‘The wild and wacky worlds of consumer oddballs’

Abstract

The article starts with the assumption that the research community of consumer culture theory (CCT) is materially experienced and negotiated in its continuous rhetorical construction. Here, we use the concept of manifestos to analyze the fragile dialectics of a rhetorical and social praxis. In two manifestary moments in the historical development of CCT, we compare how manifestos materialize the transitions from individuals to the linked subjects by a shared relation to ‘the other’. The analysis shows how the ‘we’ of yesterday was written differently from how the ‘we’ of the present and the future requires to be articulated. This sense of ‘we-ness’ is then connected to the changes in the internal and external layers of the academic environment. We conclude that to ensure a sustainable, dynamic development of CCT that avoids disintegration as well as eroding subjugation and stasis, a balance between radical and pragmatic voices has to be established. This balance incorporates the idea that power and knowledge are dynamically intertwined. In this sense, ‘we-ness’ is not a utopian final state, but a permanent necessity for CCT that emerges out of struggles and engages in conflicts.