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’

ABSTRACT

Belk’s conceptualisation of the extended self is one of the most influential articles published in the history of consumer research. However, less scholarly attention has been given to the broader ontological implications of Belk’s later arguments that his original distinction between a core and extended self should be abandoned. In this comment, I first highlight how Belk’s original formulation marked a contested transition from a dualistic view of consumers as possessing a core self that remains distinct from the socio-material world to a dialectical understanding of consumer selves as emerging from a centre-to-periphery network of relations. His ensuing update implicitly denotes another ontological shift towards an even more de-centred view of the ‘extended self’. However, Belk’s reformulation of the extended self in the digital age lacked a culturally established, alternative praxeomorphic model needed to fully disentangle the extended self from the ‘heavy’ ontology of the core self. Contemporary socio-technical innovations are beginning to offer a praxeomorphic means to ontologically re-vision consumers as distributed networks whose life narratives function as ledgers of their assembled experiences. As an emerging praxeomorphic future shaped by the mass diffusion of AI technologies is rapidly taking shape, I suggest that ‘consumer research’, as we currently understand it, may soon be radically transformed.

KEYWORDS:

• Extended self
• consumer culture theory (CCT)
• ontology
• heavy and light capitalism
• actor network theory

Introduction

This article began by suggesting that we are what we have and that this maybe the most basic and powerful fact of consumer behavior. (Belk, 1988, p. 160)

Belk’s (1988) ‘Possessions and the Extended Self’ is widely regarded as one of the most influential articles ever published in the field of consumer research (Ladik et al., 2015). One explanation for this paper’s canonical status is that it did, indeed, identify the most basic and powerful fact of consumer behaviour and as the saying goes, the rest is history. In this comment, I wish to pursue a different line of thought by using the ‘extended self’, and its subsequent modifications for the digital age (Belk, 2013, 2014), as a means to illuminate how consumer researchers’ ontological assumptions – such as ‘we are what we have’ or, conversely, that consumers’ core selves remain distinct from their possessions (Cohen, 1989) – are shaped by prevailing socio-technical conditions, or what Bauman (2000) characterises as praxeomorphism. Accordingly, I argue that Belk’s evolving conceptualisation of the ‘extended self’ presents a disparate juxtaposition of ontological assumptions (and praxeomorphic reference points) that has enabled it to serve as a potent, transitional tool for re-envisioning ‘the consumer’ and eventually, consumer research itself.

To support this exegetic claim, I will first revisit Cohen’s critical commentary (1989) on the scientific merits of the ‘extended self’ and Belk’s (1989) subsequent rejoinder. At face value, this exchange seemed to reproduce the defining themes of the logical positivist versus critical relativist discord that was simultaneously reverberating throughout the fields of marketing and consumer research (Anderson, 1986; Calder & Tybout, 1987; Hudson & Ozanne, 1988; Hunt, 1991). For example, Cohen charged that the concept of the extended self could not be falsified and that it lacked predictive power. Belk (1989) countered these challenges by advocating for the epistemological validity of contextually nuanced, qualitative measures and the value of research that pursued a goal of attaining verstehen (i.e. an in-depth understanding of subjective experiences) rather than the ‘prediction and control’ objective so valorised by consumer researchers endorsing a logical-positivist epistemology.

From a paradigm conflict perspective, it is easy to dismiss Cohen’s critique as a reactionary expression of paradigmatic parochialism that, like Hunt (1990, 1993), was fighting a futile battle against a disciplinary turn towards methodological pluralism and ‘alternative ways of seeking knowledge’ (Hudson & Ozanne, 1988). Yet, several aspects of this dialogue are worth revisiting because they afford useful insights into macro-level, praxeomorphic (Bauman, 2000) shifts that have been expressed through the extended self, in its various incarnations. Sensitivity to this praxeomorphic backdrop can, in turn, further illuminate the latent, but quite significant ontological implications, of Belk’s (2013, p. 2104) subsequent disavowal of the ‘core self’ in his reconceptualisation of the extended self for the digital age.

