Hermeneutic Practices: Mall and Media Visiting as Understanding-In-Use

Abstract

Rejecting a stimulus-response approach to research on young persons as consumers subjected to marketing, this paper draws on phenomenology’s practices perspective. Embodied, equipped understanding is always already in use—in minimally monitored (tacit) play-like projecting, a participatory production of meaning—the ludic substratum of everyday life. The article discusses Malaysian mall and media immersion as generic types of young people’s understanding-in-use: in focus group discussion, they vividly (re)present visiting a massive shopping place as audience consumer practices in engaging with ludic location or a ‘second home’. The paper reflects on Chinese Malaysian student narratives of consumer activity. Research commences from the ‘hypothesis’ of hermeneutics—or the philosophy of understanding-in-practice(s) as play-like—tested in a focus group. Visiting shopping mall or social media involves ‘ready-to-hand’ (little reflected on) ‘projecting’ and producing intelligibility, an integrating narrative, (dis)enabling ‘being-withothers’ (Heidegger). Talk in discussion enables theory to be empirically extended, grounding philosophical horizons of understanding. Our discussants’ consuming is structurally ludic, a play-like establishing of meaning from their ‘horizons of expectation’ (Jauss), equipped, and enabling. Visiting shopping malls manages goal-oriented or teleological meaning in embodied projecting and processing generic understanding of ‘entity’ (Heidegger) as equipment: people gain a purchase epistemologically in material acquisitions. ‘Ludicity’ is a core concept in consumer marketing interpretation, central to the practices perspective in business, media and sociological study. Managerial implications lie in enhancing marketing address to consumers, recognizing ludicity. The authors are now exploring understanding in visitor mall practices through the latter’s constructing cellphone images.