The Manipulation Of Symbolic Consumption In Feed

M.T.Anderson,as a contemporary American novelist of children’s literature,endows in his novels young adults more intelligence than people usually think them to have,but at the same time reveals the social fact that they are usually alienated and corrupted.Published in 2002,his novel Feed imagines a dystopian world where people are implanted with a commercial chip and are manipulated and eventually consumed by the symbolic value of commodities.This novel has been studied in the West from such themes as technology monopoly,consumerism,corporate power and dystopia though it has not yet caught much attention in Chinese academia.This thesis tries to analyze the novel’s representation of the features of symbolic consumption society in the light of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of consumer society and explore the manipulative mechanism in it to rationally rethink consumerism.Baudrillard holds in his book The Consumer Society(1970)that “sign” becomes the determinant mode of consumption that has reversed the traditional market logic as objects are consumed more for their symbolic value than their use value.People desire to elevate themselves and their individuality through symbolic consumption,but it turns out that they finally lose their subjectivity.Consuming nature as well as themselves for “signs”,people in Feed finally become the slaves of such a symbolic consumption society.This thesis analyzes the manipulation of symbolic consumption in three chapters,namely,technology enslavement,media interference and value imposition.The first chapter discusses the technological enslavement of consumption behaviors.Under the control of technology,the personalities of young adults are streamlined,so they become simple and docile consumers.Moreover,human memory is archived and turns to be data that are kept and processed by the chip instead of the human subject so that the responsibility of remembering is also transferred.The “past” is nibbled because of its “uselessness” in this consumption society.Meanwhile,nature is also artificialized to satisfy people’s conspicuous consumption.The second chapter analyzes the media interference of consumption interests.Different media together induce and distort teenagers’ consumption interests and make them blind consumers.School and home are no longer helpful for children’s intelligence and mental development but become the place to promote symbolic consumption,and endless commercial advertisements and TV sales actually dominate people’s whole life.The third chapter studies the institutional imposition of symbolic values.Symbolic values are pervasively broadcasted and people are made to believe that social status is demarcated by their spending ability and interpersonal relationship is determined by their consumption of objects.From such aspects as consumption behavior,environment and concept,Feed exposes the detrimental results of symbolic consumption,which is manipulated by technology,media,and distorted by false values.It not only reinforces tradition of the dystopian novel that shows great concerns for serious social problems;more importantly,it warns the modern world where symbolic consumption has become a trend that humanity is never to be lost,and that the youth should never be destroyed by modern technology and media,otherwise,“everything must go!” as is shown in the ending of the novel.