California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: January 2, 2002
Latest update: January 2, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org.

The Self as Consumer

Essay later. Just links for now.

Will want to include the discussion of double-consciousness and Lacan's concept of the mirror. What we are sold in advertisement is a kind of mirror held up to us. The mirror of advertisements is also impersonal, not us, but what the dominant discourse suggests we all are. Think about present advertisements. What status characteristics are involved? What ideologies are we offered? How idealized are they? More soon . . . jeanne. January 2, 2002.

• Consumer Kachina Painting by Cynthia West, exhibited at Museum of fine Arts in Santa Fe. "A wonderful painting by Cynthia West depicting the devil of consumption as an evil Kachina." Link added January 2, 2002. backup

• Fakeville From the Website of Professor Russell W. Belk, University of Utah, David Eccles School of Business.

  "This is a sign at the center of Nashville Indiana, a town devoted almost exclusively to the sales of "country" souvenirs and crafts. The marketing of a neo-traditional shopping mall as 'a visit with the past' is a characteristic of an American 'Disneyesque' blurring of the boundaries between the real and the fake, as described so well by Jean Baudrillard. The long-term question is - does parasitic marketing 'steal' our past and leave us without real roots?"