ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 finalizes the arguments of the two previous chapters and shows how the genesis of the consumer was the outcome of the interplay between the answers that commercial actors gave to the structural transformations of the economic sphere and socio-cultural changes affecting individuals. Specifically, the chapter shows how consumer goods signified by the image-making of advertising offered a way out of the paradoxical search for identity under disenchanted conditions. Through the analysis of the transformation of the artistic personality, the first section shows how the new style of personality-based advertising was the unintended embodiment of the answers practitioners gave to social and cultural transformations they lived through with a high degree of reflexivity. Through an in-depth analysis of advertisements, the second section describes the formation of the associative mechanism in advertising between the “personality” of the product and the “identity” of the consumer and shows how under liminal conditions the transfer became effective in reality. The chapter concludes by arguing that the elective affinity between the modern subject’s perpetual longing for identity-building and self-refashioning, and the commercial promotion of consumption as the fuel of capitalism, gave birth to the consumer as the form of subjectivity appropriate to the functioning of consumer capitalism.
