Consumption as an Althusserian Ideological Apparatus

Introduction

Insofar as the term of ideology was identified with the Soviet regime and its operations in the second world, first the end of the Second World War, then the end of the Cold War were considered to be the end of ideology, or at least its decline, as it was defended in ‘The Opium of the Intellectuals’ of Raymond Aron (2001) and in ‘The End of Ideology’ of Daniel Bell (1960). Likewise, Francis Fukuyama even declared with the fall of the Soviet Empire ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama, 2006, p. xi). Although those claims, based on liberalism, were themselves ideological, their psychological effect was strong enough to discourage any investigation about the role of ideology in the modern societies for a very long time (Jost, 2006, p. 651). Yet, in reality, ideology still operates and has an important function in the modern world as a political means of governance under different guises, one of which is the new mode of consumption among the other ideological State. This article aims to investigate the role of modern consumption practice as an ideological apparatus in the capitalist societies in relation with the thesis that apparatuses that Louis Althusser (2014) put forth in his book ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. In order to find out the place of consumption in the transformation of individuals into conform subjects, first, ideology and its role in a political structure will be discussed; then, consumption will be analyzed in parallel with Althusser’s thesis of ideological State apparatuses.

Emergence of Ideology

To expose the ideological role of consumption, first, ideology itself should be defined. However, there is not any exact definition of the concept. For instance, while, according to Erick Allardt, ideology is a ‘system of evaluative principles about the ends of human actions, about the means of attaining these ends, and about the nature of social and physical reality’ (Allardt, 2017, p. 117), Slavoj Žižek defines the concept in a different way as he claims that ideology is something which can ‘designate anything from a contemplative attitude that misrecognizes its dependence on social reality to an action-orientated set of beliefs, from the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure to false ideas which legitimate a dominant political power’ (Žižek, 2012, pp. 3–4). In the first definition, the term appears as an instrument of the human action, which is believed to be a mere system of principles. Nevertheless, Žižek introduces the deceptive and biased dimension of ideology as a contemplative means dissimulating the socio-political reality within a set of beliefs. Thus, how can we define the concept? Is ideology a mere system of evaluative principles about the human acts or is it an apparatus dissimulating the political reality in a set of beliefs and false ideas operating for the legitimacy of a dominant political power?

The concept of ideology epistemologically emerged during the Great Terror period of the French Revolution and it was first used by the French aristocrat and Enlightenment philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy in his book ‘Eléments d’idéologie [Elements of Ideology]’ which he started to write while waiting his turn to be executed in a dungeon in 1796 (Kennedy, 1979, p. 353). He etymologically derived this concept by combining two Greek words: ἰδέα (idea) which is the original word for idea in Greek, and λόγος (logos) which has various meanings in the Western philosophy like logic, explication, ground, opinion, and, with its primary meaning in the sense in which Heraclitus used the term to indicate a rational structure of nature, the intelligible order hidden in nature. In this sense, ideology was designed, in the first place, to refer to a rational order of ideas. Indeed, Tracy used the term to refer to a science of rationality, which should teach people how to think in the rational manner, in order to appease the irrational tendencies of the revolution that he observed in his epoch, through establishing a social order premeditated in the domain of ideas.

Tracy believed that, despite the violence it unleashed, the French Revolution provided an enormous opportunity to construct the new rational citizen. He was even worried about losing the chance that the historical circumstances of the revolution brought forth. He considered ideology, in this aspect, as the right method of rational thinking which could overcome the misuse of reason. Indeed, following the Terror, the ideologues, philosophers who believed that it was the right time to diffuse the science of rational thinking, found the occasion to realize the project of Tracy with the accession of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Napoleon had close relations with the ideologues, and thanks to his support, they found a considerable place in the Institut de France (Institute of France) that aimed to set up a new system of education based on the principles of philosophy. However, since those philosophers did not aim to protect the political authority at any price in detriment of their own ideals, they found themselves in a vigorous conflict with Napoleon as they objected to some of his decisions, especially to his idea to re-establish the Catholic schools in France (Mardin, 2015, pp. 24–25).