Border disputes

Cohen’s (1989) deployment of standard logical positivist objections to interpretivist consumer research (e.g. Calder & Tybout, 1987; Hunt, 1991) obscured his more specific reservation about the ‘extended self’:

How do we resolve the question of whether there really is a psychologically meaningful extended self or whether the term should only be used as a figure of speech or term of art? Before Belk can convincingly claim that possessions comprise the self, he needs to tell us where along the conceptual continuum, past a certain point of self-relatedness, it is appropriate to use a term like the extended self. But Belk does not appear to want to limit the term in any meaningful way, giving researchers little guidance regarding where product importance (for whatever reason) ends and self-definition begins. What are the conceptual criteria for the latter? Does a high degree of attachment to an object make it self-defining, or does it require a certain degree of effort to distinguish self from possessions for it to be true that ‘we are what we have’? If the author sees a distinction between a true internal or core self and an ‘external self’, then the ‘external self’ is not really ‘self’ at all. Consider an individual who uses a car, clothing, or certain symbols of success or power as part of a daily routine. If the individual recognizes these as merely props, do they comprise self and/or define identity? (Cohen, 1989, p. 126)

Cohen’s critical contention that the ‘core self’ must necessarily be demarcated from the ‘extended self’ assumes that a distinct boundary distinguishes the self/mind from the external world of objects, symbols and other people. While Cohen could rest perfectly content with the claim that consumers might attribute autobiographical significance to some of their possessions, Belk’s stronger assertion that these object relations could actually ‘extend’ a consumer’s self glaringly conflicted with his dualistic ontology.

For Cohen, the extended self, barring exceptional evidence to the contrary, should be treated as a figure of speech. If a consumer states, ‘I feel like I lost part of myself when I lost my dog’, Cohen would assert that such a consumer’s core self has not been objectively reduced or truncated by this sense of emotional loss. [For a more extensive analysis of consumers’ emic understanding of their self-concepts, see Stone et al. (2017)]. Rather, the core self remains intact because the (now absent) object is external to the consumer’s mind (cognitive processes and structures) that has ascribed such feelings of importance and loss. In sum, Cohen (1989) equates the ‘core self’ to one’s internalised knowledge, memories, cognitive processing capacities and emotional states.

Belk’s (1989) rebuttal directly speaks to the subtext of Cohen’s critique:

[T]he distinction between the proximal or core self and the more distal extended self is also influenced by culture’s effects on our perceptions. For this reason, it is not possible or desirable to draw an absolute distinction between things that comprise the inner self and things that comprise the extended self. Although it might seem possible to suggest an absolute distinction that does not vary over people and situations-e.g. that the inner self comprises the mind and the extended self comprises anything else regarded as ‘me’, or that the proximal core self is capable of engendering pain when it is attacked while the distal extended self is not-such absolute boundaries are inadequate because they fail to recognize individual, cultural, and situational differences in what is phenomenologically a part of self. The extended self is a dynamic concept that changes throughout an individual’s life (Elster, 1985). For instance, to specify that an attack on the extended self does not cause pain seems untenable when people become parents and see their children (found to be part of parents’ extended selves) attacked. As the article notes, boundaries of extended self are perceptual, not physical or physiological. (Belk, 1989, p. 129)

In retrospect, one of the most surprising, and informative, aspects of this exchange is the extent to which Belk and Cohen share a common ontological assumption; consumers possess a core self which is the agentic force instigating the process of cognitive attribution (as per Cohen) or self-extension (as per Belk). However, Belk rejects Cohen’s ‘internal mind’ versus ‘external world’ dualism in favour of a dialectical ontology. His response to Cohen reiterates his foundational premise that ‘the possessions central to self may be visualized in concentric layers around the core self, and will differ over individuals, over time, and over cultures that create shared symbolic meanings for different goods’ (Belk, 1988, p. 152).

