Some Intensities of Terminal Marketing

It really feels like the world is quickly becoming more uncertain by the day. Not only is there a looming ecological disaster that is already with us (sitting in the midst of a heatwave, we remind ourselves that this is most likely the coldest summer for the rest of our life ), but it seems that this state of affairs runs in parallel with an ideological intensification of societal death drive in various guises of politics (rise of alt-right, aggressive denial of anthropocentrism) and consumption that revels in the excessive (revenge consumption, dark tourism, economic nihilism). At the same time, interpretive marketing and consumer research, often the champions of the therapeutic powers of their own discipline, largely continue to rewrite consumer culture as a social necessity and even a virtue. But even within the field’s hegemony of North American journals, from the 1990’s optimisms following Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ and an interpretation of postmodernity as a liberatory force, it today seems increasingly intentional not to recognise that marketing operates as a fantasy-machine that channels incessant consumer desires and is deeply implicated in our current predicament.