Abstract
Marketing theory has twisted and turned with the introduction of many theoretical innovations. Yet, despite being influenced by various critical perspectives, the general marketing discourse remains remarkably optimistic about contemporary consumer culture, its capability to produce meaning and individuality, and its potential to overcome the existential threats of the 21st century, or at least its capacity to be transformed for the better. This paper discerns a countervailing current within critical marketing thought; a smattering of scholars that resist the therapeutic urge to tell that all will be well, producing a proliferation of papers that are deeply pessimistic about conventional marketing concepts like meaningful experience, agency, and the sovereignty of the consumer ‘self’. Against the current of convention, this research seeks to address an increasing zeitgeist of bleak cultural aporia, an atmosphere of apolitical apathy where the future has increasingly been ‘cancelled’ and all that remains is a carnivalesque consumer culture that has resigned itself to extinction, even if on the semiotic surface it is increasingly ethical and ecological. The present paper catalogues this development and draws together some of its tendencies. Chief amongst these is the tendency to see the consumer as a desiring intensity immersed in vast networks of techno-capitalism and thus reduces the idea of the agentic and individualistically creative consumer into a myth at best. We propose the term Terminal Marketing to describe this pessimistic theoretical attitude, but we consider its mood as potentially producing more critical interventions than the generally critical-yet-optimistic tone of interpretive marketing.
Letting out the scream
Francis Bacon (1949) – ‘Head XI’
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2003) once explored the artwork of Francis Bacon, noting a particular motif running through the British figurative painter’s work: from one image to the next, an unmistakable affect of unbearable agony rushes beyond the canvas itself. It is as if Bacon’s characters, his deformed and writhing humanoid beings, are unable to contain the irate forces within. Rather than a representation seeking to produce symbolic equilibria at a precise instant, the imagery is emotionally troubling in its rawness and open-endedness. It shows immobile bodies tormented by primordial horrors seeping through the cracks in surfaces assumed to be solid and understandable. Instead of meaning, what erupts is a scream where ‘the entire body is trying to escape, to flow out of itself’ (p. xiii).
The conventions of marketing and consumer research 1 stand in stark contrast to these Deleuzo-Baconian screams. Rather, they been invested in silences that produce and maintain certain orthodoxies (see Alvesson, 1994; Dunne, 2018; Eckhardt et al., 2018; Kravets and Varman, 2022; Tadajewski and Saren, 2008). Critical positions that question the politics of marketing theory and practice have often been hushed, muted or elided. Critical thinking often becomes sequestered into specialist streams of research, meaning that criticality does not threaten the mainstream in any significant sense. 2 Recently, Hewer (2020) noted how even interpretive 3 approaches in the field tend to accept critical interventions only if they are published in a suitably sanitized way; allowing readers to pick up these pieces, nod appreciatively, then return to narratives of consumers happily constructing identity projects, finding purpose in consumption communities, and transforming societies through conscious consumption. Put differently, ‘critical’ discourse is designed to remain unthreatening and agreeable (Dunne et al., 2008). Journals like Marketing Theory serve as clamorous exceptions, publishing critical works that interrogate the implicit ideological inclinations of approaches claiming criticality (see Bode and Østergaard, 2013; Fitchett et al., 2014; Ulver, 2021), but the effects have remained residual (see Cronin and Fitchett, 2021).
In this essay, we seek to map out an alternative space for critical marketing theory and practice. We note a growing number of studies that have directly engaged with a concept of consumer culture marked by runaway excesses, which override assumptions of coherent subjectivities and individualized ‘meaning’ in consumption, and an absence of teleological stories, resisting the utopian urge to find narrative resolutions. We term this mood Terminal Marketing (TM). The term ‘terminal’ connotes the inevitable, incurable, and the grave, but also an end-stage, a stopping off point where something has been reached. The fatal(istic) connotations highlight how TM is intellectually juxtaposed to the utopian optimism found in marketing scholarship, including its interpretive variants (Cova et al., 2013; Maclaran and Brown, 2001; Sherry, 2013). By utopian optimism we mean an often-implicit predilection of research to assume an agentic and individualist stance for the consumers whom the work addresses, and a generally progressive potential for change within consumer culture itself. This potential tends to be tacitly upheld even where it is explicitly critiqued. For instance, while interpretive marketing scholars with critical and transformative aspirations resist claims that consumption is benign or apolitical, they often hold onto a ‘contributive belief’ in consumers (e.g. ethicality, resistance) and producers (e.g. sustainability, fairness) forming relations that tend towards ‘better’ arrangements (e.g. Ozanne et al., 2021; Mende and Scott, 2021), usually defined as better able to satisfy consumers without harming societies and ecologies destructively (e.g. Bahl et al., 2016; Davis et al., 2016; Schultz et al., 2021). In contrast, TM has risen to throw a pessimistic view of marketized society into the discourse, to caution how consumption might only provide illusions of transformation without changing any of the fundamentals of capitalist markets (see Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Jenkins and Molesworth, 2018; Zwick, 2013). 4
The studies that we organize under the TM are irreducibly diverse. In a Jamesonian sense, our work is simply an attempt to stop, ‘to take the temperature of [this] age without instruments’ (Jameson, 1991: xi). In other words, we attempt to recognize a certain mood emerging within interpretive marketing theory, and to provide theoretical labels to dutifully follow the pleasures of control that come with acts of categorization. Engaging in such delights, this paper positions itself as a point where a terminal mood has reached its saturation point, generated by a critical mass of studies that no longer believe in maintaining typical assumptions of meaning, identity, and teleology in markets and consumer culture. While there have been calls to find difference by following non-representational frameworks (Bajde, 2013; Franco et al., 2022; Hill et al., 2014) and post-postmodern reconstructions to discover new meaning and community (e.g. Canavan, 2021; Cova et al., 2013), we suggest there is a need to go through marketing first before any imagination beyond it seems likely. We see how TM is at work doing this: delving deeper into the morass, plunging into the terminal mood to get a richer insight into how the excesses and intensities of consumer culture manifest today. It might be seen as a gambit – an effort to find alternatives rather than passive reactions in a global emergence that relies on its crisis and all the resistance directed against it. As such, we will show how TM encompasses an unconventional style of thinking about and presenting research, one which challenges the convention of ‘contributions’ that affirm a rhetoric of solutions to theoretical and practical problems. When scholars typically reach conclusions that are uncomfortable and unpalatable, they acknowledge them but then often diffuse their affective charge by providing hope in the form of a solution. Even when this solution is explicitly marked as partial, it still satisfies the need to negate negativity with a message of usefulness (Pawlett, 1997). In contrast, we witness TM studies that are increasingly characterized by a lack of therapeutic resolutions. This directs our attention to outcomes that are quite unlike the usual approaches in marketing.
