Four corners of the unsettling: the more-than-uncanniness of consumer culture

ABSTRACT

Although consumer culture has been studied extensively for its propagation of comforting signs, symbols, and experiences that reassure us of our selves and other marketable fictions, it is also conducive to unsettling effects and affects, many of which are unintended, undesired, and unavailable for introspection. Departing from Freud’s theory of the uncanny and borrowing from commentaries by cultural critics Mark Fisher and Adam Kotsko, we diagnose the unsettling’s relationship with four affective-experiential categories which contribute to its hybrid makeup: the weird, the eerie, the creepy, and the awkward. Drawing upon a phenomenological rubric of presence–absence, we characterise the weird as competing co-presences which disturb the borders between things; the eerie as absence of the expected or presence of the unexpected; the creepy as excess presence; and the awkward as excess absence. These “four corners of the unsettling” provide an alternative perspective on the discomforting character of consumer culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Uncanny
• experiential consumption
• structure
• function
• terminal marketing

Introduction

Whilst it is a principal part of consumer culture, “the unsettling” retains such broad and indeterminate meaning that it tends to exist as an open-ended term for anything that might dislodge a subject from one’s normal emotional state. On one hand, the unsettling can refer to any of the purposeful attempts by market actors to “capture” and press disturbance into the service of super-desirous consumption possibilities. Everything from staged kidnappings (Tzanelli and Yar 2021), slum tourism (Benali and Kravets 2022), and public autopsies (Goulding, Saren, and Follett 2003), to shock websites (Jones 2010), haunted house attractions (Yang and Zhang 2022), and spirit possession services (Preece, Rodner, and Rojas-Gaviria 2022) reflect far-flung attempts to produce and curate experiences for consumers who, for a variety of reasons, volitionally seek out disturbance or discomfort. On the other hand, the unsettling can denote the affective consequences of marketplace encounters that disturb or discomfort consumers without their volition, consent, or even understanding. Whether finding oneself racially profiled by employees at brand stores (Pittman 2020), ogled by others at commercial fitness centres (Clark 2018), targeted by hyper-personalised advertising (Hoang, Cronin, and Skandalis 2022), or alienated amidst extensive service closure during economic austerity (Raynor 2017), the unsettling is as much an undesirable, unavoidable, and often unmanaged consequence of market societies as it is a commodity.

Expanding theoretical understanding of consumers’ experiential lives remains paramount for cultural studies of consumption, markets, and marketing, though much work to date assumes that consumption experiences are sought out by individual “problem-solving ‘protagonists’” (Ahlberg, Coffin, and Hietanen 2022, 673) based upon perceived structural or anti-structural dimensions (Tumbat and Belk 2011) and functional or anti-functional consequences (Lanier and Rader 2015). While useful, dimensions such as structure/anti-structure and function/anti-function are not sufficient to account for the oftentimes extra-discursive, ethereal, and involutional character of experiential life which can be discomforting, non-consenting, and, for the most part, “unrepresentable” (Hill, Canniford, and Mol 2014, 382). Because of the wide breadth of ways that consumers can become disturbed or discomforted in their experiential lives – whether by happenstance or by design – greater precision in defining, communicating, and anatomising the unsettling throughout consumer culture is required.

In this essay, we explore the unsettling as a critical concept for understanding the inconsistent and extra-discursive excesses and intensities often smuggled in through daily consumption environments that discomfort or disturb. Our objectives are twofold: to scaffold four affective-experiential categories which the unsettling is often associated or conflated with – the weird, the eerie, the creepy, and the awkward – as a unified framework; and to diagnose how collectively, the unsettling is something “going on” within consumer culture and under capitalism more broadly.

To fulfil our objectives, we draw upon the monographs of cultural critics Mark Fisher (2016) and Adam Kotsko (2010; 2015) whose post-Freudian analyses provide important groundwork for arriving at a unified conceptualisation of the composite makeup – or what we call the “four corners” – of the unsettling. Our intention here is to go beyond common “beast within” hypotheses that rely on the universalising assumption that all human subjects, regardless of circumstance or disposition, derive functional, cathartic enjoyment from feeling unsettled because of assumed links to our “unreconstructed animal nature” (Tudor 1997, 445). Even if beast within arguments retain prima facie plausibility for willing thrill seekers, edgeworkers, or others who intentionally seek out intense, anti-structural events, they do not readily explain the experiences of the preponderance of comfort-seeking subjects who, despite their habitual avoidance of suffering (Cronin and Fitchett 2021), will inevitably become unsettled sporadically and unwillingly throughout even routine interactions with the marketplace.

Using a rubric of presence–absence (Leder 1990) we explore how the four corners of the unsettling connect with but also differ from Sigmund Freud’s ([1919] 1955) classic concept of the “uncanny”, enabling us to arrive at two main contributions. First, the increased precision we offer through distinguishing four categories of the unsettling not only illustrates the diversity of ways that consumption can be disturbing or discomforting but provides an analytical framework that can sensitise consumer researchers to non-agentic constituents of experiential life that may otherwise go undetected, misrecognised, or simply dismissed. By thinking abstractly in terms of what is “present” or “absent”, instead of concretely about what consumers reflect upon and express, we show how affective-experiential events that remain important but inaccessible for discursive expression can be uncovered. Sensitivity to the gestalt of abstract presences and absences in consumption contexts can overcome the blind spots of consumers’ attentional and actional fields, allowing researchers to depart from discourse as the “primary mode of world-disclosure” (Leder 1990, 25) and, instead, adopt an approach “that is conductive to questioning and tracing differential constructions of reality” (Bajde 2013, 229). In these respects, our Lederian rubric of presence–absence offers an alternative to the kinds of representational tools and devices (such as in-depth interviews or member checks) that consumer researchers continue to rely upon in detecting and presenting social experience (see Hill, Canniford, and Mol 2014). Through the rubric of presence–absence, we also depart from the interiority of Freud’s uncanny, offering instead a multidimensional “more-than-uncanny” account of the unsettling.

Second, we offer an alternative perspective to extant work in consumer research which disproportionately equates discomfort with voluntary pursuits of physical pain and their functional relationship with rediscovery of the body (Cova, Carù, and Cayla 2018; Scott, Cayla, and Cova 2017). In contrast, we arrive at a more cynical assessment, revealing how discomfort triggered by the weird, the eerie, and so on goes beyond corporeal matters and confronts subjects with the traumatic “Real” of their existence, where the fallibility of explanations and meanings of their symbolic order is exposed. We show how the more-than-uncanny can provide a dark obverse to the more positively valenced, frequently deployed notion of the “sublime” (Canniford and Shankar 2013; Kover 1998; Schouten and McAlexander 1995) when accounting for extra-discursive excess in consumption phenomena. Recognising the diversity and unavoidability of consumer culture’s unsettling character is significant for “de-romanticist” or “terminalist” approaches to consumer research (Ahlberg, Coffin, and Hietanen 2022; Fitchett and Cronin 2022). We present consumer culture as operating precipitously at the fault lines between the production of effects and affects that may not always be positive, meaningful, or even knowable yet nonetheless remain commodifiable and valuable to the accumulative logic of capitalism.

