ABSTRACT

Critiques from the right and left, from secular and a variety of religious perspectives inveigh against market capitalism and contemporary consumerism. As Baudrillard’s epigraph suggests this set of social practices is characteristic of our age, and historical studies suggest that the choir of voices has increased in amplitude as the scope of consumerism has expanded geographically and culturally without for all of that altering its ritually evoked positions. The chapter here simply interrogates (I dare not say deconstructs!) some of the semantic and sociological dimensions of each of the component words of the title in an effort to avoid the most highly ritualized form that this argument tends otherwise to take. First, I review some positions on the notion of agency and actorhood in consumer research, and suggest that agency is conceptually problematic. Second, I discuss the term consumers and propose that the anti-consumption ideology that seems to underlie the overarching question is in fact a class-based ideology, one that is consistent with a long history of reformist ideology in the UK and the USA ultimately traceable to our common Calvinist heritage. Third, I examine the idea of escape. Here we confront a

Romantic idea, the apotheosis of which is the utopian dream. Perhaps, hyperreality and cyberspace constitute some interstitial spaces of escape. The dangers of escape are illustrated with an example. Next, I discuss that notion of the market entailed in the question. The term seems to cover a variety of distinct irritations ranging from the common market, to exchange, to consumption. Finally, some momentary escapes ‘before the world is formed’ are proposed.