Consumer possessed: A comment on assessing Belk’s “Possessions and the Extended Self”

Abstract

While outstanding in observing the contemporary experience of being a “consumer” to become a “canonical article” in consumer research, as Thompson deftly analyzes, Belk’s “Possessions and the Extended Self” is subject to varied traps of remaining within the “mainstream marketing’s ideological boat.” This commentary attempts to highlight these ideological traps as we hopefully escape contemporary capitalism’s system of production of consumer subjectivity.

The premise of Belk’s (1988) Possessions and the Extended Self (P&ES), for which Thompson (2024) provides a deft explanation of why it has come to be considered seminal in consumer behavior studies, is “[t]hat we are what we have … is perhaps the most basic and powerful fact of consumer behavior.” Together with earlier sentences including “… understanding what possessions mean is recognizing that, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves,” these constitute at once a brilliant observation regarding the contemporary capitalist market cultures of consumption and an unfortunate misspeak when and if the observation is universalized or eternalized. Both Belk and Thompson are aware of the danger of such misspeak, which they acknowledge unfortunately only in passing. What is most sad and frightening for the future of science, scholarship, and disciplines’ contributions to humanity’s understanding of itself and its existence in the universe that it shares with others that are living and lifeless is the implication of the observation by Thompson (2024) that “… Belk’s … tacit alignment with the field of marketing’s neoliberal (and uncritical) predilections represents a potentially necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding its canonical influence.” It is indeed sad and extremely dangerous for human knowledge and existence if the only possibility of getting heard in the discipline is by adherence to a currently dominant ideology, by conceding to pressures not to “…rock the marketing mainstream’s ideological boat” (Thompson, 2024: xx).

Ideology, specifically as it constrains and directs thought, is an understudied topic in our field. Indeed, ideology is fundamental in people’s adoption of the prevailing myths that inscribe current dominant cultural atmosphere; one that Wright (2010) calls “capital’s ecology” in the contemporary market society (Slater and Tonkiss, 2001). It is within this ecology of modern capitalist market society that the current subjectivity of the human being is inscribed as the “consumer” (Fırat and Dholakia, 2017), further reinforced by consumer culture.

Interestingly, the original modernist ideology, liberalism, the aim of which was to liberate the human individual from all oppression stemming from nature or from others, in order to have unbiased knowledge of and act upon her/his environment, and for each to participate in the vision and construction of a grand society envisioned to provide the conditions and the means for each to realize her/his potential, according to her/his own free will, did not intend to isolate each individual to fend for oneself. Modern culture, under a liberalist ideology, was constructed through principles and institutions that would assure the individual liberties envisioned to be necessary to build toward the grand society across its different domains. Domains especially considered to be key were the political, the social, and the economic domains. Democracy as the principle of the political domain and civility as the principle of the social domain both suggested collaboration with and consideration of others in constructing humanity’s common future as at the same time individual liberties were preserved.

Neoliberal ideology, currently dominant in the globalization of marketization (Chaudhuri and Belk, 2020), on the other hand, a result of the eventual hegemony of the economic domain over all others, fosters an individualism that isolates one from others and, specifically under capitalism, brings a singular focus on the individual, where each individual is left to look after one’s own, and is left much without socialized support, leaving the individual with little energy to have consideration for others and birthing the tragedy of the commons. Consumer researchers’ “alignment with the field of marketing’s neoliberal (and uncritical) predilections” and focus on each individual consumer’s experiences, focus on individual own self, without much attention to communal implications, further diverts attention from focus on communal wellbeing.

Another key concern with contemporary scholarship in our discipline has to be that we are too focused on “what is,” exploring and describing current phenomena with as much precision as possible, maybe not recognizing that when these descriptions are not regularly contextualized in history our studies reinforce the continuation of what is, helping to calcify our present conditions and circumstances (See, for example, Fırat, 1985).

Again, both Belk and Thompson are aware of this problem. For example, Belk provides some discussion of perspectives arising from works such as that of Sartre, Marx, and Fromm, in which possessions, consumption, and commodities are not necessarily constituents and/or extensions of self but have come to be so deemed in the context of specific historical circumstances. According to the work of such authors, the self is more a construct of one’s character, or one’s actions, or one’s existential orientation. The advent of possessions, which in capitalism assume the form of commodities, taking a leading role in representing and “extending” the self is indeed a temporal-contextual condition, suppressing what a person’s character is or what a person contributes to her/his community, the principles by which the person lives, how the person behaves toward others, etc., as the bases for the constitution and representation, as well as recognition by others, of the self. Unless this is acknowledged to help explain why and how we came to experience the conditions and circumstances we are observing at a specific time and context, intentionally or unintentionally we fall into the trap of reproducing and reinforcing the conditions that may or may not be helping meaningful existence.

