Desperately seeking the elusive epistemic consumer: reflections on reflexivity

ABSTRACT

In this recursively reflexive comment, I reflect on the seven commentaries that critically elaborate upon my proposals about the radically decentering ontological implications of Russ Belk’s conceptualization of the extended self. These wide-ranging commentaries address a nexus of thought provoking and intriguing topics that significantly expand and enrich this discussion about the future of consumer research (as we can best envision it from the limits of our contemporary standpoints). I am thrilled to have provided an impetus for these reflections and, as a secondary benefit, they have helped me to better crystallize my initial reflections via the reflexive trope of the consumer as an elusive epistemic object, endlessly pursued by marketing researchers.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic objects
• ontology
• extended self
• gender politics
• genealogy
• performativity

[T]he human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man … .among the objects of science … .they appeared when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known.

Michel Foucault (1970), The Order of Things, p. 344

Inspired by the occasion of Russ Belk’s Doctorate Honoris Causa, hosted by the University of Reims (Thompson, 2023), I developed a genealogy of his canonical concept, the extended self, with a goal of exploring its underlying ontological assumptions and explicating the epistemic shifts in marketing’s understanding of ‘the consumer’ that it anticipated (Thompson, 2024). I optimistically envisioned that this reflection might precipitate further dialogue on the ontological assumptions that tacitly frame marketing and consumer research. With full appreciation to this journal and its indefatigable editor Mark Tadajewski, these seven responses have exceeded my most roseate expectations. Many thanks to all the authors and author teams who invested their valuable time and intellectual capital to create these invigorating responses.

Preece and Rojas Gaviria surmise that these exchanges are ‘very much the beginning of a conversation’ (2024, p. 631). I hope they prove to be right. By linking these abstract, but fundamentally important ontological questions to Belk’s canonical concept, this series of essays may call greater disciplinary attention to these theoretical, analytic and representational issues. Much like Taylor Swift and the National Football League, Belk (1988) always brings a devoted audience to any theoretical language game.

Given the intersecting complexities of Belk (1988, 2013, 2014) and posthuman ontologies (Haraway, 1997, 2003, 2016), my comment was bound to be rife with historical elisions and unrecognised errors of omission and commission. The corrective insights offered by Arnould, Bettany and Coffin, Hewer, Hietanen and Botez, Kuruoglu, Preece and Rojas-Gaviria, and, of course, that expansive progenitor of theoretical insights himself, Russ Belk, all help to illuminate these unarticulated issues. As readers will also soon see (assuming they have an extended network of patience-inducing relational capacities), I interpret some of these responses as having mainly topical associations to my original comment rather than speaking to its primary motifs. The phrase ‘this critique is orthogonal to my argument’ will appear more than a few times in this essay. However, I am quite happy about this turn of events because these seven responses have broadened the scope of this conversation about marketing’s ontological commitments in diverse and interesting ways. I found each to be fascinating and enlightening and I could not be more thrilled that my comment provide an impetus to their creation.

As an additional preface, in my response to these responses, I am going to follow the lead of Andrei and Joel who used my first name, rather than surname, when referring to me in their essay. I find that this convivial mode of address greatly helps to reduce the sense of antagonism that can be an unintended consequence of such intellectual deliberations. So, thanks Andrei and Joel for providing a simple but effective means to attenuate, to some extent, that narrative dilemma.

Now facing the rather daunting task of responding to these wide-ranging ideas, I will start with two broad observations. First, several of these authors emphasise that pervasive interconnectivity and co-shaping interdependencies among heterogeneous material and organic actants are not unique to our era of digital networks, big data and algorithmic consumer culture (Airoldi & Rokka, 2022). On a closely related note, these essays further contend that my comment erroneously and problematically discounted the significance and indispensability of materiality, and most particularly human embodiment and emotionality, in these complex arrangements. These essays remind readers that we have always been interconnected, interdependent, and embodied.

While these are all excellent points, they can also be strategically deployed in the manner that, following Foucault (1980), I will characterise as the continuity critique – i.e. ‘you say that things are now different, but, in fact, these processes, effects, relationships, and problems have been always been integral to the human condition’. This rhetorical strategy provides a compelling rationale for dismissing or discrediting analyses of discontinuity and difference and the ways in which consequential divergences and variations can be manifest in the repetition of structured arrangements (Deleuze, 1968/1994).

As perhaps an imperfect analogy, humanity has always been dependent on the sun for its survival, but the geocentric sun of the 15^th century organised a very different set of socio-cultural relations and ritual practices than the heliocentric sun of our post-Copernican age. For my analytic purposes, however, the relevant differences are not material ones – like depleted ozone layers, sunscreens, sun-burned or cancer-marked bodies, solar farms, satellite communications disrupted by solar flares, etc., etc. – that have emerged through centuries of technological development. While these material alterations in what might be called the sun-humanity-biosphere assemblage are of obvious importance, the sun is also an epistemic object, inscribed in all variety discourses, mythological meanings and representational models, that frame how it is understood as an object of knowledge/experience and that organise different arrangements of social beliefs and actions.

Seguing to my second and more encompassing point, the differences that I sought to address were decidedly not material. Rather, they concerned the ways in which marketing academics (and their marketing research counterparts in the commercial and non-profit sectors) have constructed (and are constructing) consumers as epistemic objects. Drawing from Knorr Cetina (1999), Zwick and Dholakia (2006, pp. 20–21) discuss the defining qualities of epistemic objects:

[E]pistemic consumption objects are characterized by two interrelated features. First, interaction, observation, use, examination, and evaluation of epistemic consumption objects reveal them progressively., by increasing rather than reducing their complexity (Rheinberger, 1997). Second, such objects … are characterized by an essential elusiveness of look, content, shape, and, ‘story’. This material elusiveness or lack of ontological stability turns the object into a continuous knowledge project … .While the epistemic consumption object is well defined in terms of its components and properties at any given moment, it is ill defined with respect to the direction it will take at the very next moment and in the less immediate future. A knowledge object may thus be called more or less ontologically liquid (or ontologically viscous) depending on the speed by which the object is revealed and the rate at which it changes

Zwick and Dholakia (2006) are analysing the epistemic objects that occupy consumers’ attention, such as when on-line investors seek to decipher and accurately predict the volatile fluctuations of the stock market. While the ‘stock market’ has real material consequences on people’s lives and livelihoods, it is an epistemic object that can only be known through a multitude of representational forms – screen graphs, charts of market trends, analytic/expert discourses, news reports, stock indexes, trading algorithms, and so on, and the aggregate of which can also exhibit conflicting and obfuscating properties – creating the paradox that the more representations we have of an epistemic object, the more mysterious and elusive it becomes.