As a dialectical structure, the extended self is theoretically invocative of the objects-relation school of psychoanalytic theory (Klein, 1975; Winnicott, 1953). Object-relations theory holds that individuals use ‘objects’ (which can refer to a person, animal, cultural symbol or a material object) to establish, ‘relationships for certain types of emotional sustenance, psychological development or needs, and for bridging the inner and outer worlds, personal and cultural spheres … .People use certain objects from within their environment to develop, manage and mediate their sense of self, others and the external environment’ (Woodward, 2011, p. 373).

Seen in this theoretical light, the extended self emerges from a process of cathexis (i.e. an investment of psychic energy) through which consumers project their desires, unmet needs, fantasies, and idealisations, etc. onto an object and then introject those substantiated attributes back into their self-conceptions (Klein, 1975).¹ When Belk (1988, p. 160) states, ‘we are what we have’ – a statement unintelligible from a dualistic, internal mind vs. external world perspective – he is espousing a dialectical argument that the ‘self’ is constituted through a network of reflexive object-relations.

Yet, Belk’s original trope of ‘concentric circles’ cannot do representational justice to this dialectical conceptualisation because it portrays the extended self as a sequential ordering of discretely bounded domains that emanate from a central core to increasingly distal spheres. When Cohen demands to know exactly where the core self ends and the extended self begins, Belk counters that this fundamental boundary between the core self and its proximate to distal extensions is contextually and phenomenologically relative. This rebuttal, however, elides a key implication of object-relations theory – there is no ‘core’ self and, hence, there is no absolute or relative boundary to be drawn. Rather, there is only a relational self that is fundamentally a being-in-the-(social and material)-world (Heidegger, 1962).

In one of the first major revisions to the original conception of the ‘extended self’, Tian and Belk (2005) conclude that this concentric circle model of the extended self is incompatible with the identity practices highlighted by their study of employees’ workplace possessions:

Contrary to the original formulation of extended self as involving concentric spheres of progressively more distal aspects of collective self (Belk, 1988), we found that work and home selves vie with one another as alternative sources of identity. Rather than forming a well-integrated whole, home and work selves often compete and seek to impose themselves in the physical domain of the other. This is articulated most often as revealing versus concealing the nonwork extended self in the workplace. (Tian & Belk, 2005, p. 308)

This conceptual pivot suggests a less integrated sense of self than did Belk’s (1988) original arguments. In this revised version of the extension process, the parallel dialectical relations between self and home possessions and self and work possessions precipitate a multiphrenic identity whose conflicting components must be managed through practices of strategic revealing and concealing (Tian & Belk, 2005, p. 308). While eschewing the concentric circle trope, Tian and Belk (2005) still exhibit lingering vestiges of this former conceptualisation, as they emphasise the existential significance of managing the boundary between work and home:

The contesting roles of home and work selves, as well as the characteristics of the postmodern corporation, call for boundary permeability between these key spheres of life. How we manage this boundary has a great deal to say about who we are. (Tian & Belk, 2005, p. 309)

To this juncture, we have seen that the extended self is an ontological position that sits between Cohen’s dualistically framed critique and the dialectical ethos of objects-relations psychology. Tian and Belk (2005) recognise some of the conceptual incompatibilities that arise from this betwixt and between ontology but do not fully redress them, as their modification still presumes that there is a core self who is managing the various boundaries that define a consumer’s extended home and work selves.

Re-assembling the object-relations self

When Belk (2013, 2014) updated his original conception in response to the dramatic changes in consumer culture wrought by digitisation, he explicitly disclaimed the dualistic connotations inherent to the ‘core self’ versus ‘extended self’ distinction:

[C]ontrary to Belk (1988), there is no singular core self. As Hood (2012) observes, ‘authorship of actions requires the illusion of a unified sense of self’ (p. 134). It is this powerful illusion of a singular purposeful core self in control of our actions that leads us to over-attribute positive outcomes to our self rather than others or the situation. And, by extension, our perceived control of our digital extended self leads us to feel that these things are a part of us. (Belk, 2013, p. 483)

Although Belk is discussing transformations emanating from the digitisation of consumer culture, this cited passage presents an encompassing, post hoc reflection on the defining tenets of the extended self. At face value, Belk’s rendering of a unified core self as an ‘illusion’ seems to contradict the original phenomenological premise of the extended self – that is, consumers’ subjective perceptions determine the flexible boundary between the core and extended self (Belk, 1988, 1989; also see Stone et al., 2017).

