Confessions of a Shopaholic

experiential inlet and ir sensible appetite Richard Elliott University of Oxford, Oxford, UK If marketing is right-hand(a)fully the ultimate br another(prenominal)ly practice of postmodernist consumer culture (Firat, 1993) hence it carries the corpulent burden of determining the conditions and means of brio for the future (Firat and Venkatesh, 1993). Certainly, friendly possibility is straightaway focusing on white plague as playing a profound role in the way the favorable world is constructed, and it shag be argued that marketing is too important just to be left to marketers as it plays a key role in giving pith to life by use of goods and services (van Raaij, 1993). trade has been criticized from inwardly as organism a technique with break through moral regard for the consequences of its actions, and in that location is no shortage of critics of its approximately commonplace face advertizement. This paper aims at identifying approximately of the issues raised by postmodern and poststructuralist delineates of using up. In p artistic creationicular, it is argued that enjoyment bottom of the inning be conceptualized from ethnical, tender and psychological perspectives as being a prime site for the negotiation of conflicting themes of immunity and control.It is proposed here that in postmodernity the outgo of emblematic marrow, particularly finished the map of advertizement as a cultural commodity, provides the person with the opportunity to construct, adduce and elapse identity and amicable inwardnesss. This use of consumption as a resource for implication creation and kindly transactions is a work on that involves the make of preferences that be sufficiently important to be considered as existential.This is non an attempt at rehabilitating the practice of marketing, barg provided is intended to demonstrate that the consumer is furthest from being a passive victim but is an active voice divisor in the c onstruction of centre. In part this can be seen as a response to Olanders call for consumer research for the consumers pastime (Olander, 1993), but also as providing theoretical underpinning for concepts such as advertising literacy (Ritson and Elliott, 1995a) which attempt to build bran-new companionablely located and sum-based-models of advertising.Exploring whatsoever consumption dialectics As a heuristic device to help unpack some of the complexity of the consumption experience, five dialectics will be explored and their (sometimes polar) tensions used as analytical fixs for reviewing competing discourses on the meanings of consumption My thanks to Geoff Easton and Rolland Munro for discussions which improved the ideas in this paper, some of which collapse been explored in Elliott and Ritson (1995). Existential consumption and unreasonable need 285 European daybook of Marketing, Vol. 1 no 3/4, 1997, pp. 285-296. MCB University Press, 0309-0566 European daybook of M arketing 31,3/4 286 (1) the real versus the emblematic (2) the social versus the egotism (3) liking versus satisfaction (4) rationality versus irrationality and (5) creativity versus shyness. It is ack immediatelyledged that binary foemans atomic number 18 essentially structuralist and thus in danger of betraying the complexity of the poststructuralist accounts they atomic number 18 being used to elucidate here, and that they be inevitably reductionist.However, postmodernism is riven with contradictions, all the same Baudrillards account of postmodernity is it egotism a totalizing meta-narrative (Hebdige, 1989), so we must learn to participate in the b put together of incompatible choices (Lyotard, 1984) and the juxtaposition of opposites and contradictions (Foster, 1983) called for by postmodern theorists in the hope that it can develop our understanding(s) of the meaning(s) of these complex ideas.As a heuristic device, these bipolar oppositions should non be read as p osited structures but merely as aids to plan of attack to grips with the sometimes mind-numbing interrelations mingled with what ar often incommensurable concepts. The binary opposition is false and should, of course, be allowed to melt into air (Berman, 1983). The material versus the tokenic As soon as a products great federal agency to suffer mere physical need is transcended, wherefore we enter the realm of the emblematical and it is symbolic meaning that is used in the search for the meaning of existence (Fromm, 1976).Central to postmodern theories of consumption is the proposition that consumers no longer consume products for their material utilities but consume the symbolic meaning of those products as portrayed in their images products in fact down commodity manses (Baudrillard, 1981). The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions (Debord, 1977) and the ad-dict buys images not things (Taylor and Saarinen, 1994). This semiotic perspective of products as symbols raises difficult questions about(predicate) the location of cultural meaning.The term symbol it self can relate