It is not consumption technologies that have put the ‘self’ in peril

ABSTRACT

Craig Thompson (2024) offers an analysis of how Belk’s distinction between the consumer’s core self and extended self continues to be conceptually ambiguous and persistently troublesome as an onto epistemological foundation in consumer research. He notes that the recent proliferation of consumer technologies may lead us to finally see things for what they are and thus to forsake our lingering longing for an agentic core self in control. We offer a theological reading that stretches backwards for insights to what guarantees us the very problem of the self and the questions we can ask of it. We also offer grounds for believing that the trouble goes back to times immemorial, is largely non-negotiable, and is here to stay.

KEYWORDS:

• Core self
• extended self
• theology
• Christianity
• ideology
• digitalisation
• automation

Introduction

[To be a Christian] is to experience a profound vertigo. For here there is nothing to take hold of […] neither measure nor anything else […] And thus the soul, slipping at every point from what cannot be grasped, becomes dizzy and perplexed. (Ward, 2000, p. 91)

Culturally oriented consumer research, as any field of study, can only operate by reproducing numerous axiomatic assumptions that form an implicit mythology of its own being and purpose (Fitchett et al., 2014). Some particularly salient ones include the assumption of consumption as that from which social life itself stems from, and that consumers are generally benign and agentic beings who found their consumption on meaningfulness that follows teleology and purpose (Ahlberg et al., 2022; Cluley & Dunne, 2012; Coffin & Egan-Wyer, 2022). These assumptions are grounded in a mixture of modernist and postmodernist notions of an individualistic selfhood that coherently constitutes itself and only then relates, negotiates, and performs realities in a world of commodified wants. This notion of the consumer-as-centre is also an irreducible product of the ‘epistemic convenience’ (Venkatesh, 1995, p. 28) to primarily found research on emic data that guarantees the sanctity of individualised consumer experience and the reality of consumption as a foundation for social relations. Typically operationalised through ethnographic interviews, those tirelessly tinkering shibboleths of meaning, we certainly tend to get what we ask for (Askegaard & Linnet, 2011; Moisander et al., 2009). What is this self where everything continues to start from and how did we get here?

To work through this conundrum, Craig Thompson (2024) provides an interjection that seeks to force us to think. In his sweeping review, he insists that it is high time to reconsider how the onto-epistemological assumptions of the self are construed and reproduced in our field. Through a critique of Russell Belk’s oeuvre concerning the distinction between the consumer’s core self and extended self (and their subsequent reception), he produces a historical continuum of how interpretive consumer research has approached the self, and offers some potentials for its future trajectory. His analysis shows how the notion of a core self, the idea of a foundational innermost being of a person, is laden with inconsistencies and has gone through continuous fragmentation following psychoanalytical and non-representational developments. Craig also notes that in contrast to the extended self that opens up to the outside of incessant consumption and its symbolism, a core self continues to be rewritten with a generous amount of inertia that manages to preserve a relatively agentic centre.

Craig starts by noting that the ‘broader ontological implications’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 555) of the distinction between a core and extended self have not been notably developed in consumer research. The situation has not been helped by the numerous ambiguities in Belk’s iteratively changing explanations of selfhood. What seems to remain constant is an ongoing distribution of the conceptual boundaries of a true and coherent inner self, while an ideological clinging on to ‘lingering vestiges’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 558) of a core self ‘who is managing the various boundaries’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 559) remains. It would thus seem that the ‘unknown knowns’ (Žižek, 2006, p. 137) of a core self persist as an impossible but triumphantly productive object even as everything in culture speaks for its perennial relationality, malleability, and even incoherent madness (see Tadajewski, 2022, 2023). Without a theoretical account about where the privileging of any part of the core-extended-self distinction emanates from, we are destined to plod through little more than one assumption after another that necessarily stem from the very ideological grounds of consumer culture itself. If this remains the case, any question regarding whether the distinctions between cores or extensions be maintained or abandoned will simply perpetuate the very cultural tendencies such questions are intended to superficially critique. We would instead like to examine the following two issues. The first regards the cultural tendencies that, we claim, surreptitiously and tirelessly work beneath the veil of quotidian social life and thus guarantee a foundation from which to approach selfhood. The second one asks why do we trust the truth of this foundation even as it and its origins have seemingly vanished?