The conflict led to the abolishment of the project and the section of Moral and Political Sciences under the control of the ideologues was eventually suppressed (Kennedy, 1979, p. 354). After that moment, Napoleon started to consider those philosophers as being detached from reality and labelled ideology as a ‘dark metaphysics’. Thereafter, ideology lost its positive connotation and became a notion referring to eccentric ideas of philosophers thinking purely on a metaphysical abstract basis (Mardin, 2015, p. 25).

Marxian Conception of Ideology

Although the concept was epistemologically emerged during the Terror period of the French Revolution, it became widely popular today through its negative connation that Karl Marx (1972) presented in his famous work, ‘The German Ideology’. The meaning of the term in this work was not far from the original sense of the word as Marx also considered ideology as ‘the system of the ideas and represent-ations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 253). However, this system did not have the positive appeasing role to get through the misuse of the reason that Tracy tried to ascribe to the concept. On the contrary, ideology was conceptualized with a negative function in the new political order which was similar to the role of religion in the feudal regime: to hide the political material basis of the relations of domination within a surreal fancy tale narrated by professional intellectuals working for the account of the dominant classes in order to mollify any resistance against the new regime. Ideology was considered, in this aspect, as a superstructure hiding what was going on in the base, the infrastructure founded on the material relations of domination. In order to clarify this part of ideology, Marx stated that the German idealist philosophy, which he considered as a reflection of the search for an ideological system, landed on Earth from the sky and endeavoured to understand the man ‘in the flesh’ through pure imagination as if the life was determined by the ideas and the consciousness, and not the vice versa (Marx & Engels, 1972, p. 47).

In this sense according to Marx, ideology attempts to alter reality within the domain of ideas. Indeed, since its preliminary definition presented by Tracy, it has put forth its own instrumentalization in the project of altering the historical reality by means of ideas for some political ends designated outside of itself. In this sense, ideas reorganized in ideology can be seen as moulds designed to reshape the perception in a way compatible with the needs of a political system. However, insofar as ideology is meant to manipulate the consciousness, it can neither ignore nor break with the material basis; but, being an instrument of altering the perception, it reinterprets and redefines the material basis within its own concepts and imagination, and eventually alters the consciousness of things by reflecting a deformed form of veracity. Only then, ideology can hinder the fact of the political power relations in a surreal intricate tale. In this sense, to ‘obtain a clear insight into the ideological problems of capitalism’ (Lukács, 1971, p. 84), György Lukács explains in ‘History and Class Consciousness’ reification on which ideology is founded, as a ‘phantom objectivity’ (Lukács, 1971, p. 83), a ‘non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society’ (Lukács, 1971, p. 87). It is the ‘second nature’ hiding the material facts and relations at service of the dominant classes by means of an imaginary autonomy of relations among things concealing the real relations between people in a society ‘where the market economy has been fully developed’ (Lukács, 1971, pp. 86–87), phenomenon which Marx called the ‘fetishism of the commodities’ (Marx, 1976, pp. 163–177).

In ideology, history, the result of the material relations of the human beings, is reinterpreted by means of a distorted past leading to a phantom end, that is, the paradise. Ideology, which, according to Marx, finds its supreme achievement in philosophy as ‘ideology par excellence’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 254), tries to reinterpret the historical facts within an imaginary purposeful movement of history directed by ideas, that is, a universal history directed by an absolute reason in a spiritual universe, which only the philosophical history could discover (Hegel, 2001, pp. 21–96). According to that vision, all the historical events pursue a unique path to accomplish all together the realization of the ideal, that is, the Spirit concealed in the absolute mind which alone comprehends the ‘universal truth’. The realization of the ideal by its passage through the material world, the process which brings about the History, will, then, eventually come to a successful conclusion in an imaginary paradisiacal future, that is, self-consciousness or Religion, which is the ‘driving force of history’ in the Hegelian idealist philosophy (Marx & Engels, 1972, p. 60). In reality, this hope, that is, the hope for the paradise on Earth, is the main drive directing the acts of men in keeping with the phantom objectivity and the pseudo end of history is the very beginning of the manipulation of the material.

