High-fidelity consumption and the claustropolitan structure of feeling

Abstract

This paper invokes Redhead’s concept of claustropolitanism to critically explore the affective reality for consumers in today’s digital age. In the context of surveillance capitalism, we argue that consumer subjectivity revolves around the experience of fidelity rather than agency. Instead of experiencing genuine autonomy in their digital lives, consumers are confronted with a sense of confinement that reflects their tacit conformity to the behavioural predictions of surveillant market actors. By exploring how that confinement is lived and felt, we theorise the collective affects that constitute a claustropolitan structure of feeling: incompletion, saturation and alienation. These affective contours trace an oppressive atmosphere that infuses consumers’ lives as they attempt to seek fulfilment through digital market-located behaviours that are largely anticipated and coordinated by surveillant actors. Rather than motivate resistance, these affects ironically work to perpetuate consumers’ commitment to the digital world and their ongoing participation in the surveillant marketplace. Our theorisation continues the critical project of re-assessing the consumer subject by showing how subjectivity is produced at the point of intersection between ideological imperatives and affective consequences.

Futureless vicissitudes: Gestural anti-consumption and the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer

“…This is seen in what Fisher (2009: 25) calls an "ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture" wherein time becomes fragmented into "digital slices" that allow consumers to treat their relationships with technology as discrete, momentary encounters and thus negotiate the cumulative costs of semiocapitalist subjugation (e.g., addiction, targeted advertising, algorithmic manipulation, etc.) (Hoang et al, 2022).…”

Bleak signs of our times: Descent into ‘Terminal Marketing’

“…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).…”

“…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).…”

“…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).…”

“…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.…”