to the product that carries meaning or to the meaning it carries, and the interpretation of meaning is a complex product of what is contained in the representation and what the individual brings to the representation (LeVine, 1984). Symbolism can be analysed semiotically by examination of the system of signs and what they signify. It has been realized, however, that this leads to an infinite regress as one sign leads to another without there ever being boththing real outside the system.All meaning is socially constructed and there is no essential external reference point, so ultimately There is nothing outside the text (Derrida, 1977). To complicate matters further, symbolic interpretation is essentially non-rational improvisation that does not obey the codes of dustup but serves at the unconscious(p) coming back (Sperber, 1975). A Jungian analysis goes level furt her and suggests that the full significance of a symbol cannot be Existential grasped in purely intellectual legal injury, if it becomes fully definable in rational consumption and terms it is no longer a true symbol (Storr, 1973). rrational trust exactly even for the sign-dependent human being things are never purely material nor purely meaningful, there is ever so a negotiate relation between matter and meaning. This mediated process races done the corporeality 287 of language as a dynamic force in the transition of an indeterminate range of human possibilities into a restricted moral sparing of meaning, in which we are simultaneously authors of and authored by the language with which we try to communicate (Pfohl, 1992).This relationship is partly a function of the individuals faculty to understand and control the interaction between the material and the symbolic, and material objects themselves are always in transit and their meaning is likewise on a trajectory (Appadu rai, 1986). The social versus the self The functions of the symbolic meanings of products operate in both directions, outward in constructing the social world social-symbolism and inward towards constructing our self-identity self-symbolism (Elliott, 1995).Consumption of the symbolic meaning of products is a social process that helps make visible and stable the basal categories of a culture which are under constant convert, and consumption plectrums become a vital source of the culture of the moment (Douglas and Isherwood, 1978). The meanings of consumer goods are grounded in their social context and the demand for goods derives more from their role in cultural practices rather than from the satisfaction of simple human needs (Douglas and Isherwood, 1978). Consumer goods, then, are more than just objects of economic exchange, they are goods to think with, goods to speak with (Fiske, 1989).Consumption as a cultural practice is one way of participating in social life and whitet horn be an important element in cementing social relationships, while the whole system of consumption is an unconscious expression of the be social structure through a seductive process which pushes the get impulse until it reaches the limits of economic potential (Baudrillard, 1988). It is in spite of appearance this social context that the individual uses consumer goods and the consumption process as the materials with which to construct and maintain an identity, kind relationships and frame psychological events (Lunt and Livingstone, 1992).The self-symbolic role of material goods is long established in social anthropology and the individuals attachment to objects may be a culturally universal function which symbolizes security, expresses the self-concept and signifies connection to gild (Wallendorf and Arnould, 1988). Consumer goods are not nevertheless used to construct our self-identity but are also used by others to make inferences about us that guide their behaviour tow ards us (Dittmar, 1992). tho now in postmodernity we are able to use consumer products to become any of our possible selves (Markus and Nurius, 1986) inEuropean daybook of Marketing 31,3/4 288 which we utilize consumer goods to construct pastiches of others we have been exposed to via the media or more directly. In cyberspace, I can change myself as easily as I change my clothes (Taylor and Saarinen, 1994). But the woofs as to which self to construct and present are attended by the possibility of social consequences which may be actually negative for example, a failure of a young person to utilize symbolic majuscule in the form of knowledge of the appropriate meaning of advertising can lead to rejection by the peer group (ODonohoe, 1994).Desire versus satisfaction The symbolic blessedness promised by advertising manages to recode a commodity as a desirable psycho- ideological sign (Wernick, 1991), and the operation of advertising at the unconscious level is driven by the sea rch for an complex number self which motivates the individual with propensity for coherence and meaning (Lacan, 1977).Advertising caters the desire to achieve the unobtainable unity of the self with