Thus, ideology makes history non-historical as it detaches the historical facts from their context by redefining them in an ‘omni-historical reality’ of pure imagination (Althusser, 2014, p. 175). Like in the example of the Hegelian Idealism considering the material history as the creation of the ‘substance of the universe […] which sets this Material in motion’ (Hegel, 2001, pp. 22–23), ideology reinterprets history in conformity with and in the grip of a system of ideas which are coherent within each other. Thus, history as a movement contained in the frontiers of the ahistorical ‘pure thoughts’ (Marx & Engels, 1972, p. 60), and the tension of the material history is appeased by means of the coherence of ahistorical ideas. It even puts forth an ideal, a high purpose which can direct the acts of people in an ideal consistency in every sense without any conflict. This coherence independent of any real historical struggle reflects the ultimate purpose of ideology in a political order in the Marxian theory.

Triumph of the Subjective Reason in Ideology

In another Marxian point of view, Max Horkheimer demonstrates this degradation of the human mind by introducing the distinction between objective and subjective reasons. According to him, objective reason designates the human mental capacity which concentrates ‘on the idea of the greatest good, on the problem of human destiny, and on the way of realization of ultimate goals’ while subjective reason concerns ‘with means and ends, with the adequacy of procedures for purposes more or less taken for granted and supposedly self-explanatory’ (Horkheimer, 2004, pp. 3–4). In other words, while subjective reason operates on the means in order to adapt the human acts for the realization of some given ends, objective reason puts the emphasis rather on the ends themselves. Subjective reason seems to have practical purposes; objective reason deals with abstract concepts which may even seem mythological to the eyes of the modern man, like highest good or the imperatives of the moral. On the one hand, subjective reason, which we can equally call practical reason as it is merely shaped by practices, aims the immediate realization of given ends obviously beneficial for the subject in a given objectivity; on the other hand, objective reason represents the capacity to elaborate and criticize abstract constructions reflecting ‘an objective order’ (Horkheimer, 2004, pp. 3–39).

Insomuch as ideology as a thorough reflection on the objective order of things works through objective reason, it can only be analyzed by the latter. The material history which ideology reflects in a distorted way can only be unveiled by way of the objective reason. Although subjective reason cannot be separated from objective reason, according to Horkheimer (2004, p. 4), it is more ‘a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality’ brought about by objective reason. Trapped in the unilateral perception of ideology, the mind of the subject becomes a mind inept to understand the material fact enclosing it, incapable to recognize its own conditions and, thus, its own ends. Yet, this mind can still be considered to be reasonable according to its conformity to ideology as Horkheimer (2004, p. 4) claims the ‘degree of reasonableness of a man’s life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality’. Insofar as mind, deprived of the means of objective reason and reduced to the level of subjective reason which takes for granted the ends imposed by the outer objective order of the ruling ideology, is dispossessed of its own ends and its reflection on ends; it turns into an instrument for the realization of given ends. Thus, the reasonableness of any agent is even evaluated on the basis of its practicability as an apparatus according to its conformity to ideology.

This subordination process is not realized in the first instance by coercion; on the contrary, it results from the obviousness of the practical virtues of subjective practical reason. The ends that the subject aims to achieve become self-evident thanks to their practical virtues which can be recognized without any deliberation by the ideological consciousness while the objectivity perceived in ideology becomes ‘common sense’ or a ‘self-evident truth’ as Horkheimer (2004, p. 19) stated. This obviousness of the benefits and common sense is, in fact, linked to the obviousness of ideology. Moreover, insomuch as the ends are considered to be obviously beneficial, the exhausting interpretations of the objective reason are not only excluded from mind, but they even become inutile and futile in a rational perspective. Consequently, although coercion still exists in the base, subject serves the interests of ideology while believing to realize its own interests through the obvious daily practices through the reasonable calculations of the practical reason.

It is not surprising to see that Max Weber tracked down the beginning of the modern capitalism in the reduction of the mind to that calculating rationality, ‘calculating according to the methods of modern bookkeeping’ (Weber, 1950, p. 276). Once the social environment is thoroughly dominated, obviousness brings about the reduction of mind to simple calculations for the realization of given ends in private domain, obviously beneficial for the self-preservation in a wild ideological image of public domain, that is, in a world where ‘homo homini lupus’ (Hobbes, 1994). Consequently, even the separation between private and public can be seen as an invention of ideology. The submission of the individual mind to the ruling ideology is realized in the private domain in the grip of the ideological State apparatuses in the public domain.