Theoretical underpinnings

Consumption experiences: a brief background

A consumption experience, in its broadest terms, can be defined as the sum of outcomes or impressions that an individual derives from the socio-material, emotional, and affective features of some consumption-related activity and its surrounding environment (Carù and Cova 2003; Tumbat and Belk 2011). Extant research informs us that consumption experiences can be bisected across two axes: their structural and functional dimensions (Lanier and Rader 2015). The structural dimension relates to “structure”, characterised by the orderly realm of social obligations, work duties, and cultural forms of today’s reigning liberal-capitalist orthodoxy, and its obverse, “anti-structure”, characterised by disorderly relations and cultural forms that can be both destabilising and liberating (Belk and Costa 1998). The received view in consumer research until relatively recently presupposed that ordinary, routine consumption experiences are classifiable as structural whereas extraordinary, rarefied, and enclavised consumption experiences are anti-structural. However, extraordinary experiences are not always liberated from or independent of the structural rhythms, institutions, or norms endemic to ordinary life (Canniford and Shankar 2013; Lindberg and Eide 2016; Tumbat and Belk 2011). In their account of commercial high-altitude mountaineering, for example, Tumbat and Belk (2011) present a consumption experience that, while phenomenologically removed from the humdrum of daily life environments, still manifests in the kinds of petty, wearisome conflicts, competitive individualism, positional struggles, and search for purpose that are commonplace tropes under meritocratic capitalist structures. Neologisms have since been introduced to account for hybridity across the structural continuum such as anastructure (Husemann et al. 2016) and synstructure (Goolaup and Nunkoo 2023). Nevertheless, emphasising hybridity between the poles of anti-structure and structure leads to functionalistic assumptions that all consumption experiences no matter how atypical or outré maintain some instrumental purpose for consumers in their relationships with broader structural orders.

To militate against universalising assumptions of functionality in every consumption experience and the necessity of purposefulness, Lanier and Rader (2015) introduce the poles of “function” and “anti-function”, suggesting that not all consumption experiences have a definitive consequence or conclusion, nor can they be (re)solved or explained by purely functional thinking. Lanier and Rader refer to the “random, unpredictable and uncontrollable” act of casino gambling with no guaranteed outcomes as an example of an anti-functional experience within structural relations (2015, 497). Moreover, anti-functional experiences can occur within anti-structural relations too, such as engaging in unprotected “chemsex” with a stranger at an illegal rave, constituting a consumptionscape that is risky, prohibited, and extremely unpredictable (Hickson 2018). Anti-functional experiences are capricious, uninhibited, and present threats to one’s ordered existence, yielding consequences that are unplanned, ambiguous, and sometimes useless. While insightful, we argue further theorisation is needed beyond exposing the anti-functional character of experiences, with greater attention given to improving understanding of the precognitive, unreflexive, and mostly non-representational aspects also (see Hill, Canniford, and Mol 2014).

Although hitherto under-theorised, some experiences are thrust upon us that must simply be endured or even accepted. Sometimes described as “immaterial hazes”, Hill et al. provide the example of mindless autopilot or highway hypnosis: “A drive to the local shops or morning bathroom rituals often leave us wondering, ‘how on earth did I get here?’” (2014, 386). Such experiences are not so easily reduced to the anti-structural we enjoy what is different or the anti-functional we enjoy what we cannot control. Rather, they are impressed upon us regardless of our will or how we feel and think about them.

Urban fear, for example, has long been an experiential theme in anthropology, human geography, and sociology (Abu-Orf 2013). Urban fear colours our encounters with the marketplace such that even routine interactions with its familiar structures whether brand stores, amusement arcades, bars, clubs, or streets, can be experienced as disorienting or threatening. This can occur along race and class lines producing prejudice and discrimination, as with racial stigma in retail settings and “urban securitisation” (e.g. CCTV, shutters, anti-homeless spikes) that strategically fortifies urban commerce against the poor. Urban fear can also be opaque, such as when city highstreets were found to be uncharacteristically empty during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, unmooring stores, objects, and locations from the familiar and expected, creating feelings of disorientation and malaise (O’Sullivan 2022).

Neither structural nor anti-structural, functional nor anti-functional, immaterial hazes like urban fear relate to an affective mood or spirit that is more felt than consciously understood, and more automatic than scripted. It is along the contours of these opaque, precognitive, and disorienting sensitivities that we turn away from standard axes of consumption experiences and delve further into the non-discursive registers of the unsettling. To do so, we first account for the uncanny.

Thinking beyond the uncanny

Any serious theoretical attempt to unpack how the unsettling shapes and impinges upon consumption experiences must inevitably contend with Sigmund Freud's ([1919] 1955) notion of the unheimlich, meaning unhomely, often translated as the uncanny. Freud’s uncanny, rather than functioning as a stable, fully scaffolded concept with specific applicability and clear boundaries is perhaps most useful for this essay if we perceive it as an abstract yet pervasive passe-partout term. The uncanny has been drawn upon to label and universalise all manner of experiences that unsettle, looming so large in its influence that any alternative conceptual formulations, such as the weird, the creepy, and so on must be carefully differentiated from it (see Fisher 2016). Freud associates the uncanny closely with fear at the beginning of his eponymous essay:

It [the uncanny] is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general ([1919] 1955, 219).

To understand the uncanny first requires considering its relationship to its ostensible obverse, the heimlich (homely) meaning “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc.” (Freud [1919] 1955, 222). The homely is a concept that has been associated by cultural consumer researchers with an atmosphere of comfort, warmth, and sentimentality that is important for subjects in constructing and navigating notions of self, family, and world (Figueiredo 2015; McCracken 1989; Ulver-Sneistrup and Johansson 2011). The homely is what we might call an “enabling context” (McCracken 1989, 175) because it provides an important adhesive that binds times, places, and their contents to subjects’ lifeworlds, rendering them knowable and familiar – thus enabling their acceptance.

An obvious and literal point of contrast, Freud suggests, might be drawn between the homely and unhomely allowing us “to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” ([1919] 1955, 220). For Freud however, that conclusion is not strictly accurate as the uncanny is less about what is unfamiliar to us (what we are not at home with) and is often found in that which is all too familiar to us (those things that hit too close to home). Freud ([1919] 1955) presents several examples that reflect the familiar becoming defamiliarised including seeing our face looking back at us (mirrors, doppelgängers), human characteristics in inanimate objects (prostheses, dolls, waxwork figures), déjà vu (or “unintended recurrence” p. 237), and bodily movements that are not volitional (epileptic fits). In all cases we are confronted with the unsymbolisable quandary of how unfamiliar the familiar can be.

