ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters have discussed the relation between consumerism, identity and belonging through a focus on the visual in advertising. By outlining the way in which knowledge of the consumer circulates within the advertising industry and within the advertising campaigns it produces, I have argued that visuality and knowledge articulate in powerful and complex ways. Colin Campbell (1997, 1999) has argued that studies of advertising and consumerism should not restrict themselves to a simplistic tracking of meanings in ‘messages’ about identity. Campbell wants to get away from the idea that consumer acts do not so much do something as say something or communicate something. As I have demonstrated in previous chapters, theories of performativity can be useful for exploring how ‘saying something can be doing something’. This ‘doing’ does not necessarily centre on sending messages, but rather is the very action of constituting the self. Performativity looks at how speech acts produce the subject and aims to show how something as apparently ‘immaterial’ as speech can form the very materiality of the bodily self. I have adapted this framework to consider the visual and have explored how the origins of meanings and their relation to the awareness of the self produce complex forms of intent and responsibility.