The ‘cunning of reason’ that Hegel (2001, p. 47) thought as the main apparatus driving unconscious passions of mankind towards the path of Zeitgeist can be traced in this subordination of the subject’s reason to ideology’s reason by way of determining the ends of the former in the domain of the latter. The subject becomes an autonomous agent, an instrument of ideology once it takes the given ends of the ruling ideology as its own ends. What’s more, on the contrary to what Engels thought, this is a lock-in situation, a trap from which the subject cannot leave merely by way of the historical development without any conscious intervention, as Lukács claimed, insomuch as the instrument to which the human mind is reduced cannot understand its own conditions as long as it stays as a being ‘in itself and for us’ without becoming a conscious ‘being for itself’ (Lukács, 1971, p. 132).

Ideological State Apparatuses

Louis Althusser conducts a careful examination of ideology to understand the underlying facts of the political and economical constitution of capitalism in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. Following the Marxian perspective, he considers ideology as an ‘imaginary construction’, a pure dream to the extent of ‘nothingness’ and he underlines that ‘ideology has no history’ as it leans on pure illusion elaborated with ideals detached from the soil of the material basis (Althusser, 2014, p. 254). Having said that, to suggest that ideology is detached of the material basis and, thus, it has no history does not mean that it is purely arbitrary and there is no history in it at all. On the contrary, ‘it is merely the pale, empty and inverted reflection of real history’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 255) insofar as it is determined by the struggles in the basis, which it aims to appease or disarm. In other words, ideology does not have its own history but it reflects in a distorted way the material history which it aims to dissimulate and manipulate. In this sense, as it comprises the history on which it is founded and its illusion makes allusion to the material basis of history, it should be reinterpreted to discover the real history hidden behind its imagination. Before that instance, its history is external to it.

To begin with, according to Louis Althusser, ‘every social formation arises from a dominant mode of production’ and ‘the process of production sets to work the existing productive forces in and under definite relations of production’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 233). The first and foremost purpose of any production mode, and thus, all political systems, is the reproduction of its own conditions of production. Therefore, the ultimate concern of the political power is the ability to reproduce the conditions which can maintain its domination in the social relations throughout time, in other words, its aptitude to reproduce the social relations as relations of domination, the practices of the political power on which it is founded.

The reproduction of the docile subjects is the major duty of ideology in light of the fact that history, the temporality which the power aims to dominate, is nothing but the result of the material acts of the individuals. With this in mind, according to Althusser, all ideology exists as long as it can produce subjects as concrete beings in practice while the category of subject can only live within ideology. Although the repressive methods of the State, the major apparatus of the political power, provide the basis for the reproduction of the physical conditions of the submissiveness in this tableau, Althusser puts forth that the ideological State apparatuses ‘largely secure the reproduction specifically of the relations of production, behind a “shield” provided by the repressive State apparatus’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 248). While the repressive State apparatus functions straightaway by violence, the ideological apparatuses, although they are based on that violence as well, operate in the first instance by ideology; this is to say, by symbolic power operating by way of the hegemony of a system of ideas on the mind.

To produce docile subjects, ideology influences the practices by reinterpreting the material basis by means of its concepts reshaping the perception of things. The individual adopts the given ends by means of the everyday practices insofar as ‘an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 259). Any practice of ideology aims to realize, after all factors are considered, the ultimate goal of ideology: the subordination of the individual for the autonomous realization of the desired practices as a docile subject in the course of time. Thus, ideology does not work only at an abstract level and, although it is initially designed at an abstract level like any human product, it becomes concrete in the practice through the practices of subjects once it unfolds its value at a material level. Thus, following Lukács and Althusser, it can be said that, although ideology leans on an abstract ‘phantom objectivity’ to the extent of ‘nothingness’, its existence is as material as the reality it conceals in its ‘imaginary construction’.

In this perspective, according to Althusser, ideology brings out ‘the (imaginary) relationship’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 258) of individuals to their real conditions keeping them in line. While the phantom objectivity of ideology does not let the mind under its hegemony unveil the real conditions of its existence, it secretly establishes its relation to those real conditions necessary for the reproduction of the material relations of domination. Consequently, although it is based on some ideals and mystical tales, the real conditions of existence are represented at every level within an ideology insofar as the ultimate purpose of ideology is the reproduction of the subjects autonomously realizing their practices in conformity with every level of the mode of production. Thus, all the ideals and the spirituality evident in ideology correspond in a sinuous way to the oblique representations of the material basis.