My variation on this idea is to say that ‘the consumer’ is the epistemic object for marketing and consumer researchers. Using the ‘extended self’ as a conceptual touchpoint, I further sought to consider how our discipline has constructed this epistemic object, with an emphasis on the shifting ontological assumptions that have been and might be coming into play.¹ I sought to maintain this analytic distinction between the consumer as an epistemic object and the socio-material realities of consumers’ actual lives and experiences throughout my comment. As this set of responses makes abundantly clear, however, my efforts were insufficient and/or betrayed inadvertent conceptual slippages. Perhaps, in the response, I can partially redress some of these communicative miscues.

Turning to these matters, Alev (Kuruoglu, 2024), in her eloquent and thought-provoking response, cautions that my discussion did not pay sufficient attention to the materiality of consumers’ lives and their embodied relations to the world. Again, I fully concur that such materialities are crucially important, harbouring profound politics of identity implications (also see Bettany & Coffin, 2024; Preece & Rojas Gaviria, 2024). However, these pressing material matters are a different topic than addressed by the quite limited scope of my reflection on the ontologies and praxeomorphic tropes that frame how marketers understand the ‘consumer’ as an epistemic object.

In pursuing this elusive epistemic object, marketers, particularly in corporate settings, are not that interested in consumers’ materiality. Rather, their more profitable aim is to collect and aggregate the digital traces of those material relations, as encoded by, among other data sources, consumers’ fitness tracker data and biometric measures and their browsing and shopping histories, all of which provide surrogate representations of their material conditions (What particular kinds of hygiene products, OTC medicines, grooming and self-care products are you buying? What medical conditions and health concerns are you googling about? What restaurant and entertainment activities have been mapped by your smartphone’s apps?). These digital traces are far more readily incorporated into monetizable algorithms (and the predictive models favoured by quantitative marketing researchers) than actual materialities and, hence, serve to ‘liquefy’ (or digitise) the body of the epistemic consumer (see Airoldi & Rokka, 2022; Zwick & Denegri-Knott, 2009).

My analysis focused on the relationships between this complex disciplinary assemblage (marketing) and broader socio-cultural trends that are increasingly valorising the digital trace, and the algorithmic prediction. Why is it that our mythic marketing Ahabs are no longer interested in hunting the whale and instead, seek to marketise its next predicted location using sonar tracking of its oceanic paths? Rather than ignoring or dismissing the materiality of consumers and consumption, my comment sought to explicate some of the socio-cultural/socio-technological conditions that have led marketers to increasingly believe that the digital trace holds all the secrets needed to attain their market-driven goals.

Shona and Jack (Bettany & Coffin, 2024), in a similar spirit to Alev, suggest that my analysis glaringly ignores the positionality of consumer researchers, the neoliberal proclivities some attribute to CCT research, and the academic politics that sustains the holy trinity of North American journals (JCR, JM, and JMR). Again, those topics are all worthy of focused discussion and ameliorative action. However, they remain orthogonal to the issues I was seeking to highlight.

If one wants to resist and disrupt the dehumanising effects of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic consumer society, I will proffer that a Homo Academicus-styled (Bourdieu, 1988) analysis of the marketing academy is precisely the wrong place to start. Marketing journals are, almost by institutional design, reactive rather than proactive forums. To combat the technocratic reduction of consumers to disembodied, epistemic objects, the target of change needs to be the broader socio-cultural, corporatist, and socio-technical currents that situate the marketing profession.

As academics, we like to think that the language games we play in our journals can be a powerful, if not revolutionary, means of social change. An alternative consideration is that academic journals are best suited to reproducing academic status distinctions and vying for the forms of symbolic capital that hold sway in these particular fields of competition. For the reflexive record, these institutionalised and indeed habituated, academic practices are also implicated in the production of my comment on Belk (1988) and the corresponding responses published in this issue. Status value accrues to myself, the commentators, this journal (and perhaps even Russ might garner a marginal increase in his pharaonic volume of symbolic capital) through participation in this dialogue over the extended self.

On the flipside, journals can also be a space where disruptive discourses find expression (though often on the institutional margins) and which can then gain some degree of traction in other institutional settings. But, executive board rooms, well-funded, well-connected think tanks, large marketing research firms, consulting and lobbying groups, political leaders, and grass roots organisations are the sites where problematic constructions of the epistemic consumer can be more directly and effectively contested.

Of course, I am not denying that academics can become agents of change. However, I am not the first to say that academics have limited potential to affect these cultural and political conversations, so long as they remain sequestered in the academy (Holt, 2017). For example, the massive influence of the Chicago School on global economic policy and politics (which we in marketing now comfortably gloss as an anonymous ‘neoliberalism’) did not stem from publishing ‘insightful’ articles per se. Rather, its leading proponents made alliances with political and corporate leaders by convincing them that their ‘creatively destructive’ ideas could generate unprecedented wealth and power by dismantling the welfare state and other institutional and political protections against the privatisation of the commons and the financialization of the economy. To be blunt, Milton Friedman supported and advised Pinochet for many lucrative reasons (see Klein, 2007).

Emancipatory-oriented marketing scholars could perhaps benefit from studying and reverse engineering, to the extent feasible, the influence strategies that enabled the Chicago School to gain these game-changing real politik capacities. In contrast, the question of how one’s academic institution ranks specific journals for tenure, promotion, and pay – while a very consequential matter for those in the academy – is not that central to combatting surveillance capitalism and its societal effects.

