As criticisms of consumerism and the “consumerist society” propagate and proliferate at a compounding rate, I believe it is necessary to examine the nature not only of the “industrial age” and capitalistic ventures, but the nature of the criticisms themselves. I fear that a great deal of critical “scholarship” has fallen under the same paralyzing guise of consumerist intentions; in a phrase, scholarship borne in critical social analysis has assumed a consumerist function within itself. Mass production has become the primary impetus behind the majority of contemporary academic publication; now, in an attempt to accumulate profit, garner fame, and make the bestsellers list, authors and publishers alike have created a hybrid form of critical evaluation, a method of social and economic analysis that both draws from and reinvents mass opinion. This is not the age of critical thought advocated by the radical schools of philosophy that grew out of the mid-20th century’s turbulence, nor is it drawn from the traditional models borne in the Enlightenment and, in some cases, the Hellenistic era: rather, the very tools of criticism have now fallen victim to the mass consumption of the industrial age, thus rendering potential uses of evaluative functionism an impossibility.

This symptomatic response to the philosophy of late capitalism—namely, the fact that critical evaluation, which at one point was removed and detached from its subject material, has now been conquered by its economic counterpart—fundamentally alters the equilibrium of critical responsiveness; the nodes of social and philosophical criticism are controlled by the consumerist drive, as are the research methodologies and strategies of analysis. Every aspect of legitimate critical functionism has become a subset or extension of its capitalistic nexus: like a black hole, the economic nebulae, created in the singularity of the unrepresentable consumerist impulse, has reached, with its massive gravitational pull, the furthest outposts of radical philosophical discernment.

I suppose the late capitalistic era deserves credit, in a sense—the greatest critical tools fashioned by such thinkers as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Lucaks, Marcuse, Baudrillard, and so forth have turned against their original intentions; the need for economic expansion, coupled with the mass entity of the “silent majorities,” has generated an inexplicable anomaly that, with economic, political and social mechanisms, has even come to assimilate its counteracting principles into its aqueous infrastructure (for the structurality of the mass itself cannot be fully articulated, and avoids definition through its ubiquitous and seismic presence). But here we encounter an odd paradox: where I hesitate to grant agency to non-singular entities, it seems as though we have no other option but to categorize this mass anomaly as an instrumental force of singular manipulation: though composed of various components, participants and social functions, it moves and acts under the four main features of capitalism. It is, in a sense, the natural and organic realization of consumerism incarnate: it is both the “invisible hand of the market” as it is the market itself; it is both the driving energy behind consumerism as it is the momentum of consumerism itself, the very structural and institutional foundation of consumption and its associated conceptual framework.

This paradoxical agency-non-agency dichotomy only further subjugates our critical potential. The more we attempt to employ analytical faculties in the hopes of facilitating either intellectual or social progression, the more we encounter the looming presence of this mass entity. It devours our understandings of critical evaluation and simultaneous challenges our very interpretations of reality: its roots grow so deep as to undermine the conceptual underpinnings of conceptual realism. It channels its impulsive energies into a narrow venue, a defined medium of social subversion: the more we try to avoid it, the more it injects its control. Like the tools of dissent, dissent itself is a natural and controllable byproduct of the entity—it allows for, and draws support from, this limited subversion. It is the essential realization of Mosca, Trevelyan and Chomsky: the very confines of debate are defined and advertised by this mass entity. But beyond—and yet still interrelated to—the boundaries of dissent lies the boundaries of realism: our conceptions transition, often sloppily, into Zizek’s “staged fake,” a cultural panorama that moves about and performs under the same declarations and instructions as would a poorly-scripted play. Reality itself melts away into an ambigous combination of loosely-associated consumerist images; it is the “world of lights and sounds” without the conceptual framework of the “lights and sounds” themselves insofar as the singularity has no referential node. Contrary to many contemporary theories, the anomaly lacks even internal cohesion: not only does internal referencing not exist, but it lacks all substantive and structural capabilities to formally construct any point of reference whatsoever. Its entire existence rests solely on the conceptual framework of the lost conceptual whole. The staged fake replaces the “real” conceptual reality without the reference to an external symbolic order; due to its lack of internal reference, it must exist as a constantly-changing, fluid system of assimilation and synthesis—it absorbs, assimilates, and transforms rather than designing, creating or developing any unique symbolic order.
This is both a completion of Baudrillard’s work as it is a formal rejection of its undermining theoretical proposal: while I agree with, and seek to augment, the theory of the silent majorities, I am not convinced that this singularity, this ever-changing, ever-evolving, ever-energy-dependent order has any symbolic substructure of its own. I see how it must necessarily “conquer”—for lack of a better term—all the social, economic and political systems directly or indirectly connected to it, and I understand that its method of assimilation, though a clear derivate of its existence, is difficult to identify as a result of its obtuse, holistically-unholistic nature. Its consumption is limitless, so it must indeed consume its very own structural components—those components, in turn, are recycled in a never-ending process of consumption. Its foundation metamorphs into its fuel: the compounding rate of consumption—the demand for not only goods and services, but the conceptual structure behind those goods and services—reaches such a high capacity that the system cannot end, but only continue to consume, assimilate and transform. But Baudrillard is wrong to suggest that this “silent” mass has any sort of internal cohesion; on the contrary, it seems to operate under the stipulations of swarm theory—there is no clear “leadership” component, no element in the order that defines or directs the myriad other constituent parts. Indeed, its multifaceted foundation is not so much a foundation at all, but a loose affiliation of consumer-oriented parts: the affiliation kept together only through the limitless demand for more. We once again find a problem with the agency of the system: while no singular component acts as a formal organizational instrument, the apparatus assumes an odd set of characteristics, moving and evolving in much the same way organic organisms adapt to environmental changes. It seems only appropriate to allocate agency to a system that lacks any principal element while at the same time actively seeking to ensure its survival and pursue means of growth—without agency delegation, would an analysis be possible at all? And with the system having already assimilated the critical tools necessary to deconstruct and dissect its structurality (if we can go so far as to call it that), are we left with any possible alternatives?