The reproduction of this submissiveness of individuals as subjects within the practice of the omni-historical nothingness is exactly what ideology is. Only in this wise, it can detach the practices from their contradictions. In this aspect, according to Althusser, religion, education, family, legal and political system, trade unions, communication, culture, etc., are all ideological State apparatuses at the service of the ruling ideology reflecting the ideas of the ruling class. They all have the same and unique purpose: to reproduce the individuals as submissive, docile subjects for the mastery of their practices. In this sense, Althusser considered school, the State institution which has in its roots the very purpose of this transformation of the inexperienced souls into good citizens, as the most powerful ideological apparatus, insomuch as it does not only provide the theoretical and practical knowledge which might be necessary in the realization of the desired practices, that is, the labour process or the law enforcement agency, but it also subordinates the individual from inside at a very young age to ‘the “rules” of good behaviour’, this is to say, ‘the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 236).

Hence, ideology renders mind, its very own basis, instrumental by reshaping it from the state of tabula rasa to the state of subject, once it encloses all the perception. The subordination of the individual mind to ideology manifests itself in the perceptive obviousness of the ideological objectivity which encloses all the spheres of the life once it thoroughly dominates mind. Thus, as Althusser (2014, p. 262) points out, obviousness is an elementary ideological effect seeing the fact that the consciousness under the influence of ideology does not ‘fail to recognize’ what it is supposed to recognize. The constant practices of ideology in the reproduction of subject in conformity with the mode of production assure the foundation of this instantaneous ideological recognition. Indeed, people spontaneously live in Logos, in ideology, insofar as it is constructed by the quotidian practices.

As this process produces subjects autonomously carrying out their social roles, it is the individuals, who, being ready for ‘interpellation’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 191), try to form themselves as moral subjects. The ‘subjection to the ruling ideology’, the mastery of the practice (Althusser, 2014, p. 234) is, then, autonomously realized by the subject itself, like in the case of the Foucauldian subjectivation in which ‘the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 27). To such an extent that ideology is integrated in everyday life within all its practices in which people even recognize themselves as self-conscious beings ready to reply to interpellation, the imaginary construction, the phantom objectivity, that ideology brings about becomes more real than the reality itself, more natural than the nature itself; it eventually becomes extremely hard to identify its operations (Althusser, 2014, pp. 262–264).

The mind itself, being contained in the limits of ideology and deprived of its critical reason in the ideological obviousness, can no more reinterpret the world and perceive the basis founded on domination hidden under the opaque surface of the superstructure. Thus, mind risks to lose its capacity to question the objectivity which it obviously perceives; it assumes ideology as the absolute truth like a ‘second nature’. The subject of the authority, at this stage, is utterly submissive as it is dispossessed of the principal power to react, the critical thinking which can permit to perceive the material basis of the conditions of the individual. Consequently, mind is transformed into a simple instrument of survival at an individual level in the midst of a wild distorted objectivity.

From Consumption to Consumerism

Consumption in the modern society must be examined under the light of this aspect of Althusserian thesis which puts forth that ideology assures the submissiveness of subjects. Consumption as consumptive production has the ultimate purpose to reproduce the labour force because it is the department of the capitalist economy in which the wage capital realizes its use value, the reestablishment of the biological and mental power of labour. While consumption is still the precondition of the reproduction of skills of labour necessary in the labour process, it has also become an ideological apparatus through which the submission of subjects to the political order is reproduced since its evolution towards consumerism in the twentieth century.

As Lisabeth Cohen described in her article ‘A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America’ in a very convenient way, it is obvious that consumption has experienced a radical change in the modern world especially during the golden age of capitalism once the mass consumption was put in the centre of ‘a successful reconversion from war to peace’ (Cohen, 2004, p. 236). This transformation did not spontaneously have effect. The advertisements had an important role in this shift as the study of Lester D. Taylor and Daniel Weiserbs has shown that ‘advertising does in fact tend to increase consumption at the expense of saving’ (Taylor & Weiserbs, 1972, p. 642). People started to purchase products not only for their physical virtues seeing the fact that those products were merely sold by way of advertisements whose market attained a worth of 500 billion dollars in the world in 2015 (‘Magna Advertising Forecasts Winter Update,’ 2016). In this way, consumption became a means to reproduce the individuals as subjects, as decent citizens conform to the political reality through the manipulation of the personal drives by means of the socio-symbolic meanings conveyed through advertisements.

