The distributed body

ABSTRACT

In this commentary, I draw on Annemarie Mol’s work to ponder the implications of multiple ontologies of the body that are enacted in research as well as in domains such as athletics. I highlight the work of consumption scholars who have been demonstrating the relational entanglements of human bodies various other-than-human bodies and materialities, revealing a more distributed performance of the body and the self. I note the possibilities of reading Belk’s oeuvre through the lens of multiple ontologies and enactments. In doing so, I question the linear and uni-directional evolution from “heavier” to “lighter” ontologies of the self in consumer research that Thompson’s commentary seems to imply. I finally highlight the politics of ontological enactments and their implications for bodily wellness and autonomy.

KEYWORDS:

• Body
• multiple ontologies
• distributed self
• relational approaches
• ontological politics

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what worlds make worlds, what worlds make stories. (D. J. Haraway, 2016, p. 12)

‘Things’ matter. This much is fairly uncontested (though sometimes lamented precisely how much they matter). The precise nature of this mattering, however, has been at the core of many a discussion and debate on consumption, and is at the core of Belk’s very influential article ‘Possessions and the Extended Self’ (1988) as well as Craig Thompson’s commentary (2024) on the evolution of Belk’s oeuvre. Thompson ponders the ‘ontological implications’ of this evolution, noting that Belk, as well as others, have moved from the ‘extended self’ metaphor of possessing things, towards conceptualising the self as distributed within a network of humans-nonhumans. In this commentary, I will try to first highlight the multiplicity of approaches and scholars in consumer research, who have been influential in bringing the ‘missing masses’ (Latour, 1992) – objects and non-human animals – front and centre. I will then move on to question the linear and uni-directional evolution that Thompson’s commentary seems to suggest and ponder the implications of multiple ontologies of the self and the body (Mol, 1999) that are enacted in research as well as in ‘the wild’.

Thompson argues that this shift from a ‘heavier’ towards ‘lighter’ ontology; accompanied by a proclivity towards working with relational ontologies, makes sense – given, referring to Zygmunt Bauman, that we are living in the era of ‘light capitalism’ and lack the heavy machinery and Fordist factory that might weigh the self down. ‘Our digitalised cultural epoch is now one where assemblages and de-centered agency are no longer abstract, philosophical ideas used to dislodge sedimented cultural beliefs and philosophical outlooks (as per Deleuze and Guattari)’, Thompson (2024, p. 560) says. Indeed, the presence and prevalence of certain types of technologies seem to have made it easier, in our limited human perception, to conceive of a self that is distributed across things. The forcefulness of technologies becomes particularly evident with objects that mimic or augment various ‘human’ capacities, such as self-tracking devices that ‘nudge’ and ‘steer’ (Kristensen et al., 2021) humans into various kinds of activities, and which have widespread moral and political implications (Latour, 1992).

Thompson highlights assemblage theory in its capacity to reveal consumer embeddedness within arrangements and networks. This, of course, is not the only approach that questions subject-object dualities (Canniford & Shankar, 2015) and recognises the forcefulness of non-living things in addition to human actors. Without attempting to make a definitive inventory – and recognising the multi-stability, plurality and complexity within theoretical approaches – one could also consider the following as interventions to more human-centred ontologies that have infiltrated consumer research: Actor Network Theory (Bajde, 2013), new materialism/feminist materialism (Bettany, 2007), postphenomenology (Denegri-Knott et al., 2023; Kristensen & Ruckenstein, 2018), non-representational theory (Hill et al., 2014), posthumanism (Campbell et al., 2010; Giesler & Venkatesh, 2004; Lima & Belk, 2023; Lima et al., 2022), materiality theories (Borgerson, 2005), and object-oriented ontologies (Franco et al., 2022), as well as relational concepts such as affordances (Borghini et al., 2021; Gibson, 1979; Kristensen et al., 2021; Shamayleh & Arsel, 2022), and have influenced some of Belk’s (solo as well as collaborative) work, too.

Perhaps a word of caution (and not because I think this is what Thompson’s text implies) is that the prevalence of relational ontologies is not because we are more distributed than ever before: Certainly, material culture has a very long history. Perhaps many of us feel that way and are accustomed to thinking with these dualities; as prevalent Western philosophical traditions claim a clear distinction between human-animal; nature-culture; living and nonliving things. However, there are several systems of thought, especially indigenous epistemologies (examined by scholars such as Marisol de la Cadena, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Robin Wall Kimmerer among many others) around the globe which recognise the vitality and animacy of so-called ‘inanimate’ things. These have also inspired scholars based in the Global North such as Marilyn Strathern, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Elizabeth Povinelli, Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, Phillippe Descola, and Eduardo Kohn to name a few. These scholars question the dualities above, and advocate for relational and material-semiotic approaches.

In earlier reflections, Shona Bettany (2007; see also 2015) observed the emergence and spreading of material-semiotic approaches, notably Actor Network Theory, in the social sciences and especially Science and Technology studies (STS). With the proliferation of these approaches, nonhumans are no longer the ‘missing masses’ in the social sciences (Sayes, 2014); and their coalitions (Haraway, 1991) and politics (Winner, 1980) are better recognised – even if their adoption into consumer research may have been somewhat delayed (Bettany, 2007). As Thompson also indicates, consumer researchers have recognised the need for an epistemic shift towards object-aware (if not fully object-oriented) approaches. I would like to further highlight the works of two researchers who have engaged in important epistemic work that challenges dualities such as subject-object; human-nonhuman; nature-culture; (inner) self- (outer) environment. In possibly one of the earliest pieces to discuss the potentiality of material-semiotic approaches in consumer research, Bettany (2007) registers how consumer research has privileged the human-consumer subject at the expense of the ‘object’ and points out:

… the radical indeterminacy of the material object within its multiple arrays of cultural relations. This has been both a theoretical shift in ontology from ‘social construction’ formulations (i.e. the object is socially constructed by the human and subjective relations around it) and an epistemological/empirical shift away from a focus upon what and how things mean and/or how they are used (i.e. an instrumentalist approach). This shift has underpinned the development of theory, which does not begin with an ontologically primitive object upon which multiple meanings are ascribed, with which multiple practices are engaged in and from which multiple experiences are derived. Instead they seek to understand how the objects and their boundaries co-emerge with other human and non-human entities, are ontologically mutable, active and embedded in relations of emergent and entangled meaning and materiality. (2007, p. 43)

Shona Bettany’s solo as well as co-authored works have made invaluable contributions to consumer research, in their capacity to demonstrate how humans and other-than-humans are mutually and relationally constituted. Her research in the contexts of human-Afghan Hound relationships (Bettany & Daly, 2008) and consumer-chicken-Eglu (chicken coop) arrangements (Bettany & Kerrane, 2011) draw attention to the mutual becoming of human and animal species as well as the role and animacy of ‘inanimate’ objects that enable relationships amongst companion species. Her work on the material semiotics of fatherhood (Bettany et al., 2014) further attends to the affordances of ‘inanimate’ objects – such as a jogger stroller – in making ‘human’ subjectivities possible. Consumption – as well as the consumption ‘object’ - in these relational conceptualisations, is not simply enacted by the human actor, but emerges as an outcome of the relationality and enactments of and between the two species.

Anu Valtonen has also been prominent in arguing for more-than-human approaches, particularly through her work on the body and touristic encounters in ‘nature’. She has been drawing on critical phenomenological, practice, and relational approaches, in order to highlight the relational ‘materialization’ and surfacing of the human as well as more-than-human bodies. Valtonen’s (2013) critical auto-ethnography on being ‘short’, for example, highlights how ‘shortness’, which is a seemingly ‘biological’ and ‘objective’ quality of the human body, is produced through both material and discursive encounters. For example, other people touch Valtonen’s body and comment on it in ways that mark it as short. Similarly, her body is constituted as ‘short’ when it encounters objects – such as chairs – that are designed to accommodate bodies of longer stature. Valtonen’s co-authored work with Elina Närvänen (2015, 2022) on sleep further approaches the body as surfacing and capacitated within a socio-material network where the bed plays a rather central role. The ‘inter-corporeal’ and affective practice (Valtonen & Närvänen, 2015) of sleeping occurs in companionship with other bodies and material objects. This is an entanglement in which the bed takes the shape of the bodies that occupy it, and the sleeping body – composed of flesh, bones, joints, organs, and hormones – takes the shape of the bed, as well as the other materialities occupying the bed. In other words, the sleeping body materializes through its entanglement with other materialities. Finally, Valtonen’s work on tourism experiences in Lapland is important in drawing attention to the ‘trans-corporeal’ (Alaimo, 2008) character of embodiment, in which the bodies of humans are entangled with and inseparable from the more-than-human world, and in this context with the bodies of mosquitoes (Valtonen et al., 2020). This work moreover draws attention to the ethics of engaging with ‘companion’ species who take part in ‘worlding our worlds’ but are often not deemed as charismatic as, say, Afghan Hounds. This approach, they note, allows ‘the ability to question power relations and “roles” granted according to normative, anthropocentric understandings of multispecies relations’ (Valtonen et al., 2020, p. 102945).

To sum up, both Bettany’s and Valtonen’s works have drawn attention to how sensing, feeling, leaking, eating, sleeping, biting, more-than-human bodies – collaboratively ‘world worlds’. In doing so, they have played an important part in decentring the ‘human consumer’ as the sole ‘actor’ in stories of markets and consumption.

In the second part of this commentary, I’d like to ask: why does it matter how we conceptualise the self and especially the body? Why do ontologies matter – or, to paraphrase Donna Haraway, why does it matter ‘what words world worlds’?

To do so, I’d like to look into the implications of ontologies for studying a particular kind of ‘matter’ that is quite central to the self; namely, the body. In lay speech as well as consumer research literature, the body and the self are often entangled; with one not reducible or expandable to the other, but a disentangling also seemingly unlikely. While the body is so central to the (consumer) self, I noted that it is somewhat absent in Thompson’s reflections on the ontological implications of different conceptualisations of ‘the self’. This led me to ponder, how do we make sense of bodily beings and becomings, considering the ontological implications of Belk’s theoretical evolution(s)?

What is a body? There is no straightforward answer to this question. Several disciplines have been grappling with it in one way or another, with different groups (both scientific societies as well as social groups/communities) imposing different ontological categories by which they might define and interrogate the ‘reality’ of the body and its practices (see Harris & Robb, 2012).

Within Belk’s more recent work, it is possible to see multiple approaches to – and ontologies of – the body. Roux and Belk (2019), for example, conceptualise the body as an inhabited space. They argue that through expressive modifications, such as tattooing, subjects conceive of and inhabit their bodies as their own. This seems to indicate that, in the lived experience of people who get tattoos, there is a gap between a core – the ‘self’ - and the physical ‘body’. This gap seems to be closed through material and symbolic practices: decorating, and thus objectifying the body allows people to incorporate and inhabit their bodies, almost as though their bodies (and skin) were external objects. The authors – as well as Thompson – don’t go into the ontological implications of such a conceptualisation. To my reading, this implicates a duality between an inner self and the material body: the self is contained within a core encircled by skin, and this core only becomes corporealized through various (market-mediated, elective) practices. In another piece, Lima and Belk (2023) ponder the shift from the body as the locus of perception and autonomy, towards machines that have bodily capabilities and bodies that have machinic (at the ‘expense’ of human) capacities. They thereby enact, in their scholarship, a different and more distributed ontology of the self and agency wherein dualities between subjects and ‘external’ and ‘non-human’ objects start to disappear.

Thompson notes that one ontology – or another – does not necessarily represent ‘the “reality” of consumers’ identities (as objectively observed from an omnipotent viewpoint)’ (2024, p. 560) . I understand this to imply that there is room for multiple ontologies and enactments of the self and reality (see e.g. Tadajewski (2023) on the ‘multiplex self’; Tadajewski and Higgins (2023) on the ‘porous self’). To understand the implications of having multiple ontologies of the self and the body at place, I find it helpful to turn to the scholarship of Annemarie Mol, which has opened new ways of thinking of bodies, illness, autonomy, and care. Ontologies are enacted, in Mol’s conceptualisation. They are put into practice and thus have ‘real’ outcomes. Mol and Law (2004) note that we all are and have our bodies, and we also do (i.e. enact or perform) our bodies, not only by ourselves, but also through the enactments of relevant others (as in the case of a medical doctor diagnosing and treating a bodily illness).

Mol argues that ontologies are not singular but multiple. Nevertheless, she also cautions that the multiplicity of ontologies is not the same as pluralism or perspectivalism. In her work on human diseases such as anaemia (Mol, 1999), arthrosclerosis (Mol, 2002) and hypoglycaemia (Mol & Law, 2004) as well as animal illnesses such as foot-and-mouth disease (Law & Mol, 2011), she explains how these diseases are done differently, by different actors (e.g. by different specialists) and in different settings (e.g. the lab or clinic). When it comes to foot-and-mouth disease, for example, Law and Mol (2011, pp. 1–2) argue:

… when they talk of ‘foot and mouth disease’, different veterinary traditions are not referring to the same ‘thing’. The object they are searching for, measuring or tracing is different. The clinical tradition looks for deviances in animals, the laboratory detects whether or not a virus is present in the animal’s blood or tissues, while epidemiology focuses on patterns of transmission in animal populations.

Similar arguments can be made of anaemia, where Mol (1999) identifies the ‘clinical’, ‘laboratory’ and ‘pathophysiological’ performances of anaemia, in which various criteria and instruments are put into use to observe, measure, and diagnose certain deviances that are supposed to correspond to a single (but not singular) deviance, namely, that of anaemia. But Mol cautions that oftentimes these three performances might not work together. For instance, not every person with anaemia falls within the statistical range of haemoglobin levels, for which anaemia is diagnosed; and the preference of the clinical (and statistical) approach for diagnosis might mean that some diagnoses are missed. Each diagnosis method performs different versions of anaemia, rather than revealing different aspects of it and ‘the objects of each of the various diagnostic techniques do not necessarily overlap with those of the others’ (Mol, 1999, p. 78). Political decisions are made on how to prioritise the detection of illnesses. These also have different outcomes. So which bodies are diagnosed – and ‘performed’ as anaemic – is an outcome of complex layers of ontological politics.

If we apply Mol’s ontological multiplicity to the field of consumer research, we might say that the light ontology of the self and/or the body has not necessarily replaced the heavy ontology. Rather, they might still be performed by different actors (and different scholars or even the same scholar) at different times. Then the question becomes, what are the outcomes of a ‘heavy ontology’ that presumes a ‘core’ self as opposed to a ‘lighter ontology’ which sees the self as distributed? How are these different ontologies performed differently by and upon the body? Following this line of thinking, how we conceive of the self matters because of different enactments that then have material effects on the body, as I shall illustrate below in various sporting cases. Whether we enact a ‘heavy ontology’ where the self is circumscribed around a core (with possible extensions in objects); or a ‘lighter’ one that is distributed across heterogeneous networks has political implications that follow from these different ontologies. One ontology is not more ‘real’ than the others, but what we name and experience as ‘reality’ is political and privileged within systems of knowledge production.

Along with the enactment of multiple bodies comes the indeterminacy of where the body begins and where it ends. This can be a complication when the different enactments do not overlap. Such is the case in questions related to clothing, accessories, supplements and, more provocatively, ‘inner biology’ in the realm of sports where, in theory, there is a pretence of precision, but in practice, all kinds of messiness abound. Sport ‘science’ is full of debates and discussions that lend themselves well to the questions of what is a body, what is an athlete, and how an athlete’s body is collectively, collaboratively but sometimes also contradictorily enacted, particularly when it comes to what an athlete eats, drinks, and wears.