However, I will further add that academic status position is, though in a different way than suggested by Shona and Jack, a factor that also has to be challenged. Economics, as an institution, has been very effective in shrouding itself in an aura of expert authority when it comes to matters of the market, and this symbolic capital opens the doors to the boardroom and corridors of political power. The computer and data science fields now carry significant technocratic cachet, and their voice looms increasingly large in these cultural discussions over consumer privacy rights, control of digital information, and the oligarchic consolidation of the digital economy controlled by a small set of omnipresent corporations (Amazon, Google, Meta, SAP, Tencent). The field of marketing – though having many scholars who are exceedingly well-versed in the actual socio-cultural workings of the market and consumers’ relation to technology – is their lower status, marginalised academic counterpart. Marketing academics can write wondrous emancipatory words about challenging entrenched regimes of corporate power and combatting oppressive social classifications but until we, as a discipline, become something other than the lowly supplicant to economics, and now the data sciences, few will care about our transformative insights and recommendations, outside of our own hermetic subculture of dissent.

Turning to Eric’s commentary (Arnould, 2024), his writings (Arnould, 2022) and presentations on neo-animism were an inspiration to my reflections on the emergence of posthuman and post-network ontological constructions of the epistemic consumer. The praxeomorphic tropes I highlighted were technologically oriented (digital communication networks, block chains, AI) but organic tropes can and do serve similar functions in fostering de-centred understandings of consumer subjectivities. In this regard, Emily Martin (1994) discusses the recursive and synergistic relations that emerged between paradigmatic shifts in the ontology of immunology (immunophilosophy) and the emergence of cultural conditions that we now discuss under the broad rubrics of postmodernity or liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000).

As Martin details, throughout much of the 20^th century, the body was conceptualised as fortress-guarded by an army of macrophages who stood ever ready to fight invading microbes. This modernist immunophilosophy portrayed a world of sharply defined boundaries/territories, clearly specified roles, essential structures, functional specificity, and top-down, centralised command centres. This conceptualisation of immunity was also highly compatible with the logic of heavy capitalism, where economic and market power emanated from organisational stability, rational planning, and massive platoons of labourers who could perform their discrete and repetitive tasks with mechanised efficiency.

During the 1970s, this fortress/factory model, in historical concert with the rise of neoliberal market reforms, was largely usurped by a postmodern understanding of the immune system. Rather than a fortress, postmodern immunophilosophy depicts a system of highly adaptable, interconnected actants who freely cross permeable and shifting boundaries and who respond as needed to an endless array of dynamic environmental challenges. This flexible system is construed as becoming more robust (i.e. gaining more capacities) when having to continuously adapt to changes and disruptions in this expansive, boundless, network of co-shaping interconnections. Whereas a comfortable stability/balanced stasis was a prescriptive ideal for modern immunophilosophy, in this postmodern frame, such ‘static’ and ‘inflexible’ conditions represent sources of enervation and vulnerability.

Postmodern immunophilosophy blurs the modernist boundary between the human body and the environment; it emphasises flexibility, adaptability, interconnectedness and decentralised actions that create informational feedback loops through which the system can become ever more resilient, ever more adaptable, ever more ‘competitively fit’. As a practical matter, the material properties and bio-chemical functioning of human immunity has probably not changed that dramatically during this 75-year-ish span (a mere blink in the eye of evolutionary history). But as an epistemic object, the immune system of the 1950s is radically different from its 21^st century counterpart, and each manifests a historically specific correspondence, and a recursive relation to, the prevailing socio-economic and socio-technical order.

This postmodern understanding of the immune system also presents a system of ontological assumptions that can be transposed onto other epistemic objects and reciprocally, these discourses produce actions, classifications, technologies, measures, normative guidelines, and discoveries that reinforce the perceived validity of these ontological precepts. We now have little epistemic choice but to believe that our immune systems, our identities, our organisations, and societies are flexible entities which need to be constantly challenged to maintain their vitality and whose problems invariably emanate from a lack of dynamism and adaptability.

Eric suggests that my argument can be metaphorically represented through the science fiction trope of uploading one’s consciousness from the wetware of the brain/neurosystem to the technoware of silicon chips and digital bytes (see Gibson, 1984). However, this metaphor conflates the materiality (or immateriality) of consciousness with the idea of an epistemic object. I think a more revelatory metaphor is offered by the 2002 film, Minority Report, based on a short story written by Philip K. Dick. The relevant plot detail is that the US government has developed a ‘Precrime’ programme that uses clairvoyant humans (‘precogs’) to anticipate when a murder is about to happen, enabling law enforcement to arrest the would-be perpetrator before the crime occurs.

To improve the analogical correspondence between this science fiction narrative and the epistemic consumer, let’s substitute the biological ‘precogs’ with computer algorithms that predict future behaviours based on detailed analyses of individuals’ digital data. In this epistemic context, the authorities deploying these algorithmic projections have no concern about the presumed perpetrators’ (or consumers’) agency or free will; they only care about the predicted behaviour and then act in ways to bring that predicted reality into fruition. By arresting the anticipated ‘criminal’ before they can ‘commit’ the crime, the predictive system codifies guilt in a self-fulfilling confirmation loop. Algorithmic marketing similarly targets consumers with niche ads, promotions, and other communications that entice or induce them to act in accord with the predicted behaviour.

In the case of marketing algorithms, their predictions do not always need to be correct (whereas in Minority Report the public revelation of a strategically orchestrated mistake turns society against this system of prophylactic policing). For companies basing their strategies and tactics on these algorithmic formulations, it is more than a sufficient level of performance if these aggregate predictions provide an incremental market advantage over their competitors who are similarly chasing after the same elusive epistemic object. To steal a line from Samuel Beckett, by way of Stephen Brown (2008), my corporate algorithms only have to ‘fail better’ than your corporate algorithms.

Eric further notes that my commentary does not explicitly address the cultural role of religion or spirituality in modulating how people understand their relations to nature and technology (also see Botez & Hietanen, 2024) and that different religious cosmologies, particularly non-Western ones, afford very different and highly interconnected understandings of ‘self’. This point is definitely worth highlighting but again, it is orthogonal to the topic of how marketing, and perhaps more consequentially corporate techno-capitalism, constructs ‘the consumer’ as an epistemic object. Corporate power does not want your consciousness; it does not want your soul; it only wants your sweet, sweet, marketizable digital data.

As a concluding response to Eric, he writes that ‘Thompson, like Belk, writes as if things will continue as they are in a foundational sense even as both recognise the unpredictability of technological developments. That is, they assume that the persistence of the current capitalist system based on growth without end and in which consumer “choices” endlessly proliferate to respond to equally expansive consumer “needs” endures’ (Arnould, 2024, p. 637). This comment initially brings to mind Mark Fisher’s (2009, p. 8) aphorism that, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. Algorithmic consumer culture is, in myriad ways, contributing to and exacerbating the climate crisis and, if humanity crosses all these imminent tipping points and terraforms the planet into Venus, then we can safely presume that the persistence of capitalism will be, shall we say, significantly disrupted.

