O esquema ideopraxeológico do consumo: semiologia hermenêutica da vida funcional

Abstract

The purpose of the present work consists of showing, starting from the theoretical support supplied by Jean Baudrillard's philosophy, how consumption, in its conntemporary condition, does not concern a mere individual-thing relationship-not rarely presented and understood as a need relationship , but constitutes otherwise an active and collective conduct, a system of values, a new mode of socialisation and self-assertion, a new connection with the world, with otherness andwith oneself. Furthermore, it attempts to demonstrate consumption's hyper-real action and lifestyle condition, for behind a functional life, reified, stylised according to objects characteristic rhythm and way of being, what in those relationships one consumes is a signified relationship with the others and with the world. Thus, objects become objects-signs, whose peculiar code or abstract systematic is what confers sense on them. Sign here, considered in its connoting form, is an external representation of anot-lived relationship, from the third order simulacra, maximum level of symbolic reduction. Hence, the inquiry of consumption as idealistic, total and systematic practice, as an activity of systematic manipulation of signs, just as conceived by Baudrillard, trying to disclose what one can call its durable ideopraxeological scheme, its simulacrumculturecondition, locates, ultimately, as the design of our effort and enterprise.