destabilized meanings (Featherstone, 1991), images which separate commodities from their original use and offer the possibility to reconstruct the self by purchasing the symbolic meaning of goods and constructing a DIY self (Bauman, 1991). For as Williamson (1978) points out, The conscious chosen meaning in more or less lots lives comes from what they consume, and this is energized by the attachment of bodily desire to symbolic meaning where the inchoate needs of the pre-linguistic self are channelled into language.Central to Lacanian guess is the mirror-phase, where the child recognizes itself in a mirror and assumes an image through a transformation from the imaginary to the symbolic. The symbolic for Lacan is linked with absence, in that symbols represent a world of heap and th ings that are not there. The real can only be approached through the symbolic medium of language, barely language itself contains the contradictions and fragmentations of gender, power and meaning (Kristeva, 1980).The symbolic focus of much promotional activity in postmodernity is desire, and for Lacan desire exists in the gap between language and the unconscious. Desire does not desire satisfaction. To the inverse desire desires desire. The reason images are so desirable is that they never forgather (Taylor and Saarinen, 1994). postmodern consumption is inextricably linked with aspects of sexuality, both conscious and unconscious, as it promises the satisfaction of previously taboo desires through resourcefulness and representations (Mort, 1988).These desires are constructed through the symbolic linkage between consumption and the human body (Kellner, 1992), and operate in large part through the consumption imagery with which we are surrounded and which makes even mundane cons umer actions, such as looking in shop windows, highly significant in our psychic lives (Bocock, 1993). Thus meaning is created through a search for links between identity (the social) and the self and the pursuit of sexual satisfaction through consumption, both of which are damn to failure.Rationality versus irrationality Existential This postmodern fragmentation of the experience of self has been termed the consumption and condition of multiphrenia by Gergen (1991), who points out that the new irrational desire opportunities for lick of choice are almost un express and so bring with them a vertigo of the valued where the expansion of wants reduces our choice to want not, a multiplicity of competing values and beliefs which make the very 289 idea of rational choice become meaningless.The mass media, and advertising in particular, are credi devilrthy for an expansion of inadequacy which is encouraged by a barrage of new criteria for self-evaluation. Cushman (1990) argues that we ar e in an era of the empty self in which derangement and loss of community can be solved by the lifestyle solution in which the consumer constructs a self by purchasing and ingesting products feature in advertising, a behaviour which can be construed as, at best, of circumscribed rationality.In the Lacanian perspective there is a stress on the individual mental object as being fragmented and incoherent, and this leads to the framing of the consumer as simultaneously both rational and irrational, able to both consume and reject what is being consumed, to desire and to that extent consume without satisfaction (Nava, 1991). identicalness becomes infinitely plastic in a play of images that knows no end. Consistency is no longer a virtue but becomes a vice integration is limitation (Taylor and Saarinen, 1994).The consumption of meaning, even the meaning of supposedly unambiguous television soap operas, is always ambivalent and contradictory (Ang, 1985), and the modes of rationality which operate in the space between the unconscious world of the imaginary and the symbolic world of language are little understood as they are constrained by the commanding signifying semiologies which limit the possibilities for other forms of semiotic systems and other forms of rationality (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983).The conceptualization of other modes of (ir)rationality is paralleled by the recent development in social cognition of the theory of motivated choice, which emphasizes the role of emotion in decision processes (Forgas, 1992 Kunda, 1990). Motivated choice is where judgement is driven by an emotional desire to arrive at a particular conclusion, where biased information search and reasoning processes are used to arrive at those conclusions they want to arrive at (Kunda, 1990).From these perspectives, cool, rational, informationprocessing choice is at least uncommon, and may in fact be very rare, for the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irr ationalities (de Unamuno, 1962). Creativity versus constraint The dialectic between emancipation and control in the consumption domain is typified by the influence of advertising. The ability of consumers to resist the influence of advertising and thereby