But let’s consider these apocalyptic implications further. A global network of interdisciplinary researchers working at the interface of biology, computer science, and technological R&D are engaged in projects seeking to dramatically lower the carbon footprint of our globalised digital networks and the vast array of other technological systems that are so deeply intertwined into all facets of social life. And, though still in nascent stages, some of these developments rely on creating organic substitutes for (or supplements to) silicon chips, further blurring the always fuzzy boundary between the natural and technological. Climate change is a ‘wicked problem’ because societies are locked into structural dependencies on energy-intensive technological systems. Ironically, machine-learning algorithms also offer some of the most promising means to transform these interdependencies into sustainable ones, through increased efficiencies and breakthroughs in scalable forms of alternative energy. Facing a potential apocalypse wrought by our technological dependencies (and the transnational power of the fossil fuel industries), we have to hope that the AI algorithm, to use a religious trope, can be our saviour rather than our damnation.

Turning to Chloe and Pilar’s essay, it is an engaging and edifying reflection on the phenomenology of human agency, the interconnected nature of being-in-the-world and becoming-in-the-world, and the humanising need to integrate an ethics of care into assemblage thinking. I have nothing but praise and agreement for their points. My reflection on the consumer as an epistemic object is, once again, discussing a subtly different set of ontological issues.

Since my comment focused on the praxeomorphic figures of digitised identities, block chain technologies, and AI, it can readily invoke critical concerns about the dehumanising threats and other dangers lurking in these complex socio-technical assemblages. Accordingly, Chloe and Pilar, along with Alev, and Shona and Jack, all point to the dangers inherent to this ontological shift. Linking back to Eric and the neo-animist perspective, however, these same praxeomorphic tropes also have the capacity to heighten awareness of interdependencies, interconnections, and shared vulnerabilities – if the ‘omnipresent network’ goes down, we are all incapacitated together.

Such collective fates and anxieties are compatible with an ethics of care. Alev, and Shona and Jack, reference Donna Haraway’s germinal writings, and this feminist post-humanism also seems to inform Chloe and Pilar’s essay. One lesson from Haraway (2016) is that technology can be liberating and empowering and that it would be a political and sociological mistake to equate socio-technological capacities to oppressive power structures while exclusively associating resistance and emancipation with a mythic ideal of nature and organic unity:

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artifacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture. From One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist worldwide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies … . It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. (Haraway, 2016, pp. 11–12, 65)

The scope of this discussion is again far beyond what I envisioned when reflecting on the ontological shifts implied by Belk (1988, 2013, 2014). However, it seems worth recognising that Haraway’s fervent image of the emancipating cyborg – echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1977) earlier reflections on war machines (see Jones & Hietanen, 2023) – has become a much more practical subject position to enact than when she wrote the original version of her manifesto in the mid-80s. While the cyborg may offer a different ontological trope for a radical re-imagining of the social order, it still suggests that identities, and agentic capacities, and collectively shared political interests are distributed across socio-technical/socio-material/socio-political networks.

These Haraway-ian implications also relate to another aspect of Alev’s comments (and also Shona and Jack’s) that frames my discussion of ‘lightness’ as implying a disembodied subjectivity. Given the celebratory re-interpretations of Bauman’s (2000, 2006) arguments about light capitalism that predominate in the CCT literature (see Hewer, 2024), it is fairly easy, and even tempting, for readers to infer that I am ascribing valorising, techtopian meanings to lightness – ‘hooray, we can now be free from all the horribly heavy materiality of the body! Let us forever live as light, disembodied, digital nomads!’

In contrast, the ontology of the distributed self is not about that kind of lightness. Once established, these distributed relations tend to function as enduring patterns of stratification (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While the distributed self is not ‘deep’ in the sense of mirroring some inner essence, it is does present a structured form that renders certain actions and responses as more likely than others, at any given point in time. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, which CCTers often forget, is intended to transcend the dualism between self and socio-cultural environment (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) and, in so doing, it also anticipates this epistemic image of a distributed self. The distributed self may not carry the weight of the essential self, but it is grounded in a reiterative network of relations that, from a synchronic standpoint, appear to be relatively stable.

The elusive epistemic consumer that marketers construct through these complex interlinked data bases and algorithmic calculations is a digital ledger of embodied consumption practices. While ‘data-driven’ marketers only know the epistemic consumer through digital traces, this information is most valuable, actionable, and marketizable when these digital patterns are recurrently re-cited – lightlessness is a state of random resignification, and hence, the bane of big data. Accordingly, the ontology of distributed selves does not presume that consumers are themselves disembodied ontological entities. On the contrary, the body remains a key site of incitement (and recitation) in these networks of power (Foucault, 1978).

Alev’s actor-network-ish examples of Olympic swimmers and polyurethane swimsuits or Caster Semenya and testosterone-suppressing medications clearly support the ontological claim that what we conventionally characterise as physical or athletic capacities are distributed across extensive socio-technological networks. As 21st century readers, we are strongly predisposed by our ontological precepts to interpret such relational analysis as insightful descriptions of the world that avoid the meta-theoretical traps of reductionism and essentialism. However, when parallel arguments are applied to matters of agency and identity, they quickly run afoul of 19^th and 20^th century humanistic narratives and subjectivist ontologies, that still retain a high degree of cultural and intellectual currency and, thereby, spark contrasting concerns about the technocratic colonisation of human agency, or what in early eras would have been christened as ‘the soul’. Perhaps it is time for consumer researchers to finally desacralise the ghost in the (organic) machine and consider that one’s assembled capacity to speed across a swimming pool is not that qualitatively different from the cognitive, emotional, and imaginative capacities that we believe define our phenomenological selves.