Though compelling, a difficulty emerges regarding conceptual clarity that limits the potential for Freud’s imagining of the uncanny to be neatly applied to the experiential world (Beyes 2019; Masschelein 2002). For Freud, “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich” ([1919] 1955, 226). Given the ambivalence between the homely and unhomely, it is difficult to discern a standalone definition of what is denied by one or the other without oscillating back and forth in a hermeneutic circle. Therefore the uncanny is perhaps best thought of as an “unconcept”, to use Masschelein’s term: it exhibits the possibility of a curious reversal but must remain indeterminate in execution so that it can only exist relative to – and often in conflation with – its opposite, thus limiting the possibility of imposing firm construct boundaries: “The ambivalent origin of the word heimlich makes it difficult to conceive of its negation, unheimlich, as a univocal, unambiguous concept” (Masschelein 2002, 61).

A second difficulty stems from Freud’s anchoring of the uncanny singularly and universally to the “troubled individual psyche, foreclosing the social complexity of [the uncanny]” (Beyes 2019, 184; Fisher 2016). Freud explains away all encounters with the uncanny as grounded in the unexpected return of repressed infantile complexes such as womb fantasies, memories of the mother's genitalia, or “the dread of being castrated” ([1919] 1955, 231). To relate all matters of the unsettling to psychic anxieties risks excluding idiosyncratic socio-material complexities and the diversity and porosity of those contextual triggers that cause us to become unsettled. Beyes (2019, 185) suggests that Freud’s approach to the uncanny treats the built environment as “a material disguise for deeper-rooted individual maladies”. Relatedly, Fisher (2016, 9) writes: “Freud’s ultimate settling of the enigma of the unheimlich – his claim that it can be reduced to castration anxiety – is as disappointing as any mediocre genre detective’s rote solution to a mystery”. Fisher warns that Freud’s conceptual retreat from external dialogue pathologises the uncanny as a symptom of the “inside” (the individual’s deep-rooted anxieties), which forecloses the possibility of transindividual and structural interplay where the experience for the subject is mediated or even articulated by cultural relations.

To overcome these difficulties, we defer to Lacan (2006) who moves understanding of trauma and unease away from the individual unconsciousness, toward a transindividual unconscious related to the signifying system (the “Symbolic”). Lacan insists that: “The fact that the symbolic is located outside of man is the very notion of the unconscious” (2006, 392). For Lacan, the unconscious is “external” to the subject and better thought of as a porous, pliable, and interconnected substrate interpenetrated by forces and flows from other human and nonhuman entities. Approaching the uncanny from a Lacanian lens might be interpreted as an irruption of the “Real” into our shared social reality (Bradshaw and Chatzidakis 2016; Cronin and Fitchett 2021). The Real can be thought of as a traumatic void that must be repressed and can only be discerned at the fractures and inconsistencies in our apparent reality. The Real, as it appears between what can be represented through language and that which precedes or resists representation, is experienced as a distortion rather than realisation, and thus characterised by wordless confusion, uncertainty, anxiety, or dread.

If we are to look beyond Freud’s conceptualisation, advancing instead a Lacanian approach to the unsettling, the point of departure should not be to pathologise and universalise personal anxieties, but to interrogate the unsettling as complexly intersubjective. The unsettling is both internal and external in its affects and is not fully symbolised, instead it is bound up in wordless atmospheres which can involve multiple bodies, objects, spaces, and places producing what we might tentatively call the more-than-uncanny. Only through sensitivity to the built, social, collective, political, and material relations might we begin to think beyond the uncanny when understanding the unsettling in consumption experiences. This move does not discount Freud’s original premise of the return of the repressed, but instead moves this logic beyond the pathologies of the individual and into the commons: a symbolic order that exceeds the individual and functions through intersubjectivity, signification, and collective experience.

Presence–absence: theorising four corners of the unsettling

As Freud’s original theory of the uncanny indicates, the unsettling is not a homogenous experience. In the ensuing sub-sections, we draw from Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2016) and Kotsko’s Awkwardness (2010) and Creepiness (2015) as critical source material for theorising how consumers can feel unsettled in various ways. Both Fisher and Kotsko draw from Freud, Lacan, and others to argue for affective themes that cannot be reduced or necessarily attached to fear, disgust, or horror but instead, reflect the part-distressing, part-baffling undercurrent of contemporary societies. Neither Fisher nor Kotsko writes specifically or consistently about consumers’ experiences, or how the unsettling might cohere into consumption trends or movements. However, as cultural critics, these authors propose a post-Freudian emphasis on the social and cultural rather than personal coordinates of discomfort. This provides us with essential scaffolding for understanding the unsettling in terms of more-than-uncanny affects throughout consumption, markets, and culture.

Fisher offers two concepts, the weird and the eerie, to consider as possible variants of, or even alternatives to, Freud’s uncanny that are more aligned to the outside than the inside. Kotsko presents creepiness and awkwardness as concepts that pertain to the outside but perhaps retain closer ties with the Freudian inside. Although the authors never relate their concepts to one another’s, we endeavour to integrate them into a unifying framework. We tease out all four concepts’ characteristics and assemble connections to locate each to the fraught relationships between the individual and the social order.

To comprehend the weird, eerie, creepy, and awkward as concatenated “corners” of one extra-discursive experiential concept – the unsettling – requires a departure from the volition-centred continua of (anti)structure and (anti)function in standard readings of consumption experiences and from the psychic interiority of Freud’s (un)heimlich. Our organisation of these concepts into a single framework is informed by a rubric of presence–absence, a duality that has developed within, yet radicalises, phenomenological thought on experiential life (Derrida 1976; Hetherington 2004; Leder 1990). Presence and absence are categorising tools that do not form a mutually exclusive dichotomy between one another; rather, the interplay between presence and absence can lead to various combinations, expressions, and contradictions. Leder (1990), who applied a rubric of presence–absence to the body, gives the example of sight – a routine practice that is reliant on the presence of our eyes (allowing us to confirm the presence of other things), yet our eyes are experienced as absent because they cannot see themselves. Absence is thus as much constitutive of the perceived world as presence, or as Hetherington adds:

The absent can have just as much of an effect upon relations as recognisable forms of presence can have. Social relations are performed not only around what is there but sometimes also around the presence of what is not … Indeed the category of absence can have a significant presence in social relations and in material culture. (Hetherington 2004, 159).

The presence–absence rubric equips us with an organising tool to cross epistemic and practical gaps between Fisher’s and Kotsko’s concepts of the weird, eerie, creepy, and awkward (Figure 1) and unpick the sticky, non-representational aspects of each for application to consumption experiences.