execute freedom has been minify by the Marxist analysis of its central role in the sustenance of capitalism (Leiss etEuropean Journal of Marketing 31,3/4 290 al. , 1990) which operates through the creation of ideological hegemony (Goldman, 1992). Marxists have also portrayed advertising as a put-on system (Williams, 1980) of magical inducements and satisfactions which validates consumption, if only in fantasy, by association with social and personal meanings and thus transforms goods which had rational use-value into irrational symbols.This focus on the power of the symbolic is further developed by Williamson (1986) who argues that advertisements function at an unconscious level at which the consumer is unable to resist latent meaning transfer. more than recent post-Marxist analyses have weakened their deterministic stance and recognized that the meanings and uses of products cannot be entirely controlled (Williamson, 1986).However, hegemony still exists, but now depends on affective gratifications provided by mass-mediated popular culture where familiar life in amusement society proceeds within a dialectic of enfeeblement and empowerment (Langman, 1992). From a post-structuralist perspective limited freedom is allowed to the individual through consumption choices for most members of contemporary society individual freedom, if available at all, comes in the form of consumer freedom through which the individual must take responsibility to contemplate and consciously create a self-identity (Bauman, 1988).Through the new existentialism (Laermans, 1993) consumers can exercise the freedom to create new meanings for goods through their own idiosyncratic performance of everyday life (de Certeau, 1984). This freedom can be used for incarnate and individual resistance against the imposed meanings of the overriding cultural categories, particularly through the choice of style and the use of bricolage tactics (Fiske, 1987 Hebdige, 1979).A sustained argument for the active exercise of freedom through consumption is developed by Willis (1990), who characterizes the consumption choices of the young as the behaviour of practical(a) existentialists. The young are seen as exercising choice through consumption-related symbolic creativity which operates via the concept of grounded aesthetics, a process which builds higher-level symbolic meaning structures from the mundane concrete experiences of everyday life.This allows the young a small fanciful space for making the standard social world, to some extent, controllable by them. This process is very exchangeable to the marginal tactics (de Certeau, 1984) by which the powerless make sense of consumption, and in relation to advertising would a llow them some control over the meaning of a text, but not control over the agenda within which the text is constructed (Morley and Silverstone, 1990).This is a limited freedom where we make our own spaces within the place of the other (Fiske, 1989) but save it is potentially liberating in that to leave out from dominant meanings is to construct our own subjectivity (Condit, 1989), and can therefore be conceptualized as authentic existential choice, rejecting the bad faith of accepting the dominant consumption meanings as inevitable or unproblematic (Sartre, 1969). Advertisements can be seen as cultural products in their own right, and Existential young people consume them independently of the products and have a creative consumption and symbolic relationship with them.Although Willis (1990) sees advertising as irrational desire manipulative to some extent, he emphasises the scope for individual choice and creativity in meaning and identity construction, as individuals use adverti sing images as personal and social resources. These are invested with specific 291 meanings anchored in everyday life, via the process of grounded aesthetics, which are then used to construct or maintain personal and social identities. These creative practices are particularly prevalent amongst young people of Generation X (ODonohoe, 1994 Ritson and Elliott, 1995b).The construction of social identity through styles of consumption is referred to in terms of lifestyle membership of neo- races by Bauman (1990), where one may join the tribe by buying and displaying tribe-specific paraphernalia. The neo-tribe is informal, without authority and only requires acceptance of the obligation to take on the identity-symbols of the tribe. The consumer may thus exercise the freedom to choose social groupings through existential consumption.The exercise of choice through consumption now flows across internal boundaries in a global cultural providence through the operation of advertising mediasca pes which are image-centred strips of reality which offer the consumer a series of elements out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places (Appaduri, 1990). If aspects of advertising imagery can be appropriated at will by practical existentialists then they may, as Baudrillard (1983) suggests, live everywhere