The fact that consumption was transformed into a socio-symbolic language expressing the personal desires and identities in the modern societies was already pointed out by several thinkers like Georg Simmel (2004), Jean Baudrillard (1970), Zygmunt Bauman (2013) and Robert Bocock (1993). In this new social model, goods that consumers purchase by seeing them from the advertisements which put some symbolic meanings before the functional virtues are dematerialized by exceeding their original purpose to meet the material needs and become the means to express individualities within a socio-symbolic language. As a result of this shift, as Guy Debord underlines, ‘the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images’ (Debord, 2000, p. 36) and the representations of the objects have become more significant than the objects themselves.

It is true that the commodities always had some symbolic meanings (Hawkes, 1996, 116). The difference is, as Guy Debord (2000) points out in his book ‘Society of THE Spectacle’ and Erich Fromm (2013) severely criticizes in his book ‘To Have or To Be’, economy dominates the life today in the modern societies through ‘the degradation of being into having’ (Debord, 2000, p. 17). Once the commodity took all the social life and all the public domain under its control insofar as it achieved to encompass everything visible and sensible, the subject can no more perceive anything, but these images of the world conveyed by commodities and advertisements. Likewise, the subject is dominated in its private domain; this is to say, in its own life dominated in the ideological practices, through the illusion that Guy Debord calls the ‘spectacle’. But how does this illusion become concrete and sensible in the material world? How can the nothingness take the life under its domination?

Debord (2000, p. 47) claims that ‘commodity is this materialized illusion’. The domination of life is realized by way of consumption practices as it is this practice which rematerializes the dematerialized socio-symbolic existence of the commodities through the extraction of the new use value of the commodity in the socio-symbolic language. Within the limited perception under the hegemony of the ruling ideology, the new mode of consumption conveying the personal identities seems to the individuals as a way out of the iron cage of the rationalism without breaking from society (Scaff, 2000, p. 252). Thus, the individuals find in consumption both the sentiment of security to belong to a group and a way out of the banality of the mass production (Vandenberghe, 1997, p. 118). In this aspect, consumption has even become, in the Freudian sense, the practice of the sublimation relieving the tension of the suppression as it helps the individual bear the discontent of the modern society by way of the phantasmal satisfactions offered by the consumer culture without disrupting the social unity (Kahraman, 2015, pp. 195–215). This transformation of consumer habits can be seen as a turning point for the traditional consumer markets. Henceforth, consumption crossed the frontiers of traditional needs insomuch as the psychological aspects created new demands mostly related to desires. The consequent expansion of demand has led to a new boom era of capitalism. At last, the shift from a needs culture to a desires culture that Paul Mazur of Lehman Brothers fancied so much for the salvation of the American economy (Magatti, 2017) could be accomplished. Hereafter, in the way that Mazur foresaw, consumers became agents trained to want the consumer products by means of desires which started to overshadow their traditional needs.

As Kerryn Higgs (2014) and Mauro Magatti (2017) argued, this transition did not spontaneously come about. It was more or less carried out by the big entrepreneurs by means of advertisement and audiovisual culture. It was planned and operated by social engineers like Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann (Higgs, 2014), with the help of psychologists like Ernest Dichter who believed that it was necessary as a strategy to give people a common identity by controlling their surrounding (Dichter, 1960). Consumption appeared to be a helpful apparatus to realize this project as it was the determinant of the subject’s practice in its private domain within the capitalist economy. In this sense, as Noam Chomsky (2011) put it in a clear way in his book ‘Media Control’, the consumption habits were deliberately manipulated to ‘manufacture consent’, to manage the ‘bewildered herd’ of Walter Lippmann in the age of ‘spectator democracy’.