Figure 1. The Four Corners of The Unsettling.

We draw first from Fisher’s materials to explore the weird as an inappropriate co-presence of things that do not belong together, before progressing to his positioning of its conceptual sibling, the eerie, as an absence of the expected or a presence of the unexpected. Next, we turn to Kotsko’s theorisations, contrasting the creepy as the excess presence of something (usually extimacy) versus the awkward as its excess absence. Though not always the case, the weird and the eerie are more phenomenologically aligned to objects and exteriority (i.e. locations, events, non-human actors) in the experiential world. In contrast, we find the creepy and the awkward relate more to subjects and interiority (i.e. human actors, personalities, behaviours) – although exceptions do exist. As a conceptual rather than empirical essay, our focus is on theorising “cores rather than borders, essences rather than edges” (Murray 2020, 29), meaning our attempt at categorisation centres on features, applications, and archetypes of each concept rather than confirming precise points of partition.

Given that each “corner” unsettles in a different way to the next, a single consistent example is not available for reuse across all four categories. That which is found to be weird in consumer culture is not necessarily creepy, nor are those things that are eerie the same as those that feel awkward. In the absence of a universal one-size-fits-all context, we follow a similar explanatory approach to Lanier and Rader (2015) who illustrate their own assorted categories of consumption experiences with separate, appropriate examples.

The weird

The first corner of the unsettling, the weird, is “that which does not belong” (Fisher 2016, 10). The weird antagonises the familiar (homely/heimlich) with that which ordinarily lies beyond or away from it and cannot be reasonably reconciled. Like a house that walks on legs, a smartphone that feels like flesh, or a cheeseburger that tastes like chocolate, the weird is found in uncomfortable amalgams; it is the co-presence of two or more things that in no conceivable way belong together. This conforms to the etymological roots of weird found in the Old Norse word, “urth,” meaning twisted or in a knot or loop (Turnbull, Platt, and Searle 2022). Twisted amalgams do not so much solicit from us sheer terror as they invoke “a particular kind of perturbation” (Fisher 2016, 15) or “sensation of wrongness”. Fisher (2016, 15) writes, “a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least should not exist here”. By adapting a rubric of presence–absence to Fisher’s understanding of the weird, we arrive at the logic of co-existing and competing presences. The weird emerges from co-presences that trouble the borders between things, challenging accepted “thresholds between worlds” or binaries of inside/outside, resulting in an “ontological rabbit warren” (2016, 28).

There are several levels to the weird’s uncomfortable co-presencing that are relevant for understanding and contextualising consumers’ experiential encounters. At the broadest structural level, the weird provides a useful frame for understanding the co-existing, competing presences that pre-cognitively provide the context-of-context (Askegaard and Linnet 2011) for consumption: the conditions we collectively shape and are shaped by at the coalface of our species’ entanglements with life systems and the planet. Of note here are the vicissitudes of the Anthropocene, defined in terms of a “global weirding” reflected by “both anthropogenically changed worlds and the experience of dwelling within them” (Turnbull, Platt, and Searle 2022, 1207). The traumas of unearthly ecosystems, “freak” weather occurrences, unusual species combinations (“portmanteau biota”), acid rain, smog, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the increased breakout of pandemics despite improved health sciences, are all weird co-presences that we feel should not exist – but do. They are co-present as a symptom of, but also as a backdrop to, our participation in accelerated consumer-capitalist expansion and the consumption experiences that comprise and propagate it.

Visiting a beauty salon, while phenomenologically conceptualised as a seemingly functional, structural consumption experience (Ourahmoune and Jurdi 2021), is not hermetically sealed from the outside but is thoroughly imbued with global weirding. The beauty salon is a weird simultaneity as it is both alluring and disconcerting, a confrontation with the horrors of the Real – such as the vulnerability of one’s corporeality and the iniquity of one’s vanity – but also their obfuscation through fantasy. The beauty salon is at once a consumption playground in many parts of the Global North but also a tough workplace for immigrant service workers who accompany rapid globalisation. It is a space where personal beautification co-exists with ecological scarification through the volume of imperishable waste products it produces including harsh chemicals, dyes, bleaches, solvents, plastics, foils, and colour tubes. Consuming at the beauty salon can be weirdly discomforting too because the consumer’s most valued parts of the body are opened to scrutiny and correction, and in doing so one’s self-importance is juxtaposed with one’s imperfections. Straughan (2014), in her autoethnographic account of receiving a salon facial treatment, describes the weird discomfort of chemical peels bringing life into contact with death, exfoliating away “dead” skin cells to stimulate the “living” dermis below to grow. “The weird”, Fisher (2016, 29) explains, “de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside”.

Beyond traditional axes of (anti)structure and (anti)function, consumers with a desire to broaden their cultural palette must typically seek out experiences that bring them into contact with the uncomfortable co-presence of things: “The sense of wrongness associated with the weird – the conviction that this does not belong – is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new” (Fisher 2016, 13). Consumption experiences often strike us as weird when we indulge in them for the first time: they might occur within structures but their “novum” (novelty and disruption) challenges structurality itself (Murray 2020, 31). Contra to Freud’s linking of the uncanny to traumatic personal maladies, the weird can be understood as a hysteretic catalyst for expanding the individual’s experiential horizons and assumptive worlds. For Fisher, the weird’s fundamental departure from the uncanny is that the weird does not only repel, it also compels, thus provoking ambivalent feelings. Ambivalence, characterised by Fisher (2016, 17) as “a fascination usually mixed with a certain trepidation”, makes the weird particularly amenable to marketisation. Celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal’s upmarket gastro-experimentalism reveals the commercialisation of weird dining such as his caviar and white chocolate disc combination or egg and bacon ice cream. Market-mediated weirdness such as these high-end menu items intersects with privileged tastes of freedom rooted in the desire for novel, rarefied experiences, and cosmopolitan smorgasbords of difference.

Weirdness is further evidenced through its commodification at the level of the experience economy, as reflected in categories of cultural products such as “Woke Weird” and “Black Weird” cinema, “weirdcore” fashion, and weird music genres like “pirate metal”, “folktronica”, “vaporwave”, and “witch house”. Even the idea of consumer culture itself has been weirded for consumption, represented in “weird fiction” such as Sayaka Murata’s literature which plays on and inverts themes of consumerism. In her short story, “A First-Rate Material” (Murata 2022), the taboo against using materials derived from humans in commercial production does not exist; instead it is deemed both ethical and chic to consume human rib-cage coffee tables, luxury leather goods tanned from human skin, and wedding rings cut from human front teeth. The curious reversal at the heart of the story is that anyone who avoids human-derived products is typecast as a moral outlier, a weirdo oddball who must be morally chided for their incorrect position on a “first-rate material”.

