Ivan Bo DO.

Espineda AB Philosophy IV 1

Dialectical Historical Materialism Sir Joey Pinalas

Critique of Philippine Society

The Philippine Society as a Consumer Society

From television screens to radio broadcasts to advertisements lining the length of EDSA, it all conveys one message: the Philippine society is a consumer society. A consumer society rests on consuming material goods as a paramount feature of its balance and values. Hence people who do not consume are undervalued. Lots of investments and spending are consecrated to consuming, irrespective of whether it is good for health and the environment. There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services, and material goods. Differing from the society before our time, humans of this age are surrounded not so much by other human beings but by objects. And as Jean Baudrillard puts it, Just as the wolf-child became a wolf by living among wolves, so we too are slowly becoming functional. We live by object time, by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession. Today, it is we who watch them as they are born, grow to maturity and die, whereas in all previous civilizations it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which outlives the generations of human beings. (Baudrillard, 1970)

Look anywhere and you would see people holding on tight to their cellphones or laptops. Eyes today are hard to pry away from the different screens that encompass our lives. Everything we see is diminished to consumable products from technology, to lifestyle, to art. According to Baudrillard, the finest consumer object that can be found today is the body. I think this is still true today, especially in the Philippines. Most Filipino entrepreneurs are agents of companies like Avon, MSE, etc. and these sell mostly products that are for beauty and body enhancements. Even of the products that are not directly for the body, suggestive elements in its advertisements prove that it still is a consumer objects that dominates our time. Baudrillard even goes further to say that it has literally taken over that moral and ideological function of the soul. (Baudrillard, 1970) People now see their bodies as something to invest in. Bodies have now become something consumable. The main thing is that this narcissistic reinvestment is in fact always simultaneously an investment of an efficient, competitive, economic type. The body reappropriated this way is reappropriated first to meet capitalist objectives; in other words, where it is invested, it is invested in order to produce a yield. The body is not reappropriated for the autonomous ends of the subject, but in terms of a normative principle of enjoyment and hedonistic profitability. In other words, a person handles his body as he would his inheritance. Baudrillard sees two major leitmotifs of this: beauty and eroticism. For women and men alike (vain men, anyway) beauty is no longer seen as a natural thing. It has now become the moral imperative of people. It is seen as a social crime not to take care of yourself, and that is by means of procuring expensive things to enhance your innate beauty, if you have even that. In the Philippine setting, it is seen everywhere. Being copycats of the countries that are influential, we also see beauty in this way. Filipino women no longer can go out of their houses without having to scrub their bodies so as to appear flawless, few women can go out of their houses without having a little makeup on, and even men now spend a lot of their time in the gym where they can buff their bodies up to appear healthy or, to use the now common term, hot. Alongside beauty, as we have just defined it, sexuality everywhere orientates the rediscovery and consumption of the body today. The beauty imperative, which is an imperative of turning the body to advantage by way of narcissistic investment, involves the erotic as sensual foil. In the words of Baudrillard,

We have clearly to distinguish the erotic as a generalized dimension of exchange in our societies from sexuality properly so called. We have to distinguish the erotic body substrate of the exchanged signs of desire from the body as site of fantasy and abode of desire. In the drive/body, the fantasy/body, the individual structure of desire predominates. In the eroticized body, it is the social function of exchange which predominates. (Baudrillard, 1970) In this sense, the erotic imperative is merely (like the aesthetic imperative in beauty) a variant or metaphor of the functional imperative. Again, the body is seen as mere consumable object; a thing that is invested in for the individual to make profit of. In a more concrete explanation, a woman invests in her face and body because most people today do not hire ugly people. It is often seen in ads that jobs today require people to be taller than some and also to have a pleasing personality, by which they only mean pleasing to the eyes. Recuperated as an investment of enjoyment and an indicator of prestige, the body is now then subjected to a labor of investment which doubtless represents a more profoundly alienated labor than the exploitation of the body as labor power. (Baudrillard, 1970) Baudrillard says that this a more alienated kind of labor because the person is the one alienating himself from himself. Whereas, in using the body as labor power, it is mostly because of the things used and other external objects which deem the person alienated. I am sad to say this is where the Filipino society now stands. It is simply a mutation of Louis Althussers Ideological State Apparatuses, one that uses the media. In our society today, the only way out of this kind of exploitation (that is, the exploitation of a body by its very owner) is a cultural revolution.