Living with nothingness: Consumer intentionality and meaning-making in the no-where place

Building on and extending Susie Scott’s theoretical lens of social nothingness, our paper examines how people in the English town of Wigan create meaning within a living condition of persistent “nothingness”. To facilitate our theorisation of social nothingness, we draw on ethnographic accounts of participants’ lived experiences in Wigan, a post-industrial town characterised by long-term economic scarcity, and enduring sociocultural and geopolitical insignificance. Rather than treating nothingness as momentary and aesthetic consumer choice, we consider it as a persistent and normalised lived reality continually negotiated and navigated through acts of accepting, disregarding and wandering. In doing so, our study extends understandings of consumer intentionality by moving beyond the dichotomy of commissive and omissive acts, toward the intersections and ambiguities between them. We also argue that transformation and progress in consumer culture is not always necessarily overt and positive; experiences of being ‘stuck’ or ‘lost’ can also serve as important sources of meaning making in consumer life.