Further, consumer agency foreseen in the currently popular approach in consumer research tends to generally assume that the consumer is largely in control of the meanings assigned to her/his possessions and experiences. Perhaps the strongest critique of this tendency regarding agency is coming from some significant theoretical contributions made by European scholars who propose a different understanding of the current actualities of the capitalist market system of production that has implications for insights into consumer agency, self, and existence under capitalism. Influenced by Foucault’s (see, e.g., Foucault, 2010) theorization of power, not as a phenomenon of some having and others lacking it but also as distributed throughout society through which some enable others to exercise governmentality, consumer subjectivity under capitalism is seen to be produced in a way to enable reproduction and accumulation of capital. That is, consumers internalize desires, meanings, ideas of a good life, and lifestyles that perpetuate the capitalist system of production of capital. As Lazzarato (2014: 24) reiterates in colorful expression,

“By assigning us an individual subjectivity, an identity, sex, profession, nationality, and so forth, social subjection (in this case, consumer subjectivity) produces and distributes places and roles within and for the social division of labor. Through language it creates a signifying and representational web from which no one escapes. Social subjection produces an “individual subject” whose paradigmatic form in neoliberalism has been that of ‘human capital’ and the ‘entrepreneur of the self’.”

In this sense, consuming becomes labor for the consumer, to assure that capital production purpose of capitalism is realized through consumers seeking to consume possessions to reflect and represent assigned selves.

Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) intervention further articulates the consumer’s existence in capitalism as part of a “machine,” itself constructed as a “desiring machine,” desiring commodities to have as possessions in ways that will further capitalism’s aim; to produce more capital. In effect, following Marx’s (1976[1867]) analysis of capitalism, these scholars recognize that human existence is a system of production. Moments of the system of production, including distribution, exchange, and consumption, along with production, are moments that all produce. In the moment of consumption, for example, selves, emotions, thoughts, values and beliefs, ideologies to be guided by, in general, and mentalities, as well as biological characteristics, bodily growth, health conditions, etc., are all being produced. It is only that under modern capitalism, since these products do not also produce economic exchange values, our contemporary vocabularies and perspectives do not codify them as production. That a chef cooking food in his restaurant is a producer because market exchange values are created, but a consumer when cooking the same food at home for family, is only the circumstantial distinction based on our contemporary language codifying value creation as dependent on creation of exchange value in the market.

Consequently, desire for possessions, with the idea that they reflect and represent a self that is predetermined otherwise than produced, “has nothing to do with “drives” or “conatus.” It is a question instead of the possible, of the creation of new potentialities, of the emergence of what appears possible within the framework of capitalist domination” (Lazzarato, 2014: 51). The significant production in the “machinic” ecology of capitalism is one of a consumer subjectivity that desires to have a self, which then requires extension into possessions, which results in seeking “satisfaction” in the market for tangible or intangible commodities that help produce more capital. Even the current consumer research texts admit that this self has to be continually reproduced through cycles of perceived, actual, desired selves. This recognition, however, is often just acknowledged without reference to its implications in terms of consequences for historical significance, ideology, society, ecology, or the universe in general; only largely in terms of consequences for the individual consumer. This isolation of knowledge from history and context greatly blinds us to much of the human condition.

It is finally time to rock the marketing mainstream’s ideological boat and free our self from being consumers of mythologies caught in the clutches of capitalism’s machinery. There is a growing imperative to stop focusing too much on what goes into consumption as input, as means of expressing or extending ourselves, and start focusing on what is produced in terms of ideologies, mentalities, politics and the social, and ecology, in general, the culture that is produced, as a result of what is being consumed. The consumer subjectivity has stymied humanity’s resolve and shaped us as a species ready and willing to make itself redundant and extinct as we, as consumers, revel in the wonders of new technologies we get to consume. We need to consistently acknowledge the temporality and contextuality and the contingencies of our significations and the necessity of new constructs and language in order to be able to recognize and articulate the possibilities of and changes in the human condition. To be possessed by subjectivities and semiotics, systems of production of particular times and contexts can only help to impede humanity’s potential for being a worthy member of the universe.