Consumer Culture Gothica: Marx’s phantasmaterialist influence on critical consumer research

This essay accounts for the features of Gothic Marxism and its influence on critical streams of consumer culture research. First, the essay explores the Gothic imagination and outlines how its de-familiarising aesthetics enabled Marx to denaturalise the chimerical functioning of marketplace ideologies, their depredations, and everydayness. At the heart of Gothic Marxist critique is attentiveness to the phantasmal character of lived “reality”, of seeing the unseen and making the taken-for-granted appear as it actually is: horrific, monstrous, pernicious. Second, the essay discusses the residue of Marx’s phantasmaterialism throughout critical consumption scholarship and synthesises illustrative research under the banner of Consumer Culture Gothica. Four main research programmes are outlined: (1) Sado-masochistic market relations; (2) Consumer inscapes; (3) Carnivalesque consumption formations; and (4) Defatalising marketplace metaphors. The essay concludes with Gothic Marxism’s impact on how marketing is “written” and how an “artistic critique” of capitalism’s cultural production is formulated.