They ended up in our garbage cans, carried by advertising and its mirages of cleanliness and individuality. However, paradoxically, the more beautiful and white they are, the more polluting they are. It is these disposable objects, cups, handkerchiefs, telephones, deodorant sticks, whose history the French philosopher Jeanne Guien traces in her latest book Consumerism through its objects.
Through this story, it is the foundations of our consumerism that she tracks down, as they are conceived by an industry constantly in search of profits. To reach them, it is the individual that she targets at the heart of her intimacy. And this pseudo-individual cleanliness, disposable and perfumed, is done too often, we see it with the environmental crisis, at the cost of health and collective well-being.
“Consumerism is something very individual,” she confirms in an interview. It is first the individual who acts. The ad is directed at “you, your body, your family,” not society as a whole. “In a world like this, political thought becomes individuality. »
For Jeanne Guien, however, consumerism is not “so much the moral vice of spoiled societies as a matter of production and design”. And it is by deciphering how the market and advertising have created these needs that she reveals the possibility of freeing oneself from them.
For each object analyzed, the author traces the contexts and above all the fears that led to its appearance, then its consumption.
The disposable cup, for example, appeared in the United States in the middle of the XXe century, in a context where common cups, which were hung for example on water fountains, were suspected of transmitting germs.
In 1910, the Individual Drinking Cup Company (IDCC) first launched the “public cup”, then the “individual cup”, then the “sanitary cup”, popular during the Spanish flu epidemic. “Always more cleanliness always implied more material: disposable cups, disposable straws, disposable packaging,” she writes.
Invented needs
What Jeanne Guien demonstrates is that there was no pre-existing demand for the appearance of these objects. In France, in the XVIIe century, “the people blew their noses with their fingers or their sleeves, the nobles with a scarf”. The disposable handkerchief, ancestor of the Kleenex, was designed in Japan. The nobles indeed blew their noses there in tissue paper from the 9th century.e century, she tells us.
In 1930, an American advertisement for Kleenex claimed that “Kleenex replaces cloth handkerchiefs among progressive people”. After targeting wealthy women who used disposable tissues to remove their makeup, Kleenex launched its Mansize, to conquer the male market. And then, why back down before the manna of a wider audience? Disposable tissues are now presented as “‘practical and essential’ products, like everyday objects in all homes”.
Even more than necessity, fear is often put forward to justify the sale of a new product. In an interview, Jeanne Guien cites the case of deodorants as an example. In 1912, at a time when people considered washing with water to be more than enough of a hygienic measure, an advertising agency came up with the idea of convincing women that they could make those around them suffer. the smell of their perspiration without realizing it.
“This type of advertising, dubbed the ‘campaign of shame’ or ‘fear’, later became a model: around the world, it is found in advertisements for soap, toothpaste, vaginal deodorants and even stationery…” she wrote.
Indispensable telephones
Without being immediately disposable, but at least as polluting, smart phones have been the subject of “rapid and massive diffusion, at a unique point in the history of techniques”. Thanks to the systemic network effect, “the object becomes in itself a means of integration, or of exclusion”.
“In some countries, such as China, it is necessary to have a smart phone to take public transport,” she notes.
An expert in planned obsolescence, Jeanne Guien warns the reader against multiple ways of avoidance when it comes to reducing overconsumption.
Do we really prevent overconsumption, for example, by marketing a vegetarian steak? Are we really caring for the environment by replacing, as McDonald’s did in the 1990s, polystyrene with cardboard? Why not downright reduce the use of plastic rather than relying on its recycling? Should laws on planned obsolescence, such as the one in force in France, be more widely applied?
the greenwashing, widely practiced by corporations to achieve dubious environmental acceptability, also deserves condemnation, she says. “Kleenex and Pornhub can never replace a boreal forest by planting tree monocultures. This discourse is all the more absurd since these monocultures are generally used for production,” she writes by way of example. Another example ; a so-called “bio-effective” deodorant, which failed the safety test “for pregnant women, adults, children and adolescents, in other words for everyone”, she writes.
“We should be able to legislate on advertising content,” she said in an interview. “If there is no law, companies will not do things on their own. In this advertising report which directly links companies and the general public, the forces involved are currently unbalanced, and the intermediaries are not there.