| Chapter 1: | Shopping for its Own Sake: Don Delillo's System of Objects |
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argues that the discrepancy between what consumer culture tells us the object will do for us and what the object actually does robs us of our ambivalence toward objects. Moreover, this lack of ambivalence leads us into an unhealthy relationship with the objects that surround us:
While Baudrillard's definition of ambivalence gains greater nuance in his later works, he uses the term broadly in this passage; ambivalence is a sense of both fulfillment and nonfulfillment, or gain and loss, in relation to the object of desire. Because consumer ideology does not allow for ambivalence and, instead, forces the consumer to view the business of consumption only in terms of gain, the consumer cannot help but feel inadequate in relation to the objects he or she possesses.
The trouble with consumer ideology, Baudrillard argues, is that it tells us (via advertising, media images, and the like) that the commodities we purchase will bring us absolute fulfillment, that for every need we may experience, an object exists within the system that will bring us unconditional satisfaction. This reasoning, Baudrillard notes, ignores the fact that needs can never be satisfied in full, and that “a completed process, where there is only positivity, is something which is never found” (203). Hence the consumer's “giant fund” of anxiety: our natural ambivalence toward objects is repressed insofar as consumer ideology tells us that our enjoyment of objects should