To approach these questions, after first reviewing some of the key points Craig highlights, we will rapidly move beyond the immediate writings of consumer research. We propose a theological account of a self in peril that brings back more than perhaps bargained for in Belk’s (1989) early recognition of how any self is ‘influenced by culture’s effects on our perceptions’ (p. 129). The self is both an enigma and a production, but what is it that creates the conditions for both the former and the latter?

Craig’s introjection

Craig catalogues Belk’s tumultuous development of a notion of a consumer self that is relationally attached to its (commodified) surroundings. While being contested from positivistic perspectives, Belk maintained a distinction between an integrated core self and an extended self that is deeply embedded in the symbolic and narrative production of consumer culture. While a notion of a singular core self assumed notable agentic primacy, the extended self was always dipped in ambiguous metaphysics that iteratively opens up and distributes itself to the outside of consumption. What was at first a relatively clear distinction continues to fragment. In more recent work inspired by the ongoing digitalisation of consumer culture, Belk’s (2013) core self has emerged into ‘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’ (p. 1110).

However, it remains clear that in all these accounts that Belk went on to develop, there is a keen tendency to ‘retain a kind of centre-to-periphery structure’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 559) which demands ‘that the extended self has to have some kind of agentic centre from which it is “extended”’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 562). The analytical work the noted distinction does becomes increasingly indistinct, even as it has remained deeply attractive for interpretive consumer researchers ideologically, epistemologically, and methodologically. Craig’s slightly implicit key point, it seems to us, is that because developing the notion of self has been typically left to the level of definitional word play, what we lack are theoretically nuanced accounts of where the commonplace assumptions of self hail from. There remains an inherent tension between fragmenting a core self into the currents of cultural embeddedness while concurrently miraculating it as a starting point of analysis. What we seem to have here are simultaneous centrifugal yearnings to shatter the self indefinitely and to constantly reconstitute its centripetal harmony, coherence, and incontestable being.

Craig’s additional key point is that we are now witnessing and experiencing a gargantuan proliferation of consumer technologies that both distribute and assume agency away from the ostensibly focal consumer self. This creates a novel necessity to understand any “heavy” ontology of the core self’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 555) as a myth. To do so, Craig notes that the recent development of technologies such as the automation of behavioural data gathering and manipulation direct us to recognise the deep fragmentation of any selfhood and may bring about a situation where the ‘tenuous balance of continuous and discontinuous change seems to be tipping (and dizzyingly so) toward the latter’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 566). It would seem that ideologically, consumer culture’s individualism continues to rest on very persistent myths of a responsible self in control that is somehow free to choose as an island (e.g. Fitchett et al., 2014; Tadajewski & Higgins, 2023; Thompson & Kumar, 2021). It does thus seem strange not only why so little consumer resistance and public outcry there has been about the automation of consumption technologies, which plunder consumer experience and work to profitably take over choice and sociality (Haynes & Hietanen, 2023), but even more so, how such technological proliferation seduces through notions of relevance and convenience (Darmody & Zwick, 2020; Dholakia et al., 2021). Such changes in consumer culture have indeed become more visible and are echoed in notions where coherent individuality is constantly commodified, manipulated, and thus dividualised (Bruno & Rodríguez, 2022; Hietanen et al., 2022). However, what readily happens in such analyses is that the gaze is poised forward and thus does not focus on the historical conditions that culturally ground such movement. While such tendencies may indeed be ‘now becoming possible to understand’ (Thompson, 2024, p. 560), the impulse by which they have been set in motion is in no way recent. Today, such arcane forces may be shrouded, but they are not innocent in how they gift us a grand capacity for amnesia (see Tadajewski & Saren, 2008).

