The role of Archaisms in Post-Historical Consumer Culture
Creators: name: James, Sophie
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024

description: This doctoral thesis provides a critical account of the functions that
 archaisms (i.e. cultural objects, symbols, or ideas that originate from a
 pre-modern period of history), fulfil in consumption, markets, and
 consumer culture. Although nostalgic attachments to the past have
 previously been conceptualised by marketing scholars as a means for
 consumers to escape the overt commercialism of contemporary social life in
 favour of a return to a more authentic and communal existence, few have
 considered how past-centred escapism is itself a strategic accompaniment
 to political-economic stability in the present. In contrast to the
 ‘utopian optimism’ that perpetuates celebratory accounts of the nostalgic
 in the marketplace, this doctoral thesis explores the consumption of
 archaisms as tied to a kind of cruel optimism where
 
 the more consumers attach themselves to a distant pre-capitalist past, the
 less chance they have at securing a post-capitalist future. Following the
 argument that societies in the Global North are ‘post-historical’, in the
 sense that they are characterised by the unlikelihood of a
 political-systemic change that would radically challenge capitalism’s
 hegemony, I show how the magical imaginarium of a pre-patriarchal and
 earth-bound pagan past functions as fantasmatic support for consumers to
 tolerate – rather than overcome – their rationalised overdetermined
 present. 
 
 
 The primeval figure of the ‘witch’ is used as the illustrative context for
 this thesis. Empirical portions of the thesis draw upon a historiography
 and digital history of witchcraft throughout modernity and a critical
 ethnography of witch interest undertaken over a two-year period in
 Lancashire, Northwest England. Using observational netnography alongside
 interviews with self-identifying witches and those interested in witch
 tourism, I explore the meanings that the witch holds for consumers and I
 integrate these with readings of the
 
 structuring influence of market systems. Drawing upon critical theories
 adapted from philosophers Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Fisher, and
 Fredric Jameson, analyses show how market-mediated attachments to a
 magical past not only lack the nuanced futurity to ameliorate remorseless
 dissatisfactions with the post-historical present but work to perpetuate
 the conflation of capitalism with reality itself (i.e. capitalist
 realism). To explain this
 
 phenomenon, I introduce new concepts to marketing theory including
 marketplace revenant, retrocorporation, and thinking magically. Each of
 these concepts contributes to terminalist (Ahlberg et al., 2022) and
 de-romanticist (Fitchett and Cronin, 2022) research agendas. 
 
 
 This thesis is presented in alternative format (by publication) and
 features two
 
 published papers (see Chapters 3 and 4), one work-in-progress manuscript
 (see Chapter 5) and supporting conference papers (see Appendices 5-10).
 Each paper presents specific sub-questions which contribute to the
 overarching question driving the research: how is the ‘witch’ made to
 function in ways that sustain the logic of capitalism?