Paradoxically, Belk’s (2013, 2014) digital update actually creates a better alignment between his original conception of the extended self and the tenets of object-relations theory (Winnicott, 1953). From this standpoint, the ‘illusion’ of a core self would refer to the contingent sense of identity that results from consumers’ processes of projection and introjection. Consumers’ ‘non-illusory’ self would refer to the subconscious desires, anxieties, and fears that underlie (and motivate) their identity-defining psychic investments in possessions and their corresponding consumption practices. These subconscious states would not be directly accessible to consumers’ conscious minds (barring therapeutic intervention) but would be indirectly recognised through their sublimation in object-relations.

In keeping with this object-relations frame, Belk’s (2013, 2014) revised version of the extended self could coherently retain a kind of centre-to-periphery structure. Consumers’ subconscious states would be the centre point, or motivational origin, for their acts of object cathexis which, in turn, create a peripheral network of identity constituting object relations. Referring to this network as the ‘extended self’, however, would remain a misnomer. In terms of object-relations theory, consumers would be better described as cathected selves or relational selves.

That semantic quibble aside, Belk (2013, 2014) could have largely resolved the ontological ambiguity manifest in preceding formulations of the extended self (Belk, 1988, 1989; Tian & Belk, 2005). Therefore, it is noteworthy that Belk (2014) does not forge such clarifying connections to object-relations theory. Instead, he moves in an entirely different ontological direction through a discussion of Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005) and Assemblage Theory (Canniford & Bajde, 2016; DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Drawing from these works, Belk (2014) posits that material actants can exert an agentic influence on human actants, such that ‘rather than speaking of the extended sense of self we might equally talk about the extended sense of object’ (Belk, 2014, p. 1110).

In the remainder of this commentary, I pursue the ontological implications of ANT and assemblage theory (aka flat ontologies) for developing a more radical reconceptualisation of the ‘extended self’. From this agencement (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) standpoint, the ‘extended self’ would be understood as a decentralised actor-network in which socio-material actants are brought into contingent alignments through mediating socio-technical and cultural structures and processes and whose transient arrangements produce particular capacities and material traces of continuous and discontinuous changes.

Of course, the origins of assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and ANT (Woolgar & Latour, 1979) predate the digital era by many decades. However, our digitised cultural epoch is now one where assemblages and de-centred agency are no longer abstract, philosophical ideas used to dislodge sedimented cultural beliefs and philosophical outlooks (as per Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Rather, consumers are fully embedded in complex socio-technical assemblages (Jones & Hietanen, 2022; Kozinets et al., 2016; Schöps et al., 2020) and where they routinely engage with bots, algorithms and other AI systems that recursively learn (or mislearn) from the totality of interactions across these constituent socio-technical networks (Vincent, 2023). Consequently, once notoriously obtuse Deleuzian and Latourian conceptions can begin to function as a culturally naturalised, praxeomorphic model for making sense of the world.

To clarify, I am not proposing that this alternative ontology represents the ‘reality’ of consumers’ identities (as objectively observed from an omnipotent viewpoint). Rather, my argument is that it is now becoming possible to understand, in a seemingly common-sensical or intuitive way, the self as being a dynamic, decentred assemblage, just as it has been natural to understand one’s self-identity as an agentic core extended through a network of centre (proximate) to periphery (distal) relations.

