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

Consumerism and Narrative Identity

What we've introduced with MTV is non-narrative form . . . We rely on mood and emotion. We make you feel a certain way as opposed to you walking away with any particular knowledge.[103] 

A basic assumption underlying this argument of the abusive and fragmented consumer narrative (as well as narrative identity more generally) is that the modality of the story not only participates in explaining but also in constituting identity. The narratives we are embedded within not only describe but also help to create and maintain our identities. My approach can be summed up by the following passage from Anthony Giddens and its implications: "The existential question of self-identity is bound up with the fragile nature of the biography which the individual 'supplies' about herself. A person's identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor-important though this is-in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going."[104] 

I found it hard, it's hard to find
Oh well, whatever, nevermind.[105] 

These tragic words of Kurt Cobain, which captured the hearts of a generation of teenagers and young adults, articulate the prototypal failed attempt to make sense of life. It is a story of attempts made within consumer culture by people using the tools that consumerism provides. It is a story of the failure of meaning; an anti-redemption to which Kurt Cobain's suicide is the abused and tortured Messiah sacrifice. The story fails, I suggest, because of a poverty of imaginative resources; people cannot make sense of their complicated world within capitalism because the elements within consumer culture lack the necessary narrative depth for a coherent sense of identity to be constructed. In order to elaborate, it is necessary to look again at Ricoeur's narrative identity theory.

According to Ricoeur, a person's self derives fundamentally from their narrative location. An answer to the question 'Who am I?' will not come from metaphysical truth structure but, rather, from the contingencies of the stories in which the person is located.

Central to Ricoeur's notion of narrative is the idea of emplotment, a continual process of re-orientation through which stories achieve and maintain intelligibility. For Ricoeur a story is not simply a chance configuration of real events thrown together arbitrarily but, rather, it is the narrative configuration itself which gives meaning to events, which confers to physical happenings the very status of 'event'. In talking about the interaction between story, event and emplotment Ricoeur writes that "an event must be more than just a singular occurrence. It gets its definition from its contribution to the development of the plot. A story, too, must be more than just an enumeration of events in serial order; it must organise them into an intelligible whole, of a sort such that we can always ask what is the 'thought' of this story. In short, emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession."[106] 

The 'art' of emplotment requires resources. It cannot happen without what Ricoeur calls 'fictive resources'-those elements of history and fiction which a narrator draws upon in telling a story. Ricoeur links emplotment, fictive resources and 'real life' in the following passage.

As for the notion of the narrative unity of a life, it must be seen as an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience. It is precisely because of the elusive character of real life that we need the help of fiction to organise life retrospectively, after the fact, prepared to take as provisional and open to revision any figure of emplotment borrowed from fiction or from history.[107] 

Emplotment is not limited to events, but is also the process through which an identity is constructed. "There is . . . not just an emplotment of actions; there is also an emplotment of characters. And an emplotted character is someone seeking his or her or its identity."[108] 

It was mentioned before that Ricoeur calls these materials of emplotment 'fictive resources'. Whereas Ricoeur, by fictive resources, has in mind the textual materials of histories and fictions. We might well expand the category to include broader contextual elements of culture such as songs, images, myths, and advertisements. Significantly, this includes the polyphonic collection of image grabs and sound-bites which constitute consumer culture.

Having laid this groundwork my criticism of consumerism runs as follows: Consumerism, in its lack of narrative coherence, withholds crucial fictive resources for emplotting identity while at the same time supplying an overabundance of unhelpful fragmented resources. Through the process of socialisation into consumer culture the consumer's identity lacks any coherence derived from being part of a meaningful story or set of stories.

Emplotment does two things: on the chronological dimension it "constitutes the episodic dimension of narrative. It characterises the story insofar as it is made up of events". On the configural dimension it "transforms the events into a story. The configural act consists of 'grasping together' the detailed actions or what I have called the story's incidents. It draws from this manifold of events the unity of one temporal whole . . . it extracts a configuration from a succession".[109] 

To: Losing the plot

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.