Imaginative Hedonism

The concept of imaginative hedonism has been developed by Colin Campbell (1987) to account for the apparent insatiability of the modern consumer. Campbell states that this insatiability cannot be explained by a generalization of aristocratic luxury consumption. Such luxury in “traditional hedonism” typically is not innovative but merely quantitative excess over need satisfaction. Having moved beyond necessity, the traditional hedonist tries to re-create the pleasure of need satisfaction by intensifying and refining the sensual stimuli involved. But in relying on sensations, such hedonism still remains bound by the absolute limits to possible physical arousal. Further, overstimulation does not only fail to infinitely increase pleasure, but also it often achieves the opposite: nausea. Traditional luxury consumption normally has the function of asserting social rank (cf. conspicuous consumption), and this performance character, too, militates against the possibility of achieving genuine pleasure.

To allow insatiability, Campbell argues, the link to sensual stimuli must be severed and pleasure seeking has to shift to emotions instead. Pleasure then no longer is a property of stimulating external objects but of internal “spiritual” processes. Here, pleasure is gained by conjuring up emotional states through a skilled mastery of the imagination, by indulging in daydreams. While these daydreams are facilitated by the use of consumer goods, the pleasure is not in the immediate sensual effect of those goods on the consumer but in the consumer's self-illusionary engagement with them. As this involves a considerable degree of self-control, Campbell also speaks of “autonomous” hedonism. The imaginative hedonist enjoys involvement in fictional worlds, shares the adventures of invented characters he or she can identify with, or dreams him- or herself into a semifictional identity while, for example, donning a certain style of dress, driving a particular car, and being on holiday or in a theme park. This self-illusion does not lead to multiple personalities or a loss of reality in a world of simulacra as it is performed in a cynical mode: the illusions are “felt to be true”—but “known to be false.” Crucial for this feeling of truth is that the dreamed-up parallel realities are still realistic in that they are internally consistent worlds—not entirely arbitrary fantasies.

The imaginative hedonist not only uses consumer goods as a launch pad or aide for further daydreams but also is able to anticipate the pleasure to be had from objects not yet acquired. Thus, not only the desired object is a source of enjoyment, but desire itself also becomes an object of gratification. This leads into a dynamics of longing in which the acquisition of the desired object nearly always must disappoint as daydreams will be more perfect than any reality they anticipate. This frustration then triggers new longings, which fuels demand for novel products and thereby accounts for fashion as “most central of all institutions of modern consumerism” (Campbell 1987, 93).

To explain the emergence and persistence of modern autonomous imaginative hedonism, Campbell employs an argumentative strategy modeled after Max Weber's Protestant Ethic. As the economic system does not “produce” mentalities but can only favor some already existing ones over others, the “spirit of modern consumerism” like the “spirit of capitalism” must have sprung from other sources. Just as Weber singles out Calvinism as source of the spirit of capitalist producers and administrators, so Campbell identifies Romanticism as the source of the spirit of consumerism. This genealogy has been criticized as it does not account for the continued existence of consumerism after the demise of the Romantic movement (Holbrook and Hirschman 1993). Campbell holds against this that [Page 758]once the consumerist mentality has emerged, like the Protestant ethic of production, the romantic ethic of consumption no longer needs the originating spiritual movement as it is sustained by its fit to the current social system. Campbell locates the site of reproduction in the gendered personality attributions in the middle-class nuclear family that reproduce a “purito-romantic personality system” in which the father identification encourages a rationalistic work ethic and the mother identification encourages emotionality, creativity, and imagination.

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