A praxeomorphic analysis of the ‘heavy’ to ‘light’ self transition

The way human beings understand the world tends to be at all times praxeomorphic: it is always shaped by the know-how of the day, by what people can do and how they usually go about doing it (Bauman, 2000, p. 56)

According to Bauman (2000), when prevailing modes of economic production, and the technological systems that support them, become sufficiently integrated into the practices of everyday life, they are soon translated into ubiquitous cultural metaphors for making sense of the world at large. Bauman’s discussion of the praxeomorphic changes precipitated by the socio-transformation from ‘heavy’ to ‘light’ capitalism is particularly germane to analysing the extended self’s function as a transitional ontology.

In the heavy capitalist era, corporations gained economic and political power by making massive investments in machinery and labour, as exemplified by the Fordist factory. Accordingly, those in positions of power (e.g. corporate executives, politicians, economic experts) valorised the ideals of stability/predictability, solidity, and rootedness in place (with boundaries and territories being zealously monitored and defended). In contrast, light capitalism (aka the neoliberal era) culturally and economically re-frames such capital investments as resource misallocations that create anti-competitive barriers to flexibility. Light capitalist corporations operate as highly diffused networks, who are essentially symbolic-cultural entities – represented by brands and marketing techniques – and who aggressively seek to minimise their long-term investments in production facilities and in-house workforces. They do so in order to optimise their capacities to rapidly adapt to ever-shifting market, economic, and political conditions.

The neoliberalization of the economy and the emergence of light capitalism also destabilised the employment security that heavy capitalism had once provided to its unionised workforce. Consequently, workers’ everyday lives have become increasingly marked by a pervasive state of precarity, where their economic fate hinges upon their entrepreneurial acumen (see Standing, 2011). In the global economy, the boundaries of the nation-state have also become highly permeable to global flows (moving resources in all directions) and, hence, no longer buffer its citizenry from the whims of global market forces, as protectionist economic policies have been steadily dismantled under the auspices of the World Bank and the WTO (Harvey, 2005).

Bauman (2000, 2007) famously proposed that the era of light capitalism is best represented by the metaphor of liquidity. However, ‘liquidity’ lacks the praxeomorphic resonance that Bauman attributed to the machine and the Fordist factory as cultural models for understanding life in the era of heavy capitalism. Our everyday lives and practical know-how are not domains of ‘liquidity’. Rather, the network serves this praxeomorphic function. As a mundane example of naturalised know-how, ‘smart homes’ are now arranged as a network of interactive, automated technologies that can be remotely controlled from anywhere, thereby diffusing our very concept of ‘home’ across an extended arrangement of spatial and temporal nodes (see Hoffman & Novak, 2017). In a parallel fashion, Belk (2013) discusses that consumers’ interactions with social media now distributes their experiences, memories, personal knowledge, and identities across an array of technological platforms. And, free-agent neoliberal workers are culturally and institutionally encouraged to view themselves as adaptable entities who continuously expand their assemblages of human capital in response to a dynamic network of market connections and opportunities (McGuigan, 2014). At every turn, it seems that we are embedded in networks and that our life experiences (and identities) emerge from movements across these networks.

Now, let’s revisit the fractious exchange between Cohen (1989) and Belk (1989), with a sensitivity to their differing praxeomorphic models, rather than their more overt paradigmatic and theoretical disputes. Cohen’s challenge to the theoretical viability of the extended self presupposes a ‘heavy self’ that is stable and anchored to its established preferences, emotional predispositions, and cognitive habits. While such ‘heavy selves’ might feel a sense of remorse (or elation) over a valued possession that was lost (or acquired), their deeply rooted (i.e. internalised) mental representations and somatic predispositions remain distinct from these external circumstances.

In contrast, Belk (1988) advocated for an understanding of the self as a ‘lighter’, more mobile, and adaptable social construction that could be readily transformed through its relations to the socio-material world. In this vein, Belk (1988) anticipated Bauman’s (2000) argument that light capitalism has engendered new ‘indices of social standing, position, power and prestige’ which depend upon individuals’ ‘degree of “connectedness”, the density of the respective networks which made them into nodes, and the quantity of other nodes they could link to at will’ (p. 154).

