a reading: the spirituality of the shopper

(aus dem buch: "liquid church" von pete ward, hendrickson publishers)

James B. Twitchell is critical of cultural commentators who eschew the value of advertising and consumption. He argues that the problem is not that we are materialist but that we are not materialist enough!

"If we craved objects and knew what they meant, there would be no need to add meaning through advertising We would just gather, use, toss out, or hoard indiscriminately. But we don't. First, we don't know what to gather and, second, we like to trade what we have gathered. Third, we need to know how to value object that have little practival use. What is clear is that most things in and of themselves do not mean enough. In fact, what we crave may not be objects at all but their meaning."
(from the book "Adcult USA" by James B. Twitchell)

Consumption is not primarily a materialist occupation, and here Twitchell echoes Baudrillard; in fact, it is based on the exchange and enjoyment of "meanings". The role of advertising is to add value to objects by investing them with meaning. In this sense, says Twithell, advertising performs a role in our society that historically has been associated with religion. In the past value was located with God in the world beyond. In contemporary society value has been relocated in material goods and their use. Twitchell uses the term adcult to describe this religious dimension of advertising. Advertising is like religion, he says, in that it is part of a meaning-making process. Religion and advertising attempt to build a bridge across the gap between ourselves and things, and they do this by offering a systematic order.
The meaning of things is related to our place insociety and the world. The clothes I wear, the car I drive, the music I listen too all locate me in relation to my friends and neighbors. Consumer choice is related to the development of taste. In this sense taste represents an ordered system for choosing between various products. Taste, according to Pierre Bourdieu, is related to a system of social boundaries, which he calls distinctions. Consumer choice links us to some people and separates us from others. Consumption is therefore about finding who we are in the world. Twitchell interprets this as a promise of salvation. The meaning making of advertising, he says, offers the possibility of redemption. (see Twitchell "And lead us into Temptation"). Nor is Twitchell alone in this insight; David Lyon also speaks of consumption in similar terms, as being a kind of salvation:
"Consumerism has become central to the social and cultural life of the technologically advanced societies inthe later twentieth century. Meaning is sought as a "redemptive gospel" in consumption. And cultural identities are formed through processes of selective consumption." (see David Lyon, "Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times")

Clearly more is in play than we may have first thought when we visit the shopping mall or when we flick through the pages of a magazine. Christian leaders are right to see consumption as a challenge to belief, but they are wrong to locate this in the material world of the object. If Twitchell and others are right, then adcult represents an alternative source of meanging to the traditional Christian gospel. This means that as we shop we search for a kind of salvation.

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