Our attempt at conceptualizing TM outlines how a darker and strikingly eerie mood has been brewing in the literature for some time now. If the etymology of ‘conceptualize’ comes from the Latin for ‘grasping’ (Olsson in Merriman et al., 2012), then we might say that the TM mood is too overwhelming to exhaustively grasp. We can only outline some of its contours, calling on more hands to help us hold on. For now, in the remainder of this paper, we describe three theoretical tendencies and one mode of expression of TM:
a concept of subjectivity as fragmented and largely non-coherent, with consumption conceptualized as momentarily exhilarating but never truly transformative.
an understanding of ‘meaning-makings’ as fantasies and inscribed lies of agency.
a devaluation of goal-directed explanations and teleological narratives.
a style that resists providing effective short-term solutions in favour of affective texts that evoke the techno-capitalist, dystopian phenomena that they describe. This style resists providing the salve of a ready-made solution, but ripple-affects may collectively conduce a paradigm-shift that is currently unthought.
TM thus emerges as something seeking to engage directly with dark desires, death and destruction, and to do so from a perspective that rejects the idea of consumer-led solutions or the awareness-raising activities of more conventional critical scholarship in marketing. While TM can be criticized for its speculative and pessimistic style, we put forth that, paradoxically, this style of theorizing belies a urgent realism that may be more effective than the optimistic utopianism that currently abounds. TM claims that unbridled excitations, fantasies, and manias are not the epiphenomena of consumption, but its actuality. Thus, without the habituated reflex of providing a solution in the text, TM might indirectly usher in a change in the mood of conversations around marketing and market systems. We advance this broad discussion by presenting each of the theoretical tendencies in turn, before concluding with a more detailed discussion on the terminal mode of expression. By addressing what TM scholars seek to theorize before detailing how they approach theorization, we provide an upsetting of the old optimistic order and a vista for its inevitable stuttering to a halt.
The utopian optimism of marketing theory: Agentic, critical and transformative
After the postmodern debates of the 1980s (Anderson, 1986; Arndt, 1985; Siegel, 1988), interpretive marketing emerged as a sprawling field of inquiry aside the conventions of what today is called the positivistic approach (e.g. Shankar and Patterson, 2001). While diverse, this tradition has generally followed an agentic conceptualization of the consumer and the idea of consumption as a largely naturalized ‘given’ that organizes social relations (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011). Consumers were generally theorized as reflexive and creative, actively producing meaningful identity projects by managing diverse consumption symbols and objects (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). This view opposed the reductionism and anti-humanism of conventional quantitative approaches (Hudson and Ozanne, 1988), by writing consumer experiences ‘back in’ to the consumption process (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Thompson et al., 1989). The reflexive consumer was an intellectual innovation (Murray and Ozanne, 1991), but also an ideological imperative. Introducing a reflexive and creative consumer in theory also founded the possibility of a defiant subject, able to challenge the real-world structures of oppression created by the culture industry of consumer society via consumption (e.g. Cherrier and Murray, 2004; Holt, 2002; Ozanne and Murray, 1995). Crucially, if personal and social change could be achieved without the need for economic revolution (á la Marx), then interpretive marketing scholars could look optimistically at markets and consumption as the vehicles of progress toward utopia, just as marketing practitioners do (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021).
Although this utopian optimism proliferated in interpretive marketing, it is also a motif of what has become known Critical Marketing Studies (CMS) (e.g. Burton, 2001; Brownlie, 2006; Tadajewski, 2010) and Transformative Consumer Research (TCR) (e.g. Mende and Scott, 2021; Mick 2006; Mick et al., 2012). Within these traditions it is also assumed that the consumer is a reflexive, creative, and defiant subject, meaning that the consumer can use their creative reflexivity to become more critical of pre-existing structures and systems, and thus to exert their agency to contribute to change for the better (e.g. Ozanne et al., 2021). While this figure is explicitly represented as an ideal case, the key for both CMS and TCR scholars is that critical agency is achievable. As such, CMS and TCR seek to inform as to empower consumers (Mende and Scott, 2021) and ‘pave the way, one article a time, for societal well-being and a better world’ (Cross et al., 2021: 51). However, the leitmotif of the critical and agentic consumer has endured in multiple, albeit often latent, forms in interpretive approaches, holding out utopian hope that emancipatory change is possible, and that ‘what is to be done’ for the individual or society comes through consumer culture (see Cross et al., 2021; Mende and Scott, 2021).
