Personalization

Definition

Personalization is Baudrillard's term (The System of Objects, 1968, Part D) for the consumer system's production of personal distinctiveness through inessential difference. The "personalized object" is the serial object marked by a "specific difference" — a colour, an accessory, a detail — that promises uniqueness while leaving its technical essence untouched. Personalization is not an advertising trick but "a basic ideological concept of a society which 'personalizes' objects and beliefs solely in order to integrate persons more effectively": "only if the buyer is offered a whole range of choices can he transcend the strict necessity of his purchase and commit himself personally to something beyond it." Its paradox is named as "a misadventure of the person": "in the act of personalized consumption the subject, in his very insistence on being a subject, succeeds in manifesting himself only as an object of economic demand." It depends on marginal-difference and the model-and-series gradient.

Key Claims

Choice is imposed, and experienced as freedom. "We no longer even have the option of not choosing, of buying an object on the sole grounds of its utility, for no object these days is offered for sale on such a 'zero-level' basis. Our freedom to choose causes us to participate in a cultural system willy-nilly."
The difference is always inessentials. "A car cannot be personalized in its essence as a technical object, but only in its inessential aspects." "At the level of the industrial object and its technological coherence the demand for personalization can be met only in inessentials."
Personalization is parasitic as well as added value. "The personalization function is not just an added value – it is also a parasitic value. Indeed, from the technological standpoint it is impossible to conceive of an object in an industrial system being personalized without thereby losing some measure of its optimal technical quality."
The subject is reified at the point of his uniqueness. "In seeking to add that 'something' which will make for uniqueness, consciousness is reified in an even more intimate way, precisely because it is reified right down to that particular detail."
Yet it is lived as freedom. "Overall, the system of manipulated personalization is experienced by the vast majority of consumers as freedom. Only to a critical eye does this freedom appear merely formal, and the process of personalization as a misadventure of the person." Baudrillard refuses to dismiss the satisfaction: "No theory of needs can authorize us to assign priority to one actually experienced satisfaction over any other."
Automatism is its sublime form. "Automatism is simply personalization dreamt in terms of the object. It is the most finished, the most sublime form of the inessential" (see automatism).

Key Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: personalization as ideological concept and "misadventure of the person."
David Riesman (not yet paged) — the "other-directed" personality and the "product… is a personality" diagnosis.
Xiaobing Tang — the interior-scale successor: the decoration craze as the pursuit of sign-distinction (see sign-value).

Model and Series — the gradient along which personalization operates.
Marginal Difference — its material: inessential differences produced on an industrial scale.
Sign Value — personalization's currency: a difference consumed for what it signals.
Ideology — personalization as a basic ideological concept of consumer society.
Consumerism — the social condition it integrates persons into.
Taste — displaced by calculated difference.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Part D, ch. I): choice; marginal difference; "differences by default" vs "differences of overmeasure"; the model as idea; "a misadventure of the person"; the ideology of models.
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

Does mass customization and algorithmic recommendation dissolve personalization into pure individuation, or extend the same logic (see model-and-series)?
Baudrillard grants that personalized satisfaction is real. On what basis can a critical account distinguish "true" from "manipulated" satisfaction without appealing to an "authentic essential value" he rejects?
How does personalization differ from the wiki's self-fashioning and interior-as-biography registers — consumption's pre-scripted difference vs. the subject's own construction?
"Consciousness is reified right down to that particular detail": is this the same alienation Marx named for labour, transposed to consumption (see consumerism, ideology)?