One of the most crucial examples of the engineering of consent to manipulate consumer habits is the introduction of cigarettes to women (Murphree, 2015). When George Washing Hill, the president of American Tobacco Company in 1929, decided to hire Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew known as the father of public relations, for the task to commercialize cigarette among women, Bernays did not base his marketing strategy on the virtues and the benefits of cigarette. On the contrary, in order to decide his strategy, he consulted a psychanalyst, Abraham A. Brill, to understand the subconscious sense of a cigarette for a woman. Following Brill’s advice stating that women desired cigarettes as they saw it as a symbol of freedom exciting the oral zone (Brandt, 2007, p. 84), Bernays organized a fake march of a small group of smoking women protesting the taboo of smoking against women with the slogan of ‘Torches of Freedom’. His campaign achieved to increase the cigarette sales through that new desire produced by means of the subconscious sense of smoking.

Yet, the new social model found the possibility to be set up in the modern life because the masses were already touched by the capitalist ideology (Adamic, 2008). They lacked the objective reason to understand their real conditions and they contented with reasonable improvements in conformity with their practical reason based on arithmetic calculations. Thus, they were already deprived of the means to understand and question the objective order, the reified phantom objectivity which surrounded them. As wealth already had a socio-symbolic sense in the ruling ideology, the consumer goods gained their meanings on the basis of the symbolic power they represented. In other words, the consumer goods had symbolic meanings as they represented the symbolic power relations designated by wealth. Accordingly, Georg Simmel (2004, pp. 122–141) considered the fashion as a result of the incessant quest for social status by means of consumer goods insofar as he thought that the movement in the fashion was due to the eager of the lower classes to imitate and appropriate the consumption habits of the higher social classes. Likewise, according to Jean Baudrillard (1970, p. 79), the products differentiated their consumers in a consumerist society either by incorporating them in a social group designated as an ideal reference point or by putting them forward within their own groups by means of references to another social group which had a higher status. In both perspectives, the consumption surpassed its material borders and became an incessantly growing desire due to the symbolic meanings based on the comparisons designating the social status of the people according to the symbolic power relations the products represented.

Consumption as a New Ideological State Apparatus

Consumption in the modern age went beyond its physical frontiers and became, in this wise, a part of a socio-symbolic language expressing psychological aspects of individuals and their individualities. Henceforth, consumption transcended its original purpose to provide to the physical needs insomuch as it was more and more founded on desires. It started to play a dual role in both the reestablishment of biological and mental power of labour and the subordination of subject in the ideological structure. Consequently, consumption was transformed into a new ideological apparatus which facilitated the subjection to the ruling ideology and the mastery of the practice once it became the apparatus to express the individualities. At this stage, the parallelism between the new consumption practice and the ideological State apparatuses that Althusser puts forth will be apparently apprehended if the basic traits of the former are examined in the light of the latter.

As we have seen in the previous parts, an ideological State apparatus has some major traits. To begin with, ideological State apparatuses are by no means neither natural nor innate. This trait of being unnatural is related to the phantom objectivity of ideology which appears as a second nature. They are all introduced by means of a mode of production and they are all parts of an imaginary construction. However, while they are unnatural components of an imaginary construction, they do realize a vital function of the political structure by relating the individuals to their real conditions. They do not work only at an abstract level as they are the means to produce and keep in line docile subjects in practice. At last, although ideological State apparatuses produce subjects in practice, individuals cannot realize their operation because they live in ideology and their minds are subordinated to its practical reason. They conceive those apparatuses as a part of nature insomuch as the reason cannot apprehend the totality of the mode of production in which they operate.

Following the analyses of Robert Bocock (1993), it can be concluded that the modern practice of consumption exhibits all those traits of an ideological State apparatus. First, as an ideological apparatus, the new consumption practice is not innate but learned once the subject is surrounded by the commodities. Indeed, as Bocock (1993, p. 54) mentions, there is nothing natural in the modern mode of consumption, to such an extent that it is founded on the learned symbolic values. Consequently, for the sake of the new mode of consumption, a capacity to understand and respond to the symbols of consumption should be developed in the consumer’s mind, and this process of becoming a consumer is only possible by way of a learning process based on the practices of consumption, that is, shopping trips, holidays with private tour companies, etc.; because a subject should not only desire, but also purchase goods and experiences to become a consumer (Bocock, 1993, p. 54). Thus, like the ideological apparatuses, it is the practice of consumption itself which incorporates the symbols of the goods in the consumers’ mind insomuch as it is based on a pure dream to the extent of ‘nothingness’ which cannot exist without this learning process in the daily life through which the individual assimilates his role of being a subject of consumption as a consumer. At last, in order to realize this transformation, all the physical and the mental environment of the individual should be rearranged in conformity with the consumption practices as Lefebvre (1991) mentioned in his book The Production of Space. Only then, it can become more natural than nature itself.

