Zadok Paper S101 Winter 1999
The Abuse of Consumerism
by Dave Collis

The consumer spectacle speaks in an abusive voice

Freud might have said that sexuality and sexual attitudes oppressed people. I would say now motor cars, traffic, oppress people. Corporate procedures and culture oppress people. They have lost confidence to be authentically human with all the rough, strange bits.[2] 

The voice of consumerism speaks in many languages and from many places, including television, radio, newspaper, advertising, the mouths of politicians, the song lyrics of pop singers. Umberto Eco characterises it as an "uncontrollable plurality of messages".[3]  Ched Myers describes its voice through advertising as "a relentless aural and visual onslaught upon our consciousness, with objectified texts and seductive subtexts which we cannot help but absorb".[4]  The all-pervasive nature of its presence in society is too great for any meaningful separation of it to be made from the rest of society. Umberto Eco gives a helpful illustration of the simple-to-identify yet impossible-to-isolate presence of the mass media:

A firm produces polo shirts with an alligator on them and it advertises them (a traditional phenomenon). A generation begins to wear the polo shirts. Each consumer of the polo shirt advertises, via the alligator on his chest, this brand of polo shirt (just as every owner of a Toyota is an advertiser, unpaid and paying, of the Toyota line and model he drives). A television broadcast, to be faithful to reality, shows some young people wearing the alligator polo shirt . . . Where is the mass medium? Is it the newspaper advertisement, is it the television broadcast, is it the polo shirt?[5] 

Even those aspects of culture not directly associated with the media or commodity production processes are implicated in its presence. Just through living as people within consumer culture we participate in the telling and retelling of its stories. The unwitting nature of our participation is captured by Fritz Haug's following anecdote: "In Venice a picture postcard is on sale which advertises both the city and an American company. It shows St Mark's Square, empty of people, but with its famous flock of pigeons. The pigeons are sitting in an organised shape: in huge letters they form the name Coca-Cola."[6] 

Like the pigeons in St Mark's Square, consumers are unwittingly socialised into propagating the consumption process. Their very lives are the living embodiment of consumerism's propagation and self-justification. Given the impossibility of separating the content of consumerism from its form, a better way of characterising the heart of consumer culture is as a giant spectacle around which everything else is connected. The spectacle, or series of spectacles, is both the form and the content of consumerism. It is advertising, newspapers, entertainment and other elements of the mass media; but it is also the intra-psychic projections which result as well as the lifestyle they dictate. It is both what is shown on television as well as the lifestyle of the spectator sitting on the couch in front of the television. Guy Debord describes the spectacle in the following terms:

The whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles . . . [It is] where all attention, all consciousness converges . . . The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung [world view] that has been actualised, translated into the material realm-a world view transformed into an objective force.[7] 

Debord's characterisation is helpful in touching on one important aspect of consumerism: it can be regarded as the socially incarnated world view of capitalism. One of the key functions of consumerism is to justify the underlying economic operations and associated social forms of capitalism. It speaks these justifications in a 'spectacular' voice which is, however, not a still-small voice to which people are free to listen. Instead, it speaks loudly and forcefully to its subjects. It must speak in this way because, according to Debord, as the justifying voice for capitalism it must drown out all other voices apart from those of the ruling apparatus. As in any oppressive situation, an open and fair dialogue cannot be tolerated.

The language of the spectacle is composed of signs of the dominant organisation of production-signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that organisation . . . [It is also the] spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of the only discourse which society allows itself to hear.[8] 

More than simply being forceful, I want to argue that consumerism has an abusive relationship to its subjects, the relationship being a mirror of the relationship of sexual abuse. In what follows I hope to do more than simply hint at analogies but, rather, to show that the system of consumerism and the system of sexual abuse share deeper structural similarities. In using such volatile imagery, I am not seeking to achieve persuasiveness through any associated shock value, neither am I wanting to trivialise the findings of research into sexual abuse. Instead, by revealing the structural similarities I'm hoping to identify the depth and seriousness of the damaging nature of consumerism.

Don't move, don't talk out of time

Don't think don't worry everything is just fine, just fine.

Don't grab don't clutch, don't hope for too much

Don't breathe, don't achieve or grieve without leave

Don't check, just balance on the fence

Don't answer, don't ask

Don't try to make sense

I feel numb.[9] 

The authoritarian voice of consumerism has the same tone as the perpetrator of sexual abuse. As expressed in the song lyrics above, consumerism pushes its victim to a dark place psychically buried beneath the weight of a host of repressions, numb amid a background of superficial consumer reassurances. The mindset of the consumer has the same mindset of the victim of sexual abuse; the pathological power relations in both cases mirror each other.

In a handbook designed to help train Australian sexual abuse workers, Lesley Laing, a sexual abuse therapist working within the Australian health system, gives a (feminist) definition of sexual abuse. "Sexual abuse is characterised by the abuse of power by the perpetrator resulting in the victim being de-powered [sic], objectified and unable to control what will happen."[10] 

During the process of abuse the victim is made to feel like she is somehow the cause of what is happening; she is the one who let it happen. She is to blame. Laing describes how this process of making the victim feel bad is achieved:

The dominant knowledge about sexual assault is 'well known' to everyone: only 'bad' women get raped, those who do are 'asking for it' by the way in which they act or dress or relate to men, and men cannot be expected to control their sexual urges in the presence of a woman who appears to be 'asking for it' or a child who is 'seductive'.

If rape and child sexual assault are believed to stem from the provocative sexual behaviour of women and children, the victim will construct the experience in terms of personal culpability, and as a consequence is likely to experience guilt and shame.[11] 

A second feature especially present in child sexual abuse is the idea implanted in the victim that what is happening is somehow natural, that this is just the way the world is. Within the shroud of secrecy that surrounds the process of abuse, the child has no other point of reference through which to identify the pathological nature of the relationship. Roberta Freedman, a welfare worker specialising in child sexual assault, writes that it is in "the offender's opportunity to shape the beliefs of the victims, in particular, lies his in his role and power to enforce secrecy, which perpetuates a closed unchallenged system until disclosure".[12] 

This 'closed unchallenged system' is one in which the abuse is perceived by the victim as an intrinsic part of the way the world is and, sadly, an essential part of themselves. Acting in a converse manner, successful therapy reverses this naturalisation process by lifting the secrecy surrounding the abuse.

Diffusing the secrecy . . . allows an alternative view to emerge of the absolute responsibility of the offender for the instigation and maintenance of the abuse. The abuse is therefore disowned as part of the child's persona and is more correctly seen as a problem imposed on the child.[13] 

Phrases common to the study of sexual abuse, such as the 'guilt and shame' of 'personal culpability', and 'closed unchallenged system' as an intrinsic part of the 'persona', could equally well apply to the consumer under the abuse of consumerism as to the victim under sexual abuse.

To: The consumer spectacle tells a story full of myths

Dave Collis is project worker for Jubilee 2000 Campaign in Australia, and is involved with street ministries with the Urban Mission Unit of Collins Street Baptist Church and the St Vincent de Paul Society.