have said, whether or not anti-consumerism is popular in academic circles has no bearing on the level of consumerism in society as a whole.
I know that. But consumerism is not my concern here. It's anti-consumerism I'm concerned with.

This at least makes for an opening to a more nuanced look at the subject. Obviously it's not the same thing to become a debt slave chasing the latest fashion that one must have not to feel embarrassingly out of step with whatever pop mob or sub-cultural tribe that advertisers assert one must belong to not to be cast into an imaginary and shameful social outer darkness, and quite another to equip one's private surroundings with creature comforts designed and built from the outset to deliver objectively better living without regard to how easily it sells to the easily indoctrinated. There is no doing away with the matter of critical judgment in the objective value of things, without making oneself the butt of advertising or the butt of some puritanical ideology that condemns all industry as the work of the devil.

>Yes. These markets and corporations came into existence in part by the writers who theorized the principles they were founded on.
Lol. People were trading and founding joint-stock corporations long before the academic notion of "capitalism" was ever put to paper. You must be one of those leftists who believe in the "capitalism is historically contingent" meme.

>corporate brainwashing
I mean, you didn't EXPLICITLY say "false consciousness", but....

>People were trading and founding joint-stock corporations long before the academic notion of "capitalism" was ever put to paper.
There are always some early experimenters, yes. But it's writers who reap those harvests for future generations to refine and master these systems. You need them for that.

Consumption got new level. Even you you do not have enough money to consume all this stuff produced by our civilization in supermarket or internet shops you can consume information. I am talking about internet or tv. You do not need to go anywhere or do something. Just watch. And system works.