The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates--the inhabitants of marketing zones in the con...sumer goods society, television audiences and news magazine readerships... vote with money at the cash counter rather than with the ballot paper at the polling booth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising..., the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, cons...umer goods, status--all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The power of consumer goods ... has been engendered by the so-called liberal and progressive demands of freedom, and, by appropria...ting them, has emptied them of their meaning, and changed their nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The connection between ad and sale, so direct in classified ads, or between ad and consumer contact, reasonably direct in the Janu...ary white sale ad, is very remote in the national consumer-goods ad. It is indirect in both space and time. The commercial for Coca-Cola or Alka Seltzer does not say how the customer can buy the advertised product; it does not typically announce a phone number to call or a place to shop. It takes for granted the consumer's shopping skills and it assumes the successful distribution of the product to retail stores. In time, it does not presume a quick response of customers to its efforts. It does not presume that the consumers it wants to reach will see any given showing of the ad or, seeing it, quickly respond by buying. It is a general reminder or reinforcer, not an urgent appeal to go out and buy. What the ad says or pictures, then, is obliged to be relatively placeless and relatively timeless. National consumer-goods advertising is highly abstracted and self-contained.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, ...and freedom through consumption. The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods, ...and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with obje...cts, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and t...he geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows ... the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing more clearly shows how little God esteems his gift to men of wealth, money, position and other worldly goods, than the way... he distributes these, and the sort of men who are most amply provided with them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »