An ontology of consumers as distributed networks: a question of cause and effect

ABSTRACT

In responding to Craig Thompson’s commentary, we argue that assemblage, contrary to how it has often been theorised in consumer research, is subject oriented. Drawing on Deleuze, we explore how desire is thus not abstract but is part of a context of life that is organised by the subject. In neutralising the subject’s attachments, consumer researchers are prevented from seeing how desires left unfulfilled can represent deeper social marginalisations and how the market incentivises unsustainable and uncaring behaviours. We argue that Craig’s commentary raises the need to recognise that an affective architecture of feelings is always at work. We call for a more ‘care-full’ approach which does not ignore the desiring body, deny the power differentials that exist and apoliticises our attachments within these networks of relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Ontology
• artificial intelligence
• relational
• deleuze
• desire
• ethics of care

Journos working in this area need to be on their guard & not take the claims of the AI hypesters (doomer OR booster variety) at face value. It takes effort to reframe, effort that is necessary and important. We all must resist the urge to be impressed. @emilymbender (X Platform, 24 November 2023)

The promissory future that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is thought to offer us has been widely hyped, critiqued and discussed, as noted in the opening quote. Craig’s invitation to devote further attention to understanding how this ‘brave new socio-technical word’, of which AI is but one example, challenges consumer researchers’ ontological assumptions (Thompson, 2024). This debate is timely, and Craig’s ideas are thought-provoking. We are no doubt living in a time where urgent transformation is needed in both marketing thought and practice. At the heart of Craig’s commentary is an argument that we fully agree with, namely that relationality, although rarely fully theorised as such, has long been central to marketing thought (Tadajewski, 2022; Tadajewski & Higgins, 2023). To understand the world, the relational is essential, whether these relations are to humans, objects, animals or other actors. Indeed, recent research such as Franco, Canniford and Phipps’ paper (2022) focused on object-oriented ontology, clearly points to the limitations of a human-centred perspective. We ourselves recently called for a more ‘selfless’ epistemology in our research (Preece, Rojas-Gaviria, et al., 2023, p. 2) in order to avoid the ‘epistemological pitfalls which (…) arise from centring the researcher and marginalising the researched’. Yet, despite being largely in agreement, we see the problem of the self differently from Craig. After reading his commentary, we are left with three problem-questions that are made possible because of what Craig’s work opens up, even if responding to them may require going places that the commentary does not get to:

The emerging subject: being and becoming

As Craig demonstrates vividly in his commentary with the example of losing one’s dog, the experience of loss, for instance, is a fundamental experience of being in the world. Death itself can be represented relationally, as the presence of death and the dead in daily life, for instance, emerges and develops in the ‘lives of the living’ (Bonsu & Belk, 2003; McCarthy et al., 2023). However, our all too human vulnerability or, as Joronen and Rose (2021) call it, ‘the woundness of living’, demonstrates that the vulnerable subject not only emerges from relational networks but also responds to existential threats inherent to our essential vulnerability. ‘Our vulnerability operates as a condition that precedes and exceeds the various capacities and formations of power that attempt to mitigate, exploit or manipulate the realities vulnerability situates’ (Joronen & Rose, 2021, p. 1403). Beyond the relationality involved in the experience of living with the dead, the lived experience we enjoy in our relationships with the living is also marked by our essential vulnerability and our existential preoccupation with loss. One can only hold onto experiences, loved ones and dreams for a limited amount of time before those relationships mutate from the shape and texture we have experienced. As Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art (1983) persuasively articulates: ‘the art of losing isn’t hard to master’. Loss is thus a too common human experience which as Dobscha’s (2015) edited collection highlights, has too rarely been centred in our consumer research beyond transactional studies of loss aversion. Our humanity is marked by our finitude, for the uncertainty involved in who we are about to become and the number of dreams shattered along the way.

Every day, people drive for the last time, fail at school, do not get to see a close friend anymore or are separated from family relatives. Life losses more often than not come unexpectedly, and even when we know we are about to lose something or someone we cherish and love, we never know the specific shape of our losses. (Rojas-Gaviria, 2021, p. 476)

Indeed, Craig’s previous research (Pollio et al., 1997; Thompson et al., 1989, 1990) highlights how we are conscious of ourselves because of these existential preoccupations. It is in moments of intensive vulnerability, such as in illness, that we are the most conscious of being (Downey, 2016). Therefore, affect and relationality may exacerbate our essential vulnerability. Still, it is our vulnerability, our non-relational, essential human condition that drives those relations (Rose, 2023). The theorisation of identity-in-creation is, for instance, a less self-centred understanding of identity that incorporates the notion of vulnerability. It showcases how often ‘we are possessed by our identities, rather than owning an identity project’ (Rojas-Gaviria, 2021, p. 463) and yet demonstrates how the individual still shows an agentic force orientating, projecting even, a future for the self. The idea of a flat ontology such as an actor-network or assemblage-orientated approach that could suppress the self at the centre altogether, presents us with the problem of not paying enough attention to this conscious self that emerges within the specific context of a particular life with agency, with self-orientated options. Looking at these particular lives, we argue, is essential because particular embodied experiences allow us to see the structural forces in society that affect us differently, and it is within these different sets of affects that we emerge, for instance, as privileged or marginal. Holding onto the self as an existential being in the world (see, for example, Lai et al., 2007; Preece, Rodner, et al., 2023) differs from a consideration of a purely relational self which ‘is a continuously updated summary of the material, symbolic, and virtual traces of past interactions that have coalesced into its current representational form’ (Thompson, 2024) without capacity for individual agency and action. The marketing and advertising field has previously explored the notion of the self and its myriad of complexities (Tadajewski, 2023), and rather than focusing on decentring the self, an important step to undertake is to engage with this multiplicity of interpretations. It is clear, for instance, that the self as pure will, as the master of an identity project, requires challenge and nuance, but we must also retain that being and becoming are always anchored within an existential preoccupation and personal consciousness. Only when we pay close attention to this centred, humbler self can we appreciate movement, resistance, activism, and transformation. Certainly, the distinction is slight, yet, we argue, it is significant: as Bendik-Keymer (2023) argues, it is only within the intimacy of self-work that big issues such as planetary justice can be undertaken.

Flat ontologies

As noted by Franco et al. (2022, p. 414), object-oriented ontologies (including certain perspectives in assemblage and actor-network theories) as flat ontologies appear ‘agnostic’ in that human subjectivity is held to be just another object. In line with Campbell et al. (2019), they suggest that other forms of posthuman epistemologies can better ‘retain sensitivity to the qualities of subjects in these systems’. Indeed, if we go to the source, in one of his final works, Deleuze (2004) critiques the way in which assemblage has been interpreted. Desire, he argues ‘is not what people thought it was … It was a big ambiguity and a big misunderstanding … but we have said a very simple thing, really simple, simple, simple’. [translated by author]. Deleuze emphasises that although ‘you speak abstractly about desire because you extract an object supposed to be the object of desire’ one never desires something or someone, but rather always an aggregate (ensemble). What Deleuze and Guattari’s work asks, then, Deleuze (2004) states, is the nature of relations in order for there to be desire, for these elements to become desirable:

when a woman says ‘I desire that dress’, ‘that blouse’, it is obvious that she does not desire that dress or that blouse in the abstract, she desires it within a broader context, the context of her life, a whole that she will organise. She desires it not only in connection with a landscape, but in association with other people who are her friends or who are not her friends, or with her profession (…). In other words, there is no desire that does not flow into an assemblage.

To desire is therefore to construct and be interpolated within an assemblage (agencement). What this order of importance highlights is that assemblage, contrary to how it has often been theorised in consumer research, is subject-oriented. The subject is agentic within an assemblage. In the example here, the woman is desiring the object and not the other way around (although of course, the market can then reduce the subject of actions to the object of actions, see Kilbourne, 1991). Therefore, in revisiting these ontologies it is worth further considering the agentic hierarchies within these networks and relations. The existential problems alluded to in the previous point: sickness, death, etc. are concrete, yet ultimately subjective realities, they can only be experienced from a subject-perspective (Pavia, 1993).

Desire, as the driving force of consumer research (Belk et al., 2003), is thus not abstract but is part of a context of life that is organised by the subject. To desire is to construct an assemblage, and the subject is always building such an assemblage in relation to the context, it is desire within or ‘dans un ensemble’. According to Craig, consumer research will change radically by taking the self as a ‘dynamic, decentred assemblage’, yet this ignores the desiring body within this assemblage. Although there are networks (machines) in operation, these networks are joined by subjects so social positioning is still relevant. Orientation still matters (Preece et al., 2023). In neutralising the subject’s attachment to these objects, consumer researchers are, at times, prevented from seeing how desires left unfulfilled can represent deeper social marginalisations and different agentic forces fighting for humanisation (Diversi, 2006), and how the market incentivises unsustainable and uncaring behaviours (Hutton, 2019). This takes us to our third problem-question.