Second, although the modern consumption practice is the realization of a pure dream, it brings out, indeed, like all ideological apparatuses, ‘the (imaginary) relationship’ (Althusser, 2014, p. 258) of individuals to their real conditions. It is what delineates the affiliation of the individual to a social group. Accordingly, the symbols of the consumer goods cannot be ‘simply imposed upon customers by capitalist companies advertising their products; they have to tune in with the potential customers’ own ways of life if they are to be effective’ (Bocock, 1993, p. 55). Thus, the symbolic values of the consumer goods have to correspond to the potential customers’ sub-cultural values, which are nothing but the reflections of the real conditions of individuals.

Third, the working of consumption as an ideological apparatus cannot be unveiled by the subject’s reason thanks to its obviousness seeing the fact that the subject’s consciousness is dominated by the reified phantom objectivity which excludes any alternative appearance of the reality by way of the subordination of the objective reason. The unconscious is never unrelated to the ideology in general, as Althusser (2014, p. 176) mentions. Insomuch as the consumption experience helps the individual bear the discontent of the modern society by way of the phantasmal satisfactions, the desires which lead to the consumption practices appears to be unconscious due to the ideological obviousness, the autonomous harmony of the subject’s reason with the ruling ideology. Thus, the learning process of the modern consumption practice even operates through manipulations using unconscious mechanisms. Thus, psychoanalysis has always been handy in the promotional campaigns to manipulate the desires of the consumers (Bocock, 1993, p. 55). The consumption as an ideological apparatus eventually reproduces the individuals as subjects from inside even without their realizing their own conditions.

The fact that individuals turn to the consumption in the modern societies for the expression of their distinguishing aspects may seem, in the first instance, like a way to satisfy some egoist desires as it can appear to be obviously beneficial for the self. However, this obviousness is the most effective trick of ideology operating on the autonomous and unconscious harmony of the subject’s reason with the ruling ideology. With the subordination of the subject’s reason to the ideology’s reason, the individual interest serves, in the last instance, the interests of the political power insofar as the egoist passion adjusted to the general interest aligns the subject inside the ruling ideology by means of the practices repeating the symbolic power relations. In this sense, the modern consumption has become the practice of the teleological cunning of ideology.

Conclusion

As consumption transcended its original purpose to re-establish biological and mental power of labour following its drastic transformation towards consumerism, it gained a central importance in the reproduction of the social conditions which are necessary for the preservation of the capitalist mode of production. Once it became an apparatus to express individualities within a socio-symbolical language transmitted by means of consumer goods, people started not only to consume for their physical needs but also for their psychological needs and desires. On the other hand, thanks to this transformation, the markets overreached their natural frontiers of demand in the beginning of the twentieth century since they were not anymore restrained by the physical needs of people, but they could henceforth produce new needs and accrue demand by way of manipulating desires of their customers. Thus, the individuals who were subordinated to the capitalist mode of production at workplace in what they produced were also subdued by the markets in their private lives in what they should want to consume.

Consumption became, in this way, a new ideological apparatus for the mastery of the practice insofar as it subordinated the individual ends to the ideological objectivity. To such an extent that consumption is dematerialized within the symbolic meanings that the consumer goods convey, it has become a new language that subject ought to speak in order to find a place in society. The submissiveness of subjects is, hence, reproduced in the modern capitalist societies through the repetitive practices of consumption imitating the habits of the higher classes, which can be seen as the realization of the symbolic power relations by way of the symbolic meanings of the consumer goods. To sum up, all things considered, it can be said that consumption constitutes today a new ideological State apparatus whose content and meanings are learnt in the practices of consumption, which establishes the relation of subjects to their real conditions by way of the symbolic power that the symbolic meanings of the goods represent and which, thanks to its obviously beneficial ends, transforms the individuals into subjects even without their realizing their own conditions.