Consumption and teleoaffective formations: Consumer culture and commercial communications

Abstract

This article considers the potential of a novel practice theoretical concept – teleoaffective formation – for the study of consumption. The concept builds on Schatzki’s social ontology of practice. Teleoaffective formations are configurations across multiple practices that enjoin those practices to common ends, ordering their affective engagements and offering general understandings through which participants make sense of the projects they pursue. This article argues that the approach affords consideration of large-scale configurations of practice and discourse and, therefore, enables re-engagement, from a practice theory perspective, with an earlier generation of concerns with consumer culture – including issues of cultural intermediation, consumption norms and the motivational structures of consumption. The distinctive features of the approach are illustrated through three successive teleoaffective formations that link the field of commercial communications (advertising, marketing, public relations, etc.) with consumer culture. The first – ‘consumer sovereignty’ – originates in the 1920s and 1930s and finds its fullest expression in the mid-20th century. The second – ‘emancipatory consumerism’ – emerged in the late 1960s and came to characterise late 20th-century consumer culture. These are briefly sketched. The third, which I propose to call ‘promotional sustainable consumption’, is a nascent formation of discourse and practice relating brands, sustainability and consumption. This formation is explored in more depth. The periodisation should not be understood in terms of epochal shifts but as an ongoing, recombinatory process. The three formations represent reconfigurations between heterogeneous elements, inter alia: general understandings, teleological orientations and affective engagements. Each successive formation informs novel understandings of the consumer and provides cultural resources for transformations in consumption norms. Each also provides resources for capitalist legitimation. The article concludes with a brief discussion of some theoretical and methodological implications of the approach.