Praxeomorphology, ontology, and renewal of post-consumer personhood

ABSTRACT

This comment complements Thompson’s comment on Belk 2024 in this journal. It suggests the selves Thompson and Belk refer to are both unusual and more fragile to impending changes in praxeomorphology than either author supposes. Hybrid praxeomorphologies fortend hybrid selves that may be other than the gnostic selves these authors imagine.

KEYWORDS:

• Hybrid ontology
• post-humanism
• praxeomorphology
• prefigurative experiments
• relational self

The key point for me in Thompson’s (2024) ‘Towards an Ontology of Consumers as Distributed Networks (or the End of “Consumer Research” as We Know It?): Retrospective Insights from the Praxeomorphism of Russell Belk’s “Extended Self”’ are his insistence on the isomorphism between our concepts of selfhood on the one hand, and the prevailing modes of economic production and the technological systems that support them on the other, that is, our praxeomorphology. When the latter become sufficiently integrated into the practices of everyday life, he says, recapitulating Bauman, they are soon translated into ubiquitous cultural metaphors for making sense of the world, including our definitions of and experiences of selfhood, e.g. the heavy sense of self that emerged in production - and accumulation-oriented capitalist modernity (Campbell, 1987/2018; Mauss, 1934/1985) and the distributed sense of self Belk (2013, 2014) and others now claim is emerging. This theoretical point is well worth retaining.

Thompson uses this point to remind us that the vernacular of consumer research ascribes a centrality to the human actants who assume the market position/identity of consumers. He then develops the interesting comment on the evolution of thought in consumer research from a dichotomous view of the relationship between consumer subjects and consumer objects to a dialogical view grounded in the object relations school of psychoanalysis, to Belk’s (2013, 2014) recent agencement conception of a consumer self as a decentralised actor network mediated by cultural structures and processes.

Interestingly, the concept of consumer ‘need’, which is inextricably intertwined with the solid Judeo-Christian self that is imagined in capitalist modernity (Sahlins, 1999), has not been revisited either by Belk or Thompson. The theorists of liquid consumption have only incrementally rethought the concept of need in pointing to the dematerialisation of attachments among global cosmopolitan elites (Bardhi et al., 2012; Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2017). They have not mounted a serious critique of the foundational notion of endless need in consumer research.

Thompson then elaborates how blockchain and the ‘regulated Internet of Things’ tropes offer a praxeomorphic approach to the question of how consumers ‘experience a relatively stable and coherent sense of self while their respective identities are diffused across a multiplicity of possessions, social contexts, and on-line personas’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 563) without resorting either to an ontologically problematic notion of core and extended selves or illusory selfhood.

Thompson argues ‘as AI evolves into a more autonomous AGI (i.e. Artificial General Intelligence), this taken-for-granted boundary between the machine and the human and between personal choices and algorithmic predictions (see Zuboff, 2019) will almost certainly become harder and harder to distinguish and could even cease to be a legitimate cultural distinction’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 565) leading to the end of consumer research as an ontologically valid, culturally meaningful domain of inquiry.

Belk and Thompson’s gnostic prediction that consumer research reaches an apotheosis in the distribution of selfhood through digital networks calls to mind the movie Transcendence in which Johnny Depp’s consciousness is uploaded to a computer network. At first, wonderful discoveries ensue; subsequently, AI Depp becomes increasingly powerful and megalomaniacal. Eventually, he is destroyed by the heroic supporting cast, perhaps an apt cautionary tale for the digitally distributed consumer.

There are alternative endings to the sovereign consumer myth that is enshrined in managerial consumer research (Bhatnagar et al., 2023; Tadajewski & Higgins, 2023). In this regard, it is useful to remember that this sovereign self is both an unusual conception of the person and a relatively recent product of Western thought from Descartes through to Kant, Nietzsche, and Fichte as Mauss, (1934/1985) pointed out. We know also from Weber and Colin Campbell (1987/2018) and the wry commentary of Sahlins (1999) that the desiring consumer self, while rooted in the story of Adam and Eve, who were the first people to experience consumer need, in fact, the need for fashion (pace Maslow!); that the ever-desiring consumer subject is the hybrid child of the Protestant work ethic and Romanticism within a capitalist praxeomorphology.

This heroic story has biased our perception of selfhood in several ways. First, the consumer research literature is shot through with evidence for the essentially relational self that Hartmut Rosa (2019) has theorised through the concept of affective resonance. From studies of communitas, hygge, communal ecstasy, conviviality, collective catharsis, deceleration, intergenerational kinship, fellowship, and pain (Arnould et al., 1993; Borghini et al., 2009; Debenedetti et al., 2014; Goulding et al., 2009; Higgins et al., 2019; Husemann & Giana, 2019; Linnett, 2011; Rokka et al., 2023; Scott et al., 2017; Tim et al., 2022), we have ample evidence that our most meaningful (consumer) experiences are embodied and cocreated with other beings, even if the reliance on consumer self-reported narrative has biased consumer research towards an individualist and cognitivist perspective on collective experience and relational selfhood.