Shona and Jack raise two additional issues that I would like to address. First, they state that my comment ‘suggests new technologies necessitate new ontologies, it is also worth noting that notions of decentralised networks and assemblages emerged decades ago when these new technologies had yet to emerge’ (Bettany & Coffin, 2024, p. 594). However, my comment suggested a quite different relationship – ontological precepts often precede their praxeomorphic instantiations:

[T] he origins of assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and ANT (LaTour & Woolgar, 1979) predate the digital era by many decades. However, 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) … . Rather, consumers are fully embedded in complex socio-technical assemblages … Consequently, once notoriously obtuse Deleuzian and Latourian conceptions can begin to function as a culturally naturalized, praxeomorphic model for making sense of the world (Thompson, 2024, p. 560).

My self-quoted passage outlines a highly recursive relationship between ontological conceptions and technological materialities. This recursivity does not produce a quasi-causal relation in which advances and diffusions of new technologies necessarily lead to the invention of new ontological perspectives or vice versa. Rather, we have idealistic and material actants whose relatively autonomous capacities gradually become more or less socio-culturally and socio-technically aligned over the course of history.

As a thought experiment, let’s consider our current praxeomorphic relation to quantum mechanics and its ontological implications. Outside of a relatively small cadre of experts, quantum mechanics is incomprehensible – ‘so you are saying that these tiny sub-atomic thingies can simultaneously be waves and particles?’ We can mouth those words and they don’t actually mean anything to us; we currently lack the capacity to think through them. Now, envision some point in the future (assuming that humanity is still a going concern, as per Eric’s cautionary note) when quantum computing and other quantum technologies have become as integrated into everyday social practices as the network of relations that are now accessed through our smart phones. While lay folk in this future quantum age may be unable to explain in detail how these technologies function, they likely will have a comfortable familiarity with its broad principles and be able to use these quantum experiences as praxeomorphic tools to think with and thereby create a very different kind of socio-cultural order – for example, try to envisage a society organised by a quantum view of gender identity.

I also confess to having a more ambivalent reaction to Shona and Jack’s conclusion that, ‘The Thompson commentary appears to rest upon an assumed positionality of academic researchers as objective observers analysing external market developments and consumer technologies. This depiction conflicts with feminist material-semiotic perspectives that foreground scholars’ inescapable embeddedness within the very sociocultural worlds they investigate’ (Bettany & Coffin, 2024, p. 600).

As a mea culpa, I did not utilise explicitly self-referential language in writing my comment on Belk (1988) – i.e. my situated knowledge emanates from the position of a white, hetero, cisgender, middle-class, North American college professor. So, I do appreciate the irony of their objectifying phrasing – ‘The Thompson’. Nonetheless, I was surprised that they levied this critique at a paper addressing the limits imposed by our prevailing ontological conceptions and the difficulty of thinking beyond the praxeomorphic tropes that have been naturalised by the socio-technical forces that situate our actions and outlooks. On further reflection, there are some underlying complexities posed by this reflexive critique that I think warrant further consideration, particularly as they pertain to the question of how can we know the ontological precepts (or socio-cultural biases) that govern ‘how we know’. A Kantian dilemma still haunts the contemporary quest for emancipatory knowledge.

At the risk of getting ahead, in discussing Russ’s essay, I will interject Foucault’s (1970) related concepts of ‘the analytics of finitude’ and the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’, which articulate the epistemological problem of ‘how do we know what we know?’. The social sciences’ reflexive turn alters this problematic by asking how do we know what we know does? Reflexivity demands that ‘we’ as researchers continuously reflect upon the discursive limits set by our positionalities and the power relations imminent to our discourses and actions. Admonitions for ‘situated knowledge’ implore researchers to not be seduced by the methodological guise of dispassionate objectivity and to never forget that the conduct of social science is a socio-political practice (and should be continuously interrogated as such).

While offering a valuable corrective to objectivism, reflexive narratives paradoxically presume the existence of a transcendental subject who can know what needs to be known to mitigate oppressive consequences. The transcendent knowing subject, albeit one who is now self-aware of its positionality, is the agentic force who would enact Shona and Jack’s primary recommendation: ‘This demands moving from “praxeomorphic” theorisation narrowly aimed at mirroring practices toward more proactive “praxeomorphing” approaches deliberately working to transform realities by seeding cultural ecosystems with new conceptual metaphors and explanatory logics’ (Bettany & Coffin, 2024, p. 600).

More surprisingly (at least to this white male, hetero, cisgender, middle-class, North American college professor), they approvingly reference the quintessential neoliberal strategy of social change – nudging – as an example of ‘praxeomorphing’ that forges a socially beneficial connection between academic research and social praxis. Let’s break down these responsibilizing consequences of nudging in real politik terms. Rather than governments, acting as representatives of their citizenry’s interest, demanding that corporations, for example, reduce their mass production of petroleum-based plastics, and take financial responsibility for redressing the eco-crisis of micro-plastic pollution, they instead function as technocractic ‘risk managers’. Hence, their corporate-friendly solution is to ‘nudge’ consumers to drink micro-plasticised tap water from expensive Hydro Flasks and Stanley stainless steel cups. Seen in this light, the transcendent technocratic nudger – who assumes the authoritative position of knowing what is ‘best’ in this specific situation – acts as a decentralised agent of neoliberal social engineering.

Ironically, my analysis has some structural resemblances to the logic of nudge theory except that it dispenses with the paternalistic, neoliberal expert (i.e. the transcendental authority who exerts control over the empirically finite consumer subject). To elaborate, Shona and Jack conclude that my comment focuses on ‘accurately tracking ontological shifts in conceptualising consumer identities and subjectivities’ (Bettany & Coffin, 2024, p. 600). While I concur with this assessment, it omits an important corollary point. I am suggesting that marketers’ ontological conceptions are being shaped by socio-historic forces beyond their control (an implication indirectly addressed in Paul’s comment). Shona and Jack take this disconcerting decentralisation as a de-politicising move but I see it as a means to identify viable lines of flight from anticipated trajectories.

To the matter of reflexivity, we can describe to some extent the socio-historic forces that are carrying us along; what becomes more conjectural and difficult to know, with any degree of certainty, is where these partially understood forces are leading us. The best we can do is chart a projected course, derived from the trajectories we can track, and then make whatever adjustments/changes we can if that projected destination appears to be a deleterious one, knowing full well that we must also anticipate the hidden dangers lurking in our new direction, every ready to re-orient. If that recursive strategy sounds like a reflexive application of an algorithmic logic, well, now you have comprehended the idea that I so poorly expressed in my original comment.

