Desire

Desire refers to the experience of a lack. The concept of desire is one of the best with which to begin an inquiry into the complexity of conceptualizing human behavior. The persistence and the evolution of treatises regarding what desire refers to is enlightening for consumption research and provides a good example of how and why conceptual rigor matters for the field. Indeed, the way that anyone, including academic researchers, understand and interpret desires reflects, at least in part, the desires of that person—for example, whether that relates to viewing desires as a shallow reflection of capitalist-driven consumer cultures or as the freedom of individuals to express themselves through their consumption.

Many an economist or manager would like for sociologists or psychologists not only to define the concept clearly but also to identify exactly what it should refer to—a problem they often believe they could deal with better, provided they were given a precise and clear foundation. Such a wish emanates from their desire, and the lack of recognition of this fact reveals a clear misunderstanding of the specificity of human behavior. With this misunderstanding, humans are treated almost as if they were plants: identify the seed and you will know what is most likely to occur and how to deal with it. Such an approach to social behavior flourished within economic development theory when economists and sociologists dreamed they could identify the seed that needed irrigation or the engine that needed fuel. However, the complexity of social existence is irreducible to such simplicity and, as we shall see, even when pointing to a core concept—as Georg Friedrich Hegel pointed to the rule of desire in our world—theorists of social behavior end up stirring a wide range of factors.

It has been evident for ages that human beings differ radically not only from plants but also from other animals. For instance, Plato in The Republic (380 BC) indicated that humans can desire contradictory objects (e.g., one can be thirsty and not want to drink). In his Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind (1755), Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked that “a pigeon would be starved to death by the side of a dish of the choicest meats, and a cat on a heap of fruit or grain.” Thus, it is not the satisfaction of needs that should be of interest for consumer research. For humans, there is not a single need that is not subject to a whole series of questions. Water quenches thirsts, but there are many ways humans deal with thirst, hunger, and the like. Most often, human beings are caught in dilemmas of the following kind: I wish to eat this cake and want to stay fit; I would love to buy this but I also want that and cannot afford both; I would love to do this but I don't want to upset my spouse; I wish I just could do this but I can't help wondering why.

Consequently, what matters is not so much the expression of the need but its interpretation, that is to say, how need translates through a whole system of symbolic representations and social relations that humans use to make sense of whatever they do in various ways. There is not at single need that remains untouched by sensemaking. Humans never experience a need in a pure (or natural) form but always in a symbolic and cultural context. This is why and how desire comes about. It can be said that desire originates from the fact that humans are compelled to relate to what drives them to do this or that. Contrary to other animals, humans just cannot help thinking about it, and they do so at the intrinsically linked individual and collective levels. Desire, then, is the form that needs take once the symbolic order is established. Whereas needs link us to the order of things, desire binds us with the rest of humanity. Thus, any endeavor to reduce desire into something more natural and simple is bound to miss the whole point. This is indeed a core issue for consumer science: we should not seek the power of nature but the nature of power. We should try to look beyond needs and wants and study desire in process and context.

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