Introduction

Grant, Iain Hamilton

doi:10.5040/9781474241151-006

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“…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.…”

Section: Reaching the Terminal (M)ood: Invective Styles And The Power...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2022

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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.

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Section: Reaching the Terminal (M)ood: Invective Styles And The Power...mentioning

confidence: 99%