eu2 and Michael Saren3

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to be experienced in the social imagination.Social forms are much more recognisable whenwe have had some time to classify them,

Journal of Consumer BehaviourJ. Consumer Behav. 9: 86101 (2010)Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/cb.306

*Correspondence to: Dr Norah Campbell, School ofBusiness, Trinity College, College Green, Dublin 2,

Ireland.E-mail: norah.campbell@tcd.ieIntroduction

Humanistic inquiry has opened new vistas inconsumer research because of its focus onsome aspect of human nature, creativity orlife (Hirschman, 1986; Stern, 1989: 322; Sternand Schroeder, 1994). However, humanisticinquiry valourises an implicit worldviewwhich limits understanding and discovery inconsumer research. In this paper we examine

how interpretative consumer research mightbenefit by questioning the inherited, westernand ideological basis of humanism by acknowl-edging other, posthuman modes of existence.

The posthuman: a structureof feeling

The cultural theorist Williams (1977) talks aboutthe strange way in which a sense of an era starts Posthumanism is used as a collective term to understand any discursive or bodilyconfiguration that displaces the human, humanism, and the humanities (Halber-

stam and Livingston 1995:vii, emphasis added). There are compelling reasons for

introducing posthumanism to consumer research. Consumer research often theorises

technology as an externalised instrument that the human creates, uses, and controls.

In the 21st century we are beginning to realise that, far from being a mere tool,

technology is the centre of critical thought about culture and about nature. It has

recently been suggested that marketing and consumer research now need to think

about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and

aesthetic dimensions, and the ways in which it can radically change humanness and

human-centred approaches to researching the world. Posthumanism is fundamental

to theorising humanness in an era that is witnessing the complexification of new

technologies. To follow a posthuman mode of thinking will lead to important ethical

and metaphysical insights.

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The posthuman: thbeginning of the hNorah Campbell1*, Aidan ODriscoll1School of Business, Room 3.22, Trinity College,2School of Marketing, Dublin Institute of Techno3University of Leicester Management School, Roo

Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UKCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Jollege Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

gy, Aungier St., Dublin 2, Ireland

511, Ken Edwards Building, University ofend and themanournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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The posthuman 87articulate them and theorise them. We can pointto times in the past and say that was anEnlightenment sensibility; they were theRomantics or more recently, that was post-modernism. But sensing the here and now,articulating what is actually being lived at thepresent moment, are difficult things to do. Thistype of practical consciousness, which pro-vides an ineffable sense of a period, always existsat an embryonic stage; at the very edge ofsemantic availability. It has yet to become fullyarticulate and defined exchange. This, Williamsargues, is a structure of feeling (Williams, 1977:130135).

Structures of feeling are general and wide-ranging sensibilities. Williams notes thatchanges in language, or buildings, or dress fromgeneration to generation reflect changingstructures of feeling, but it is most often in artand literature that the first indications of newsocial experience are articulated. What structureof feeling is forming in the contemporarywestern world? The art of Stelarc and BobFlanagan, the films of David Cronenberg or theliterature of Thomas Pynchon and John Updikeare afloat in the social imaginary. We begin tohear terms like postbiological, postcorporeal,cyborg existence and Bodies-Without-Organs.Even as we grasp to understand the newsciences of complexity, nanotechnology andgenomics, we are inundated with ever newerones of synthetic biology, neurobotics and DNAcomputation. In philosophy, Gilles Deleuze andDonna Haraway talk about desiring machinesand companion species. In what ways do allthese derealise the borders between science andfantasy? The natural and the artificial? Thehuman and the nonhuman? In the contemporaryindustrialised west, a new structure of feeling isemerging it is the posthuman.

So you think youre human?

Humanity is in peril: not from the familiar

menace of mass destruction and ecologi-

cal overkill but from a conceptual threat.

(Fernandez-Armesto (2005: 1).Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. JSo resilient and seemingly undeconstructible isthe idea of the human that the fact ithas changed radically over time goes largelyunnoticed. Throughout intellectual history,many modes of knowledge from philologyto neuroscience, philosophy to evolutionarypsychology, anthropology to molecularbiology, psychoanalysis to bioinformatics,management science to legal theory havein various ways attempted to comprehendwhat it means to be human. In what seems likean esoteric venture, what is the purpose of aninquiry into the concept of humanness?

In the contemporary west, longstandingnotions of what it means to be human areundergoing intense philosophical, scientific,technological and political interrogation. Someof these attacks are happening so unexpect-edly and developing so quickly that it isdifficult to theorise them as fully-formedknowledges and phenomena. Genomics, glo-bal finance and the nature of the social invirtual communities are only three divergentphenomena that produce yet-to-be formalisedparadigms of human experience. For the sakeof brevity, let us take the cases of two divergentdisciplines to highlight how they have metwith radical change in the face of newchallenges to what it means to be human the disciplines of law and genomics.

