Artlike resistance has been an inherent part of anti-consumerist protest and critical consumer practices during the past decade or two. The artful protests that often emerge as performances, street art or viral images are essentially interpretative acts: they are contentious re-presentations of consumer practices, commercialized spaces and corporate and product identities, challenging prevalent perceptions of them. Regardless of the highly symbolic nature of these acts they are usually assessed according to their ability to effect change in material conditions (as changes in the production and/or the consumption of goods). Studied under the framework of political consumerism, they are thus reduced to a discursive form of political consumerism (often consumer pedagogy), emphasizing - and taking granted – the agency of the political consumer. What this framework dismisses is the whole fascinating interpretative dimension of creative resistance: the ways in which it reflects on and reinterprets the role of the consumer as a political actor in contemporary consumer societies. Especially interesting are the performances of consumption/non-consumption, in which activists “simulate” consumer identities or assume “the role of a consumer” as part of their protests. These fictitious consumer identities provide an interesting opportunity to analyze the possibilities of political action in and outside of consumer role. Focusing on the art ritual known as Whirl-Mart as well as on invisible theatre by activist performance group Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping, this paper asks what to make of the use of fictitious consumer identities – are we talking about merely tactical or in fact factual erasure of the position of an activist/citizen in issues related to consumption and production? Or is it that the invented, fictitious consumer positions are paradoxically the ones that can set the consumers temporarily free as genuine political actors, without the burden of inescapably failing as political consumers in real life.
