On Consumer Culture, Identity, the Church and the Rhetorics of Delight

Mark Clavier

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781501330919
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501330957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Reading Augustine series presents short, engaging books offering personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo's contributions to western philosophical, literary, and religious life.

Mark Clavier's On Consumer Culture, Identity, The Church and the Rhetorics of Delight draws on Augustine of Hippo to provide a theological explanation for the success of marketing and consumer culture. Augustine's thought, rooted in rhetorical theory, presents a brilliant understanding of the experiences of damnation and salvation that takes seriously the often hidden psychology of human motivation. Clavier examines how Augustine's keen insight into the power of delight over personal notions of freedom and self-identity can be used to shed light on how the constant lure of promised happiness shapes our identities as consumers. From Augustine's perspective, it is only by addressing the sources of delight within consumerism and by rediscovering the wellsprings of God's delight that we can effectively challenge consumer culture. To an age awash with commercial rhetoric, the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo offers a theological rhetoric that is surprisingly contemporary and insightful.

1

Introduction

Paradise just a purchase away

We begin with the ‘good life’ as depicted in two recent advertisements:

In the first, images of hard-working men – farmers, welders, ranchers, and construction workers – flit across the screen, interspersed with those of smiling wives, fathers with their sons and daughters, and the advertised truck barrelling along dirt roads. The only sound in the long commercial is a well-produced country/western song extolling ‘masculine’ virtues of strength, dependability, and endurance. Taken as a piece, the commercial presents the ‘all-American’ ideal of strong families founded on steadfast men situated within happy, rural communities and engaged in wholesome pastimes. Implicitly, the dependable truck symbolizes the identity of the equally dependable male customer and the kind of life he undoubtedly desires.

The second commercial catches the viewer’s attention with the sudden syncopated rhythms of an upbeat song introducing us to three young, attractive women adorned with short, flattering dresses and happy smiles. With their shopping bags full, all three spring into a convertible in what appears to be a prosperous Mediterranean city on a warm, sunny day. As they pull away, colourful ribbons begin to rain down on them, which adds to their obvious delight. Their gestures and smiles speak of freedom and enjoyment and the whole scene presents a happy life – a kind of grown-up ‘feminine’ version of a world from a Disney cartoon. Only the fleeting close-ups of their bright pink lips and the final still reveal that this is actually a commercial for lipstick.

These advertisements do more than promote a commodity: they sell a dream. In neither the truck nor the lipstick commercial is the viewer given any information about the product itself beyond the self-evident facts that large trucks are particularly well-suited for hauling heavy objects and pink lipstick will make the wearer’s lips pinker. Instead, the focus is on an idealized life. Someone new to American advertising might think that each is promoting a dream rather than a product. Such a person would not, in fact, be wrong.

In a gender-stereotyped way these two commercials use a portrayal of the ‘good life’ to grab customers’ attention, appeal to their emotions, and whet their appetites. Undoubtedly, each portrait was meticulously designed and scripted by a bevy of focus groups, researchers, market analysts, and consultants who used their expertise to craft the precise combination of words, music, and images to connect emotionally with the intended market. Each in its own way implicitly portrays what free and happy lives look like. They seem to ask: Wouldn’t you love to live like this? Wouldn’t this be fun and fulfilling? They also implicitly urge us to reflect on our own lives – cluttered with unfulfilled dreams, responsibilities, anxieties, and regrets – and to yearn for something like those in the commercials. The marketers have no need to create these dreams from scratch since countless advertising campaigns over the decades have done so already. Their job is simply to remind us of that dream and associate their products with it.

We see ‘lifestyle’ marketing like these all the time. They’re so common that we no longer think it strange that our lives should be saturated by them. Advertisement such as these target, segment, or create ‘consumer markets based on behaviour, values, leisure time patterns and expenditure, individual preferences and tastes, attitudes and aspirations’ (Doyle 2016). If successful, the targeted audience will identify the advertised product as a necessary part of its self-expression and deepest yearnings. Think Nike for runners, branded Spandex for cyclists, or BMWs for successful professionals. The goal of such marketing is to ‘offer cultural materials (a set of values or idealized ways of life), grafted onto the physical product through expensive, long-term investment in branding, advertising and marketing campaigns, with which the consumer can construct and express their own identities’ (Eilis et al. 2011: 179).

