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

Abstract

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.