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

The consumer spectacle privileges consumer hyper-reality

Subjugate thyself to the screen-more real than real.[77] 

We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that.[78] 

In talking about narrative traditions Alisdair MacIntyre argues that one of the "signs that a tradition is in crisis is that its accustomed ways for relating seems (and is) beginning to break down".[79]  Consumerism is a narrative tradition in crisis. The distinction between truth and illusion is blurred beneath the manifold images and messages of consumer 'hyper-reality', a blurring essential to sustaining consumerism's abuse of the consumer. Consumerism's story lacks a proper narrative depth in the sense that in privileging hyper-reality its fictional plots fail to adequately describe the world of our lives.

Throughout this discussion, I'm aware of the difficulty of comparing realities: Doesn't the identification of a false reality imply a privileged position for perceiving reality? On what grounds can the consumer 'hyper-reality' be judged any less true than any other reality? To what extent does the prefix 'hyper' entail rejection in an ontological sense? This paper accepts the impossibility of making reality judgments with certainty. Instead of embracing a criteria-less relativism, however, I'll use the dimensions of abuse and narrative depth to provide grounds on which the discussion can proceed. Discussions about truth will thereby be avoided by judging hyper-reality according to these other criteria. Rather than talking about hyper-reality's ontological status as truth, therefore, my critique consists of a criticism of hyper-reality's lack of narrative coherence and its complicity in the abusive presence of consumerism.

Hyper-reality is the imaginary plurality of constructed consumer images and practices which bring reality into confusion. It is the embodiment of the unraveling narrative of consumerism. To embrace hyper-reality is to participate in the felt loss of meaning at the far end of the narrative crisis. Before embarking on an academic description of how hyper-reality is created and propagated through the spectacle of consumerism, however, let's take a brief pause to reflect upon what hyper-reality feels like from the point of view of the consumer.

The melancholic tone of the following passage, written by Douglas Coupland the writer who termed the phrase 'Generation X', is in no way accidental but rather is a necessary affective counterpart to the blurring of reality which underlies consumerism. Not coincidentally, it shares a similar emotional tone to the sadness of an abused child. Note the blurring of distinctions which become evident-between reality and image, between other and self, between earth and heaven, between life and death.

As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space . . . We would float and be naked-pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses-all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing-bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn't even know we shared a womb . . . Ours was a life lived in paradise. Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.

Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of pioneers-life after God-a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life-and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.

I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.[80] 

A more recent example of the struggle to grasp reality in the face of hyper-reality is seen in Peter Weir's movie, The Truman Show, in which the hero, Truman, is born into and brought up in the artificially constructed town of Seahaven, unaware that it consists merely of actors and movie settings and is being televised live worldwide. The story consists of Truman's efforts to realise his entrapment in his televised un-reality, and to escape into the reality outside the movie set into which he was involuntarily born. When taken as an analogy of the position of consumers within the consumer culture hyper-reality, Truman's story offers in fictional form a playing out of the struggle for emancipation from consumer hyper-reality. The justification given by Christof the (evil?) mastermind creator of Truman's world, for keeping Truman unaware of his hyper-real surroundings could equally well be the unspoken voice of consumerism justifying its own imposed hyper-reality.

[In justifying Truman's hyper-real life to a critical caller on a talkback show]: He can leave at any time. If it was more than just a vague ambition, if he was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there's no way we could prevent him from leaving. What distresses you, really, caller, is that ultimately, Truman prefers his "cell," as you call it....

[In justifying Truman's life to Truman himself in the final scene of the movie]: YOU were real. That's what made you so good to watch. Listen to me, Truman. There's no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. Same lies. The same deceit. [81] 

In the terms used within this paper, I want to suggest that Coupland and Truman's hyper-realities are abusively imposed upon them. As such their choice, along with the consumer, is not simply the arbitrary acceptance of one reality over another equally 'real' reality as Christof would have us believe ("Same lies. The same deceit."), rather it is the choice between a despairing acceptance of an abusively deceptive narratively fragmented reality, and a painful journey of emancipation into a reality containing a narrative fabric which stands up to critical examination. The ability to discern reality is thereby less an achievement of the intellect than it is a courageous movement out of pathology. For the consumer within consumerism, the choice is between continued pathological acceptance of the abusive but spectacular hyper-real (non-)story, and the painful but healing journey towards an identity derived from an alternative story. A consumer's lack of ability to see through the cracks of their hyper-real surroundings says more about the depth of their abuse at the hands of consumerism than it does about any lack of intellectual prowess.

Hyper-reality is created by the economic workings of consumer capitalism. More specifically, it is through the illusory plurality of desires and goals that consumers are shaped to fit the needs of commodity production-the abused are forced to accommodate to the abuser. Although propagated through an indescribably complex collection of images and behaviours, hyper-reality is very much a creation of advertising.

To: Hey, Mr Ad man, play a song for me

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.