Unpacking both Craig’s comments further and tracing them back to what was specifically said and left unsaid in Belk’s original writing would be a worthwhile task. However, in this essay, this is precisely what we will not engage in to depart towards a completely different direction. We thus move to show how the self is to be seen theologically in Christian dogma, one that is implicitly hidden beneath all consumer culture, and thus to suggest that it is by no means technological developments that herald the idea of a distributed, asymmetrical, wounded, and unhealable self. By additionally establishing Christianity as a grand belief system of its own disappearance, we make some additional notes on how it mirrors capitalist consumer culture, the incessant aspirations of technological development to replace the social, and how it is all but impossible to resist or meaningfully negotiate that which works by constantly destroying its own foundations.

Looking backwards by not jumping forwards

Craig develops the concept of selfhood in consumer research by elaborating how various psychoanalytical and relational theorising have increasingly made the maintenance of an integrated and coherent self more difficult in theory. He concludes that these changes in thinking are now actualising in practice through the digitalisation of consumption that may well dismantle commonplace self-centred epistemologies of consumer research. To elaborate on the need for onto-epistemological rethinking due to technological proliferation, Craig seeks to explore novel changes in culture and scholarship – changes that incline themselves to the future. In attempts to look for a difference that can make a difference and to see why we have the self that we do, we turn our gaze backwards to offer further grounds where the impulse of change, fragmentation, and the essential self in peril originate from. While their appearances may seem novel, some ideas that today resist detection have been founded in Western thought since time immemorial. For us, the question of the contemporary self lies in how the very question of its deconstruction can be asked. To found a self in consumer culture, we need to look far backward to theology rather than forward to technology. They share common ideological grounds, but there are certain tendencies that surreptitiously keep us from recognising what it is we are attempting to see.

By continuing our work on the inherently theological Christian grounds in consumer culture (Botez et al., 2020), our approach works not by adopting theology into novel forms of marketing scholarship or consumption phenomena. Instead, we draw conceptual attention to the theology which is already there – largely forgotten in the murky foundations of culture. We are thus critical of the exotic, yet quite popular tendency to attach spiritual questions to various consumption contexts, or to mix up consumer research with various theological positions for the purpose of creating morality-infused models that can, in turn, serve as panacea for all the perceived ills of late capitalism (overconsumption, pollution, etc.). There is much more to the story.

We have already noted how Christianity as a totalising cultural foundation operates through a grand act of disappearance and denying its own origins (Botez et al., 2020). Using Böhme’s (2014) helpful dialectic, the present presences of Christianity such as recognisable and representational customs, tradition, and associated practices may offer an image of identity and stability in any local milieu, but these belie the present absences of deep dogma that work in the cultural background. Their original foundation was the eradication of the Hellenistic essences that predated them. In time, however, as Christianity expanded far beyond its cradle, this extended over every other view that recognises the reality of such elements. Instead, what was put in place is an ambiguous God that is perennially unknowable, unfathomable, and fragmented (see Branson, 2014; Chrysostom, 1984). Instead of totalising certainty, Christianity is founded on a boundless fluctuation of appearances (Maspero, 2010). An unfathomable essenceless world without identity in itself is an endlessly changeable, thus malleable one: once change is set in motion, what triumphs is the absolute demand for change itself. The biblical myth of the Fall of Man attests to this, demanding an incessant striving to ascend the now broken human condition. With the self forever stained with transgression and incompleteness and facing the unknowable, what is gifted to humanity is, according to Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-c. 394), a hope of salvation expressed in perennial reconstitution (see Douglass, 2005).