Pervasive lifestyle advertising emerged primarily during the 1940s and 1950s when public relations experts began to offer their skills to American corporations. One of the first major campaigns to link products to lifestyle was conducted for the American automotive industry. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, later explained how the automobile was marketed:

In terms of the greater freedom of motion it offers to individuals and groups, at a cost within the reach of all income groups in the nation. Freedom of motion brings with it facilities for the freer exchange of ideas, a greater opportunity to see and experience how other groups in other localities live and meet their problems. This interchange of ideas and knowledge, brought about by more extensive, quicker, and cheaper transportation in any of its forms thus … becomes a conduit of democratic thought and ideas… . The automobile thus becomes more than a mechanism on wheels – it becomes an instrument of democracy. (Bernays 1938: 126)

Subsequently, advertisements started to display idyllic scenes of a carefree life into which cars were situated – everything from a young male driver being admired by beautiful young women to a happy family on a car holiday. By the 1960s, cars, trucks, and motorcycles had become an essential expression of the American lifestyle. That identification continues into the present as can be seen in the truck commercial that began this chapter.

Since the 1950s, the number and reach of such advertising have expanded exponentially across the globe. With the use of an ever-growing variety of platforms – such as social media and smartphones – advertising has now become the ‘prevailing social language’ of America and, indeed, all consumer societies (Ewen 1988: xvi). Thanks to Disney, Lucas Films, Marvel Comics, and other similar corporations, such marketing saturates the social imagination of consumers from an increasingly early age. Very young children demonstrate brand preference and both children and teenagers increasingly now spend a considerable amount of their time within online commercial environments. Such is the depth and prevalence of advertising that we now rarely notice it. Even Christians who might strongly oppose the idea of businesses sponsoring their worship hardly think twice when an Apple™ or Microsoft™ logo appears on a big screen when loading a praise song or a PowerPoint™ presentation. A recent far Left protest paraded a crowd of young people dressed in branded clothing and carrying iPhones.

Although each advertisement may tell its own story and offer its own promise of happiness, each is really rooted in the same ideal of happiness: a lifestyle based on consumer choice. This might not be immediately obvious since not much connects a dependable truck to lipstick. But both use images and music to connect with our imaginations and our emotions. They appeal to or even manufacture ideals of happiness and entice us to pursue those ideals by purchasing products. They also present their products as essential tools for expressing identiti es. They seem to say, Don’t just buy a truck. Get the boots, cowboy hat, and Levi jeans (not to mention attractive woman and kids) to complete the ensemble or It would be a shame to buy lipstick and not splash out a little more for the short skirt or a day of sunny shopping with girlfriends. Each advertisement is trying to impact us beneath the rational level, populating our imagination and shaping our desires so that we’re disposed towards making the decisions it wants us to make (to buy the truck or lipstick).

Consumers, of course, have become increasingly alert to the tactics used by marketers. The failure rate for marketing new brands and products is high and the history of marketing is littered with colossal failures such as the Ford Edsel, New Coke, or Microsoft Vista. But my concern is less with the impact of particular adverts than with their collective social impact. A marketing campaign may fail to increase sales and yet present once more a vision of happiness for us to consume. Be they successful or not, advertisements are rooted in a conception of the happy life that’s constantly displayed as the goal for us to pursue. Likely, most people would find it difficult to describe that happy life (and it’s important to consumer economies that we never believe that we’ve found it) except that it’s only a purchase away and thus available in the here-and-now (as opposed to the hereafter) to everyone with enough cash. As Zygmunt Bauman notes, ‘The society of consumers is perhaps the only society in human history to promise happiness in earthly life, and happiness here and now, and in every successive “now”; in short, an instant and perpetual happiness’ (Bauman 2007: 44, emphasis in original).

Take as an example a recent automobile commercial in which the camera focuses almost entirely on the sheer delight on the faces of various people as their loved ones slowly unveil a new car. No information about the car is given beyond visual appeal; the commercial’s emphasis is on the experience of receiving a spectacular gift at Christmas. The audience knows how wonderful it feels to give and to receive a surprise present. The images tap into our childhood memories of Christmas, making the scenes familiar even if the experience of unveiling an expensive car isn’t. That familiarity allows us to respond emotionally, to feel something like the visible emotions of the people in the commercial. That sensation is then replicated repeatedly in commercials, online advertisements, video shared on social media, and in shops during the Christmas season. We might not run out to buy a car, but we may begin to associate expense with Christmas. We have, in fact, experienced vicariously the good life and have started to yearn for something akin to it for ourselves. If we step back far enough to notice not so much what goods are being sold as how they’re being sold, we can begin to see how advertisements interweave to create a distinctive world of promises for our imaginations to consume. Our emotions, imagination, and desires can’t avoid expertly designed appeals for us to pursue an ideal of happiness that we’ve already been disposed to desire. Over and over again, we’re faced with these appeals, reminded how happy we might be, and are presented with a choice: to buy or not to buy. Like it or not, we now perpetually live in the marketplace.