Overall, the weird is both something happening in and around consumption experiences and an important critical lens to interpret, narrate, and contextualise consumption experiences.

The eerie

Whilst the weird is characterised by a co-presence of things that do not belong together, the second of Fisher’s concepts – the eerie – is typified by, as he suggests, either a failure of absence or a failure of presence. “The sensation of the eerie occurs”, Fisher (2016, 61) writes, “either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or [if] there is nothing present when there should be something”. Behind both manifestations of the eerie, one encounters an unsettling dilemma with agency. In the case of the first mode, a failure of absence, agency is suspected to be loitering where it should not or should no longer be. There is the sneaking suspicion that something has a mind of its own; that it is making its agency unsettlingly known to us even if good sense suggests it has none. Eeriness is felt when a seemingly dead radio splutters to life having picked up an errant signal, or a burst of television static – white noise – unexpectedly interrupts our scheduled viewing. TVs and radios are ordinarily characterised by their forms of absence as tools that are backgrounded in our experiential gestalt and only called upon to play us our favourite music and shows which assume the real focus of our consumption. But when they make themselves known to us without our explicit demand, their absence fails. O’Sullivan (2022, 117) describes the eeriness of an escalator still running in an empty marketplace during the Covid-19 lockdowns despite the expectation of silence: “[t]he rattling escalator was ongoing – undying – shouting its diabolical undeadness”.

The second mode of the eerie, a failure of presence, is characterised by the discomfort we feel from encountering that which should be teeming with life but is instead lifeless, empty, or (fore)closed such as condemned factories, uninhabited estates, and abandoned houses – what the Japanese call akiya (ghost homes). Relating to consumption experience, this mode of the eerie is reflected in ruinphilia, ruin porn, and urban exploration which centre upon the rediscovery, recreational trespass, and fetishisation of derelict and deserted landscapes (Anderson, Tonner, and Hamilton 2017). For Anderson et al. “ruins exist in a state of indeterminacy, jointly absent and present in a state of ‘unfinished disposal’” (389), and “contemplation of the death of buildings provides the opportunity for acknowledging the impermanence of life and the inevitability of death” (398). Market-mediated attachments to the eerie via a failure of presence have been forged too through a wealth of post-apocalyptic consumption experiences in cinema, literature, video-gaming, and roleplaying which rely heavily on eerie imagery: empty cities, vacant airports and hospitals, derelict shopping malls, and silent desolate motorways, to name a few.

Being able to accurately identify a consumption experience in terms of its absences and presences is valuable because it allows researchers to accord to it the appropriate analytical judgements and means of representing it. Detecting an absence of the expected or a presence of the unexpected does not merely allow a researcher to identify the eeriness of an event and label it as such, rather it requires sensitivity to themes and tonalities that one would not consider if looking at the weird. As Fisher (2016, 61) warns, “The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird”. Whether by failure of absence or failure of presence, the eerie relates closely with uncertainty and mystery and requires from the researcher effective (or affective) means of capturing these themes accurately for the reader. “The eerie,” Fisher (2016, 62) clarifies, “necessarily involves forms of speculation and suspense that are not an essential feature of the weird”. For example, if a researcher were to incorrectly assess the running escalator in an abandoned, empty mall as weird, then the resultant analysis might centre on the freak co-presence of movement and stillness while missing the mystery, intrigue, and suspense associated with the eerie failure of absence which provides a more appropriate, immersive record of the event.

Fisher suggests enigma characterises the experiential character of eeriness wherein, “[t]he eerie concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears” (2016, 62). Detecting and representing the eerie is thus more than an idiographic effort at differentiating it from other forms of the unsettling but is based on subjective sensitivity to the specific tenor of the lived experience and keeping with its themes.

“Since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency,” Fisher (2016, 64) observes, “it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world”. Eeriness pervades consumer culture when certain comforts are made absent, depriving us of the regular drip-feed of consumerist activity. Power outages, for example, are eerie through their ability to engender multiple failures of presence: lights and screens are darkened, stores and businesses are emptied, and the conveniences we rely on to cook our food, heat our homes, and connect us to others fail to comply, thereby altering the character of routine consumption experiences, their structures, and functions. At a more context-of-context level, recessions and austerity too with their quietening effects on the economy, work, and leisure engender an eeriness that infects and contextualises our experiential lives. Albeit not entirely visible, we nonetheless feel austerity’s failure of presence. As Raynor (2017, 195) recounts, austerity is “an empty flowerbed at the end of the street … a taxi no longer [taking] a disabled child to school … the implementation of the ‘bedroom tax’ and a threatened eviction … a closed autism support group”.

Unlike Freud’s uncanny, the eerie is always of the outside, never the inside; it is the product of some suspected Lacanian “Big Other” beyond the consumer’s psyche and outside of their control. At the most structural end of experience then, the invisible organising logic of capital is encountered as eerie par excellence: “Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” (Fisher 2016, 11). Capitalism is analogous to a nebulous phantom whose absence from world events should have been guaranteed after various financial crashes and disappointments, yet it remains omnipresent influencing everything about our daily lives. In sum, eeriness is never a decision; its modes of failure of absence and failure of presence represent extra-agentic occurrences that effects (and affects) consumption experiences from the outside in.

The creepy

In contrast to Fisher’s (2016) depiction of the weird as ambiguous co-presence and the eerie as either a failure of presence or absence, Kotsko’s (2015) conceptualisation of creepiness might be interpreted as excess presence, most commonly of base urges or impulses. There is an inherently unsettling character to these urges, and so they must be managed and suppressed; the social order exists to regulate, restrict, or transform them into less dangerous substitutes. From a Lacanian perspective, humans exist not as blessed beings who possess that which (other) animals lack (i.e. sense of self, rationality, beliefs, language, morality, and other contrivances), but rather as tragic creatures who lack what (other) animals possess (i.e. a “natural”, unburdened freedom to act upon instincts and biological needs). Following Lacanian thinking, human desire comes forth from this lack that cannot ever be alleviated. Desire plays out in chronically renewing, quixotic pursuits of substitutes for this lack that can be quite enigmatic, creating a sometimes-baffling sense of excess in need of its own repression. Both the suppression of unruly urges and the displaced and excessive nature of desire can, as Kotsko (2015, 9) claims, “be experienced as unwelcome and invasive when they threaten to resurface”. Just as underground magma pushes through vents and fissures to erupt into our world as “lava”, unruly urges reveal themselves through little outlets and fractures in the social order to irrupt as “creepiness”: “We are susceptible to being creeped out … because we are always in danger of being creeped out by ourselves, or more precisely, by those parts of ourselves that seem to exceed and elude us” (Kotsko 2015, 14).