already in an aesthetic psychotic belief of reality, in which the real and the simulated are indistinguishable.However, the extent to which, in a mediacratic age, advertising reflects reality or actually creates it is problematic. Are the practical existentialists using advertising or is it really using them? Schudson (1984) suggests that advertising is capitalistic realist art and that although it does not have a monopoly of the symbolic marketplace, different social groups are differentially vulnerable especially during transitional states of their lives. This form of art idealizes the consumer and portrays a s normative, special moments of satisfaction.It reminds us of beautiful moments in our own lives or it pictures magical moments we would like to experience (Schudson, 1984). This suggests that young people in particular, who are at a transitional state in their lives, may be subject to excessive influence by buying-in to advertisings pictorial matter of a false reality. In contrast, young people may be exercising (limited) freedom in their use of advertising as a cultural commodity for even as the market makes its profits, it supplies some of the materials for alternative or oppositional symbolic work (Willis, 1990).This dichotomy between creativity and constraint (Moores, 1993) in the context of advertising is represented by the problematic of hegemony, which sets parameters on the freedom to construct meaning (Ang, 1990). Hegemony European Journal of Marketing 31,3/4 292 does not dominate from outside but is a thick texture which interlaces resistance and submission, opposition and complicity (Martin-Barbero, 1988) and which therefore poses difficult problems for ethnographic analysis to unpack.Structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) offers a solution to the dualism of structure versus agency, by positing that the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organise. Thus the consumption of advertising can be both an active and creative practice yet is carried out within constraints imposed by material situation and ideological hegemony. Desire, irrationality and choice Desire develops from physical need through a growing awareness of the existential choice between a desire to have and a desire to be, desire being defined by absence or lack of being (Sartre, 1969).Lacans identification of language as the symbolic order which develops from the pre-verbal imaginary order accompanied by increasing anxiety about the self has been reframed by Kristeva (1980) as the two orders of the semiotic and the symboli c. The imaginary/semiotic order is unconscious whilst the symbolic order is rational, but there is potential for slippage between the two orders of meaning, with a reasoning backward to the unconscious and irrational order of the imaginary where desire for the unattainable powderpuff of the perfect mother holds sway.The gap between the fantasy world of consumption day-dreams of perfect pleasure and the disappointments of reality is the basic motivation for Campbells (1987) free imaginative hedonism which results in limitless wants and a permanent state of frustration. The limited resources of the individual consumer must therefore require choices to be made, choices of which desire to feed and which to deny, which meanings to consume and which to reject or avoid. This vital act of consumer choice may not be to choose that which is most pleasing, but to reject that which is most distasteful.Bourdieu (1984) suggests tastes that when they have to be justified, they are asserted pure ly negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. We may define ourselves not by what we like, but by what we dislike, and it is beardown(prenominal) negative emotional reactions to the consumption practices of others that may structure our social categories. This refusal of tastes seems to operate at the level of the imaginary/semiotic and be driven by pre-verbal inchoate emotion. While consumption may often operate at the level of the imaginary/semiotic or day-dream, it can also have real effects in facilitating the construction of self-identity (Falk, 1994).Phenomenological renderings of the everyday consumer experiences of women (Thompson et al. , 1990) have surfaced a dominant theme of being in control/being out of control which reflected an anxiety about not buying in the right way, so that women felt guilty when they perceived themselves as not making rational purchase decisions. However, they nevertheless admitted to making purchases in a phantasmagoric way when they were ca ptivated by a product. In this situation, to act in a self-perceived rrational fashion, to surrender to the symbolic, is itself an authentic existential Existential act of creating meaning through choice, the choice to be irrational. consumption and But to what extent is existential consumption the conscious exercise of irrational desire freedom through choice as idealized by existentialism? Certainly there are severe limits to the freedom contained