Such an ontology also suggests an inevitable disparity between consumers’ phenomenological experiences (I am the agentic locus of my identity network) and their structural condition of being situated in a dispersed network of relations where no isolated actant is more inherently central than another. Belk’s (2013, 2014) subsequent ‘coreless’ revision of the extended self reflects this schism by privileging the structural over the phenomenological:

The idea of a core self is an illusion that we sustain by continually updating our self-narrative in a way that provides a sense of stability in the midst of change. (Belk, 2014, p. 1110)

Yet, Belk’s ‘lighter’ (and less phenomenological) praxeomorphic self still carries some burdensome ontological remnants of the heavy self. Accordingly, his core self-as-illusion explanation raises several thorny ontological questions: 1) how does this updating process happen without a centralised or core self who is exerting authorial agency; 2) for whom does this illusion exist if not a core, authorial self; and 3) why are consumers’ stabilising updates to their self-narratives necessarily illusory?

In object-relations terms, the agentic force creating the illusion of a stable, core self would be a consumer’s subconscious mind. However, the self of object-relations theory is a ‘heavy’ ontological construct, grounded in the obdurate subconscious imprints of early life psychodramas (Klein, 1975). To lighten the extended self, therefore, Belk (2013, 2014), seeks to completely excise ‘the core self’ (and all vestiges of object-relation’s identity anchoring processes), while still maintaining the incongruent idea of self-extension. Consequently, Belk’s lighter theorisation cannot escape the conceptual demand that the extended self has to have some kind of agentic centre from which it is ‘extended’. Consequently, his updated conceptualisation of a ‘coreless extended self’ problematically underspecifies the agentic force producing both these identity extensions and the ‘illusion’ of possessing a core self.

For Belk (2013, 2014) to disentangle this melange of light and heavy ontologies, he needed access to a praxeomorphic model that had not yet gained cultural currency. Almost ten years later, we now have such a model and can more fully re-envision the self as a ‘light’ ontological entity distributed across a network of actants.

Distributing consumers

Our current techno-political and economic environment is beginning to offer a nexus of practical exemplars for conceptualising ‘consumers’ as entities whose identities are distributed across a decentralised network. One such exemplar is provided by Arvidsson and Caliandro’s (2016) concept of a brand public, which refers to social media users who aggregate around a brand (in a manner akin to a flash mob) that draws audience attention (in the form of likes and shares) to their respective social media profiles. As these authors explain, the discursive device of the #—as in #louisvuitton – provides the technological means for this heterogeneous assortment of actors to collectively assemble in a flexible and transient socio-technical network that is not grounded in communal interactions or emotional commitments to the publicity-generating brand. In a similar spirit, Jones and Hietanen (2022) analyse how users of the r/wallstreetbets subreddit were able to coordinate a massive number of stock purchases in ways that completely destabilised the ‘short buy’ strategy of Melvin Capital. As they further discuss, these rebellious actions were not mobilised by a grand political strategy or commands from a centralised leadership; rather, they were merely a subversive capability afforded by a technologically mediated aggregation (i.e. #GameStop).

Perhaps the best exemplar of this emerging praxeomorphic age is block chain technology (also known as distributed ledger technology) and its uses for cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and a myriad of other database applications. The following passage offers the standard description of blockchain technology:

A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains a number of transactions, and every time a new transaction occurs on the blockchain, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger (Hutt, 2016)

As blockchain technologies culturally diffuse, their applications will extend beyond the tracking of transactions, such as functioning as ‘a regulator of Internet of Things networks to identify devices connected to a wireless network, monitor the activity of those devices, determine how trustworthy those devices are and to automatically assess the trustworthiness of new devices being added to the network, such as cars and smartphones’²

The blockchain and the ‘Internet of Things’ tropes offer a praxeomorphic means to address the ontological problem highlighted by Belk’s (2013, 2014) comments about the illusory nature of core self – how can 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? Rather than casting consumers’ sense of coherent identity as an illusory ideal, we can view their self-narratives as the praxeomorphic equivalent to a distributed ledger that tracks their experiences across a dynamic network of actants (and contexts). This self-ledger is distributed across mentally and somatically encoded memories; material, analogue, and digital instantiations; routinised practices and their institutional infrastructures; socially shared experiences; and public memories that can be recalled, represented, and interconnected in different ways. The stability of this distributed self is, therefore, not an illusion. Rather, it is a continuously updated summary of the material, symbolic, and virtual traces of past interactions that have coalesced into its current representational form.

