Conversion of Consumer and Commodity Identities

"I think, therefore I am," said Rene Descartes. ¹⁰⁵ Were he alive today, Descartes more appropriately might say "I buy, therefore I am." In effect, the founder of modern philosophy would be confirming that, in our consumer culture, to be is to buy, and what is bought identifies who we are.

Mass advertising does more than sell goods and services; it is a discourse of symbols that characterizes consumers. Insofar as advertising succeeds, the identity of the consumer is continually reshaped by a relationship to goods and services. Advertising critic Judith Williamson captures this point: "We differentiate ourselves from other people by what we buy.... In this process we become identified with the product that differentiates us." ¹⁰⁶ Differentiation and consumer self­identification are, of course, the objectives and the modus operandi of modern marketing strategies: many advertisements portray reality by personality attributes and lifestyle images. Advertising displays the kinds of cars we should own, the kinds of clothes we should wear, the kinds of alcohol and soda we should drink, the kinds of perfumes and colognes we should use­in short, the kinds of people we should be. ¹⁰⁷

The lesson of advertising is that we learn who we are by how and by how much we perceive existence through the commercial lens. Our discourse and visions of life are colored by advertising's fictions. "[W]hether or not it sells cars or chocolate, [advertising] surrounds us and enters into us, so that when we speak we may speak in ... the language of advertising and when we see we may see through schemata that advertising has made salient for us." ¹⁰⁸ By this process, we are invited to invade the bodies of commercial fantasy figures and become them­making us a kind of "body snatcher" in the marketplace.

Beyond reshaping our identities, advertising reshapes the identities of goods and services as it invests them with fetishistic powers far exceeding their normal utility. In primitive magic, a fetish was an amulet or talisman that carried spirit powers. In current usage, a fetish is any object infused with emotional charge. ¹⁰⁹ With the decline of reason­why advertising, it did not take marketing experts long to appreciate the fetishistic potential of advertisements. A 1912 trade journal suggested as much: "[It is] possible through advertising to create mental attitudes toward anything and invest it with a value over and above its intrinsic worth." ¹¹⁰ Only a decade later, advertising agent James Wallen proclaimed that "you do not sell a man the tea, but the magic spell which is brewed nowhere else but in a teapot." ¹¹¹

A consumer culture that savors a particular liquor because it helps on "the rocky road to love," ¹¹² that splashes on a particular cologne because "everyone needs a hero," ¹¹³ or that writes with a particular pen to create literature as great as "The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes" ¹¹⁴ is a culture that injects products with powers. It is a culture in which "[ideas, feelings, time past and time future, worlds and people can all be miraculously contained in objects.... Life and meaning are attached to objects that might seem worthless in themselves. In all societies but our own we call this fetishism." ¹¹⁵