An Essay on the Psychosociology of Consumption through the Perspectives of Control Society and Liquid Modernity

Abstract

Reflecting on a psychosociological analysis of consumption requires an epistemological challenge that breaks with metaphysical ideological traditions and, to a certain extent, provokes philosophical discussions about the construction and validity of its theoretical thinking, especially when contextualised under the aegis of the perspective of the control society and liquid modernity. This study investigates the relations of consumption in liquid modernity (postmodernity), through the psychosocial bias, revealing the liquid, plastic, fluid and changeable subjectivity of the consumer in a globalised context of a control society, which values " having" to the detriment of "being". Through the theoretical assumptions traced by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Zygmunt Bauman. How to reflect the study of consumption through psychosociology, according to the view of the society of control and liquid modernity, in the production of a rhizomatic, plural, fragmented, schizophrenic and anthropophagic subjectivity entangled by the desire to consume, configuring and deconstructing pret-a-porter identities as ways of being regulated by the market, according to the logic that to "be" you must "have"? To answer this question are adopted as theoretical foundation complementary authors and works that dialogue with the object defined by the conceptual bias established for investigation. The exploratory research is used as an investigative methodology, through the technique of bibliographic survey. It is not intended, in this work, to draw a map of these differences. The pretension is simply to reflect how the philosophical thoughts of Deleuze, Guattari and Bauman contribute to the field of psychosociology.