While interpretive approaches acknowledge the precariousness of consumers capacity to autonomously make choices, the purpose of the work is to bring about meaningful responses and change (Schultz et al., 2021). Thus, any argument that would suggest that market actors are simply carried along by the flows of capitalist desires of consumption and marketization are unpalatable, even unbearable. Not only does it require one to accept that the choices and identities of consumers are illusions (e.g. Dholakia et al., 2021), but also that the choices and identities of critical consumers and even interpretive marketing researchers are too. As Gabriel (2015) notes: ‘remove identity and choice becomes empty, remove choice and identity is reduced to destiny’ (p. 29). Analogously we might argue: remove critical and transformative intent and research impact becomes complicit with capitalist accumulation, but remove research impact and critical transformative work becomes mere words. More prosaically, such a perspective renders critically inclined scholars part of the game, ‘naturally living the code themselves’ (Hietanen et al., 2020b: 37), tweaking its content but not its structure. Accordingly, any serious doubt in the benign dialectic of markets and consumption (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021) is dispelled by a discourse of consumer-led interpretations and negotiations (see Fitchett et al., 2014).
Notwithstanding notable exceptions, whose rarity signal the pro-market rule (see Alvesson, 1994; Cova et al., 2013; Firat et al., 1987; Fitchett et al., 2014), utopian optimism is implicitly reinforced by article content expectations that have been internalized by reviewers and other gatekeepers (Bettany, 2016; Dholakia, 2012), not to mention self-censoring authors, and is thus codified in the literature. This is not unique to marketing theory, but it is especially salient in CMS and TCR (see Gordon et al., 2011; Mende and Scott, 2021; Ozanne and Saatcioglu, 2008) 5 , where researchers explicitly seek to provide a diversity of theoretical and practical tools that market actors can use to change or cope with everyday injustices and suffering (Ozanne et al., 2017). As such, utopian optimism is the background logic against which the ‘contribution’ emerges as a taken-for-granted object of writerly craft, editorial affection, and readerly interest. In the contemporary schema the contribution is a necessity (Culp, 2016). Importantly, the contribution is not an accident of history nor is it an error of collective judgement; instead, the contribution serves an important function in supporting a wider epistemic culture where fatalism-inducing findings and pessimistic perspectives must be sanitized before being sent to press.
This is not to suggest that CMS, TCR or interpretive marketing scholarship is disingenuous or even ineffectual. We acknowledge that scholars are trying their utmost to understand and address overwhelming forces, such and seemingly intensifying forms of social injustice, discrimination, and exploitation (Davis et al., 2016; Ozanne and Dobscha, 2006), not to mention the risks of marketing automation to consumer privacy and agency (Schultz et al., 2021) or the gaps between ethics and actions (Carrington et al., 2016). Nevertheless, consumption-based interventions tend to be delimited in scale and scope because they work with market logics and in market systems, so their critiques and critical responses tend to firmly remain within the event horizon of the extant socioeconomic system. Thus, the darker sides of marketing and market systems come to be seen as deviances from the norm to be diminished and mitigated (Daunt and Greer, 2017), rather than inherent effects of a market logic itself (Banerjee, 2018). As such, and echoing others (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Carrington et al., 2016), our point is that such studies ‘keep spirits high’ and ‘hold out hope’ but, in so doing, may preclude more difficult but direct attempts to respond to the present-day situation we find ourselves in. Instead, we see how TM is inclined to upset what it perceives to be this state of affairs and how its tensions are already bubbling to the surface. However, the TM train offers far less in the way of comforts and amenities, so we need to pay attention to what jumping the tracks may get us.
The tendencies of terminal marketing
TM began as a series of mere aleatory blips on the radar of research – a smattering of strange academic pieces written by ostensibly grumpy or despondent marketing scholars. Over time, these sporadic studies have developed into a collection of work with discernible theoretical and stylistic patterns, in turn suggesting an identifiable mood or movement, and one that is building in size and conviction. Speaking of them collectively as TM can help to crystalize these theoretical inclinations and stylistic intentions, codifying them for future iterations of scholarship without warding off alternative trajectories. Closing what is open into categories is a modernist thrill in its own right. We already outlined these as a set of tendencies, breaking TM into the four propositions of T1, T2, T3, and M. We now unpack each term in turn.
(T1) Identity not in control: Accepting a fragmented, largely non-coherent subjectivity
Conventionally, interpretive marketing researchers theorize consumer subjectivity under the rubric of identity. Understood from an ego-centric perspective, identities are typically treated as agentic projects managed by individual consumers who use market-mediated representations and offerings (e.g. Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Graeber, 2011) to communicate combinations of collective affiliations to oneself and others. They may be fraught with frustration (Holt and Thompson, 2004; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013), stymied by stigma (Eichert and Luedicke, 2022; Liu and Kozinets, 2021), and complicated by contradictions (Canniford and Shankar, 2013; Kozinets et al., 2010), but the agentic character of these projects is rarely questioned, nor the market-based mechanism through which they are pursued (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Bradshaw, 2013). While there are exceptions to this norm (Thompson et al., 2013), interpretive marketing continues to typically write consumers into problem-solving ‘protagonists’, saving themselves and their world through better market choices. This way of conceiving the individual as identity projects in-the-making is manifestly utopian and optimistic about the possibilities of the ‘self’ as a capable actor in negotiating, understanding, and improving their situation. Yet, this inclination can be also seen as latently neoliberal in its irreducible grounding in the opportunities afforded by consumer culture (Cronin and Fitchett, 2022; Fitchett et al., 2014). Interpretive marketing approaches have been critiqued for an overt reliance on, and even fetishizing, the conscious rationalizations of individualized consumers (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Moisander et al., 2009). The emotional, ethical, and even existential consequences of such fetishizations have been recognized (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Carrington et al., 2016; Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; Lambert, 2019). Yet the consequences of such critiques are often downplayed in most of marketing canon, and an ontological outlook of identity emerging from cyclical and meaningless habituations remains unpopular in marketing theory (Coffin, 2021; Tadajewski, 2019).
