ABSTRACT
The ‘hidden god’ refers to a very influential book in the field of literary criticism, in which Goldman (1964) analyses tragic vision and its implicit religious structure in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragédies of Racine. Tragic vision, he contends, is deeply influenced in the works of Pascal and Racine by a jansenist model of religious experience. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the implicit influence of a religious paradigm on marketing thought, even though these two fields seem at first glance totally separate. Marketing, as will be shown, and especially one branch of it which is consumer behaviour is largely structured by primitive metaphors borrowed from the Judeo-Christian religion. As a field of investigation, marketing constantly imports concepts from other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, semiology, etc. It is now accepted that most of our normal conceptual system is metaphorically structured, that is, most concepts are partially understood in terms of other concepts. This assumption, largely developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) raises an important issue concerning the roots of our conceptual system. Each stream of concepts carries a number of metaphors by which heteroclit ideas are interrelated. Marketing thought is thus largely influenced by metaphors which have been developed in other disciplines. Standard theories of meaning generally assume that all of our complex systems can be analysed into decomposable primitives. Such primitives can be taken to be the ultimate ‘building blocks’ of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:69). The aim of this chapter is to show that marketing thought, as any other conceptual framework, derives from implicit original blocks of meaning that still have to be identified. One of these ultimate blocks, that is eschatology, will be specifically analysed as an essential metaphor which implicitly governs marketing thought. In other words, eschatology will be shown to be a hidden metaphor of classic marketing thinking and especially the way marketing views the relationship of consumers to goods. After having established the predominance of the eschatological scheme in marketing thought, philosophical approaches will be suggested to help deconstruct this paradigm which in many regards appears as fallacious, because it is unhelpful to account for most consumer decisions. Finally, a narrative approach will be used to propose an alternative approach to
consumption and to reconstruct the idea of marketing on a non-eschatological basis.