One such debate has been around a special swimsuit made of polyurethane, which has the following effects on a swimmer’s performance, as described by Olympic athlete Ryan Lochte:

‘Every time I put on that suit, I know I’m going to fly’, said Ryan Lochte, who set a world record in the 200-meter backstroke at the world championships. ‘I’ve been swimming constantly for like 15 years, and I’ve never felt this good in the water. It’s super thin, and it keeps you floating. If you try that suit once, you’re never going to put anything else on’. (cited in Emontspool & Smaniotto, 2020)

After leading to much controversy, this swimsuit was banned by the international swimming federation in competitions; a decision that hinges on an arguably ‘heavy’ ontology of the body, which in turn relies on a duality between subject (e.g. athlete) and object (e.g. swimsuit) (Emontspool & Smaniotto, 2020). Similar controversies have coloured athlete’s shoes, prosthetic limbs (Eveleth, 2012), and other objects that adorn their bodies as well as beverages, vitamins, and medications. These have been argued to give ‘unfair’ advantage to athletes.

What an athlete is precisely allowed to wear/ingest can be seen, among other things, as a matter of ontological politics. If one is to conceive of an athlete as a ‘hybrid’ who is constituted and enabled by various materialities and ‘coalitions’ (Haraway, 1991), then perhaps we might be looking at a very different configuration of sports competition (for better or worse) to what we have right now. However, currently, the world of competitive sports seems to place the skin as a boundary to what constitutes the athlete; with other elements classified as being separate to the athlete and subject to strict (albeit fluctuating) rules and regulations.

A particularly contested case in sports is that of Caster Semenya. Semenya’s lived experiences, as well as debates around her body, invoke questions on sex, gender, bodies, and athletic performance that have widespread political as well as individual bodily consequences (see Magubane, 2014) – in particular, for Semenya herself. Semenya is, in her words, an athlete who is ‘an African … a woman … a different woman’ (Semenya in Mokoena, 2023). Her woman-ness, however, has been interrogated by sports authorities, fellow competitors, health professionals, journalists, and legions of sports followers over the years. In the world of competitive athletics, Caster Semenya is cast as a ‘body in trouble’ (Valtonen, 2013), as various elements of her bodily materiality do not conform to what is clinically and statistically deemed ‘woman’ (see Pape, 2019; Pieper, 2014 for discussions on sex testing in sports). For example, it has been reported that her ‘naturally occurring’ testosterone levels are higher than what is accepted for women competitors, a situation that is argued to give her (and other women athletes with similar conditions) an unfair advantage (Will, 2019).

Discussions on Semenya’s case indicate that the dominant understanding in sports of athleticism is that it is primarily a biological and physiological property which can be cultivated through practice. This is evident in the words of Paula Radcliffe, a prominent female athlete, who stated in court that having Semenya in the competition ‘makes the competition unequal in a way greater than simple natural talent and dedication’ (Mokoena, 2023; italics added by the author). Arguably, this viewpoint refracts the idea that there is a ‘core’ self that is born with certain qualities which might be advanced through work. On this reading, talent and athleticism resides within the body, rather than being distributed across a network of things (including clothes and food) that makes athletics possible.

In a ruling in 2008, it was determined by a panel comprising a ‘a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist and an expert on gender’ that Semenya could compete as a woman (NYTimes, 2009, cited in Butler, 2009). The category of ‘woman’, in this ruling, was enacted (Mol, 2002) and governed by multiple authorities relevant to the field of athletics. There was, however, a condition: To continue to compete as a woman, Semenya was required to receive hormonal contraceptives, a piece of information not made public until recently (Mokoena, 2023). This decision in a way, falls against the dominant ‘heavy ontology’ in the sports world. Semenya’s ‘natural’ body is not allowed to compete, so she has to engage in a ‘coalition’ with hormonal contraceptives. This coalition is argued to be what will bring her body into standards that are acceptable for a woman athlete – but it creates a host of other troubles.

