1. Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent
and in
2. The sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but \the producer/ and the (many forces) that (constitute production).
This second principle is related precisely to Sweezy's Marxian conception of consumer (p222), when he discusses those forces that serve to stave off prices by raising levels of consumption, the movement into a consumer-oriented arrangement of social life, raising the question of WHEN, the moment where, human beings become homo consumins, when consumption becomes the principle indicator, when the worker is no longer held to work and labor in the interests of limitless accumulation of wealth in the hands of capitalists but is allowed to ensure the re-generation of the capitalist scheme through the extension of his work as CONSUMER, a kind of double compulsion. Marx found the consumer not-so-interesting since it did nothing exceptional, only starting the process anew.
Simulacrum
"It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues - ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only God has this power of passing through walls, through people, and finding Himself immaterially in the beyond. We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking, you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost." -Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations."
[Copyright © 1997–2008. European Graduate School EGS. The URL is http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulation-11-holograms.html.]
Asymptote
As one moves along the graph of f(x) in some direction, the distance between it and the asymptote eventually becomes smaller than any distance that one may specify.
If a curve A has the curve B as an asymptote, one says that A is asymptotic to B. Similarly B is asymptotic to A, so A and B are called asymptotic.
[Wikipedia. The Free Encyclopedia!]
The consumer, through this enchantingly complex commodity flow, and the mediascape attached to/derived from/apart of, it, has been transformed into something beyond a consuming mouth and defecating anus. The consumers holographic double appears, like a phantom, out of this commodity flow/media-scape. The double is a real social agent, but now and infinitely a shadow of the consumer, never to be embodied in/by the consumer self.
AND (according to Appadurai) there is also a sense in this 'fetishism of the consumer,' that the consumer has been transformed into a sign in another sense - as a mask
for the REAL SEAT OF AGENCY, which is not the consumer, (but his double, his holographic other), "the producer, and the many forces that constitute production."
Global advertising is the KEY technology for the global dissemination of all these carefully selected ideas of consumer agency.
1). These images are increasingly distortions.
2). Very subtle
3). Consumer thinks of self as actor
4). Consumer is at BEST a chooser
Q) Choosers have no agency?
A) No real agency.
Q) Is there not something in Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum (that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent) that might possibly be opposed to this notion of a mask for the real agency in the producer??
If there are only distortions and fantasies of agency, then why extend the sign to the idea that agency might then exist in the producer? Why this opposition between producer/consumer where agency is located in one besides the other? This is the idea behind the simulacrum. They are both implicated in a mediascape that has loosed havoc upon any location of so-called real agency thereof.
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