Le consommateur: tout au long de l’histoire
The Consumer: throughout History

Summary/Abstract: The material order we live in today is rigorously the opposite. In just two centuries, the self-sufficient peasant community has disappeared to make way for a myriad of urban,connected consumers. Productive labor and the act of consumption were once inseparable; today, they are two stages that stretch out and move apart in space and time, to be lost in the infinity of market mediations. If we are all consumers today, it is because the global division of labor has reached such a level of sophistication that we no longer produce anything of what we consume. Our consumption regime is a mode of social organization: each of us depends on the market, this automated system, for our every need. Consumption is not a passive mode of absorption, of devouring objects; it is a mentality, a series of naturalized gestures and practices. The consumer culture in which we all live today is the very recent product of a rapid commodification,which has imprinted its gestures, symbols, and norms on our lives. The aim of my article is to reconstruct the major stages of our conversion to consumption. Throughout the article, we will try to answer the following questions: What inflections has the commodification process imprinted on our behavior? How was market power constituted? What social changes has man brought about in man through the massive circulation of goods?

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