Importantly, this distributed self does not exist independently of the network in which it is embedded and transformed over time, and thus no singular actant controls these situational changes to the ledger of the self – the assemblage updates ‘the distributed self’ by leaving interactional and experiential marks on its constituent actants. The idea of the distributed self also effaces the conventional conceptual boundary between personal/private and collective memories (see for example Marcoux, 2016). The dispersed network remembers us as much as we remember it.

Conclusion: the end of “consumer research”?

Using the lens of praxeomorphic analysis, I have argued that Belk’s evolving writings on the extended self are a transitional ontological treatise through which consumer researchers have gradually shifted from an understanding of consumer identities as being anchored by a stable core self (a ‘heavy’ ontology) to a lighter ontological understanding of consumers’ identity practices (e.g. Bardhi et al., 2012, Bardhi & Eckhardt, 2017). Consumer researchers are now deploying this ‘light’ ontology to analyse all forms of consumer experience as assemblages and actor-networks (Canniford & Shankar, 2013; Hoffman & Novak, 2017; Preece et al., 2019). These studies explore how agency is diffused across a network of human and non-human actants, whereby material objects systematically influence the actions and goals of consumers (Bode & Kristensen, 2016; Epp & Price, 2010; Hoffman & Novak, 2017; Scaraboto & Figueiredo, 2017); and how seemingly subjective human emotions and motivations, are produced, diffused, amplified, shared, and commoditized across socio-technical networks (Bajde et al., 2021; Figueiredo & Scaraboto, 2016; Kozinets et al., 2016).

As a closing caveat, my attempt to derive ‘new’ praxeomorphic insights from Belk’s canonical writings on the extended self is unnervingly analogous to the proverbial military leaders who are always fighting the last war in their contemporary battle plans. As the pace of digital technological advances continues to accelerate, the cultural lifecycle of praxeomorphic tropes will likely also be shortened. At the time of writing, it is much easier to, for example, envision consumers’ self-concepts as distributed ledgers, than it was in 2014, because crypto currencies, crytobanks, NFTs, and other blockchain technologies (as well as the distributed and synchronised Internet of Things) have now become part of the cultural conversation, rather than being esoteric entities looming on the mystifying, bleeding edge of technological innovation. However, this potentially new praxeomorphic outlook may be obsolete before it ever has a chance to become culturally naturalised on the order of Web 2.0 tropes. As I write, a broad array of cultural practices, across all spheres of society, are being rapidly and extensively disrupted by advances in AI/machine learning/artificial neural networks (soon to be turbocharged by advances in quantum computing; Rawat et al., 2022).

At some point, our prevailing ontological categories may be even more radically reconfigured than they have been by the praxeomorphic models afforded by light capitalism and the digitisation of consumer culture. ChatGPT and similar AI applications are but rudimentary harbingers of this rapidly dawning praxeomorphic era. Accordingly, it is hard to clearly envision, just as it was for Belk (2013, 2014), how this brave new socio-technical world may eventually alter consumer researchers’ ontological assumptions. Looking ahead, albeit from the inherently myopic gaze of the present, I postulate that the next imminent turn in this praxeomorphic cycle may potentially render ‘consumer research’ as an archaic enterprise.

