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

The unraveling fabric of stories

Alone in a hotel room in New York City
with Jon Coltrane and a Love Supreme
In the next room I hear some women scream out
her lover's turning off, turning on the television
And I can't tell the difference between ABC News, Hill Street Blues,
and a preacher in the "Old-Time Gospel Hour" stealing money from the sick and the old.[123] 

Continuing with the theme of narrative identity construction (or lack thereof), I want to turn now to the other dimension of emplotment which Ricoeur mentions-that of configuring the elements of life into an intelligible whole. There is a wide range of literature which suggests that consumers use the elements of consumer culture to fashion (or emplot) their lives. Haug, for example, argues that the images associated with commodities provide consumers with "a language to interpret their experience and the world".[124]  Along similar lines Lasch writes that for the consumer "the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions, all of them equally contemporaneous to the contemporary mind".[125] 

Ched Myers describes the truth underlying the process of consumer identity formation as the "primal subtext of capitalism; I am what I buy/consume".[126]  Mary Douglas, in a study of the social signification of commodities in cultural discourse, describes this process in broader anthropological terms: "The choice of goods continuously creates certain patterns of discrimination, overlaying or reinforcing others. Goods, then, are the visible patterns of culture. They are arranged in vistas and hierarchies that can give play to the full range of discrimination of which the human mind is capable."[127] 

Rather than leaving this at the level of broad generalities, it is worth looking in more detail at a possible mechanism through which the process of emplotment occurs. Judith Williamson, author of Decoding Advertisements, in describing the process of consumer identity formation emphasises the idea that the consumer is an active part of the process. "We are both the product and the consumer; we consume, buy the product, yet we are the product. Thus our lives become our own creations through buying; an identi-kit of different images of ourselves, created by different products. We become the artist who creates the face, the eyes, the life-style."[128] 

The role of the consumer, she argues, is to step into the space of created identity that the advertisement provides.

Every ad necessarily assumes a particular spectator: it projects into the space out in front of it an imaginary person composed in terms of the relationship between the elements within the ad. You move into the space as you look at the ad, and in doing so 'become' the spectator . . . as an individual this imaginary subject [portrayed by the advertisement] does not exist, but in that we 'become' him or her, he/she exists as a set, a group-the totemic group centred on the product. And as we each of us step into this totemic space, we become the person . . . We constitute a totemic set of one, we find our identity as part of a group the rest of which does not exist.[129] 

Williamson argues that there are two reasons why consumers participate in this process: firstly, in doing so the consumer feels a sense of belonging, in this case to the imaginary community of people.[130]  In her language you become part of the "clan" full of others who are never met except in the advertisement.[131]  Second, and more immediately relevant, in adopting the imagined identity projected by the advertisement the consumer is able to satisfy for a brief moment her or his yearning for coherence of identity. This could be equivalently stated in Ricoeur's terms: The advertisement offers a model of emplotment which the consumer can participate in through the act of consumption, and in doing so adopt a prepackaged narrative identity.

The subject may indeed be given a 'gestalt' of different subjective possibilities to be united in the product . . . this still presupposes a coherent self, a subject-or at least, it presupposes the desire for such a self.

What the advertisement clearly does is thus to signify, to represent to us, the object of desire. Since the object is the self, this means that, while ensnaring/creating the subject through his or her exchange of signs, the advert is actually feeding off that subject's own desire for coherence and meaning in him or her self. This is as it were the supply of power that drives the whole ad motor, and must be recognised as such.[132] 

Whether or not this is a full and accurate description of how advertisements operate, it at least provides a way of understanding how the fictive resources of consumer culture are used to emplot (along the configural dimension) an identity. The inadequacy of this process, however, is that the fictive resources of consumer culture are limited to the myths and images it contains and the content of these myths is dictated by the needs of the production process associated with capital expansion. The limited scope of these resources mean that only a thin sense of identity can be constructed out of what Daniel White and Gert Hellerick describe as the "mask of prefabricated identity readily available in the myriad consumer images on display in the mall".[133]  Wachtel describes the limited nature of consumer choice in the following terms: "We live today with many more choices than any previous generation. It is true, as many critics point out, that not all our choices are "meaningful". The sense of option is often illusory; we choose what the system can safely let us choose, but choices that could really make a difference are frequently foreclosed."[134] 

In order to avoid losing the gist of this argument in a sea of generalities, we'll look now at two specific areas of consumer culture in which the fictive resources have been tamed to the point of no longer being useful-Christian religious imagery and the imagery of nature.

To: The sacred commodity

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.