In addition to often rewriting individuality, marketing in general is in the business of promoting the habituation of consumers to what it constructs as meaningful, enjoyable, and ultimately profitable practices. More bluntly, marketing is a discipline that disciplines bodies to be docile and lucrative (see Darmody and Zwick, 2020; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016). The burgeoning TM study is at works to add an important proviso – the decisive trick of capitalism is to continually ‘fail’ at creating stable habits (Loose, 2015; Tadajewski, 2019). A health-conscious consumer may spend money on organic food, gym memberships, and bio-tracking devices, but may also be side-tracked by fast food, binge-drinking weekends, and plastic surgery. Market actors make profits and losses from wildly oscillating consumers, but at the macro-level the market can continue to diversify and develop; thus, marketing is most effective when it finds ways to disruptively both form habits and simultaneously break them, effectively creating dialectical tensions that maximize profitable opportunities overall. 6 There is an invisible duality where the social stability for more powerful market actors is predicated on the precarity, uncertainty and instability for (of) consumers (Beckett, 2012). This is a state of affairs that some describe as neo-feudal, but might also be understood as a strange moment where the creative destruction of markets ossify and lose their creative edge (see Zwick, 2018).
Rather than rely on theories of the ‘whole individual’, TM study problematizes subjectivity irredeemably. Agency and individuality become fractured, displaced and incoherent (Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Gabriel, 2015; Hietanen et al., 2020; Hoang et al., 2021). This should not be confused with now-familiar claims that consumer identities are ‘fragmented’ (Firat and Dholakia, 2006), ‘tribal’ (Cova and Cova, 2002) or ‘liquid’ (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2017). Such theorizations tacitly assume a single ‘self’ who manages these multiple parts, so although consumer subjects are ‘marked by points of conflict, internal contradictions, ambivalence, and even pathology', nonetheless 'These complications frequently engender the use of myriad coping strategies, compensatory mechanisms, and juxtapositions’ (Arnould and Thompson, 2005: 871). Who is coping, compensating and juxtaposing, if not a singular self or homunculus in the mind (Baggini, 2011), who ensures that multiplicity does not descend into schizophrenia? In contrast, TM has been discovering its theoretical grounds in psychoanalytical perspectives where the self or ‘I’ is an after-effect rather than the primary cause (Hietanen et al., 2020a). Accordingly, first-person accounts should be critically analysed because they omit repressed content (Cluley, 2015) and falsely celebrate the meaningfulness of habitually repetitive activities (Cronin and Cocker, 2019). Instead, TM has been focusing on unconscious forces operating underneath conscious reflection, which are readily channelled by consumer culture to inculcate anxious, competitive and self-centred subjects (see Böhm and Batta, 2010; Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Lambert, 2019). TM is increasingly recognizing how modernist expectations of rationality, coherence and individuality are often heavy burdens on the mind – an overwhelming excess (Pawlett, 1997) – that can only be borne through repression (Cluley, 2015; Gabriel, 2015), and fantasy (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Carrington et al., 2016; Cronin and Fitchett, 2021). Similarly, TM notes that although the body is built to survive as a seemingly self-identifiable subject over time and across space, it also desires various degrees of self-destruction thanks to an insatiable ‘death instinct’ (also Hietanen et al., 2020a; Loose, 2015). This helps to explain why consumers readily seek out and enjoy painful experiences in order to escape, however temporarily, from the burdens of selfhood (Cova, 2021). Yet, the majority of interpretive marketing literature presumes a ‘sane’ selfhood that sticks to life-affirming experiences and a coherent subjectivity that disavows any notion of enjoyment that has to do with self-destructivity.
Given the above, TM does not think and write in terms of constituted subjects or even subject positions – both of which tacitly assume an ego at the centre of events – but rather subjectivation that is, bodies subjected to an interplay of forces that give rise to a sense of self as an epiphenomenon, an after-effect emerging from ephemeral entanglements of psychosocial events. These forces are diverse in origin and character, bringing about unstable oscillations between neurosis, perversion and psychosis (Hietanen et al., 2020a; Lambert, 2019). As such, subjectivation gives rise to egos akin to Bacon’s figures, crisscrossed by conflicting forces that saturate the unconscious to the point of regularly rupturing the veneer of coherent identity narratives. Rather than treat these ruptures as exceptions to be explained (or explained away), TM is at works to catalogue these as evidence of underlying intensities to be analysed and accounted for. Some of these forces are long-standing features of the humanity, a haunting historicity generating unconscious forces that are narcissistic (Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Patsiaouras et al., 2016), sadistic (Fitchett, 2002, 2004), destructive (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016) and cruel (Hietanen et al., 2022b). For TM, these are not epiphenomena or accidents that simply have to do with some unfortunate excesses of the market. Instead, they are enjoyments that are actively at work in constructing society itself. In addition, novel technologies are rising to channel desire in consumption in ever-intensifying ways. These include algorithmic social automation that dynamically delimit consumer choice (Darmody and Zwick, 2020; Dholakia et al., 2021; Hietanen et al., 2022a), and which are predicated on behavioural control that brings about a newly perforating consumer ‘fidelity’ (Hoang et al., 2021; Wood and Ball, 2013). TM entwines these different forces with neoliberal capitalism both emerging from and exacerbating its inherent tendencies (Coffin, 2021).
