On The Question Of Identity In Consumer Society

Identity is mutual recognition between people. Identity is always self-identity and it has two meanings: one is to know ?I", which means recognizing self-existence; the other is to make"I"and myself be the same one thus achieving self-confirmation. Consumer identity is the way people use through the consumption to express the identity or difference between others or social groups. Self is established in comparison, and thus socially positioning and classifying self. In a consumer society, this identity model forms a large impact on the traditional labor-intensive way of the identity. Identity is not constructed by the labor but constructed mainly via the sense of consumption access to self-identity, mental satisfaction and meaning in life.Production society and consumer society succeed each other but two they have significant differences. Consumption serves as the inevitable result of capital production system and the logical extension, replacing the apparent logic of production being dominant and leading people?s other activities in society. In rich material consuming society, everyone can participate in consumption activities; also it is not only people?s right but also people?s duty. Consumption undergoes a fundamental change and it has become an establishment relationship and active behavior with abstract meaning. The process of human consumption is the process of identity construction and vice versa (meanwhile the process of identity construction process is also the process of human consumption). The most important features of consumption society are: Consumption is always referring to the identity consumption, and consumption activities are always around the identity. People engaging in consumption are to in create, maintain or change their identity. What people spend or not to spend reflects people?s identity of a certain value target. What kind of identity people maintain leading to the value judgments of the contents and forms of consumption thus carrying out consumption behavior fitting in their own status and position.From a cultural point of view, consumer identity is the result of modernity. It has caused the crisis of identity. People can not insist or obtain the status, meaning and value of their own, as well as the significance arising from recognition and practice together with the acceptance and faith of value and relationships. Identity Crisis is the disappearance of the traditional social structure and the dilution of class-consciousness, but also the growing failure of human creativity and the consequences of lacking in identity utterance. Identity requires an ethical framework, which takes a variety of standards and values into the whole. However, by now the western moral and cultural development has lost pre-modern society, especially the ancient Greek traditional real virtue and perfection and trapped into the situation of the collapse of the framework. At the same time modernity creates the sufficient conditions in the aspects of material, culture and so on for the form of the consumer identity model. All human activities follow the rule and logic of matters.Symbolic value of goods means that they have a certain symbolic sense, convey some information and reflect the relationship between people in exchange. It isn?t just use value of goods that people consume; what?s more important is to consume the symbolic value of goods. The production of symbolic value and its quantity are manipulated by the cultural industry of capitalism and mass media system, especially the advertising media. Modern advertising continuously strengthens the symbolic effects via attaching symbolic meaning to goods for demands. People?s pursuit for symbolic value of matters becomes extremely prominent and crazy so that people serving as the goal itself are driven out of human activities. The main part of consumption symbolizes along the track of materialization and a human?s identity becomes the equality of sign and symbol.Objectively speaking, the consumer identity is a simple and convenient way of identity. It not only relives the identity crisis but also has some rebellion function. But the consumer identity is not omnipotent. The realized identity can only be limited local one and unreliable and changeable identity. It easily leads the public to the wrong way resulting in widespread consumerism. The unprecedented prosperity of consumer culture means that more general loss of life value and consumption can still not fundamentally solve the identity crisis. Consumer identity is essentially a new mechanism of late capital society playing a role of controlling. It becomes an ideology serving as the consolidation of the existing ruling power. Consumer identity is the product of capital movement. In order to achieve its increase it combines with culture generating a culture capital to focus on the consumer domestication of the people, constantly expanding and stimulating new consumer demands. When people consume with the help of sign absorption to construct self- identity in consumption with to, the capital achieves consumer control and control of consumers through the manipulation of symbols. However, the general public are unaware of all of this, immersed in the illusion of freedom and equality which is created by consumption, thus they forget the real class differences. The policy of consumer identity lies in from the standpoint of anti-modernity to pursue and realize human perfection through moral strength and achieve the true liberation of mankind via social revolution. From Marx?s point of view, consumer identity is alienation of mutual recognition between people. The key point lies in the class struggle as for solving all problems."using violence to overthrow all existing capitalist systems". To obtain"human nature and the power"in the economic field promotes the end of bourgeois ideological hegemony. Strauss diagnoses crisis of the modern as the crisis of modern political philosophy, with his diagnosis, identity crisis rooted in the lack of virtue, lying in the change of"the highest good"in the long process of the development of human idea and the consequences of losing moral imperative of diversification value. What people should do is to reconstruct the existence of"moral framework"as values to pursue the perfection of human nature and build a unified and meaningful self as a whole.