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

Hiding production from the consumer

ONE DEFINITION WHICH JAMESON gives of commodity reification is as "the effacement of the traces of production".[67]  Products are presented to the consumer as fully separated from the process through which they are produced. In identifying this phenomenon Jameson writes that "the product somehow shuts us out even from a sympathetic participation, by imagination, in its production. It comes before us, no questions asked, as something we could not begin to imagine doing for ourselves."[68] 

As well as the technological vertigo alluded to here, Jameson suggests that another reason for the mysteriousness of the production process is simply because it is too painful for consumers to be constantly reminded of the socioeconomic realities involved in the production of the commodity. "You don't want to think about Third World women every time you pull yourself up to your word processor, or all the other lower-class people with their lower-class lives when you decide to use or consume your other luxury products: it would be like having voices inside your head . . . For a society that want to forget about class, therefore, reification in this consumer-packaging sense is very functional indeed."[69] 

As a result people are prone to only understanding those elements of production involved in the act of purchase and consumption rather than those involved in preparing the product for sale. Although consumers live in the smorgasbord of information of the 'information age', they know surprisingly little about the processes which produce the material world of commodities that surround them.[70]  The processes of production, resource extraction, and capital movement are effectively hidden, or at least distorted into stereotype, by consumerism. In the language of abuse one could say that the effacement of the processes of production is the denial mechanism through which the reality of the material processes surrounding our lives are hidden. It constitutes part of the necessary concealment from consciousness of the socioeconomic realities in which the consumer lives.

The second feature of the pathological relationship of the consumer to the material world is the taboo regarding the end point of the consumer's material existence-death. Consumer culture is conspicuously silent about dying. It says almost nothing about death except, perhaps, for the moral imperative of the dying to organise finances for those left behind. Christopher Lasch describes this silence as an "irrational terror of old age and death" wherein "Men and women begin to fear growing old before they even arrive at middle age."[71]  What is interesting about this silence is the way it reinforces the social relations of consumerism. Lasch, for example, argues that the silencing of death involves a necessary silencing of the elderly. This silencing is achieved through a trivialisation and excluding of the elderly from making valid contributions to society.

Our society notoriously finds little use for the elderly. It defines them as useless, forces them to retire before they have exhausted their capacity for work, and reinforces their sense of superfluity at every opportunity. By insisting, ostensibly in a spirit of respect and friendship, that they have not lost the right to enjoy life, society reminds old people that they have nothing better to do with their time. By devaluing experience and setting great store by physical strength, dexterity, adaptability and the ability to come up with new ideas, society defines productivity in ways that automatically exclude "senior citizens".[72] 

Consumerism has thus "devalued the wisdom of the ages, and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute".[73]  Arguing from a feminist perspective, Naomi Wolf identifies the silencing of the elderly with the operation of the beauty myth in consumerism. She cites an example taken from the world of women's magazines: "Dalma Heyn, editor of two women's magazines, confirms that airbrushing age from women's faces is routine. She observes that women's magazines "ignore older women or pretend they don't exist: magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, 'retouching artists' conspire to 'help' beautiful women look more beautiful; ie, less their age".[74] 

In a startling comparison to racism, Wolf argues that the issue of hiding the signs of age is about women's identity and the freedom to be old.

The issue is not trivial. It is about the most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to imagine one's own future and to proud of one's own life. Airbrushing age off women's faces has the same political echo that would resound if all positive images of blacks were routinely lightened. That would be making the same value judgement about blackness that this tampering makes about the value of the female life: that less is more. To airbrush age off a woman's face is to erase women's identity, power, and history.[75] 

Debord, coming from a Marxist (and more abstract) position also notes the silencing of death arguing that consumerism's privileging of youth is at one with the transience of capitalist production.

. . . the consciousness of the spectator can have no sense of an individual life moving toward self-realisation, or toward death . . . under advertising's bombardment it is simply forbidden to get old. Anybody and everybody is urged to economise on an alleged "capital of youth" . . . [Youth] characterises only the economic system, the dynamism of capitalism: it is things that rule, that are young-things themselves that vie with each other and usurp one another's places. [76] 

By viewing death as the endpoint of physical human existence, the silencing of death within consumerism can thereby seen as part of the pathological relationship of humans to nature. The link between consumerism and material estrangement implies that any healing of the relationship with nature will inevitably threaten the viability of the production processes underlying consumerism. In the language of abuse, the silencing of death as well as the effacement of the traces of production, and the estrangement of nature more generally, is a necessary denial mechanism through which the abusive relationship of consumerism is maintained. The reality of the physical world stands as a constant threat to the abusive reality of consumerism.

To: The consumer spectacle privileges consumer hyper-reality

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.