Shona and Jack’s discussion of reflexivity also offers a source of rapprochement. Seguing from their reflexivity critique, they discuss the socio-cultural biases and prejudices that are built into algorithmic codes (often without anyone’s explicit knowledge of their stealth operation and that invisibly reproduce broader societal patterns of exclusion and inequity). My original essay did not address this ubiquitous form of systemic bias and so I am glad that this exchange has done so. To close the loop, strategies and tactics based on algorithmic analyses and predictions provide marketers with a coveted cultural licence for abdicating their normative responsibilities. ‘We are only giving the people what they want’ has morphed into ‘we are only doing what the algorithm, in all its technocratic wisdom, instructs us to do’. Shona and Jack underscore that such blind faith in these quintessential ‘black box systems’ is always bad faith.

Andrei and Joel use my comment as a point of departure to venture across the millennia and draw out the historical and cultural continuities between the disruptive, disassociating, ‘dividuating’ effects of Christianity on Western identity practices and the ever proliferating, theoretical analyses of the fragmented postmodern self. In so doing, they invert the emancipatory goals of postmodern social theory to reflect on this dismal prospect: perhaps the deconstructive project of postmodernism is not seeking to finally rid society of its misguided commitment to an essential self. Rather, it may be desperately seeking to compensate for the loss of the finite, limited, and knowable pre-Christian self who is securely ensconced in a defining network of animistic relations. [Though such a comparison is beyond the scope of this response, I encourage readers to consider the synergistic and divergent relationships between Andrei and Joel’s genealogy of the Western ‘dividual’ and Eric’s writings on neo-animism referenced in his essay].

As I understand Andrei and Joel’s arguments, academics now insist on the fragmented self because we have no other means to fill the lack created by the Christian annihilation of the limited and, hence, knowable self. We, like all other ‘dividuals’ immersed in this Christian understanding of humanity’s fallen state, feel impelled to understand our most fundamental ontological state as being a process of endless becoming, where we must continually look outward for salvation (or in secular terms, self-knowledge), in begrudging recognition that there is no timeless essence to anchor our search for meaning and purpose. The praxeomorphic shifts that I attributed to the contemporary socio-technical milieu, are from this standpoint, contemporary articulations of this Christian renunciation of the essential, knowable self. They suggest that the ever-accelerating currents of corporate capitalism have been more than happy to sweep the de-essentialized, disenchanted, disillusioned consumer away in a spectacular tide of goods, brands, media spectacles and digital captivations and fantasies. Echoing Holt (2002), they caution that the quest to deconstruct the essential self is a not a critical challenge to techno-capitalism but a complicit and enabling socio-cultural practice. We postmoderns valorise difference and change because we have lost faith that we can ever be continuous and stable.

Andrei and Joel’s paper also suggest a different way to think about the appeal of Belk (1988). Seen in this light, the concept of the extended self promises that consumers can ‘know thyself’ through the reflective mirror of their possessions and social relationships. Andrei and Joel (and Paul in his essay) call attention to a theorised relation suggested by Belk (1988) that I completely glossed over – the stronger and more developed our unextended selves become, the fewer material goods we need to acquire and own. Applying Andrei and Joel’s argument to this premise, Belk’s (1988) conception of the extended self juxtaposes a pre-Christian ideal of a fixed, secured and knowable self that can be perfected through inner reflection (or in secular terms ‘be authentic’) and the post-Christian construction of human existence as a perpetual quest for salvation through ‘perennial reconstitution’. This contradictory figure of the extended self retains faith that the authentic self can be known while accepting that such self-knowledge has to be derived from our interdependent relations to others and objects (also see Belk, 2024).

Andrei and Joel’s account further implies that this promise can never be fulfilled. The mirror of consumption only provides a simulation of selfhood that we can therapeutically confuse for the elusive real thing – the ‘illusion of a core’ self to use Russ’s phase (Belk, 2013, p. 478) – but that never convincingly resolves this profound sense of loss. As I compare that option to the idea of the distributed self, I think an alternative implication could be stated as, paraphrasing Kubrick, ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Core Self and Love my Interconnectedness’.

To use a linguistic analogy (Austin, 1962), I take Andrei and Joel to be arguing that we have lost our denotative sense of self (a self that is fixed and solidified by an inner essence) and are struggling to cope with the resulting ‘lack’, this dizzying experience of liquidity, by creating a connotative self through external relations to material goods. I suggest that the idea of a distributed self could function in a manner parallel to performative statements, such as ‘please silence your phones’. Performative statements are not evaluated for their ‘truth’ value (authenticity) but their capacity to effect action, and they exist through only their expression – a command, a question, or a request have no denotative referent that lies behind (and authenticates) its linguistic enactment. In hindsight, perhaps my concept of the distributed self was overly wedded to a singular praxeomorphic trope. Perhaps, the more general ontological concept is the performative self who exists only through the network of relations that produces it and where one’s sense of agency is an emergent property of these interconnections – and, yes of course, Judith Butler (1997).

To conclude, with respect to Andrei and Joel, their analysis is an excellent corrective to a myopic present-ism and an insensitivity towards enduring historical conditions and trajectories that underlie contemporary states-of-the-world. I also want to think considerably more about their arguments in respect to other histories that focus on the relation between the Gnostic Christian tradition (the original heretics) and the spiritual-mystical dimensions of science and technology (see Davis 1998; Noble 1999). My initial inclination, perhaps inadvertently proving Andrei and Joel’s thesis, is that the cultural influences Christianity has exerted on our culturally framed understanding of the self and our relations to the material world may be more heterodox.

Their essay also reminds me of Foucault’s (1985) historical comparison between the Hellenistic view of ‘appetites’ and the subsequent Christian one. According to Foucault’s genealogy, the Greeks (i.e. patrician males) sought to exert control over their appetites (with no strong distinction made between the gastronomic and the sexual) in order to demonstrate their fitness to govern in the polity. Their emphasis was not abstinence or prohibition but on a reasoned and controlled use of pleasure. In sharp contrast, Christianity demonised the flesh and reconfigured the governance of one’s appetites (particularly sexual urges) as a spiritual struggle against mortal sins that demanded abstinence, denial, and renunciation.

