The attrition of consumer culture in America

Consumer culture has traditionally been analysed through the concept of ideological interpellation, whereby markets, brands and advertising continually hail individuals into recognition as consumer subjects. Contemporary capitalism increasingly displays an opposite tendency in the weakening or withdrawal of this address. Advertising circulates without attention, platforms process users as data rather than subjects, and the infrastructures that once organised consumer life, from malls to mass retail brands have declined. This article discusses the concept of de-interpellation to describe this transformation. Rather than intensifying recognition, consumer capitalism increasingly produces conditions of ideological abandonment in which subjects are rendered invisible or surplus. America, historically the paradigmatic site of consumer interpellation, now functions as the leading laboratory of this withdrawal where consumer culture appears as a degraded spectacle persisting after its ideological vitality has waned. The resulting subject is not liberated but abandoned, confronting the silencing of markets that once promised recognition.