De-romanticising critical marketing theory: capitalist corruption as the Left’s Žižekean fantasy

ABSTRACT

Following Slavoj Žižek, critical marketing scholars have interrogated the ideological fantasies of mainstream marketing, de-romanticising markets and marketing. However, Žižek argues there is no ideology-free subject, so it stands to Žižekean reason that critical marketing scholars are also ideological fantasists. Our paper seeks to de-romanticise critical marketing theory by identifying the fantasy of capitalist corruption. This sustains the ideology of critical marketing theory by disavowing (self-)destructive desires within the human unconscious and suggesting that displacing capitalism will be enough to usher in a postcapitalist utopia. This ideological fantasy has therapeutic, motivational, and institutional benefits, but romanticises the human subject in ways that ultimately frustrate the critical project of societal betterment. By acknowledging the human unconscious as a corrupting influence, we hope to make critical aspirations more likely to be realised. We illustrate our argument via studies of sustainability, a favoured topic of Žižekean, critical, and mainstream scholars alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalist corruption
• critical marketing
• Žižek
• ideological fantasy
• fetish
• capitalism
• unconscious
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As shown by Gordon and Zainuddin (2020), this penchant for indirect violence applies to marketing academics as much as it does to the consumer subjects that these academics usually study and scribe about.

2. Although Žižek treats Marxism and psychoanalysis as traditions that work in tandem, Cluley and Dunne (2012, p. 256) point out that for many scholars, ‘the question of whether we can reconcile the work of Marx and Freud … remains open’.

3. For Žižek (2006), all subjects are shaped by ideological fantasies. Logically, this means that fantasies are not always false. They are more akin to erotic fantasies. Some erotic fantasies may be more plausible than others, but the main point is that they are almost certainly romanticised distortions. The purpose of analysis is not to evaluate how close a fantasy is to the truth of a given situation, but how a fantasy motivates thoughts and feelings to alter the true state of situations through the actions of fantasists.

4. As one of our reviewers incisively interjected, ‘I would be more inclined to think the Truth is not interesting to Žižek at all – rather just the truth of the fantasy itself.’

5. We argue that those who use Žižek to interrogate the ideological fantasies of others must acknowledge that they, too, are ideological fantasists. We would be remiss if we did not apply this same logic to ourselves. What spectres haunt us? What lies have we told ourselves to get by and to get closer to our desires? From a Žižekean perspective, our ideologies are invisible to us and can only be identified by a third person observer (this is also a feature of Freudian psychoanalysis; see Cluley, 2015). As self-identified critical marketing theorists, we acknowledge that we have been taken in by the fantasy of capitalist corruption, but it is likely that there are other ideological fantasies at work, including between the lines of our seemingly self-reflective argument.

6. This paper focuses on the Marxist-psychoanalytic thought of Žižek and those critical marketing scholars who take degrees of inspiration from him (e.g. Bradshaw & Zwick, 2016; Carrington et al., 2016; Cluley & Dunne, 2012; Cronin & Fitchett, 2020; Zwick, 2019). But it is worth noting that there are other thinkers who combine Marxism and psychoanalysis, such as Deleuze and Guattari (Coffin, 2021), and that many psychoanalysts implicitly analyse the political economy by indirectly addressing the market, as shown by Freud’s repressed considerations of consumption (Cluley, 2015).

7. A Bourdieusian might surmise that these alternative forms of capital (and capitalist) have always existed, but were overshadowed by the economic imperative in neoliberal systems. As Žižek (2004, p. 10) notes, Nietzschean thought provides philosophical substance to the adage ‘plus que ça change, plus ça reste le même’, the problem is that surface manifestations change but the underlying structures or substance remains remarkably similar. Crockett’s (2017) study of racial respectability in America provides a detailed empirical illustration of this.

8. Canniford and Shankar (2013, 2016) have argued convincingly that natures and cultures are intimately intertwined in reality, even though they are usually represented as distinct. Similarly, psychological and sociological phenomena have conventionally been conceptualised as contradistinctive, but psychosociality has emerged as a new Marxist-psychoanalytic perspective that addresses the two as an inseparable dialectic (Frosh, 2003; Frosh & Baraitser, 2008). Some marketing academics have explicitly applied the term ‘psychosocial’ to domains like consumer ethics Chatzidakis et al. (2018) and market spatiality (Coffin & Chatzidakis, 2021), but others have advanced similar perspectives under other names, such as Nixon and Gabriel’s (2016, p. 39) ‘socio-psychoanalytic’ study of consumerism.

9. While many contemporary issues inspire critiques of capitalism, it is the existential threat of the climate crisis that seems to unite the Left across class, country, and creed. The only threat that has come anywhere close is Covid-19, providing another global issue that may help to unify the fragments of critical thought and activism (Žižek, 2020). Alas, so far the pandemic seems to have done more to divide and capitalise than unite and communise (Žižek, 2021).

10. Sustainability is an area of discourse replete with fetishistic fantasies. In addition to those already mentioned (i.e. Bradshaw & Zwick, 2016; Carrington et al., 2016; Cronin & Fitchett, 2020), the fetishisation of carbon emissions is worthy of note. Swyngedouw (2010, p. 220) writes of ‘the fetishist disavowal of the multiple and complex relations through which environmental changes unfold finds its completion in the double reductionism to this singular socio-chemical component (CO2). The reification of complex processes to a thing-like object-cause in the form of a socio-chemical compound around which our environmental desires crystallize is furthermore inscribed with a particular social meaning and function through its enrolment as commodity in the processes of capital circulation and market exchange’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jack Coffin

Jack Coffin is based in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester. His scholarly USP? Theorising phenomena that are Unconscious, Spatial, and Posthuman. He teaches fashion marketing modules but often learns more about style from his students. His email address is [email protected] and he welcomes comments, constructive critique, and opportunities to conceptualise.

Carys Egan-Wyer

Carys Egan-Wyer is a post-doctoral researcher at Lund University’s School of Economics and Management with a PhD in marketing. Her research interests lie at the nexus of consumption, retail and sustainability, and she has a particular interest in the responsibilisation of the neoliberal citizen. Carys is also the deputy director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Retail Research, where she works to communicate cutting-edge retail and sustainability research to individuals and companies.