To explain the emergence of creepiness in this conflict between repressed urges and our social order, we defer to Lacan’s concept of extimité, or extimacy – a play on intimacy. Lacan’s neologism suggests an inversion of those things that are confidential, interior, veiled; they are instead made public, exterior, exposed. Extimacy is somewhere between external intimacy and “intimate exteriority” (Lacan 1992, 139). Still private by nature, just put on show, the “extimate” is, as Dolar (1991, 6) describes, “where the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior and becomes threatening, provoking horror and anxiety”.

Although the marketplace is a zone for cultivating deceiving stand-ins for repressed urges in the outside world, these compensations are nonetheless policed by an admittedly threadbare social order that prevents the materialisation of creepy behaviour. Consumer culture remains libidinally and licentiously charged in multiple arenas that involve tacit – and sometimes explicit – relationships between sex and consumption (Lanier and Rader 2019), but behaviours such as publicly leering, touching oneself or others, and making unwanted advances in the marketplace are all subject to taboo. Female servers who sexually objectify themselves for better tips at the Hooters chain of restaurants, for example, describe the consumption experience they co-produce as rewarding but can turn uncomfortably “creepy” and in need of intervention when a customer’s desire exceeds acceptable boundaries and introduces a “bad vibe” (Moffitt and Szymanski 2011, 85).

Across digital landscapes of consumer culture, where the social order is perceived as more diaphanous, Kotsko (2015) suggests few irruptions of extimacy reach the levels of creepiness as the unsolicited “dick pic” (see also Paasonen, Light, and Jarrett 2019). In what has been read as an act of online harassment or “technology facilitated sexual violence” (Waling and Pym 2019, 71), the unsolicited dick pic phenomenon is disproportionately characterised by cisgender, heterosexual men who send intimate pictures to women by electronic means without their consent. The act is mired in a kind of obliviousness – or “perceived cluelessness regarding the desires of women” (Waling and Pym 2019, 73) – that disregards how such erotic oversharing will be perceived by the recipient, conforming to an absence of self-awareness that Kotsko identifies as an innate part of creepiness. The act is creepy not because of the base sexual drive that motivates it per se, but rather its inherent excess – the perverse necessity to unabashedly display one’s desire regardless of the other’s interest or consent, thereby disregarding, misreading, or perverting the social order. This excess emerges in a Freudian-Lacanian “pervert” who assumes that deep down, everyone desires the same thing as they do; that their excessive display of desire is itself desirable and desired by the receiver: “This is what makes the pervert so creepy – the sense that their desire is not only invading your space, but that they keep insisting that it’s your desire” (Kotsko 2015, 54).

Like the weird and the eerie, the creepy is commodifiable within the experience economy as reflected in the popularity of true-life crime stories, biographies, and television documentaries centred on serial murder, sexual abuse, rape, cannibalism, and all manner of unchecked extimacy that disturbingly exceed the social order. A burgeoning market for creepiness however does not merely reflect some functionalistic demand led by consumers who are addicted to extimacy. Rather, the commodification of creepiness in consumer culture is structurally contingent upon and inseparable from the creepiness of commodification itself. Nowhere is this clearer than the creepiness one feels upon receiving an advert on one’s smartphone for something not long after talking about the very same thing (Hoang, Cronin, and Skandalis 2022). The experience of personalised, micro-targeted advertising and the broader spectre of surveillance capitalism has the potential to unsettle due to the excess presence of marketers’ desires to get close to us – their creepy insistence that they are giving us exactly what we want, brazenly forcing their libidinally-charged offerings upon us based on the thinnest signs of our implied interest. The targeted advert might even be considered the commercial equivalent of the unsolicited dick pic: an obscene insistence that its recipients desperately want what the sender has to offer.

As with serial killer documentaries, intrusive ads, and technology facilitated sexual violence, creepiness is detected when displaced desire is left to surface in flagrant disregard or perversion of the social order. Our reaction to those offenders whose extimacy exceeds our level of comfort tends to complicate questions of agency, as the Real of our animal urges, drives, and the nebulousness of consumer desire is reflected back at us by their offences. The extimate offender might be oblivious or uncaring, but as spectators we are made conscious of how our own opaque desires, if they ever were to irrupt in an extimate way, could be judged as creepy, catalysing an uncomfortable type of self-recognition. This brings us to the final concept of the unsettling, awkwardness.

The awkward

While creepiness is typified by an excess presence (usually of extimacy), awkwardness is characterised by excess absence – a desperate, all-consuming yearning to make absent what has, or could, become present. We can all relate to experiencing an awkward moment when we might wish the earth would open and swallow us whole, instantly taking us away from the discomfort we feel, making us absent. The awkward is characterised by uneasy silence, embarrassment, inaction, solicitude, the absence of knowing what to do, what to say, or how to respond; a stiff, paralysing discomfiture that tonally upends any consumption experience, altering its consequences and injecting it with a desperate pining for egress (Kotsko 2010; 2015). Awkwardness is felt when we might lurk through someone's social media profile and accidentally click “like” on an old photo posted long ago or when we return a wave to an attractive stranger at a bar only to realise that they were waving at someone else. In such scenarios, we may feel suspended by a mode of compensatory and mechanical inelasticity – a sudden and overriding desire to make absent any perceived extimacy leading us to behave clumsily and self-consciously. The tragedy here is that in trying to avoid being perceived as creepy, a subject often opens themself up to the experience of awkwardness. Kotsko (2015, 121) claims that awkwardness irrupts out of the subject’s self-creeping-out – “the subject’s own anxiety in the face of the unruliness of desire”.

An excessively compensatory demand for absence can be observed “most clearly in the case of neurotic young men who are mortally afraid of being declared creepy” (Kotsko 2015, 5–6). Within consumer culture’s den of self-presentation, self-marketing, and selling oneself in all matters of human relations from the job market to the dating market, the decision to hide, opt for inaction, and remain absent can be the catalyst for awkwardness. “[M]en are awkward in seduction,” Kotsko (2010, 3) argues, “always worrying that an unwelcome advance will produce impressions of awkwardness or its dread cousin creepiness.”

The experience of suppressing something contrary to one’s perceived self-image is characteristic to awkwardness. Jantzen, Østergaard, and Sucena Vieira (2006, 192) draw upon the experience of an individual who during a sexual encounter felt the “special mood was spoiled” when she remembered that she was wearing “ordinary cotton briefs”. The problem for this individual was not her partner’s reaction but with the perceived incommensurability of “ordinary” underwear with the self-image she wished to curate for herself in that moment. Resultingly, “[s]he perceived herself as awkward and not in control of the situation. Interacting with a stranger and wanting to perform sensually … she revealed a non-public side of herself” (Jantzen, Østergaard, and Sucena Vieira 2006, 192). For Jantzen et al., the awkwardness is the result of a Goffmanian struggle: this subject’s front-stage performance is imperilled by what she feels to be the creeping interruption of an incompatible element from her backstage (Goffman 1982). Here too, one only need imagine being badgered by a pushy salesperson whose persistence in not taking “no” for an answer seems only to uncomfortably advertise our reluctance or inability to pay while testing our ability to remain polite.