Perceiving reality

In his bestselling book, Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Buying Is Wrong, Martin Lindström recounts a study of ‘Pepsi Challenge’, the famous advertising experiment/campaign conducted during the 1970s in which people were invited to participate in a blind taste test of Coke and Pepsi (2009: 25–7). That experiment determined that when people were given blind samples of Pepsi and Coke, more than half of them preferred the taste of Pepsi. Yet, Pepsi sales lagged far behind those of Coca-Cola even when consumers were informed of the results of the test.

A later neuroscientific study conducted at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston discovered why this might be the case. Its first test backed up the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ experiment: when slightly more than half of the participants drank Pepsi, their ventral putamen (the region of the brain stimulated by appealing tastes) lit up on the scans. But when the same people were told which product they were drinking, an overwhelming 75 per cent preferred Coke. This time, however, their brains did something very different than before: not only was there activity in the ventral putamen but now there was increased blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for complex thinking. Effectively, the emotional part of the brain overruled the thinking part of the brain (Lindström 2009: 24–6). Lindström concludes:

The positive associations the subjects had with Coca-Cola – its history, logo, colour, design, and fragrance; their own childhood memories of Coke, Coke’s TV and print ads over the years, the sheer inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand – beat back their rational, natural preference for the taste of Pepsi. Why? Because emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally – think Apple, Harley-Davidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters – will win every single time. (Lindström 2009: 26–7)

This study demonstrated two things about how we respond to well-done, pervasive marketing. First, if an emotional connection is made, our rational faculty is overridden by our feelings. This suggests, among other things, that the impact of pervasive marketing on our notions of freedom, happiness, and identity happens before we even stop to consider it. Second, the analysis added to the wealth of observations made since the advent of psychiatry that people aren’t nearly the rational agents that they like to believe.

A bedrock belief of the Enlightenment was that human beings have the capacity for objective, rational thought. The long project of modernization assumed that properly educated men could exert their reason and will over nature and ‘weaker’ people (that is, ethnic minorities, less advantaged societies, women, and Catholics) to construct a better society. Even when much of the rhetoric of modernity had been rejected after the horrors of the twentieth century, belief in the rational agency of individuals remained strong at the popular level (as it continues to be in a kind of mythological way to this day).

Influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, however, a growing number of social scientists became increasingly convinced that our conscious behaviour and beliefs often aren’t the result of a rational process but of a subconscious world of dimly perceived psychological influences. In 1896, Gustave Le Bon, one of the earliest analyst s of ‘social psychology’, wrote in his The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind:

The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the unconscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind in the main by hereditary influences… . The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. (Le Bon 2000: 18)

What Le Bon and other social psychologists perceived is that what’s true for the individual must also be true for ‘the crowd’. Sigmund Freud observed:

The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at first may seem to be full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely… . In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first, individual psychology … is at the same time social psychology as well. (quoted in Ewen 1988: 138–9)

Before we even start the process of rational consideration we’re undermined by the limits placed on us by our experience of inhabiting our world. Freud’s view of the crowd was of a neurotic writ large ‘guided not by ordinary objective reality but psychological reality’ (Ewen 1988: 139). In short, how we perceive reality is usually influenced more by the groups to which we belong than by the objective evidence we encounter. So, for example, a wealth of evidence about global climate change has failed to undermine the beliefs of a large swathe of American conservatism. This socially constructed reality is even truer for things like marriage, money, freedom, and nationhood that we take for facts but actually arise entirely from social agreements (Searle 1996: 1–7).

We’ll return to consider this idea of belonging in more detail in the second part of this book. For now, let’s continue to follow this strand of thought back to the Pepsi test. Le Bon contended that crowds are influenced by often disconnected images that our imaginations weave together to form a narrative:

Our reason shows us the incoherence there is in these images, but a crowd is almost blind to this truth, and confuses with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has superimposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind, though they most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact. (Le Bon 2000: 23–4)

Public opinion isn’t governed by rational principals but by meaning-laden images woven together by our social imagination. He referred to this as the ‘excessive suggestibility’ of crowds (Le Bon 2000: 23). For an example of this, cons...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part One Worldly rhetoric
• Part Two Heavenly rhetoric
• Part Three The mission and ministry of God’s rhetoric
• References
• Index
• Copyright