While articulating the Christian myth of humanity’s fall from grace, this Christian idea of the spirit seeking redemption from its sinful flesh also suggests an anchor to one’s identity – we must constantly battle against our material imperfections and seek self-improvement through, in contemporary secular terms, restrictive diets, demanding fitness regimens, the entire panoply of ascetic lifestyle practices, and more recently, the penance of green consumerism. Andrei and Joel posit that Christianity has produced a limitless self, impelled and consumed by the compensatory idea of infinite reconstitution. These socio-historic forces have also engendered a culture that fears losing its soul to pleasurable excesses. We have become defined by our negations; that is, not what we ‘lack’ but what we must purify or expurgate.

Paul’s essay is another insightful complement to my comment that further elaborates (and illuminates) Bauman’s (2000, 2006) arguments about light capitalism and the emergence of liquid modernity (and liquid fear). Paul notes that his writings on the dystopian implications of Bauman’s thesis have been largely marginalised or ignored by CCT scholars. I hope this series of papers can provide a corrective to that unfortunate erasure. Given the grim realities of climate change and the impotence of conventional political action to restrain and reform capricious corporate power, Bauman’s insights into the disempowering and despairing effects of liquid modernity could not be more timely.

Paul reiterates and reinforces my previous point that, while the term ‘light’ has been valorised in CCT (and the broader culture at large), in the context of Bauman (2006), it is a tragic term. For all its many problems, heavy capitalism was dependent upon a ‘strong’ and emplaced workforce. Those spatialised and embodied industrial needs created interdependencies that workers could leverage in negotiating with the owners and managers of Capital, and that could mobilise collective action, and collective identities/solidarities, particularly along class lines. Of course, Bauman was not suggesting that the industrial era was a Utopian time for labour but only that unionised, industrial workers had more means at their disposal to contest and modulate the terms of their political marginalisation and economic exploitation. Light capitalism is the era of the increasingly disempowered and displaced worker. The insecurities and vulnerabilities that might have once applied only to those inhabiting the most precarious positions in the global economy have now become increasingly widespread across blue-, pink-, and white-collar professions (Piketty 2019).

Paul’s deeply personal reflection further describes the affective tolls of living in an age of liquidity. As mentioned in Eric’s essay, marketing and consumer research has deeply entrenched predispositions towards heroic portrayals – utility-maximising sovereign consumers who bend the market to their will; swashbuckling managers invigorated by the ceaseless challenges of market competition; intrepid consumer researchers who explore the mysterious terrains of consumer culture and return with treasure troves of rarefied knowledge. Paul’s essay conjures another figure – distressed people who are suffering from the interminable instability of liquid modernity and who must cope with feelings of frailty, fear, depression, and abject hopelessness.

While a Google search will locate some consumer research articles that do address, to a greater and lesser extent, these experiences of liquid fear and liquid anxiety, they remain marginal considerations in our field and border on being taboo topics. The performative identity of the marketing profession is one of perpetual (if forced) optimism. The extended self is an equally optimistic construction – people can and do find genuine meaning and happiness in their possessions. But what if they don’t or, even more disconcertingly, what if, try as they might, they simply can’t? Where does one then turn in a consumer society that demands not just happiness, but unwavering fealty to the idea of becoming happy, as a token of legitimate consumer-citizenship? Paul’s essay invites us to seriously ponder those possibilities and their existential and societal implications.

Last but certainly not least, Russ has also graciously provided a response to my comment. Before turning to his essay, I want to briefly reflect on how Russ Belk’s ‘extended self’ became part of my extended self. When Belk (1988) was published in those halcyon days before electronic pre-prints, I was about two years deep into my infatuation/obsession with existential phenomenology and hermeneutic philosophy but struggling mightily to adapt these ideas to a consumer research field that was primarily interested in measuring and modelling consumers’ attitudes and other cognitive variables. Belk (1988) more than any other ‘interpretivist’ consumer research paper of that era, helped me to bridge that yawning intellectual chasm between Continental philosophy and consumer research.

Over the years, my research interests trended in a sociological direction and I, in some sense, left the ‘extended self’ behind. The academic conference associated with the conferral of Russ’s honorary doctorate provided an opportunity to reacquaint myself with this old intellectual friend and inspiration. A few decades down the road, I read Belk (1988) with a renewed appreciation and a new set of ontological questions, which resulted in the comment now being discussed.

In the world of sports, media pundits often caution fans to not take the recurrent brilliance of great athletes, like Messi or Biles, for granted. And I think a similar admonition needs to be made about Russ. His essay is the usual Belkian analysis we have come to expect and yet, we should always appreciate that ‘the Belkian’ remains very unusual. And so, we have been gifted with yet another intellectual tour de force that beautifully integrates and synthesises a broad array of cultural phenomena, social experiences and interdisciplinary insights into a compelling and innovative conceptualisation.

While I am very pleased to have provided the sandy irritant that facilitated the production of Russ’s scholarly pearl, like several of the other essays in this volume, it addresses a series of issues that remain, drum roll please, ‘orthogonal to my original comment’. I take full responsibility for this pervasive cross-talking (though I don’t regret this consequence because it has had such fecund discursive effects). Had I been clearer about my focus on the consumer as an epistemic object, however, we would likely have had a greater convergence, though again at the expense of the exhilarating divergences expressed in this set of responses.

But to the more immediate point, the distinction that Russ draws between the me-self and the I-self, thought provoking as it may be, strikes me as being, last time I promise, orthogonal to my reflection on the ontological and praxeomorphic shifts that have de-centred the ‘consumer self’ and naturalised and normalised variations of ‘assemblage thinking’ in marketing’s construction of the consumer as an epistemic object. So, I will leave those intriguing passages to be appreciated in their own right.

More germane to my comment is Russ’s discussion of extended objects, though to make this linkage I first need to revisit the quote which began this essay. In The Order of Things, Foucault (1970) details the historical transition from the Renaissance, Classical, and Modern epistemes – that is, the implicit ‘rules of formation’ that govern what constitutes legitimate forms of knowledge in a particular historical era and that situate any specific intellectual discipline’s production of knowledge. Broader than Kuhn’s (1970) concept of a scientific paradigm (though having some structural resemblances to it), the episteme orders the relationships between scientific representations and states of the world. In terms closer to this conversation, an episteme is the meta-ontology, or intellectual Zeitgeist, shared by different branches of the humanities and social sciences.

