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Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Revenants in the Marketplace
T2 - A Hauntology of Retrocorporation
AU - James, Sophie
AU - Cronin, James
AU - Patterson, Anthony
PY - 2024/9/1
Y1 - 2024/9/1
N2 - Drawing upon a cultural-historical reading of the witch, we discuss how modern capitalism is chronically haunted by obstreperous vestiges of what preceded it yet remains proficient in assimilating all that returns to challenge it. By adapting and extending a theoretical toolkit informed by Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, we trace market and state administrators’ co-optation of the primeval witch figure and her ideological trappings: initially, to expropriate those who threatened incipient modernising structures; later, to provoke increasingly secularised subjects towards consumption; and eventually, to calibrate rather than obviate capitalist expansion, so that it remains aligned with consumer interests. Introducing the new concepts of ‘retrocorporation’ and ‘marketplace revenant’, we discuss how long-foreclosed, ancient imaginaries become re-invoked and re-programmed to perpetuate capitalism's dominance. Our message for the nascent tradition of ‘Terminal Marketing’ is that the collision and collusion of past and future has the potential to ossify capitalist realism in the present.
AB - Drawing upon a cultural-historical reading of the witch, we discuss how modern capitalism is chronically haunted by obstreperous vestiges of what preceded it yet remains proficient in assimilating all that returns to challenge it. By adapting and extending a theoretical toolkit informed by Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, we trace market and state administrators’ co-optation of the primeval witch figure and her ideological trappings: initially, to expropriate those who threatened incipient modernising structures; later, to provoke increasingly secularised subjects towards consumption; and eventually, to calibrate rather than obviate capitalist expansion, so that it remains aligned with consumer interests. Introducing the new concepts of ‘retrocorporation’ and ‘marketplace revenant’, we discuss how long-foreclosed, ancient imaginaries become re-invoked and re-programmed to perpetuate capitalism's dominance. Our message for the nascent tradition of ‘Terminal Marketing’ is that the collision and collusion of past and future has the potential to ossify capitalist realism in the present.
KW - Derrida
KW - Fisher
KW - Hauntology
KW - capitalism
KW - history
KW - terminal marketing
KW - witch
U2 - 10.1177/14705931231202439
DO - 10.1177/14705931231202439
M3 - Journal article
VL - 24
SP - 397
EP - 416
JO - Marketing Theory
JF - Marketing Theory
SN - 1470-5931
IS - 3
ER -