‘Just normal and homely’: The presence, absence and othering of consumer culture in everyday imagining

Abstract

The imaginative aspects of consumption have been recognized as playing a key role in accounting for Western consumerism, yet there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the role of imagining in everyday life. Previous consumer research has tended to focus on goods and services within daydreams and fantasies so that goods seem to be central to, and key resources in, the construction of imagined scenarios. Here we argue that this methodological framing has restricted a broader understanding of the imagination and the contextualization of consumption within it. By analysing phenomenological accounts that placed imagining ahead of consumption as the focus of the study, we found that individuals readily envisioned common cultural desires for successful relationships, happiness and love in positive imagined futures, where goods may be merely assumed as part of the background, or dismissed in favour of preferred emotional experiences. As such this article uses Law’s (2004) conceptions of presence, manifest absence and othering to provide a more nuanced analysis of how and where consumption may be seen in the imagination. In this way we suggest that previous narratives of the consumer imagination have neglected individuals’ autonomy in both removing consumer practices and positioning social relationships as more prominent.