According to Semenya, these contraceptives had the following effects: ‘you’re living every day with a sore body. Your stomach is burning, you’re having panic attacks, you’re sweating’ (Mokoena, 2023). Prior to taking hormones, Semenya’s enactment of womanhood did not overlap with the womanhood prescribed by her field. She was thus forced to ‘augment’ her bodily composition and performance with hormones. This, on one hand, allowed her to be an ‘athlete’ – a subjectivity that is vital for her – but also left her in severe discomfort. This was a choice she made, but is it an instance of ‘bodily autonomy’? In many ways, it contradicts Western and feminist understandings of the term, especially given that this choice means she cannot comfortably inhabit the space of her body (Roux & Belk, 2019) if she wishes to continue to compete.

The ‘work’ required to ‘produce’ and perform (Butler, 1992, 2011) a body as a ‘woman’s body’ is consequently different in the multifarious fields that a person occupies. In each, it depends on ‘the particular sociomaterial arrangement of relations and ordering of practices that simultaneously produce the social, the technological, the embodied, the subjective and the human’ (Moser, 2006, p. 376). Semenya’s is a case where the ontological conflict between different disciplines and their enactments has profound effects upon her body. Having an ‘abnormal’ hormonal profile then becomes a problem within the material-semiotics arrangement of competitive sports where the standardised environment does not allow someone like Semenya to perform without the constant interruption of tests, hormonal ‘therapies’, pain, and news reporting.

To conclude, it is not my intention to prescribe a particular philosophical, theoretical, or methodological approach to studying the consumer. I also do not attempt to even try to answer the question of ‘what is a body’ (nor of ‘what is a woman’, or ‘how should sports competitions and categories be configured’). Rather, I want to draw attention, as a matter of ontological politics, to the multiple enactments of reality that might be present in any given situation, as well as the multiplicity of what we call the self as well as the body. When seen this way, the body and the self – and indeed, the ‘consumer’ – are as ‘emergent’ (Bajde, 2013) and distributed in the research process as they are through all the other socialities and materialities in which they are embedded. Ontological and epistemological choices are not necessarily better or worse enactments of the ‘reality’ of any given situation. These are choices, however, that actively produce the particular facet of a ‘problem’ – such as ‘the body’, or ‘gender’ – that the researcher is attending to. They not only reflect the position from which the researcher is asking questions and conducting inquiries (Haraway, 1988); but they also have political implications and consequences (Mol, 1999, 2002).

On a final note, Thompson ponders what will become of the ‘consumer’ in the face of the rise of relational ontologies, in their insistence of co-emergence, entanglement, and distribution, as well as the rise of technologies that disrupt human agency and autonomy. How will the field which has a ‘flagship’ journal with the name ‘consumer’, front and centre, deal with this? Bettany (2015) has already pointed out that while ANT and assemblage-inspired accounts of consumption proliferated in CCT research in the decade after her original theoretical piece; the centrality of and the micro-focus on the individual consumer has not necessarily been challenged. Bettany notes that it’s understandable that ‘consumer research is supposed to be about consumers … that human actors are labelled consumers and given primacy in our discourse’ (Bettany, 2015, p. 192) but posed the important question of who counts as a consumer; whether all consumers are equal; and should the human consumer have primacy? In consumer research, despite efforts to ‘flatten’ (Bajde, 2013) the objects and subjects of inquiry, we have observed a continued primacy of the human due to the epistemic culture, where the human consumer is not just privileged but expected to be front and centre. Moreover, the length of a journal article is insufficient to properly unfold the full potentiality of ANT or other relational approaches (Bettany, 2015). Perhaps, then, addressing the important questions of how human consumer subjects are produced, distributed, extended, or even erased in the face of up-and-coming technologies indeed requires further ‘cultural’ transformations in our field.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mark Tadajewski for providing valuable editorial insights during the writing of this commentary. I am also grateful to Domen Bajde for engaging in discussions and offering thoughtful comments on this piece.

Disclosure statement

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