The situation was the opposite in Hellenistic thought. For the Greeks, the goal was not to constantly look to the outside for betterment and salvation, but to reach the fixed, pure sphere of ideas. Anthropologically speaking, that entailed a total movement inward in order to find a resolution in essence. The symbol of the completion of such a move was a perfect sphere: the Self turned into itself, ‘well-rounded and spherical, so that nothing extraneous can adhere to it’ (Hadot, 1998, p. 119; see also Graver, 2002). It was to become a sage that has no wound at the centre of their being. Today, we have no meaningful way to think this thinking. Instead, once we put aside popular romantic portrayals, to us the figure of the Hellenistic sage might resemble that of a sociopath, or perhaps someone like the Marquis de Sade or Hannibal of The Silence of the Lambs fame. Indeed, Hannibal repeatedly gestures towards this model. As he declares in the Hannibal TV series, ‘You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. I’m not the product of anything¹’. Our culture today is incapable of conceiving such movement, let alone the characters it generates. Contemporary psychoanalysis, that can only operate through an unresolvable wound in being, would have been meaningless to such figures, as would our clingy attachment and relational indebtedness to difference and outward change.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the great French sociologist, and often considered to be the father of anarchism, offered some insights into the paradoxes at the heart of Christianity. He noted how ‘[a]ll progress begins by abolishing something’ (Proudhon, 1969, p. 101). Christianity founds its historical model based on constant progress by ‘denying the plurality of gods’, thus by ‘becoming atheistic’ (Proudhon, 1969). This is a deeply puzzling model. Importantly, Proudhon’s conjecture of Christianity becoming atheistic should not be read as a figure of speech. Indeed, there are several instances from as early as the mid-2nd century where the Christians were called ‘the most atheist ones’ by the Greek-Roman pagans. Far from taking it as an insult, they acknowledged it. Justin Martyr (c.100-c.165) ‘admitted that the Christians were indeed atheists regarding their attitude toward the pagan gods’ (Bremmer, 2007, p. 21). In the Martyrdom of Polycarp (c. 160) ‘we are told how Christians were martyred while the crowd was shouting, “Away with these atheists!”’ (Bremmer, 2007, pp. 20–21). Now, of course, there are many critical voices who find the idea of progress very problematic to say the least. We have, however, to keep in mind that, at the time, an outward oriented move without a definite end in sight was revolutionary. In contrast, for Aristotle, as he put it in On the Soul, ‘the progress is into one’s own (already) perfectly realised self’ (see Cué, 2017) – thus suggesting some sort of circularity, one which perfectly mirrors the sage’s centripetal movement.

While these thoughts may sound strange to readers more familiar with the representations of Christian present presences, they do continue to reverberate in scholarship today. A few years before his passing, the French philosopher and Derrida’s student Jean-Luc Nancy, noted the following about Christianity (see Cué, 2017):

Christianity is not made of religion. It was made from a profound mutation of Mediterranean humanity when it needed to emerge from the Ancient World, a world of limits, a finite world, and what we could even call de-finition. Everywhere there were gods with precise functions, rules to comply with, models to imitate and fixed horizons. At some point, that all crumbled […] So then a desire for the infinite, and the promise of infinity began. This attainment produced a change in civilization, culture and society. (emphasis added)

We emphasised particular descriptions of the Mediterranean Ancient World. Against this, Christianity emerges as a curiously anti-religious movement, unravelling everything that had to do with fixity. Jean-François Lyotard (1993) also noted the contrast to the pagan world, when he asked rhetorically: ‘What does the Christian want? To bring connection into disrepute and almost to disconnect it: the next […] As a result of this disconnection, more singularities’ (pp. 8–9). A similar sentiment was famously also put forth by Nietzsche, in how Christianity desires ‘to destroy, shatter, stupefy, intoxicate’, and ‘the one thing it does not desire is measure’ (Nietzsche, 2005, p. 66, emphasis added). The full ramifications of this ‘immense reorganization of culture’ (Foucault, 2002, p. 48) are constantly unravelling. What is important for the time being is to emphasise that with the advent of Christianity, a new definition of what is to be human appeared. It was based on the great disorder, or in other words, the annihilation of the Self.