Foucault’s analysis pays particular attention to the transition from the classical to the modern episteme and the differing ontological construction of ‘man’ in each. The regrettable androcentrism of the phrasing aside, Foucault’s ‘man’ refers, not to men in a literal sense, but a complex ontological figuration – the empirico-transcendental doublet. That is, individuals are simultaneously empirically determined subjects, subject to the forces of nature and history and transcendental subjects who are capable of knowing these forces of empirical determination (i.e. the knowing subject who can discover and analyse the laws and properties of nature).

In the classical age, transcendental consciousness – the capacity to know the world – was an unreflexive, unquestioned cultural given. ‘Man’ existed as a transparent conduit of knowledge using the tools of mathematics, logic, and scientific measures to discern the divine order hidden in the world of objects and superficial resemblances. Since ‘God is no deceiver’, man could know the truth through rigorous observation, logical analyses, and precise mappings of structural properties that supersede empirical variability (e.g. the essential defining qualities of a species abstracted from non-essential variations). The goal of the classical episteme was to unambiguously order the world using tables, taxonomies and classifications, and its practitioners remained supremely confident that these representations depicted the world as it truly is. Thus, according to Foucault, man did not yet exist in the classical episteme; that is, as a reflexive, knowing subject whose transcendental act of knowing could themselves be analysed as the subject of knowledge.

The modern episteme problematised the duality of the empirico-transcendental doublet by raising a nexus of epistemological concerns related to the ‘the analytics of finitude’. Unlike the classical episteme, the ‘man’ of the modern episteme is no longer presumed to be the transcendent (and detached) scribe who documents the order of the world. Rather, man becomes an empirical subject who seeks to know, and which then raises a complex question: how does an empirically finite subject comprehend transcendental truths? This epistemic shift also impels a further question: what barriers, hidden in our language, our cultural histories, our psyches, prevent us from truly knowing? According to Foucault, the modern episteme marked the invention of ‘man’ as a problematised subject of knowledge.

In the modern episteme, the once unified transcendental knower has been fragmented into a plethora of scientific representations: the id, ego, and superego psychodrama that produces the neurotic subject plagued by repressed memories and subconscious desires; a cognitive system seeking to exert rational control over the unruly affective impulses and instincts set by our evolutionary history; an overdetermined subject bound by the norms, mores, and linguistic conventions of society; an alienated subject whose true self-interests are masked by the interpellations of distorting ideologies; and so many other potential sources of finitude that modernism has defined and hypostatised as barriers that must be overcome in the quest for authentic, liberatory self-knowledge.

So, now back to Russ’s discussion of extended objects. I think such linguist modifiers – I also include other ontological neologisms such as the extended mind (Clark & Chalmers 1998; Heersmink 2020), postmodernism, posthumanism, transhumanism, liquid modernity and perhaps even neo-animism – are transitional, and perhaps compensatory, efforts to make our current but increasingly outmoded epistemic language more viable, more helpful, in these shifting times of ecological crisis and technological upheaval. The analytics of finitude becomes most pressing when we are sensitised to the inability of our ontological vernacular to express what we vaguely recognise to be happening. We chafe at the limits of our contemporary conditions of intelligibility, beyond which only lies the frustratingly nebulous realm of the inexpressible and the inconceivable.

Our collective lebenswelt induces an escalating dread that the present episteme has failed and that we must desperately find a new way of ordering our relations to the world, as Eric and Paul poignantly note. Perhaps, this ongoing epistemic shift is also manifesting an even more radical de-centralisation. Neither the modernist nor the postmodernist epistemes questioned humanity’s privileged role as the producer/discover of knowledge. Sure, we moderns and postmoderns are inextricably mired in a Kafka-esque journey where we can never quite push through the many barriers that block our path to transcendental knowledge. But we must keep trying because it is our moral responsibility to utilise our unique capacity ‘to know’. In this epistemic frame, technology, in all its variegated forms, remains a resource/tool that serves our will to knowledge.

Machine learning, AI, General AI, and the looming prospect of Super AI are rapidly puncturing these humanistic conceits. For many intellectual tasks, AI systems can access more knowledge and aggregate it far more accurately and quickly than humanly possible. Many of us now take Schadenfreude-ish pleasure in media reports on the inexplicable and often comical miscues of AI systems, when they attempt creative tasks that seem intuitive to us. Forgive the anthropomorphism, but we also realise, perhaps more than we care to admit, that these digital malapropisms are the growing pains of AI. As slightly bemused but mystified, and, perhaps fearful, parents, we watch as AI’s ever accelerating baby steps transform the socio-technical, bio-technical, and socio-cultural landscapes in ways that are increasingly difficult to both comprehend and apprehend. What becomes of us (as the knowing subject) when our ways of knowing are completely and unambiguously dwarfed by the very technologies we invented? The cataclysmic implication is that the empirico-transcendental doublet, which valorises humanity’s centrality in the act of knowing, will no longer be seen as a problem in need of solution; rather, it will become an archaic relic of a distant era, much like the permutations of Ptolemaic astronomy.

How this epistemic shift impacts marketing remains an open and very speculative question. As this remarkable set of responses has so clearly shown, I have failed miserably in my efforts to think beyond current epistemic limits, However, if my essay, and most of all the brilliant discourses that now contextualise it, can help scholars in our humble field (and perhaps beyond) to create more sustainable, equitable and caring ontologies (and socio-technical arrangements), then this discursive act of incitement will have been very worthwhile. May we all fail better, together.

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

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Craig J. Thompson

Craig J. Thompson is the Churchill Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research investigates the socio-cultural shaping of consumer identities, with an emphasis on the intersection of social class and gender, and the politics of consumption. [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. Y’all astute readers got me! I did not reference the epistemic object once in my original commentary. This rationale was implicit to my argument. I shied away from using this term in an explicit fashion because ‘epistemic objects’ are an arrangement of ontological assumptions and representational strategies. Concerned that the juxtaposition of ‘epistemic object’ and ‘ontology’ might be confusing (and unwieldy), I opted for a more streamlined narrative, though that choice perhaps set the stage for subtle miscommunications. This opportunity to respond to these responses affords a valued means to redeem that communicative shortcoming and, perhaps more importantly, to crystallise my original argument. After reading these responses, I think I now know what I wanted to say that I didn’t know to say when originally writing about the epistemic limits on what we can know (and say).