(T2) Seeing consumer meaning-makings as inscribed fantasies instead of experiential, playful or creative
Interpretive marketing often theorizes consumers as negotiating inherently meaningful lives through the material and symbolic resources of the market (e.g. Arnould and Thompson, 2005; McCracken, 1986). Whether consumers are negotiating ideological norms (Thompson and Üstüner, 2015) or post-postmodern narratives of authenticity (Canavan, 2021), the underlying epistemological concern is how and why do consumers construct meaning in this context? As detailed above, TM questions the idea of the singular ego-interpreter, but also the meaning of meaning within marketing theory, which despite critiques (e.g. Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Moisander et al., 2009) has continued to generate a ‘discourse-heavy discourse’ where meaning remains central to conceptualization. Even when theoretically attempting to make poststructural breaks, methodological individualism tends to readily reinsert meaning as a central unit of analysis (cf., Carrington and Ozanne, 2021; Kozinets et al., 2017).
Interpretive marketing theorists have also acknowledged less pleasant aspects of these meaning-making processes. Examples include community antagonism (Kates, 2002; Luedicke et al., 2010), the ‘costs’ of ludic agency (Seregina and Weijo, 2017), and disenfranchised consumers looking to overcome adversity (Campbell, 2005; Üstüner and Holt, 2007). Nonetheless, meaning-making continues largely axiomatic – as beneficial, characterized by creativity, playfulness and a sense of belonging (see Belk et al., 2013; Kozinets et al., 2004; Schau et al., 2009), or bringing about transformative change (e.g. Bahl et al., 2016). Here the hope for ‘meaning’ tends to be that consumers and other market actors will be educated by critical texts that ‘raise their awareness’, moving away from meanings with malign effects towards more beneficial (e.g. more sustainable) interpretive frameworks. By often drawing from various psychoanalytical approaches, TM holds little faith in the self as the locus of control and seeks to focus on mapping unconscious instead. The simplest psychoanalytic precept is that most, if not all, of human decision-making is driven by forces that the conscious self is not aware of (Cluley and Desmond, 2015; Gabriel, 2015). O’Shaughnessy (2015) notes that this precept is now accepted by most marketing academics, not to mention the wider public – however, he adds that the more fatalistic implications of psychoanalytic ideas, that meanings and experiences are after-effects of unknown processes elsewhere in the psyche, are rejected in favour of conceptual compromises, like the idea that routine consumption takes place on ‘autopilot’ but the conscious self still takes charge for important or difficult decisions (Cluley and Desmond, 2015). The ‘lite’ take on the unconscious is more accurately described by the term ‘subconscious’, which suggests habituated processes that can operate in a latent fashion unless something disrupts the flow of activity (Hill et al., 2014; Tadajewski, 2019), including conscious reflection. The psychoanalytic unconscious, in contrast, resists being made conscious (Cluley, 2015; Coffin, 2021). Indeed, Chatzidakis (2015) shows how unconscious guilt is unaffected by disruptions, with guilt-free or guilty events forming part of a cycle of catharsis and cathexis where the original guilt is never truly resolved and never consciously felt.
Building on these foundations, TM holds that while meanings may be retrospectively attributed by an individual, and while they may indeed be professed as meaningful to that individual, these meanings as such are situational, hazy and fleeting, much like the notion of the self itself. Put plainly, a consumer may make meanings to rationalize a choice in an interview, but this does not mean that meaning was the driving motivation (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011), or that meaning itself is present in any salient fashion in the subjectivity-negating thrills that discover themselves even in relatively mundane consumption situations (Cova et al., 2018). Such moments riddle the data plentifully in many more conventional studies (see Celsi et al., 1993; Dobscha and Foxman, 2012; Patterson and Schroeder, 2010; Scott et al., 2017; Thompson and Üstüner, 2015). As such, meanings might continue to be instructive as starting points for TM. For instance, when Beyes and colleagues (2017) studied mobile phones as an anamorphic stain, they did not focus primarily on how consumers interpreted their phone use, but rather what ubiquitous screens said about the state of consumer society. Similarly, studies of anxious and precarious consumer lifestyles listen to consumer accounts, but then seek to discern unconscious forces operating between the lines of interpretation (Cronin and Cocker, 2019; Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; Lambert, 2019). 7
TM rejects the centrality and finality of meaning, but needs not to eschew of be ignorant of how it is constructed. Indeed, TM argues that the unconscious readily misattributes meaning to mask the repressed content of the consumption act and to protect the conscious ego of consumers (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Cluley, 2015; Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Gabriel, 2015), not to mention those of marketers (Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016), and marketing theorists or consumer researchers (Coffin and Egan-Wyer, 2021). TM thus also challenges the extent that critical approaches such as CMS and TCR are able to understand and then alter consumption contexts on the basis of meaning that would coherently ‘raise awareness’ and create systemic change. Again, this is not to say change does not happen or that it is ineffectual in particular contexts, but it is to say in a more abstract sense that it is the feature of markets to proliferate via such challenges, thus reminding us to critically assess what is being changed, lest the systemic global tendencies of markets are either taken for granted or overlooked. As sociality is becoming increasingly mediated by automated technologies, TM also increasingly suggests that the focus should be on the affective potentials transported and transmuted without needing to become consciously significant to have an effect (Darmody and Zwick, 2020; Hietanen et al., 2022a; Hoang et al., 2021; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016).