Speaking of new definitions of what it is to be human, one of the earliest examples of an anthropological anti-definitional model can be found in a collection of sayings of the Desert Fathers, which compiled various maxims and events from inhabitants of the Egyptian desert between the late 3rd and 6th centuries. One of these figures, Alonios, who lived somewhere around the 4th century, is recorded as saying: ‘If I had not destroyed my Self completely, I should not have been able to rebuild and shape it anew’ (Sandiopoulos, 2015). He says ‘completely’, not only something like an extended self. Around the same time, Basil of Caesarea, who lived in what is today Central Anatolia (Turkey), described the human as a being without an essence and without a fixed foundation. As he wrote, when it comes to the humans, we do not meddle about their essence, or as emphasised by Gregory of Nyssa, because essence is ‘in absolutely none of them’ (Gregory of Nyssa, 1978, p. 60, emphasis added). If we take away each of the qualities someone possesses – colour, temperature, height, etc. – we will arrive at no core whatsoever (Basil of Caesarea, 1886). None.

Moving forward to what we might call early modernity, we can see that these views continue to loom large. As Giovanni Pico della Mirandola suggested in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), a document considered to be the manifesto of Renaissance humanism (Borghesi, 2012), Adam was given by God ‘no definite place, no form proper […] no special inheritance […] You alone are bound by no limit’ (as quoted in Cassirer, 2020, p. 85). With the anthropological Self getting fundamentally reconfigured, everything else that revolves around this issue gets affected as well. For example, epistemology: how is knowledge represented? If we might quote Aristotle, often referred to as a founding champion of empirical science, ‘there will be fixed essences of all things of which there are sciences’ (Aristotle, 1933, p. 63) – science of unalterable foundation. While interpretivist scholars may today view what has become known as positivism as an old hat aspiration to Truth, there remains a most powerful commitment to Popperian falsificationism in all scientific activity. This entails that everything is necessarily incomplete, as there is always an open door for scholarship that will upset previous facts. Today, any absolute and unchangeable belief might resemble something quite unscientific – and suddenly we encounter religious belief, superstition, and fanaticism again. Interesting coincidence, perhaps?

Relationality to the rescue?

One can find contemporary guises of the present absences all around us today in terms of how subjectivity is produced. Their movement is writ large in relational philosophy as well. A common thread in poststructural theorising is to find emancipatory potential in extending towards the unknown by liberating affect and by always breaking down structures. As Jacques Derrida (1981) noted, deconstruction consists of ‘an immense and interminable work’ (p. 35). In Deleuze and Guattari (2004) this is summarised by the necessity to always ‘increase your territory by deterritorialization’ (p. 11). There is thus an inherent movement of addition and dissemination, one that puzzlingly operates through processes of subtraction (n-1). We might also remember Proudhon’s point that in order to create incessant change, one always needs to abolish something. Coercive and despotic fixed elements from the symbolic universe are to be constantly de-essentialized or deterritorialised or, as Agamben would put it, rendered inoperative. The more this happens, the more différance enters production, and with it, ever more experimentation in commoditization and consumption follow – social phenomena so dear to us.

To return to our present task, let us also quickly comment on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) influential work on capitalist dissemination: Empire. They note that:

As the prefix ‘post-’ should indicate, postmodernist and postcolonialist theorists never tire of critiquing and seeking liberation from the past forms of rule and their legacies in the present […] We suspect that postmodernist and postcolonialist theories may end up in a dead end because they fail to recognize adequately the contemporary object of critique, that is, they mistake today’s real enemy. What if the modern form of power these critics (and we ourselves) have taken such pains to describe and contest no longer holds sway in our society? […] In this case, modern forms of sovereignty would no longer be at issue, and the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule! (pp. 137–138)

We might replace the ‘modern forms of sovereignty’ with modern forms of self. This substitution is not at all a stretch given that the core self has also been known as the sovereign self (Foucault, 1989). Hence, following Hardt and Negri’s line of reasoning, we ask: what if the core self and the related forms of power (agency, rationality, choice) – that for decades we have taken such pains to critique and deconstruct – would suddenly ‘no longer be an issue’ anymore, and the postmodernist, post-structuralist, and posthumanist strategies ‘that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce’ a far more elusive hegemony than the one these strategies claim to be dismantling? We believe that this is exactly what is constantly taking place in the incessant proliferation of present presences in contemporary consumer culture that fervently spread difference and laboriously chip away at the self’s being. It can do nothing else because no other sense can make sense to us.

