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

Hey, Mr Ad man, play a song for me

IT WAS NOTED EARLIER that consumer capitalism, rather than simply producing products, produces demand for products. This demand is built by creating associations between products and desirable images, by coding these according to a "product semantics" so as to be optimally received by consumers.[82]  Such a world of associated images and feelings, what Luke calls the 'hyper-reality'[83]  of the product, can be thought of as the source of the hyper-reality we have been discussing. Associated with this coding process has been the diminishment of the use-value of the product in favour of its exchange-value. This diminishment, Luke argues, is part of a broader cultural shift in which signifiers increasingly attain a greater importance than the signifier they refer to, the Nike 'swoosh' more important than the shoe itself.[84]  Under consumer capitalism this process reaches the extreme in which the signified disappears altogether leaving only a network of signifiers referring to nothing beyond themselves; no socioeconomic or material set of realities is referred to. Thus hyper-reality, consisting of ungrounded signifiers and born of coded affective associations, thereby becomes more 'real' to the consumer than any physical or socioeconomic set of realities.[85] 

Many writers have recognised a similar breakdown of reality under consumerism, expressing it in different ways. Andrew Leak, for example, describes mass society as "the glorification of the spectacular, the illusory, the ephemeral".[86]  Baudrillard describes this breakdown of reality as an increasing fascination with the hyper-real medium rather than the message.[87]  This fascination, he argues, "is obtained by neutralising the message in favour of the medium, by neutralising the idea in favour of the idol, by neutralising truth in favour of the simulacrum".[88] 

It's not so much that the real has simply broken down, but that the hyper-real has consumed or absorbed the real. In a similar sentiment to the pop truism, 'Pop will eat itself',[89]  Baudrillard argues that "The hyper-real is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, [and] elevation to the strength of the model . . . [where] the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real".[90] 

Another way of thinking about the absorption of the real by the hyper-real is as the colonisation of the cultural sphere by the economic sphere. Jameson argues that, as the commodity becomes less important in comparison to its media image, the spheres of culture and economics come to refer to the same set of hyper-real (non) referents.

In the gradual disappearance of the physical marketplace, of course, and the tendentious identification of the commodity with its image (or brand name or logo), another, more intimate, symbiosis between the market and the media is effectuated, in which boundaries are washed over . . . the products sold on the market become the very content of the media image, so that, as it were, the same referent seems to maintain in both domains.[91] 

One important aspect of this process of absorption is that the imitation becomes more desirable than the thing imitated. Umberto Eco describes in elegant terms how theme parks such as Disneyland positively foster this hungering for mimesis, the preference for the imitation over the real.

Disneyland not only produces illusion, but-in confessing it-stimulates the desire for it: A real crocodile can be found in the zoo, and as a rule it is dozing or hiding, but Disneyland tells us that faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands. When, in the space of twenty-four hours, you go (as I deliberately did) from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real one, and from the wild river of Adventureland to a trip on the Mississippi, where the captain of the paddle-wheel steamer says it is possible to see alligators on the banks of the river, and then you don't see any, you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed . . . [Disneyland's philosophy] is not, "We are giving you the reproduction so that you will want the original," but rather, "We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original."[92] 

To: The loss of history

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.