Second, not only is the ‘concept of the person as a plural composite … popular in New Melanesian ethnography and cross-disciplinary work on Christianity’ (Appau et al., 2020, p. 168) but the ontological postulate that the ‘dividual’ may be a ‘composite of multiple social relations … cached in a body that is porous to external relationships and continuously restructures its composite parts’ (Appau et al., 2020, p. 171; see also Tadajewski, 2022) is widespread. Dominant praxeomorphic relations among those peoples living from foraging and horticulture lead to persons being defined by their relational epistemologies. Where gift-giving predominates, fully realised persons are idealised for their generosity and selflessness (Levi-Strauss, 1976); where reciprocal exchange predominates, persons are relational products of far-flung webs of resource circulation; where predatory symbiosis provides a cultural template for selfhood, the fully realised person has absorbed vital essences from other beings, both human and non-human. Moreover, all these systems create concentric circles of intimacy in which selves are experienced with decreasing degrees of solidity (Descola, 2013; Sahlins, 1972; Viveiros de Castro, 2014).

Thompson, like Belk, writes as if things will continue as they are in a foundational sense, even as both recognise the unpredictability of technological developments. That is, they assume that the persistence of the current capitalist system based on growth without end and in which consumer ‘choices’ endlessly proliferate to respond to equally expansive consumer ‘needs’ endures. But the premise of perpetuation of the praxeomorphic status quo is clearly contestable, to say the least. Either there will be radical change in the prevailing modes of economic production and the technological systems that support them or we are headed towards ecological and economic collapse, which amounts to the same thing, radical change (Elliott, 2016; Hickel, 2019; Saito, 2024; Wilk, 2015). In this respect, so-called doomsday preppers are canaries in the figurative coal mine (Campbell et al. 2019).

Digital processes consume huge and growing amounts of energy, and digitalization only decreases carbon emissions if tethered to low carbon technological innovation, hardly a foregone conclusion (Allen, 2022; Wang et al., 2023). At the same time, industrial agriculture contributes 11% of global CO2 emissions and shows no sign of declining (FAO, 2018). Again, either radical change or collapse (Hickel, 2019; Saito, 2024) is inevitable. Some consumer researchers reframe digitalisation as liquification (Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2017), which they tend to view as a progressive change, but they have ignored the massive individual carbon footprints of their jet-setting, global cosmopolitans (Barros & Wilk, 2021).

Outside marketing and consumer research, many have begun to imagine radical economic change. However, the big thinkers on the topic of radical economic change have not thought through the praxeomorphic consequences for marketing, especially consumption (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971; Hickel, 2019; Raworth, 2017; Saito, 2024). And yet there are many small-scale signs of shifts in the prevailing modes of economic production that we have previously documented that put into play the relational foundations of personhood and point towards a different political end to consumer research as we know it and other than Thompson imagines (Laamanen et al., 2023). We have seen intentional efforts to ‘escape the market’, so to speak, in affectively charged events, e.g. adventure tourism, Burning Man, pilgrimage, raving, Tough Mudder, anarchist utopian communities, etc. (Arnould et al., 1993; Chatzidakis et al., 2021; Goulding et al., 2009; Higgins et al., 2019; Husemann & Giana, 2019, Kozinets, 2002; Scott et al., 2017). We see an increase in experiments in extra- and hybrid market forms of resource circulation and value cocreation (e.g. Arnould & Helkkula, 2024; Casey et al., 2020; Giesler, 2006; Ozanne & Ozanne, 2021; Rosenberg et al., 2023; Scaraboto & Figueiredo, 2022; Schor & Thompson, 2014). Whether in so-called ecovillages, cooperatives, local currency communities, community supported agriculture, time banks, and other prefigurative experiments (Casey & Tadajewski, 2023), they are harbingers of different kinds of persons, different kinds of selves than the modern consumer self. In this regard, Latour (1993) reminds us that modernist ontology is fragile and incomplete. Descola and Pignocchi (2022) imagine that hybrid ontologies must emerge in a future shorn of market capitalism (see also Helkkula & Arnould, 2022).

One empirical study identifies some hybrid ontologies that predictably should emerge from changes in praxeomorphology away from market-mediated forms. Animist-naturalist and animist-analogist ontologies of personhood thrive in at least one eco-village (Marchais et al., 2024). This study points to a fuzzy praxeomorphic boundary not between humans and AGI as in Belk and Thompson’s thinking, but between humans and the non-human biotic community possible in a new eco-economy of persons (Arnould, 2022). Not only the planet suffers, but many, if not most human beings suffer from the globalisation of consumerist logic (Appau et al., 2020; Appau & Crockett, 2023; Arnould & Press, 2019; Saatcioglu & Ozanne, 2013; Üstüner & Holt, 2007; Varman et al., 2022). Prefigurative experiments in extra- and hybrid market forms of resource circulation and value cocreation, as well as the emergence of hybrid ontologies of the person, point to how we might escape the tyranny of market logic (Arnould, 2007, Kozinets, 2002), the tragic fiction of endless consumer need, and indeed escape from consumer selfhood altogether. Researchers in search of transformative impact might bend their thoughts towards these experiments in hybrid eco-economic life (Casey & Tadajewski, 2023).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Arnould

Eric Arnould is Emeritus Professor at the Aalto University Business School, Helsinki, Finland. He has pursued a career in applied social science since graduating from Bard College in 1973. He earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1982. He has co-edited a second edition of Consumer Culture Theory for Sage Publications. Eric’s research on consumer culture, cultural marketing strategy, services marketing, sustainability, and marketing and development appears in over 100 articles and chapters in major social science and managerial periodicals and books. He will become co-editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing in August 2024.