Indeed, we might give ourselves a congratulatory pat on the back that we’ve finally annihilated the core self by employing cutting edge academic tools with proliferating ‘posts’ as their prefix. The reality, however, is that post-annihilation, a great deal has not changed. Quite the opposite: the hegemony of the present absences simply becomes more embedded in the invisible fabric of culture, surreptitiously becoming stronger all the time in its grand disappearance. By removing another perceived fixity (i.e. the core self), we disseminated the absences – and thus multiplied the presences – further through subtraction (n-1).

In this context, Craig is right to criticise the notion of core self and the related inconsistencies that such a constructions create. However, an additional question that needs to be asked is: cui bono? Countless books and articles have been published in the past fifty years or so that denounce and deconstruct capitalism and consumerism. And yet, as it very much seems today, both continue to live their best lives against all the odds and an entire horizon of melancholy and misery (Ahlberg et al., 2021; Fisher, 2009). It now even seems that capitalism and consumerism can indeed function perfectly without any of the assumed issues of modernity that were believed to support and legitimise them. In fact, they seem to do better now that it appears that the hang-ups of individuality, agency, and choice are increasingly being reduced to the scrap heap of the humanist niceties of modernity. The immanent lure of convenience and the dopamine of restless aspiration constantly overwhealm any critical academic or activist texts trying to convince the consumer to let go of these illusory traits. Such calls harken back to a rational core self that increasingly resembles an annoying speed bump on the amazing street of more and faster, or what Mark Fisher (2014) called ‘thought at the speed of business’ (p. 345). Business ethics and sustainability within capitalist consumer culture are merely less than diversions (see Bradshaw & Zwick, 2016). We understand: these words will put almost all critical and radical scholars on their mettle. However, more+faster is exactly what happens once the hindrances of meaningful agency are reduced from the process. For all its incoherencies, Belk’s (1988) self manages to make this exact point, right towards the end: ‘We may speculate that the stronger the individual’s unextended or core self, the less the need to acquire’ (p. 159, emphasis added). The problem naturally is that beyond word play, we do not have a core self to retreat to.

Thus, what is illustrative here is the following paradox: the criticism of the issue of core self is nothing but a gateway through which the present presences of more+faster enters into our lives (see Holt, 2002) – another such portal being the dopamine of the convenience and relevance of consumption technologies for marketers and consumers alike (Darmody & Zwick, 2020). Almost 160 years have passed since the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital and we have yet to see critical scholarship make much of a meaningful dent (Fisher, 2014) to the infinitely malleable armour of the Empire. In fact, every time a class in critical marketing and consumer research is taught, or a paper or a book chapter is published, the therapeutic difference it proliferates pushes the present absences further into disappearance, making the gateways through which the present presences keep flooding, wider, disseminating a relentless and, and, and …

Are we saying that such notions – the core self – should not be criticised? Not at all. Of course, they should, and they must. But we might draw attention to some of the paradoxes of these approaches – paradoxes which are, to the best of our knowledge, virtually absent in contemporary scholarship. An additional point we would like to put forth in respect to the anti-core’s methodological and epistemological tools that appear to be liberatory is that they are always arriving too late. This has primarily to do with a redefinition of the concept of what is indeed liberatory. The very sense of the word liberation, as it is used within the noted areas of scholarship and research, is exclusively infused by the meaning that the Christian system gives it: liberation from structures that have to do with limits, fixity, and certainty.

No way out?