Rejecting the centrality of meaning, TM conceptually tends to draw from desire as the speculative focus. When recognized by more conventional interpretive marketing theorists, desire has been written as driven by lack (Belk et al., 2003) or a vital force seeking connection (Kozinets et al., 2017). Following a linguistic heritage in psychoanalytic theory, these interpretations of desire tend to emphasize meanings and interpretations (Coffin, 2021). Even when desire is theoretically approached in more immanent and primordial ways, it tends to be optimistically constructed as creative, energizing and enriching part of the human condition (Carrington and Ozanne, 2021; Kozinets et al., 2017). A TM mode of thinking about the unconscious is increasingly treating desire in a darker fashion – as a meaningless outcome of blind but powerful forces (Hietanen et al., 2020a). When TM writes about unconscious desire, then, it does not simply allude to things consumers have forgotten about or failed to reflect upon during interviews. It instead pays more attention to the destructive, dampening and diminishing effects of desire, treating it as inhuman in the sense that the human ‘self’ has no primary control over it, and it comes from elsewhere. It is beyond, beneath or between what we would typically call human (Murphet, 2016). By going further down the TM road, a harrowing realization of markets and the social propelled by meaningless intensities (Zwick and Denegri Knott, 2009) and narcissistic, sadistic and cruel enjoyments (Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Fitchett, 2004; Hietanen et al., 2022b) begins to emerge. From this vantage point, stable meaning is precisely what the market and consumer culture lacks (Botez et al., 2020; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016). TM thus is in the works to recognize how a gargantuan production of marketized meaning is generated to mask the cultural aporia below.
(T3) Writing teleological ‘stories’ in market societies driven by goal-directed protagonists that negotiate and find catharsis in consumption
If markets consist of ultimately meaningless desiring forces, then how are interpretive marketing theorists supposed to respond? In conventional approaches, coherent subjectivity and meaning-making tends to be tacitly oriented toward something, typically utopian possibilities within progress-oriented and goal-directed capabilities. For instance, consumers seek social mobility (Bernthal et al., 2005; Coskuner-Balli and Thompson, 2013; Thompson et al., 2018), compete for status (Kates, 2002; Schau et al., 2009; Üstüner and Thompson, 2012) or seek to fit within societal myths (Holt and Thompson, 2004; Thompson et al., 2018). Consumption is thus generally written as constantly seeking to achieve a telos or goal. Teleo-logics are also perpetuated in their own right in the appealing form of research as sensible stories (see Sherry, 2017), that found their exegesis as narrative arcs of consumer journeys from struggle to solution, and which continues today in the field’s empirical commitments. As such, even if the reporting of such narrative arcs is not intentional, such form readily manifests itself into being in interview-based methods that tend to miraculate rationalizations and cathartic explanations (Moisander et al., 2009). As such, apart from the most conventional stories of how consumers and producers achieve co-creation together (see Healy and McDonagh, 2013; Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder, 2011), we find amounts of teleologies invoking transitional experiences (see Arnould and Price, 1993; Holmqvist et al., 2020; Scott et al., 2017), heroic journeys or individual triumphs (see Dobscha and Foxman, 2012; Holt and Thompson, 2004), and communal strife that overcomes adversity (see Epp et al., 2014; Muñiz and Schau, 2005; Sandikci and Ger, 2010; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013). Bettany (2016) aptly summarized how these stories tend to go: ‘consumers assemble experiences and collectives; managers struggle with brands and markets; consumers make markets using resources’ (p. 192).
Activist approaches such as CMS and TCR tend to take teleology a step further. Their foundational assumption is that the present is not a natural fact, but rather a product of particular histories; importantly, this suggests that the trajectory of future development can be redesigned for the benefit of all (see Mick et al., 2012; Tadajewski et al., 2018). This may involve giving consumers information, instituting policy-changes or any manner of interventions, but there is a shared dedication to a macro-narrative arc where societies get better over time with scholars playing their part (see Cross et al., 2021; Schultz et al., 2021). Yet, while CMS and TCR take these teleological tendencies further, this affirmative trajectory is a feature of interpretive marketing more generally, even Western humanism in toto (Botez et al., 2020). Under the pall of marketized ideology it tends to readily morph into an arrow of progress operating through markets themselves (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; Fitchett et al., 2014) – the stories of marketing theory are stories of consumers solving problems through a progressive procession of products, services and other market resources.
TM critiques the assumption and perpetuation of these story-arcs, first by militating against the utopian optimisms, detailing how all teleology is a retrospective fabrication (building on T1 and T2), and by paying more attention to the darker futuristic visions that abound in consumer culture. TM studies build on the recognition that capitalist societies have not delivered on their promises of ecological regeneration (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Campbell et al., 2019; Carrington et al., 2016), or societal betterment (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; Shankar et al., 2006). Thus, TM seeks and provides no comforting myth of resolution but instead considers capitalism as a bifurcated spiral. One arrow expands the circle of the market to try and encompass all aspects of social life (Bouchet, 2018; Darmody and Zwick, 2020; Eckhardt and Bardhi, 2016). The other travels over old ground to try and find new opportunities to commodify every symbolic nuance and permutation of the social, or what used to be the externalities of capital (e.g. pollution, mental disorders). From a TM perspective the re-cycling of consumer culture indicates an overwhelming cultural stagnation rather than creativity (Ahlberg et al., 2021), a solidification of the social structure by the superficial diversification of cultural content and consumer choice (Zwick, 2018). Overall, TM traces how market actors intentionally and inadvertently channel unconscious desire to generate profits through constantly escalating catastrophes (social and ecological). As such, it presents a story without progress but also without regress – TM studies write in terms of processes that intensify and accelerate as commodification lurches on. The situation is immiserated by the lack of formidable alternatives to ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009). Here TM contrasts with CMS and TCR because it forsakes the hopeful figure of a revolutionary subjectivity who could re-make meanings and bring about systematic political and social change. Instead, TM often strays into an uncanny scholarly space of not offering predictions, workable solutions or even eschatological narratives (see Botez et al., 2020; Campbell et al., 2019; Cronin and Fitchett, 2021). The typical TM conclusion is striking – we do not know what comes next and there is likely little we can do about it!
