Consumer Materialism: An Ideological Critique and a Dialogic Response

Abstract

By constructively critiquing consumer materialism as a fantastic ideological form (Zizek, 1997), this article answered Rogers's (1998) call to develop communication theories that resurrect a place for the natural, affirm that humans are embedded in a nonhuman world, listen to nonhuman agents, and deconstruct binaries like subject/object, social/natural, and ideational/material. Through the lens of Zizek's (1989, 1997) interpretation of Lacanian fantasy, it was revealed that consumer materialism reproduces itself in consumer advertising (intersubjectivity), planned obsolescence (problematic of the fall), popular film (empty gesture), the Gross Domestic Product (symptom), and efforts to resist materialism manifested in presidential Earth Day commemorations (problematic of the fall and empty gesture). This essay concluded by articulating a transhuman, material, dialogic (Rogers, 1998) concept of productive-consumption as a means of transcending the signified Desire of the Other at consumer materialism's ideological core. Productive-consumption was illustrated with wilderness travel, food production, and meal preparation.

Keywords:

• Consumer Materialism
• Dialogism
• Environmental Communication
• Ideology
• Lacanian Psychoanalytic Criticism

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the National Communication Association where it was recognized as a top student paper by the Environmental Communication Division.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shane M. Semmler

Shane M. Semmler (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of South Dakota

Jacob Bobby

Jacob Bobby (Masters of Divinity, Concordia Seminary) is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science, University of South Dakota.