One more point might need to be considered, and it concerns Christianity as a metanarrative and a counter-totality. Yes, there are important voices in the contemporary scholarship that are not just increasingly recognising the importance of theology but are also actively working in bringing theological approaches into various fields. Accordingly, there is also a growing field of research of the X and theology² type, linking contemporary authors (most of them self-declared atheists, or at least agnostics) with theological interpretations of the kind we are presenting here. We do not intend to give Christianity a break, so let it be far from us to introduce our approach as Christian apologetics. Our method and what it might mean to our understanding of the self in peril, albeit similar to what is already on the market, is also different in some fundamental ways. One of the differences regards the negative, almost instinctively made association between boundedness, or finitude, and religion – whichever that religion might be, Christianity included. In a paradoxical way, the moment some analytical light is shone on theology is the moment that its disappearance is also under way. In other words, when the theology tends to be brought in (metanarrative), the theology that is already there will end up obliterating it (counter-totality).

This, in many ways, describes the situation that we’re addressing with respect to Craig’s essay: the only reason we bring the core self up is to deconstruct it and to show that there’s no such thing as a core. Thus, contrary to many (sometimes celebratory) voices, we’re not dealing with, let alone proposing, a theological revival. The observed temptation is to fix theology into a here-and-there, into a space – in the exact same way that the Occupy Wall Street movement identified (metaphorically or not) capitalism with the New York’s financial district. The implication was that capitalism is the financial district, is the big banks, the wealthiest 1%. Anything that is in context can become a metanarrative and thus serve as a causal explanation leading to all sorts of deterministic views. Weber (2005) himself has been accused of determinism and causality in his analyses from The Protestant Ethic. He himself makes reference to the ‘causal chain’ (p. xxxix) that guided his approaches. That is because he identified Christianity mainly as a metanarrative, ignoring or being unaware of its absent presence as a counter-totality. Thus, instead of fixing the theology in a here-and-there, we’re positing it in what Petra Carlsson aptly called the ‘non-place of theology’.³ This comes with its own risks as well.

To follow the paradox through, we can say that we’re not taking all these methodological precautions and making these clarifications to display a laudable distance from the dogmatic structures we described earlier. Quite the opposite: it is these dogmatic structures themselves that are forcing us, so to speak, to take as much of a critical distance we can from them and to constantly and thoroughly deconstruct them. We are thus the first ones to repudiate our methodology not in spite of the contributions theology can offer to research on consumer culture, but because of them. We cannot hold and look at our object of interest because there’s nothing in there to hold. Present absences are called what they are for a reason. In the moment we shed light on them, the process of deconstruction starts instantaneously, ultimately left with nothing to show for or to even remember.

When we spoke earlier about arcane forces that seem to guarantee us our absolute capacity for amnesia, we hinted precisely at the situation we’re so desperately trying to describe here. We do not, of course, use arcane in any esoteric way, but as a descriptor for a type of hegemony that resists – in Nancy’s words – ‘de-finition’. As Baudrillard (1996) noted, certainty and origin are connected, and so is the capacity of memory as a guarantor of authenticity. He also noted how the ‘modern sign dreams of its predecessor and would dearly love to rediscover the obligation in its reference to the real’ (Baudrillard, 2007, p. 51). Plato defined memory as a disposition of the psyche, which keeps watch over the fixity within it (see Agamben, 2000). But what does memory become when the very notion of core gets denied? What does memory become when it gets turned inside out and, from contemplating the eternal and sacred fixity within, starts to gaze forward, building itself through the incessant accumulation of commodities and ephemeral memories? Belk’s core? Which is no more than ‘an illusion’ anyway?

A theology that occupies a non-place, an anti-here-and-there, is the one that simultaneously guarantees the cumulative model of knowledge and denies the creation of a definitive statement that would bring a given field to a halt. No more erected monuments ‘To the Sacred Majesty of Truth’⁴ – not even by the most positivist approaches (for they too, in the end, must always remain falsifiable). An absolute essence may have worked for Proclus or Aristotle, but not for the present absences of Christianity. It is quite telling that one of the great pagan philosopher Proclus’ students, Marinus of Neapolis, described the Christians as ‘those who move even the immovable’ (as quoted in Saradi & Eliopoulos, 2011, p. 268). When nothing stands still, when everything constantly becomes anew at an increasing speed, what is there left to remember? Paul says: ‘This one thing I keep doing: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead’ (Philippians 3:13).