It is important to note, that while some TM studies have been ready to speculate in an increasingly fatalistic stance, we see TM in all its speculative theorizing as a commitment to a more radical form of urgent realism. At present, this might readily incline one to be fairly pessimistic. TM has come to recognize how the current infrastructures are largely unable to deliver on even its ostensible claims of happiness and health even for the affluent (Shankar et al., 2006), and instead work to eviscerate any account of history (Patterson et al., 2008), while simultaneously being incapable of addressing problems in any serious fashion (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Carrington et al., 2016). Therefore, it is unlikely that any incremental alternative will be able to challenge its hegemony, especially as contemporary subjectivities are increasingly mesmerized by the almost all-encompassing technological connectivity (Hoang et al., 2021). Instead, TM has begun to take note on the sinister realms of unconscious ‘enjoyment’ in consumer culture, noting how consumers are also revelling in the pessimistic zeitgeist. Narcissism and sadism in consumption are enjoyable rushes, and dystopic visions can provide a cathartic escape from the present (Podoshen et al., 2014). Violence of markets (Banerjee, 2018; Bouchet, 2018; Fırat, 2018) can be understood as a feature of a global channelling of desire regulating a ‘kind of death drive, this desire for the dystopian’ (Bradshaw et al., 2020: 6; also Loose, 2015). In these writings, a completely unconventional approach to teleology becomes manifest. It tends to be greatly speculative or even outright fictitious. They might be called dystopian stories (see Bradshaw and Brown, 2018; Brown et al., 2021; Molesworth, 2020), but as they are not ‘predictions’ based on actualities, they remain open-ended rather than conclusive. If anything, for us they may have the potential to mirror our consumer society better through the fantasies they account for.
Thus, most TM resists falling foul of both the utopian and dystopian as a form of teleological therapy, acknowledging instead an overwhelming stagnancy in the current zeitgeist of ‘cancelled’ futures and a present suffused with the spectres of possibilities lost (Ahlberg et al., 2021). The ostensible diversity and diversification of late capitalism, wherein fashionable lifestyles and other sociocultural symbols quickly enter a self-referential sign system that has long become senseless belies a pervasive homogeneity and stasis wherein everything is rendered commensurable by the axiom of capital (O’Sullivan, 2016; Zwick, 2018). Everyday consumer culture is suffused with the anxiety that something is wrong, ‘something missing’ (Wickstrom et al., 2021: 85, emphasis in original). If there is a story in TM, it has already ended, but seems to yet go on in a bleak manifestation of a culture zombified.
Reaching the terminal (M)ood: Invective styles and the powers of the negative
After escaping the utopian optimism of interpretive and critical strands of extant marketing theory, TM screams – get real, now! Rather than look towards an ostensibly promising future, it searches for immanent possibilities from the perspective of upsetting the present. What makes TM distinct from other critical approaches in interpretive marketing is how it tears asunder assumptions of individuality, representational meaning and goal-directedness, making experience bleaker in its excessive immanence. While many have turned to non-representational frameworks in attempts to escape from old paradigms of Western modernism and humanism (see Botez et al., 2020), these approaches have not tended to disrupt the interpretivist inclination to therapeutics. TM is constituted by its tendencies, but also importantly its mood (the M in our initial outline), which takes non-representational experimentalism (Hill et al., 2014) more urgently. Based on its theoretical assumptions, TM adjourns any attempt to craft an effective form of representation: instead of trying to convince via conscious awareness, it seeks recourse in the realism of our calamity and looks for interventions in the docility of contemporary capitalist subjectivation. Put differently, rather than rely on raising critical awareness amongst readers through explicit appeals, TM scholarship seeks to shift the mood imperceptively but pervasively, inciting change through a legion of libidinal alterations beneath the threshold of conscious thought. In this final section we wish to return TM to the Deleuzo-Baconian scream, suggesting it allows us to consider how to re-channel desires when the contemporary zeitgeist is already one where there seems to be no outside to the seemingly endless perpetuation of a commodified consumer culture (also Fisher, 2009).
In TM, we witness an incantation of the pessimistic and an engagement with ‘the powers of the negative’ (Brassier, 2010). This differs from the therapeutic optimisms of raising awareness, which continue to be the mainstay of critical scholarship (Fisher, 2014b), but also the disengaged pessimism of consumer culture. While TM is doom, it is not helpless. Its sombre affectivity is itself a recourse for those who still do want to make a difference, but who have been disillusioned by capitalist realism and its feigned optimisms (also Fisher, 2009; Han, 2015). The TM style begins with the claim that capitalism readily incorporates all criticism directed to it, treating these as sources of incremental innovation to rejuvenate its ever-moving and always-mutable processes of further commodification (also Holt, 2002). This means that TM becomes criticality without critique – a stylistic tendency that begins with bleak resignation but may end, in its most striking, with affectively overwhelming texts that can bristle with unsavoury ‘hatreds of all types’ (Brassier, 2010). But what might this mean in practice?