The ethics of care

Recent literature has highlighted the significance of an ethics of care (Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Parsons et al., 2021) in consumer research. We argue that what Craig’s commentary raises is a need to recognise that an affective architecture of feelings exists within the relations he brings attention to. As Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work illustrates, some subjects are welcome, and others are not. Indeed, feminist (Maclaran, 2012) and critical marketing scholars (Tadajewski, 2010) have long recognised the power inequalities within our relations and the need to attend to social subject positioning (Davis, 2018). In focusing on the relational, power should, in fact, become centred as the relational does not erode our sense of self but rather defines it. It is in distinguishing ourselves amongst relations through our attachments that we understand the agentic capacities of actors in networks.

If we return to the context of AI and its evolution towards a more autonomous Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that would possess higher-level cognitive capacities such as flexibility, adaptability and general problem-solving skills, what is forgotten in Craig’s suggestion of an ontological framework, whereby actants are ‘localised articulations of an algorithm’, is that the algorithm starts through human agency and as the algorithm ‘generates, self-adapting codes’, certain perspectives are centred and others marginalised. Indeed, the literature on the ethics of AI is replete with examples of racial and gender bias (Gebru, 2020; Zhang & Yang, 2021), resulting in the disadvantage of certain populations. The recent drama around OpenAI’s board and Sam Altman’s firing and rapid return to the helm as CEO with a newly established board of directors illustrates this nicely; the board is now made up exclusively of white men, a situation compounded by male dominance among executives (Kassova, 2023).

There is obviously not enough space here to fully develop these arguments or the various ways they dialogue with the ideas that Craig puts forward in his commentary. This is very much the beginning of a conversation – a preface at best. What is significant is that we are having the conversation. So yes, the future is relational. And yes, more ‘self-less’ research is needed, and less consumer-centric ontologies can indeed bring much-needed perspective. Yet this self-less perspective should not lose sight of the self. We are always conscious of ourselves, and we cannot distance ourselves from our own embodied perspectives and privileges, only try to account for our own situatedness in the socio-historical context and how we affect and are affected through a wider perspective which encompasses the ‘more-than-human’ (Preece, Rojas-Gaviria, & Rodner 2023). In fact, Campbell and McHugh’s (2015, p. 100) chapter using an object-oriented ontology illustrates this nicely. While seeking to move away from traditional anthropocentric ways of thinking and acting about the world, they highlight that we can only relate to objects sensuously: ‘this is the deepest level in which we humans can access’ an object. This acknowledges the problem with posthumanist ontologies, namely that in facing some of the biggest challenges of today whether global warming or AI, it is humans who are the cause. We call for further consumer research that is selfless but not without a self to allow for critical considerations of the unintended consequences of our assemblages as we are often unaware of the effects we cause. A more ‘care-full’ approach is needed which does not ignore the desiring body, deny the power differentials that exist and apoliticises our attachments within these networks of relations. We appeal for a self-work that is urgent, particular, and centred on a conscious understanding of being situated within a complex network of relations that holds a myriad of effects. This mission requires an appreciation of the complex interactions of networks that shape the self and its consequences in terms of both the differences that target certain bodies but also the consequences generated in our individual and collective capacities for imagining different worlds and generating change (Darmody & Zwick, 2020). As Foucault put it in an interview shortly before his death:

I would like to say something about the function of any diagnosis concerning the nature of the present. It does not consist in a simple characterisation of what we are but, instead – by following lines of fragility in the present – in managing to grasp why and how that-which is might no longer be that-which-is. In this sense, any description must always be made in accordance with these kinds of virtual fracture which open up the space of freedom understood as a space of concrete freedom, i.e. of possible transformation. (Foucault, 1990, p. 36)

To preserve the self as a conscious subject is to be able to ask about the differences being produced, the agendas being followed and the consequences of these differences to envision change.

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chloe Preece

Chloe Preece is Associate Professor of Marketing at ESCP Business School. Her research focuses on marketing within the arts and creative industries and how this translates into social, cultural and economic value.

Pilar Rojas Gaviria

Pilar Rojas Gaviria is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Birmingham. Her work focuses on understanding the role of market intermediaries and societal forces in constructing multicultural collective identities and solidarities.