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

The loss of history

Welcome to nowhere fast
Nothing here ever lasts
Nothing but memories of what never was.[93] 

One important manifestation of this crisis of reality, as the song lyrics quoted above suggest, is a painful loss of a sense of history. Without any experience of historical continuity of social experience, something which consumerism erases in its transitory nature, consumers are unable to recognise or establish an intelligible temporal ordering of events. Lasch criticises consumerism for having "trivialised the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present . . . We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future."[94] 

The most important aspect, for the purposes of this paper, of this loss of historical sense is its link to the lack of narrative fabric of the story of consumerism. One of the central presuppositions of Paul Ricoeur's narrative theory, is the intimate connection between time and narrative_between proper temporal ordering and narrative fabric. His basic presupposition is that "time becomes human to the extent that it is organised after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience".[95] 

This being the case, then the blurring of reality naturally coincides with a loss of proper temporal ordering of events. The breakdown of consumer narrative, evidenced in the confused nature of consumer life, goes hand in hand with a loss of historical continuity. The abused person, not yet free from the effects of abuse, often has difficulties remembering. The consumer has little memory.

Debord, from within the Marxist tradition, makes explicit the link between the functioning of consumer capitalism and the effacement of the past. He argues that consumer culture must continually fabricate 'pseudo-history' in order to replace (or repress in the language of abuse) history. [96]  Similarly Marcuse notes that the recovering of a coherent sense of history is subversive to consumerism: "Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. Remembrance is a mode of dissociation from the given facts, a mode of 'mediation' which breaks, for short moments, the omnipresent power of the given facts."[97] 

In maintaining the power relations of abuse, the abuser has a vested interest in keeping the memory of abuse incoherent and fragmented in the mind of the abused. Myers sums up the necessary historical confusion in the following truism. "Those who want to change the relations of power in the present, to break the cycle of violence, must deal with history; those content with the status quo must keep history remote, fragmented and inaccessible." [98] 

Which brings us to the question of how does consumerism keep the past fragmented? What is the mechanism through which historical coherence is suppressed? Jameson offers a promising answer: Consumerism treats the past as a text. He argues that the means by which the past is lost is the same means by which the material and socioeconomic realities of capitalism are lost-by their replacement with pseudo events and spectacles. In a curious argument which links the loss of history to the loss of referent in the 'linguistic turn', Jameson describes the past as sharing the fate of other sources of reality in postmodernity: "In faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as "referent" finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts."[99] 

By "nothing but texts" he is describing the process through which consumer society is "condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach".[100]  Intelligible history is replaced by a heap of disconnected texts and fragments of texts. Any genuine sense of continuity with the past is thereby reduced to the spectacular re-absorption of the past into a series of images. With nowhere to turn but the past, consumer culture embraces and re-appropriates these historical images in what Jameson calls "the increasing primacy of the 'neo'".[101] 

This use of the past, which Jameson calls pastiche, rather than being parody is simply purposeless historical imitation. Pastiche is "a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satirical impulse".[102]  Contemporary examples of pastiche are the increasingly popular 'retro' scene which imitates the music, dance, and clothing fashions of the '70s and '80s, and the resurgence of cult hit movies, such as Grease, which supposedly capture a past historical moment. Pastiche, involving the reduction of history to a series of texts, contributes to the fragmentary nature of the past. Such a fragmentation of the past is a counterpoint to the lack of narrative fabric of the consumer story. The abusive nature of consumerism is thereby maintained; the abused consumer cannot remember the past in any sufficiently coherent way to challenge the present.

To: Consumerism and Narrative Identity

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.