A key characteristic of awkwardness is its contagion factor, passing between bodies and affecting all present, yielding a potentially totalising influence on consumption experiences. Awkwardness, unlike the personal, deep-seated malady Freud originally associated with the uncanny, “seems to be contagious, spreading, once started, in ever widening circles of discomfiture” (Goffman 1982, 106). There is a strange dance between the inside and outside that goes beyond the uncanny. At the realm of diffusion between bodies and the propensity to sink all who are present into its discomfiture, it is here that the awkward, like the weird, the eerie, and the creepy, has become subject to market capture. An entire species of “cringe watching” TV (Pradhan and Drake 2023) and a subgenre of market texts referred to as squirm comedy or comedy of discomfort has yielded a substantial body of critical commentary (Kotsko 2010). The tell-tale masthead for this category, contrary to orthodox comedy’s objective to invoke laughter, is the intention to invoke a “cringe”; an affective dimension of the awkward that, by its conspicuously dysphoric nature, is endured rather than enjoyed. The diffusion of a cringe – the passing of awkwardness – between bodies is socio-somatic, exceeding any type of interior Freudian psychic unease, materialising instead in palpable discomfort with its roots in the social order.

The paradox of awkwardness’s socio-somatic affect is that it works through each individual spectator’s recoil from the social, whether through pained silence, covering one’s eyes, breaking conversation to purse one’s lips, or deflecting one’s gaze from the other. The awkward isolates, atomises, and closes off everyone behind their respective personal cringe yet ironically unites them through sharing in the social order’s consequences together. Accordingly, to understand the affective functioning of awkwardness, we might turn away from Freud’s unheimlich centred upon the individual psyche and defer instead to another Germanophone concept, fremdscham which denotes the experience of shame-by-proxy or vicarious embarrassment and, to an extent, affective surrogacy. This is commensurate too with Kotsko’s argument that the awkward is bound up in the individual’s relationships with the social order.

Discussion & conclusion

In this paper we sought to move beyond the functional-structural axes of consumption experiences to explore the abstruse, involutional effects-affects of the unsettling within consumer culture. Our analytic engagements with what we consider to be four corners of the unsettling reveal how the outcomes of consumption experiences can be altered, reversed, and complicated, often at a pre-reflective level by types of absence and presence that extend far beyond the discursive world. All four corners relate to, and differ from, the Freudian uncanny, each unsettling in their own unique ways. Using a rubric of presence–absence, we have integrated each corner within a framework that diverges from Freud’s emphasis on psychic interiority, while leaving room for further categories to be included. Through this framework – which allows us to perceive a kind of more-than-uncanny – we conceptualise the weird as characterised by the ambivalence of competing presences, the eerie by the enigma of either a failure of presence or absence, the creepy by an intrusiveness catalysed by excess presence, and the awkward by a reclusiveness due to excess absence. Conceptually, this framework allows us to introduce a new definition of the unsettling for consumption scholarship: The unsettling is a genus of discomfort caused by pre-cognitive combinations of things present and things absent that influence how consumers experience themselves, others, or objects within social and material relations. This discomfort is typically sensed rather than consciously known, and thus thought of in terms of affective intensities.

Although each of the four corners contributes to this more precise, overall understanding of the unsettling, each corner also offers a distinct non-representational style or tonality for researchers “that evoke[s] sensation, feeling and emotion within an audience” (Coffin and Hill 2022, 1616). The four corners of the unsettling should be treated idiosyncratically by researchers, recognising how they each imbue a different kind of unease for the reader. In these respects, the four corners require what Coffin and Hill (2022, 1616) call “non-representational ‘represencing’” to bring the researchers’ observations “alive in the mind and body of the audience”. Although the focus in this paper has been on building an initial theoretical scaffolding of the unsettling – and has thus been executed through relatively conservative prose – it is our opinion that future analyses of each of the unsettling’s four corners will be best “represenced” through performative and evocative writing techniques.

By “writing differently” (Coffin and Hill 2022, 1622), future researchers might better differentiate the weird, the eerie, the creepy, and the awkward for readers, providing deeper understandings of these corners and courting dialogical forms of reinterpretation. Represencing the eerie necessitates writing with parsimony to arrest uncertainty and avoiding explanation to produce mystery, thus letting the reader’s imagination fill in the blanks. The creepy too might best be represenced for readers through a less-is-more approach to description, prompting readers to detect for themselves what is frighteningly in excess of signification. Represencing the weird however should trade mystery for wonderment focusing instead on detailing the incongruence and pastiche characteristic to this form. The awkward should also be represenced with detail to convey the excruciatingly circumstantial minutiae of social discomfiture. In all cases, a greater degree of sensitivity must be allowed to enter the research process than what is seen throughout regular, representational consumer research (see Coffin and Hill 2022; Hill, Canniford, and Mol 2014). In the following discussion we relate the unsettling to the literature and highlight how the four corners clarify or complicate existing theory.

First, feeling unsettled is not a homogenous phenomenon nor is it exclusive to any one scenario; rather it punctuates many aspects of consumer culture in different ways. Thinking through a diversity of circumstances, particularly non-volitional ones, prevents certain assumptions from becoming ossified to the exclusion of others. Discomfort, for instance, has previously been approached in consumer research mostly, if not exclusively, in terms of contexts related to the body, allowing corporeal associations to become taken for granted. Here, the consumption of discomfort continues to be linked to consumers choosing to partake in intensely physical experiences that cause pain, what Cova, Carù, and Cayla (2018, 453) call “warlike escapes”. Our research suggests discomfort is also provoked by the less tangible, less corporeal, and more ethereal disruptiveness of interactions between one’s self and the environments, affects, and perceptions it is embroiled. Painful warlike escapes such as obstacle racing (Scott, Cayla, and Cova 2017), CrossFit (Dawson 2017), or long and penitential pilgrimages (Husemann et al. 2016), are all tied up in the heightening of private bodily states – “corporeal presencing” – and are thus marked by an interiority that another cannot precisely share. In contrast, encounters with the weird, eerie, and so on are diffused amongst all those present, rendering individual corporeality subsidiary to the peculiarities of the social condition, decentring and reducing the body to a mere recipient of a discomforting mood external to the self. As a separate mode of discomfort to warlike escapes, the unsettling emerges epistemically rather than physically at the interstices of the social order, ultimately catalysing affective intensities that pass between individuals and objects.