To elaborate, consumer researchers drawing from assemblage theory primarily treat consumers as comparatively central nodes in these relational networks. Consumers are naturally understood to be the critical ‘actants’ who make the deciding choices and coordinate the array of objects and technologies that situate their consumption practices (Carrington & Ozanne, 2022), (for notable exceptions see Arnould, 2022; Campbell & Deane, 2019; Campbell & McHugh, 2016). As a very practical illustration, many of the works cited in this commentary hail from the Journal of Consumer Research, not for example, the Journal of Distributed Consumption Networks. Just as the concept of the ‘extended self’ manifested latent assumptions about the existence of a ‘core self’, the vernacular of consumer research tacitly ascribes a centrality to the human actants who assume the market position/identity of consumers.

This ontological orientation presumes that humans (aka consumers) possess a special kind of agency/consciousness that distinguishes them from non-human actants. However, AI technologies now simulate, sometimes in functionally superior ways, many activities and skills that have been regarded as being quintessentially human – artistic creativity, goal-driven problem solving, interactive communication, self-corrective learning, playing games, recognising emotions, diagnosing illnesses – and the list expands almost daily. 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, as evinced by the prospect of legal and moral rights eventually being granted to AGI systems (Peng, 2018). On a conceptually related note, Haynes and Hietanen (2023) discuss how the diffusion of block technologies may radically restructure and expand the sharing economy and, thereby, precipitate a new form of capitalised sociality that renders marketing – at least in its current form emphasising trust and enduring customer relationships – obsolete.

To further conjecture about a future ontology of consumption, we can take some clues from science fiction (Dick, 1981) and Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom’s (2003) once outlandish theoretical hypothesis that ‘existence’ could be a multiverse of simulated realities – a thesis that is gaining increasing traction among philosophers and physicists (Poole, 2022). Using this admittedly enigmatic praxeomorphic trope of simulation, we can begin to envision a time when those studying market behaviours and consumption practices may no longer find it natural, interesting, or even plausible to investigate questions about how products, brands, and other market symbols relate to consumers’ lives, identity goals, perceptions, and preferences. Rather, the relevant research questions might entail a shift in ontological focus whereby ‘consumer researchers’ take it as an axiomatic premise that assemblages of products, brands, AI algorithms, technological platforms, marketing strategies and human actants generate specific market outcomes, consumption practices, and recursive modifications. In such an ontological framework, human (or perhaps cyborg) actants, like the other nodes in these assemblages, might be analysed as localised articulations of an algorithm, whose emergent function is to fabricate a world based on its generative, self-adapting codes. Such an ontology might also re-imagine culture, not as a system of discourses, meanings, values, norms, performative scripts, etc. but as yet another kind of self-learning and self-monitoring algorithmic assemblage that generates multiple realities distributed across spatio-temporal settings.

Rather than ‘consumer research’, with a subfield of consumer culture theory – and where the study of consumption assemblages is a siloed CCT subspeciality (Arnould & Thompson, 2019), this ontologically reconfigured field might transmogrify into the study of how consumption worlds are algorithmically arranged, disrupted and recursively transformed through interactive arrangements among their constituent actants. Given that ‘consumption world’ researchers and ‘marketing managers’ (a contemporary category also primed for ontological redefinition) would also be interdependent actants in these recursive arrangements, such a future ontological orientation would pose some very complex and challenging reflexive questions.

Whether or not my fuzzy speculations prove to be remotely accurate is beside the point. The mere act of asking how the ‘extended self’ has (or will) change in the era of digitisation, AI, and subsequently AGI, is to subtly acknowledge that what we now culturally recognise as ‘consumers’, ‘consumer culture’, ‘consumer research’ and ‘marketing’ are historical assemblages whose tenuous balance of continuous and discontinuous change seems to be tipping (and dizzyingly so) towards the latter.

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Craig J. Thompson

Craig J. Thompson is the Churchill-Bascom Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research investigates the socio-cultural shaping of consumer identity and the politics of consumption.

Notes

1. Projection can also correspond to negative, unwanted, or unwanted aspects of the self that are transposed to an object, giving rise to a defence mechanism known as splitting (Klein, 1975).

2. Source: https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-blockchain.html.