hypermarkets

Abstract



This article explores how modern hypermarkets have reproduced the psychological processes of interaction with objects that generated “emotionality” in earlier forms of capitalist globalisation, while rationalizing the processes as strictly commercial. Instead of overtly aestheticising human communication, hypermarkets emphasize interpersonal commercial exchanges, which is reminiscent of the earlier forms of global capitalism in their use of commercial distance as their fundamental dissociation of object and subject. Not surprisingly, this mode of communication turns hypermarkets into “hot markets” that allow specific individuals to become both the object and the subject at the same time. The objective of this article is to validate the notion of counter-hegemonic production/material reproduction as a powerful theoretical terrain for understanding new waves of globalisation, which today include the growing digitalised world.



Background



In the 1960s the economist Paul Pietsch began conceptualizing “markets” as the defining category of modern capitalism, and this was well captured in the 1983 concept of the “fourth industrial revolution”. This trend of de-capitalist analysis towards applying the terms of capital-warfare and market-warfare has continued well into the ’90s and 2000s. The emphasis on markets in these traditional economic models is fundamental, allowing for the determination of today’s global inequalities, mass unemployment, or inequality among nations. In this context, the hypermarket is central to current forms of industrial capitalism.

But what does it actually mean to redefine hypermarkets as “hot markets”? This question is important for a number of reasons, since market theorists agree on the fact that the commodity is first, a visual object. Through manipulation of this object, market-warfare becomes a form of art, or even the opposite of “war”, a compromise between subjective creativity and objective algorithms. Economists increasingly focus on objectification, and how our understanding of markets can be contorted into a form of fetish, as microlevel objects have replaced macro-level organizations. Yet if this objectification is challenged, then the form of capitalism becomes any old old industrial economy. The question is therefore one of connecting the abstract with the concrete, and the last chapter of this article shows how the psycho-economic entanglement between “matter” and “personality” unfolds in hypermarkets.