As Bettany (2016) notes, ‘it is very difficult to persuade reviewers that consumer agency is being made up’ (p. 192). While she goes on to add ‘in the multiplicity of material-semiotic heterogeneous actor-networks’ (p. 192), TM might simply stop at ‘made up’, given its assertion that the meaningful ‘I’ working towards a better future is an illusion, simply serving ideological purposes (also Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; Fitchett et al., 2014). For decades, interpretive marketing scholars have read continental philosophy, but resisted its most radical implications pertaining to consumer culture (O’Shaughnessy, 2015), instead tending to favour the rewriting meaningfulness, utility and agency in their accounts. Today, it has become increasingly difficult to deny the ongoing and irreducible crises of late capitalism (Fisher, 2009; also Campbell et al., 2019), and thus in its aversion to agency and its corollary optimisms, TM can be provocatively seen as radically realist, suffused by pessimism but driven by outrage at the very realism it exposes. 8 It is a realism against the therapy produced in abundant fashion today, as there is no crisis in capitalism that is not simultaneously an exciting business opportunity (see Zolfagharian and Yazdanparast, 2017).
But if raising awareness does not work, can we make the unconscious riot instead? In order to translate this outrage into outputs that might disrupt and redirect desiring flows, academics should not simply communicate effectively but also affectively, employing ‘the style, the invective’ (Fisher, 2014b: 340) that reveals the inhumanity of our situation (Murphet, 2016). While such attempts have been historically dismissed as ‘short-lived […] somewhat naïve anti-philosophical expressionism’ (Grant, 2004: xix), the point is not simply to wax lyrically about the problems of the present, but to make affective interventions more effective than the cyclical enjoyments constantly reproduced in commodity capitalism (Culp, 2016). The seemingly ‘whole’ human subject may or may not be convinced by the explicit content of TM, but something inhuman within them may be affected and may alter the flow of forces within and between bodies. Whereas mainstream marketing and consumer research will continue with their affirmative narrative, the stakes of TM are currently precisely in this lack or reassurance. As such, we are not calling for people to be more responsible, but rather attempting to imagine desiring forces whose apparent misdirection (from the point of view of the hegemonic system) may send out ripple-effects (or ripple-affects) that ultimately bring about something presently unimaginable within the bubble of subjective-signification. In the sense of Deleuze’s (1989) ‘shock to thought’, unbridled negativity can thus become aesthetic; a violence to thought that forces thought to think itself and beyond, potentializes new affective encounters, concepts and thoughts.
To write terminally is to imagine a paradoxical form of immanent strategy-making, and its agitated, mutational, modified forces seek to open fissures in marketing’s ‘fortress of knowledge’ (Patterson et al., 2008: 459) and ‘stir up conditions for the new’ (Jackson, 2017: 674). Such tactics are neither known, formulated nor determined in advance but an emergent process ‘revealed in fragments along the way’ (p. 667). If TM goes on, it will be because its subversions remain immanent, resisting the urge to be readily put into use by another, perhaps a deeply cynical locus of power with a plan (Brassier, 2010). What we feel is happening, is that TM is experimenting how to insert an alarming and dark affectivity, but it is increasingly doing so as a movement offering little in the way of false consolations or misguided hope. And, while some of the TM style has been noted to be ‘a wee bit too pessimistic’ (Brown, 2021: 5), we deem its despair and nihilism necessary for inserting fractures into the therapeutic inclinations of the field that has insofar smoothly integrated its critical projects with the axioms of capital. Too pessimistic when compared to what? In fact, with its seeming inability of conceptual traversals away from meaning, identity, utility, future and teleology, one might even ponder whether marketing has hitherto had any de facto critical project beyond the present at all. It still does not have one now.
To echo Jameson (1991) we live in a time where it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and if indeed the future is cancelled (Fisher, 2014a) and our cultural and social imaginary is reduced to various forms of historic mish-mash presented under the veneer of the new (Ahlberg et al., 2021), new affective encounters and subsequent shocks to thought appear increasingly necessary for the invocation of possibility itself. Similar to Bacon’s paintings, TM studies seek to rupture the therapeutic representations and the new ubiquitous sincerity of marketing (Fisher, 2014b; also Dunne, 2018) without providing an alternative that capitalism could readily capitalize upon. Today, there is a global atmosphere where disasters seem to be offloading each other faster than one can keep up, and as a recourse to the shortcomings of raising awareness, less talking and more screaming appears strikingly relevant.
Whatever may become of the affective tendencies of writing we have dubbed TM, they are nonetheless marking a rupture into the body of marketing. Similar to Bacon’s paintings, our field has not become immobile, but indeed in its simulated mobility, there is a new darkness to ponder. Perhaps the Baconian screams that Deleuze sought to theorize were actually the sounds of the old order stuttering, the shriek of an intellectual machine grinding to a halt as capitalist accumulation steams on expediently. Earlier we suggested that TM is an act of jumping from one train of thought to another, of abandoning the optimist utopians before an inevitable crash. Stuttering and screeching may sound terrifying to those who are still today seated comfortably aboard, but TM seeks to intensify immobility – full screams ahead! In this sense, the various approaches of TM do not contribute, nor do they give answers. TM does not aspire to consult. We only hope we have not already talked too much.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is part of the ‘Algorithmic Selves: The algorithmic intensification of societal control’ research project funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