In further contrast to the painfulness of warlike escapes, experiencing discomfort through the unsettling is accompanied by an intensification of reflexivity. While a warlike escape “obliterates [consumers’] capacity for reflexivity and reduces their ability to remember what happened to them” (Scott, Cayla, and Cova 2017, 34), few consumers could soon forget the outré affects of the unsettling; whether assailed by the cringe-inducing trauma of awkwardness, perturbed by the creepiness of another’s desire, dumbfounded by the assumption-shattering effects of weirdness, or unnerved by the vague threat of eeriness. Though warlike escapes substitute reflexivity with brief, acute reappearances of consumers’ bodies, encounters with the unsettling tend to be characterised by the opposite: what Hill, Canniford, and Mol (2014, 382) classify as the “unrepresentable”, de-corporealised, and granular flows of social life. While both modes of discomfort exist within the extra-discursive domain of human experience, the unsettling must be understood as much less visceral and related more to the self’s relationship with the social order.

Our second contribution to marketing theory is the provision of a distinctly darker conceptualisation of the unspeakable excesses of experiential consumption. Typically, consumer researchers have been drawn to the explanatory power of “the sublime” when accounting for contact with the boundless, extra-discursive, and inexplicable (Kover 1998). For Kover (1998, 60), “the sublime has become associated with freedom and creativity” and “the sublime was something that people searched for and experienced”. Whether the sublime beauty of the ocean that for surfers, stretches “beyond the reach of urban culture” (Canniford and Shankar 2013, 1056), the “sublime manifestation of brotherhood” that for bikers, “lies in the shared experience of riding in formation” (Schouten and McAlexander 1995, 51), or the “sublime moments as adventurers” that for Arctic dog sledders, galvanise their experiences in wintry tundra (Lindberg and Eide 2016, 23), the sublime has factored regularly into interpretations of that which exceeds representation and allows consumers to get “close to ecstasy” (Kover 1998, 61). Across many of these applications, while scarcely comprehensible and sometimes invoking awe and even fear, the sublime has been reserved for encapsulating uplifting, positively valenced experiences which are comparatively different to the negatively valenced ones we might associate with the unsettling. Our accounts of weirdness, eeriness, creepiness, and awkwardness lean into the “urgent realism” that terminalist scholars claim is needed to counterbalance “the optimistic utopianism” that pervades marketing scholarship (Ahlberg, Coffin, and Hietanen 2022, 670). Whereas encounters with the sublime reflect what Ahlberg, Coffin, and Hietanen (2022, 674) consider to be “a ‘sane’ selfhood that sticks to life-affirming experiences and a coherent subjectivity that disavows any notion of enjoyment that has to do with self-destructivity”, seeking out encounters with the unsettling suggests otherwise.

Unlike Scott, Cayla, and Cova (2017), Kover (1998), and others who have asked “why” consumers would pay to experience events that disrupt their relationships with the world, we avoided over-functionalising the unsettling. The unsettling has been part of the human experience and a subject of representation long before contemporary consumer culture, exemplified by the weirdness of Hieronymus Bosch’s sixteenth-century paintings, Shakespeare’s reliance on awkwardness in his comedies, the eeriness of floating tables in Victorian séances, and innumerable scandalising tales of figures behaving creepily towards others throughout history. It would be imprudent to assume that the unsettling is something exclusive to advanced market societies or that it is a medium entirely reserved for commodifiable, functional outcomes. This is where our theorisation differs from existing accounts of extra-discursive consumption experiences that have overemphasised deliberate choice, meaning, and purpose. Feeling unsettled is not limited to functional projects of consumption: it is not undertaken singularly as a practice of self-representation (Scott, Cayla, and Cova 2017) or romantic escape (Canniford and Shankar 2013; Kover 1998), nor is it exclusive to market exchange (even as it remains susceptible to market capture). Rather than a deliberate attempt to derive cathartic value – i.e. experiencing the “beast within” (Tudor 1997) – the unsettling occurs when we must confront the fractures and inconsistencies in our apparent reality and acknowledge that not all things can be flattened into classifications, categorisations, and projections of the “Symbolic”. Accordingly, feeling unsettled is not the sole preserve of a consumer culture that offers an ever-expansive array of retreats from everyday life, rather it is experienced whenever the social subject is confronted with the cruel Real(s) of one’s existence within a world that cannot be entirely known, controlled, nor signified. Feelings of weirdness, creepiness, eeriness, and awkwardness are the effects and affects of brushing up against the Lacanian Real and thus are found where the fallibility of our reality’s social norms, explanations, and symbols is recognised.

Our essay concludes with two points of consideration for future research. First, we do not defer to consumer voices, a limitation we share with Lanier and Rader (2015) in their conceptual expansion of consumption experience. Like Lanier and Rader, it was not our intention to (re)present how experiences are rationalised and discursively expressed by individual agents, but rather to offer an initial categorisation of these experiences that can be expanded upon and problematised. Our attempt to explore the unsettling within consumer culture has avoided empirically soliciting teleological accounts from that same culture’s conscious subjects, recognising instead the influence of extra-discursive and pre-cognitive forces. Our work in these respects militates against the functionalistic assumption that underpins most interpretations of consumption experiences, detailing instead how experiences are influenced by phenomena beyond the conscious rationalisations of individual subjects.

Second, we appreciate that attempts to separate out the unsettling or any obscure phenomenon into its constituent parts risks inviting endless injections of superficially related antonyms and synonyms. For example, one risks becoming buried in questions asking how weird differs from strange, or eerie from mysterious, and so forth. We do not claim that the four corners outlined in this paper represent a complete picture of the unsettling, nor should further diversification be discouraged, but those doing the diversifying must avoid the impulse to partake in a superficial Easter egg hunt of words alone. Theorisation must not be reduced to the loose act of labelling. For an expanded framework of the unsettling to make the most sense, emphasis must remain on ensuring its constituent categories are justifiably specific in conceptual and phenomenological content which evades the possibility of them being interchangeable with each other. Only with that vigilance will future analyses offer up important affective-experiential categories of the unsettling beyond those explored here.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Cronin

James Cronin is Professor in Marketing at Lancaster University Management School, UK. His current research interests centre on the functioning of ideology within consumer culture and the role of fantasies in the marketplace. His work broadly sits in the areas of interpretive, critically oriented, and theoretically informed analyses of consumption, shared social processes, and marketing. His research has been published in journals including Marketing Theory, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Consumption, Markets & Culture, and Sociology of Health and Illness.

Sophie James

Sophie James is a PhD candidate at the Department of Marketing, Lancaster University Management School, UK. Her research is informed by cultural theory and adopts a critical perspective on the socio-historical and political-ideological structures involved in shaping present-day modes of magical thinking and consumer spirituality. She explores how premodern and pre-capitalist fantasies and imagined ways of living find themselves reproduced and commodified in the contemporary marketplace. Her research is informed by qualitative, interpretivist methods and connects closely with de-romanticist and terminal writing in critical marketing and consumer research.