Consumer Credit

Definition

Consumer credit is Baudrillard's term (The System of Objects, 1968, Part D, ch. II) for the economic-psychological mechanism by which the consumer society precedes production with consumption. "Today objects are with us before they are earned, they steal a march on the sum total of effort, of labour, that they embody, so that in a sense their consumption precedes their production." Credit is not merely financial but "a fundamental dimension of our society and in effect a new ethical system": "Credit is an ethic, but it is also a politics." It completes the personalization and advertising apparatus by giving objects a "socio-political function they never used to have," colonizing domesticity and converting objects from a patrimony into a debt.

Key Claims

• Credit overturns the patrimonial order. "A single generation has witnessed the eclipse of the notions of patrimony and of fixed capital." Once "objects once acquired were owned in the full sense, for they were the material expression of work done"; now "objects are with us before they are earned."
• The object is conjugated in the future perfect. "An object bought on credit will be mine when I have paid for it: it is conjugated, as it were, in the future perfect." "While such objects are being paid for they are simultaneously wearing out."
• Buying on credit is magical appropriation. "Buying on credit amounts to the total appropriation of an object for a fraction of its real value… This transaction mirrors the behaviour of the mythomaniac… nothing less than magical."
• It re-feudalizes under the sign of freedom. "Credit has thus brought us back to a situation that is in fact feudal in character"; "society appears to extend credit to you in exchange for a formal freedom, but in reality it is you who are giving credit to society, alienating your future in the process."
• The obligation to buy. Advertising slogans quoted by Packard — "Buy now – the job you save may be your own!"; "Buy your way to prosperity!" — express "the unending constraint" consumers "spontaneously embrace."
• Credit colonizes the domestic. "Objects, on which domesticity once depended as a means of escape from the pressures of society, now on the contrary serve to shackle the domestic universe to the circuits and constraints of the social one." "Objects now are by no means meant to be owned and used but solely to be produced and bought."
• Forward flight as a structure. "We are forever behindhand relative to our objects. They are here before us, yet they are already a year away… The obligation to follow a sequence is the same at both levels, whether it is economic… or psycho-sociological."

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: consumption before production; credit as ethic and politics; the magical/feudal analysis.
• Vance Packard (not yet paged) — the American advertising slogans and the "strategy of desire" Baudrillard quotes.
• David Riesman (not yet paged) — the "acquisitive" to "practical" civilization transition.
• Xiaobing Tang — the later consumer-credit/decoration conjuncture in a non-Western market (see consumerism).

Related Concepts

• Consumption — the sign-process credit accelerates.
• Consumerism — the society credit reproduces.
• The Patrimonial Interior — the inherited-object order credit eclipses.
• Use-Value — displaced by the mortgaged object's "future perfect."
• Possession — ownership's subjective correlate, here mortgaged.
• Everyday Life — the temporal rhythm ("forward flight") credit imposes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Part D, ch. II): "Rights and Duties of the Consumer-Citizen"; "The Precedence of Consumption: A New Ethic"; "The Obligation to Buy"; "The Miracle of Buying"; "The Ambiguity of the Domestic Object."
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Baudrillard's credit analysis predates securitized consumer debt and the credit-score society. Do those confirm and intensify his "feudal" thesis, or transform it?
• "Consumption precedes production" is a temporal paradox with a spatial analogue in the wiki's patrimonial-interior and financialisation-of-architecture: how do household credit and real-estate finance share one logic?
• Is the "domestic object's ambiguity" (escape vs. bondage) a gender question — the furnished home as the wife's debt-financed sphere (see gender-and-the-interior, consumerism)?