This personal narrative is one of the first memories I have of con- sciously participating in the culture of consumer capitalism. It is advertising as a “divine” mediator that communicates to the individual the ultimate concern of the cul- ture of consumer capitalism. This timeline is used to trace the intersection of the religious dimensions of advertising, introduced in chapter 1, as they are reflected in the shifting history of the culture of consumer capitalism.
I argue that what has made advertising so powerful throughout the development of the culture of consumer capitalism is not its ability. In summary, the culture of consumer capitalism has various com- modity-totems that express the desires of the collective. In order to answer this question, let us now sketch the historical background of advertising through the rise of the culture of consumer capitalism in the United States.
Furthermore, they [newspapers] participate as sites of the culture of advertising, which conjoins the culture of consumer Locating Religious Dimensions 91. The holiday shopping ritual is a collective act whereby advertising mediates the ultimate concern of the culture of consumer capitalism. In the final analysis, the problem of the consumer culture was not that it threatened the cultivated individual.
In the culture of consumer capitalism, individuals who are able to consume is “the real thing,” or the seemingly ultimate concern of the U.S. The supposedly sacred of the culture of consumer capitalism, the wealthy and the greedy, have refused the invitation. If advertising uses the religious to be culturally powerful, may reli- gion be used to deconstruct the ultimate concern of the culture of consumer capitalism.
Cobb, McFague, Meeks, and Taylor all argue that the culture of consumer capitalism has become the ultimate concern of the current worldview. Religion, as a production of culture,63 must be included in the performative identities of the counternarrative.
Totemic Desires
Rather, I want to invoke Paul Ricouer’s analysis when he states that “metaphor is the rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality.” What I seek to do is discover how Durkheim’s theories of religion may be useful as an interpretive key in “redescribing” certain present religious discourse and it relationship with advertising. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion(New York: Anchor Books, 1967), Part I, Chapter 1. William Leiss et al., Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products, and Images of Well-Being(London and New York: Routledge.
Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society(New York: Routledge, 1990), 27. Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society(New York: Routledge, 1990), 50. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed.
James Twitchell, Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture(New York: Columbia University Press. Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: New Left books as quoted in Jhally, “Advertising as Religion,” 228. In his video “Advertising and the End of the World,” Jhally states that there are two kinds of questions that one may ask of advertising.
Sut Jhally, Advertising and the End of the World, Video, written, edited, and produced by Sut Jhally (Distributed by Media Education Foundation, 1998).
Worshiping a Totem
Second is the argument by elimination in which alternative explanations are presented only to be systematically discounted as Durkheim’s “correct” theory unfolds. Last is Durkheim’s treatment of evidence, wherein he ignores glaring facts that contradict his own work, such as clan societies without totems and vice versa. Much of Durkheim’s anthropological work has been shown to be rather “arm-chair” and has subsequently been disproven.
Levi-Strauss thinks Durkheim’s explanation is “simplistic and reduces itself to an untenable attempt at monocausal explanation.”. Another reason that it is problematic, or at least intriguing, is Durkheim associated society with the sacred and the individual with the profane. For a good discussion of this aspect of Durkheim’s work see Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, 122–124.
See his The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959). Durkheim’s texts for analysis are Sir Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia(London: . Macmillan, 1899) and Sir Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia(London: Macmillan, 1904). One might notice that at this point Durkheim has moved from Spencer and Gillen’s world of totemism to his contemporary French society to prove how god and society are one and the same, and to sup- port his idea of the sacred and the profane.
That is, one of the reasons he wrote Formswas to try and discern how it is that soci- ety sustains itself.
Locating Religious Dimensions
Emphasizing human irrationality, they used that emphasis to limit rather than deepen understanding of the human condition—to reject human freedom, rather than acknowledging its precariousness. As Ewen and Ewen note, “to consume in its original usage (French), meant ‘to take up completely, devour, waste, spend.’ ” In almost all of the original English usages, consume had a negative connotation. What was represented by early advertising was this kind of mythic abundance and simplicity as it was juxtaposed with the urbanization of the city.
As more people moved from rural farm areas into industrial areas for job opportunities, many felt detached from the land as they crowded into burgeoning urban areas, and experienced “the anonymity of the city.” See Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization,” 6. Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 29. Cross asserts, “And most of the time, the goods that asserted status also had nonsocial meaning and appeals—control over nature, freedom from the past, or simply individual pleasure in feel, taste, and comfort.
The secret success of consumerism was that these messages to self and others were so layered, complex, and hidden.” Cross, An All-Consuming Century, 22. For an outstanding study of the intersection between adver- tising and American (religious) holidays, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays(Princeton: . Princeton University Press, 1995). An excellent study of the history of radio is Michelle Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
It is estimated that “a billion dollars will be spent on product place- ment in the United States” in 2005.
Religious Dimensions of Advertising
The purchase is actually a “regressive identification with a vague collective totality, and hence an internalization of the sanction of the social group.” Baudrillard, The System of Objects. See also Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Meeks lists three concepts of God that support human desires as coded into needs: “Divine aseity and the liberty of the independent human being, divine sovereignty and needs as necessity, divine infinity and human insatiability.” Ibid., 162–170.
Harvard economist Juliet Schor does an extensive study of the confla- tion of needs with desires in the Unites States and how some people are choosing to “downsize” in response to the “tyranny of the Joneses.” See The Overspent American. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books as quoted in Meeks, God the Economist, 169, italics added. In no way is this argument meant to diminish or trivialize the faith of Christians and their understanding of the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper.
In the culture of consumer capitalism, things have become sacred, and do tend to have a type of religious sym- bol since the ultimate concern of our society is the maintenance of mar- ket capitalism. Mark McClain Taylor, “Tracking Spirit: Theology as Cultural Critique in the Americas,” in Changing Conversations: Religious Reflection and. Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” ’ ”The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version, ed.
For an insightful critique of Nike’s unfair labor practices see Cynthia Enloe, “The Globetrotting Sneaker,” in Ms., March/April.
Disruptive Performative Identities
Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society(London: Sage, 1996), 98. For background of the “male gaze,” I am drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of the “Look” in Being and Nothingness. This awareness is what Sartre calls “shame” in recognizing that he is indeed the object which the Other is looking at and judging.
The Other, then, is he who sees without being seen and he is the only real “I” from which all others are merely others with a small “o.” According to Simone de Beauvoir, the Other then becomes the Subject, and the One, and the sexed female becomes the Other as incidental, or inessential. A woman is aware that the gaze makes one an object and strips one of freedom, yet when one looks at other women, it is often with the same lens of the male gaze that one perceives the self as an incarnated being, and subsequently denies one’s own subjectivity. Parshley (New York: Bantam Books, 1952); and Stephen Melville, “Division of the Gaze, or Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary ‘Theory,’ ” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed.
Annette Kuhn, Powers of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1985) as quoted in hooks, Black Looks, 122–123. Postmodernism and Public Policy: Reframing Religion, Culture, Education, Sexuality, Class, Race, Politics, and the Economy. Jackson, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History ed.
Division of the Gaze, or Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary ‘Theory,’ ” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed.
