“Wait… Was I Supposed to Grow Up?” Consumers’ Adventures in Wonderland

Nowadays, one can buy colorful cake lollipops, shower gels made of “magical leaves”, to enter a store selling human size LEGO just next to sex toys, and to sleep in hotels offering Batman’s bedroom… all during the same day. Once settled in the comfort of Batman’s couch, television will broadcast wizards’ adventures and super heroes saving the world against aliens or monsters on television. Considering those movies as anthropological mirrors (Kracauer 1966/2004; Morin 1956/2005), one can see an imaginary world underlying consumer society where consumers believe in what we have been taught to be “unbelievable” or out of what scientists and modernity call disenchanted “rationalization” (Weber 1919/2007). Wonderland in Alice’s Adventures (Carroll 1865/1998) is a place where one has to think differently and forget about logic or natural order of things. Postmodernism is Wonderland and challenges the ideas of rationalization, reality, or truth. As Levy writes (1974/1999, 245), “everywhere yearnings, aspirations, and interpersonal relations are laden with magical, superstitious, mystical, and religious significance, with private imageries, sentiments”. It is possible to attend a posthumous show of the murdered rapper Tupac or to see Thomas Edison presenting a new technology at an auto show. Science is no longer reserved for technical developments, but for illusions and reenchantment. It is a new approach to reality in which consumers can fulfill their need for “extravagant expectations” (Boorstin 1962/1992), so long as they believe all these illusions and accept Wonderland as a serious alternative to what modernism called “reality”. Like a child would do.