Concluding thoughts

In scholarship dealing with consumption and consumer culture the notion of the self will no doubt remain an intriguing conundrum for as long as these fields will exist. However, our analysis of decades of debate and publishing only points towards one goal. Following the deep dogma of Christianity, we shall distribute any notion of the self further, and continue to give it away to technologies in both utopian and dystopian visions. However, what we must continuously keep on missing is that in every turn towards relationality and difference, we necessarily maintain an elusive core that finds its power precisely in the way it denies itself, its own origins, and even its own being itself, becoming all the more widespread and all-encompassing in its grand moment of disappearance.

Capitalist consumer culture likes nothing more than new ideas and proliferate resistances and for us to distribute ourselves further to relentless and evermore abstract forms of commodification. The more+faster of consumption technologies spurred on by automation will continue to meld the social into exchange by reducing slowness and friction, and what is slowness par excellence than human reflection and hesitant emotion? These processes are there to remove what remains from the drag of sociality and all modernist hang-ups (Haynes & Hietanen, 2023), indeed a thirst of purification by reducing the human altogether (Andrejevic, 2020). From a theological perspective, it is nothing more than the self moving – through intensified desire and dividualising segmentation – to the direction of God. While there is growing interest on the descriptive level about how religion manifests in consumption contexts, without looking backwards this work can only tinker around the edges of a totalising worldview that guarantees the very questions that are asked.

By writing this account, we do in no way intend to say we are above what we describe. Quite the opposite, and following Žižek, we simply wish to follow a philosophical and theological path where one’s only desperate attempt is to recognise the deep shit we are in. When we are dealing with a worldview that continues to fragment any movement towards a self, and one that functions precisely by denying its own origins, from the perspective of the present absences of deep dogma ‘such efforts should remain, indeterminately, something that can only gleam in the margins’ (Botez et al., 2020, p. 17). Paraphrasing James Fitchett, who once memorably noted in a panel discussion⁵ dealing with the liberatory potentials of sustainable consumption: ‘We are dealing with forces far beyond our control. That is all’. In conclusion, there is none, and in any cultural sphere intelligible to us, will be none either.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of the Algorithmic Selves: The Algorithmic Intensification of Societal Control research project funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation [Grant number 00210377].

Notes on contributors

Andrei Botez

Andrei Botez is lead researcher in the Algorithmic Selves: The Algorithmic Intensification of Societal Control initiative, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. His research interests include the theological foundation of contemporary technologies, posthumanism, and consumer culture.

Joel Hietanen

Joel Hietanen is professor of socio-technical change in consumer society at University of Helsinki, Centre for Consumer Research, Finland. His recent work has been focusing on sacrifice, the intensification of capitalist desire in semiocapitalism and the seductive realm of consumption.

Notes

1. It is important to note that Hannibal’s sister, Mischa, only emerges, rather marginally, in the last volume of the original trilogy. She is written in to force a tentative biography for Hannibal in a move to make him analysable (and thus to pull him from being a Hellenistic sage into the Christian realm of wounded subject). We criticise this urge to solve and find reason for Hannibal in other ongoing work in more detail, but it has also been recognised as quite a ‘destructive’ effort by others (see Lehmann-Haupt, 1999). In any case, the situation remains rather ambivalent given that Hannibal does indeed eat her!

2. e.g. Kotsko’s Žižek and Theology, Brittain’s Adorno and Theology, Shakespeare’s Derrida and Theology, Depoortere’s Badiou and Theology, Boeve’s Lyotard and Theology etc. – not to mention Boer’s monumental (5 vols.) Marxism and Theology.

3. https://www.academia.edu/12001975/Foucault_Velazquez_and_the_non_place_of_theology

4. https://archive.org/details/taylor-philosophical-and-mathematical-commentaries…-t.-1-en-1792/page/n3/mode/1up

5. An online panel in the International Conference for Markets and Development (ICMD) 2021.