in consumption choices due to individuals having uneven access to the necessary resources, so existential 293 consumption may only exist for some people in some societies.However, the lived experience depict by consumers (Elliott and Ritson, 1995 Thompson et al. , 1990) conveys a strong sense of Sartres engagement even if not at the level of decisional seriousness discussed by Kierkegaard (Macquarrie, 1972). Marxists may knock off an individuals claim to be making conscious choices about consumption as false consciousness but this is to deny the hardened meaningfulness of everyday consumer experiences (Thompson et al. , 1990). The freedom of practical existentialism is authentic, even if it is constrained by inequalities in the economic system and by ideological hegemony.The emotion-laden experiences of the consumer irrational, incoherent and driven by unconscious desires constrained by the market economy yet obtaining limited freedom through existential consumption and symbolic creativity able to build a DIY self through consumption yet suffering an expansion of inadequacy through advertising this constructs the subjectivity of the postmodern consumer with whom postmodern marketing (Brown, 1995) must deal. References Ang, I. (1985), Watching Dallas Soap Opera and the dramatic Imagination, Methuen, London. Ang, I. 1990), finish and communication toward an ethnographic critique of media consumption in the international media system, European Journal of Communication, Vol. 5, pp. 239-60. Appadurai, A. (1986) , The complaisant Life of Things Commodities in pagan Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Appadurai, A. (1990), Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy, existence refining, Vol. 2 zero(prenominal) 1, pp. 1-24. Baudrillard, J. (1981), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Telos Press, St Louis, MI. Baudrillard, J. (1983), In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Semiotext, New York, NY.Baudrillard, J. (1988), Consumer society, in Poster, M. (Ed. ), Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, order, Cambridge. Bauman, Z. (1988), Freedom, stretch out University Press, Milton Keynes. Bauman, Z. (1990), Thinking Sociologically, Blackwell, Oxford. Bauman, Z. (1991), Modernity and Ambivalence, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Berman, B. (1983), All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Verso, London. Bocock, R. (1993), Consumption, Routledge, London. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction A favorable Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (trans. Nice, R . ), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.Brown, S. (1995), Postmodern Marketing, Routledge, London. European Journal of Marketing 31,3/4 294 Campbell, C. (1987), The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Blackwell, Oxford. Condit, C. (1989), The rhetorical limits of polysemy, diminutive Studies in Mass Communication, no. 6, pp. 103-22. Cushman, P. (1990), Why the self is empty towards a historically situated psychology, American Psychologist, Vol. 45 No. 5, pp. 599-611. de Certeau, M. (1984), The dress of familiar Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. de Unamuno, M. 1962), The Tragic Sense of Life, (trans. Crawford, J. ), Collins, London. Debord, G. (1977), Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red, Detroit, MI. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983), Anti-Oedipus, University of atomic number 25 Press, Minneapolis, MN. Derrida, J. (1977), Of Grammatology, (trans.. Spivak, G. ), Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, MD. Dittmar, H. (1992), The Social Psychology of M aterial Possessions To Have is to Be, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead. Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1978), The World of Goods Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, Allen Lane, London. Elliott, R. 1995), consuming symbolic meaning methodological implications, European Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 2. Elliott, R. and Ritson, M. (1995), Practicing existential consumption the lived meaning of sexuality in advertising, Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 22, pp. 740-5. Falk, P. (1994), The Consuming Body, Sage, London. Featherstone, M. (1991), Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Sage, London. Firat, A. F. (1993), The consumer in postmodernity, Advances in Consumer Research, No. 18, pp. 70-6. Firat, A. F. and Venkatesh, A. (1993), Postmodernity the age of marketing, International Journal of Research in Marketing, No. 0, pp. 227-49. Fiske, J. (1987), Television Culture, Routledge, London. Fiske, J. (1989), Reading the Popular, Unwin Hyman, Boston, MA. Forgas, J. P. (1992), Affect in social judgements and decisions a multiprocess model, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, No. 25, pp. 227-78. Foster, H. (1983), Postmodernism a preface, in Foster, H. (Ed. ), The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture, Bay Press, manner Townsend, WA. Fromm, E. (1976), To Have or to Be, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Gergen, K. (1991), The Saturated Self Dilemmas of Identity in contemporary Life, Basic Book, New York, NY.Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Polity Press, Cambridge. Goldman, R. (1992), Reading Ads Socially, Routledge, London. Hebdige, D. (1979), Subculture The Meaning of Style, Methuen, London. Hebdige, D. (1989) After the masses, Marxism Today, January, pp. 48-52. Kellner, D. (1992), Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities, in Lash, S. and Friedman, J. (Eds), Modernity and Identity, Blackwell, Oxford. Kristeva, J. (1980), Desire in Language, A semiotic Approach to Lit erature and Art, Blackwell, Oxford.Kunda, Z. (1990), The case for motivated reasoning, Psychological Bulletin, No. 108, pp. 480-98. Lacan, J. (1977), Ecrits A Selection, Tavistock, London. Laermans, R. (1993), Bringing the consumer back in, Theory, Culture & Society, No. 10, pp. 153-61. Langman, L. (1992), northeastward cages shopping for subjectivity, in Shields, R. (Ed. ), Lifestyle Shopping The Subject of Consumption, Routledge, London. Leiss, W. , Kline, S. and Jhally, S. (1990), Social Communication in Advertising Persons, Products and Images of Well-being, Routledge, London. LeVine, R. 1984), Properties of culture an ethnographic view, in Schweder, R. and LeVine, R. (Eds), Culture Theory Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Lunt, P. and Livingstone, S. (1992), Mass Consumption and Personal Identity Everyday stinting Experience, Open University Press, Buckingham. Lyotard, J. (1984), The Postmodern Condition A incubate on Knowledge, Manchest er University Press, Manchester. Macquarrie, J. (1972), Existentialism, Pelican Books, Harmondsworth. Markus, H. and Nurius, P. (1986), Possible selves, American Psychologist, No. 41, pp. 954-69. Martin-Barbero, J. 1988), Communication from culture the crisis of the national and the emergence of the popular, Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 447-65. Morley, D. and Silverstone, R. (1990), Domestic communications technologies and meanings, Media, Culture & Society, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 31-5. Moores, S. (1993), Interpreting Audiences The Ethnography of Media Consumption, Sage Publications, London. Mort, F. (1988), Boys own? Masculinity, style and popular culture, in Chapman, R. and Rutherford, J. (Eds), Male Order, Lawrence and Wishart, London. Nava, A. (1991), Consumerism reconsidered buying and power, Cultural Studies, Vol. No. 2, pp. 157-73. ODonohoe, S. (1994), Advertising uses and gratifications, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 28 Nos. 8/9, pp. 52-75. Olander, F. (19 93), Consumer psychology for the consumers sake? , Journal of Economic Psychology, Vol. 14, pp. 565-76. Pfohl, S. (1992), Death at the Parasite Cafe Social Science (Fictions) and the Postmodern, Macmillan, London. Ritson, M. and Elliott, R. (1995a), A model of advertising literacy the praxiology and co-creation of advertising meaning, Proceedings of the European Marketing Academy Conference, ESSEC, Paris. Ritson, M. and Elliott, R. 1995b), Advertising literacy and the social signification of cultural meaning, European Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 2, pp. 113-7. Sartre, J. P. (1969), Being and Nothingness, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Schudson, M. (1984), Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion Its Dubious Impact on American Society, Routledge, London. Sperber, D. (1975), Rethinking Symbolism, (trans. Morton, A. ), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Storr, A. (1973), Jung, Fontana, London. Taylor, M. and Saarinen, E. (1994), Imagologies Media Philosophy, Routledge, London. Th ompson, C. J. , Locander, W. B. nd Pollio, H. R. (1990), The living meaning of free choice an existential-phenomenological description of everyday consumer experiences of contemporary married women, Journal of Consumer Research, No. 17, pp. 346-61. van Raaij, W. F. (1993), Postmodern consumption, Journal of Economic Psychology, No. 14, pp. 541-63. Existential consumption and irrational desire 295 European Journal of Marketing 31,3/4 296 Wallendorf, M. and Arnould, E. (1988), My favorite things A cross-cultural inquiry into object attachment, possessiveness and social linkage, Journal of Consumer Research, No. 4, pp. 531-47. Wernick, A. (1991), Promotional Culture Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression, Sage, London. Williams, R. (1980), Problems in Materialism and Culture, Verso, London. Williamson, J. (1978), decipherment Advertisements Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Marion Boyars, London. Williamson, J. (1986), Consuming Passions The Dynamics of Popular Culture, Mari on Boyars, London. Willis, P. (1990), vernacular Culture Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young, Open University Press, Milton Keynes.