The Fun System or Enforced Enjoyment
One of the strongest proofs that the principle and finality
of consumption
is not enjoyment or pleasure is that that is now something
which is
forced upon us, something institutionalized, not as a right
or a pleasure,
but as the duty of the citizen.
The puritan regarded himself, his own person, as a business
to be
made to prosper for the greater glory of God. His 'personal'
qualities, his
'character', which he spent his life producing, were for him
a capital
to be invested opportunely, to be managed without
speculation or
waste. Conversely, but in the same way, consumerist man
[l'hommeconsommateur]
regards enjoyment as an obligation; he sees himself as an
enjoyment and satisfaction business. He sees it as his duty
to be happy,
loving, adulating/adulated, charming/charmed, participative,
euphoric
and dynamic. This is the principle of maximizing existence
by multiplying
contacts and relationships, by intense use of signs and
objects, by
systematic exploitation of all the potentialities of
enjoyment.
There is no question for the consumer, for the modern
citizen, of
evading this enforced happiness and enjoyment, which is the
equivalent
in the new ethics of the traditional imperative to labour
and produce.
Modern man spends less and less of his life in production
within work
and more and more of it in the production and continual
innovation of his
own needs and well-being. He must constantly see to it that
all his
potentialities, all his consumer capacities are mobilized.
If he forgets to
do so, he will be gently and insistently reminded that he
has no right not
to be happy. It is not, then, true that he is passive. He is
engaged in - has
to engage in - continual activity. If not, he would run the
risk of being