Consumption and social organization of illusions: capitalism, technology and transformation of experience

• Grant number: 15/20489-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: February 01, 2016
• End date: April 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Social Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Isleide Arruda Fontenelle
• Grantee: Isleide Arruda Fontenelle
• Host Institution: Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo (EAESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Publications and recent debates in the marketing field show an inflation of discourse around the "consumer experience" in order to indicate that this is the most advanced stage of consumer culture, as it integrates the ongoing technological changes that substantially alter the time and space of human experience; as well as by placing new challenges on the value of the realization process for capitalism. However, a brief historical reconstruction about this phenomenon indicates that the "consumer experience" is constitutive of consumer culture since its formation in the final decades of the nineteenth century. It is therefore necessary to examine what is continuity and rupture in this marketing discourse in order to understand what is radically new in the contemporary consumer culture that impacts both the field of subjective experience as the capital of the playback mode. A "consumer experience" will therefore be the main thread of this project, whose main objective is to build a theory of consumption that includes its centrality in the functioning of capitalism logic, as well as its role as the main social organizer of illusions of our time. Although there are numerous studies on consumption and modern consumerism, this analysis field still lacks joints that address the inherent tension between economic and abstract axis of consumption - in the sense of their role in the realization of value for capital - and the cultural axis, which encompasses a micro perspective, private, subjective, consumption. The purpose of this project is to work from the dialectical interdependence of these two fields, retracing the theoretical path of experience in studies of consumption, critical theory and the philosophical reflections of new technologies, taking capitalism itself as the integrating nucleus of the three key research categories: consumption, experience and technology. (AU)