As the arbiter of human rights, legal theory isof course fundamentally concerned with whatit means to be human. However, advances intechnology over the past twenty years havefractured the concept of the legal self. In theclassical world, there was no concept ofhuman as a species. The word comes fromCiceros humanitas a legal term used by thepublic in ancient Rome to distinguish theRomans and Greeks from the Barbarians(Douzinas, 2006). This was the extent of thetaxonomies of the human species at this time.It is interesting that since then, the term hascontinued to be used as an exclusionary devicearound which battles political and ethical,ancient and modern concerning the insideand the outside, the human and the nonhumanhave raged. When 21st century high-technol-ogies enter this scene, the question of what itournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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from classical philosophy, which was thenscientised for a modern audience by Descartesin the 17th century. The resulting discourse ofhumanism is predicated on fundamentalassumptions about the human assumptionswhich are rarely questioned because they areseen as a totally transparent, secular, scientificand liberal way of thinking about the world.However, humanism is an ideologically loadedand multifaceted concept, taken variously tomean a belief in progress, the technologicalmastery over nature, the separation of thehuman and the animal, a therapeutic approachto human behaviour and a secular approach toscientific inquiry. Two things are importanthere. Firstly, humanism is not a universal,ahistorical constant. As Davies (1997: 25)points out, the notion of humanism of anessential humanism unconditioned by time,

Figure 1. Ernst Haeckel (1879) The Tree of Life(Wertheim, 2007: 57)

88 Norah Campbell et al.means to be human undermines modern legaljudgments. The technological complexifica-tion of the state of humanness has made itprofoundly difficult to apply traditional law,ranging from cases of humans in persistentvegetative states (Protevi, 2006), the commodi-fication and international trade of human organs(Hables Gray, 2001; Scheper-Hughes, 2001), theHuman Genome Project (Waldby, 1995, 2000),transsexuality (Stone, 1997; Stryker, 2000) andxenotransplantation (Waldby and Squier, 2003).In all cases, humanness is not a simple, a prioristate; it is in perpetual motion, fractured acrosslegal jurisdictions, technologies and markets.

In genomics, speciation has radically dis-placed our western, (ethnocentric), inheritedsense of humanness. The ascendant Tree ofLife which placed the human at the pinnacleof creation (Figure 1) has been very recentlyreplaced by a model that classifies speciesaccording to DNA. This method first of alldisregards morphological type (i.e. howelements of a body appear), and secondly,but more importantly, reveals the human to bea tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity(Figure 2). We begin to understand how trulymarginal most of what we have long calledlife is within the grand scheme of nature(Wertheim, 2007: 56). Look at the radicaldisplacement of the human in the secondmodel. Many of these strange life-formsdocumented are microscopic, and many ofthe archaea are very recent discoveries, and yetin each of these domains are creatures asdifferent from one another as a giraffe is from amushroom (Wertheim, 2007: 55). The pointthat we are making here is that over the past 15years the social and cultural sciences have indifferent ways been profoundly influencedby the overspill of radical technoscientificthinking into cultural and sociological theoriesabout bodies, minds and environments. Howwill consumer research respond to the tech-nological unconscious (Thrift, 2005)?

Humanism

The assertion of the special status of the humanis rooted in a powerful model that emergedCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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The posthuman 89place or circumstance is a 19th centuryanachronism. But it is an anachronism that isstill deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense, tothe extent that it requires a conscious effort,every time someone appeals to human natureor the human condition, to recall how recentsuch notions are, and how specific to aparticular history and point of view, andhow odd it would seem, in cultures historicallyor ethnologically unlike our own, to separateout and privilege Man in this way.

Figure 2. DNA-based Tree of Life 1992, in Wertheim (200

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. JAs Davies (1997), Soper (1986) and Williams(1976) point out, two humanisms developedin the 19th century and beyond interactingwith each other to produce the polyvalence ofhumanisms we encounter today. One, Frenchin origin and political in purpose, consisted of aview of the human as the hero of liberty. Theother, philosophical in direction and Germanin origin, was a view that embraced educationand knowledge as the key to human freedomand cooperation. This translated into theatheist tradition of scientific positivism, with

7: 58)

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90 Norah Campbell et al.proponents such as August Comte, whoargued that the universe can only be under-stood when the scientific exploration ofphenomena was separated from supernaturalsuperstition (Venn, 2006).

The very term humanist is almost univer-sally used to describe any ethical project thatimplicitly expresses the belief that society isinherently progressive. Humanists tend tobelieve that the world is, by and large, movingtowards increasing civilisation and progress.Technology is gradually improving the humanlot throughout the world. Indeed, few nuancedcritiques of humanism exist. We make the casethat humanism needs to be deconstructed, notin a blithe, postmodern or discursive way;rather, the definitions of what it means to behuman are of life-changing importance tostakeholders, and humanisms supposed uni-versality and transparency masks the fact that itis an inherited, western and relatively recentphilosophical perspective of the world. Forexample, while progress is lauded as a centraltenet of humanism, it is implicitly conceived asa technological, instrumental and profit-oriented version of progress. It is especiallytrue that in times of great human progress,human rights, ecological states and animalwelfare can seriously suffer, so it all dependson what the term progress means, and forwhom. For example, the revolutionary dis-course of human rights, inaugurated in the18th century by works like Rousseaus SocialContract (1792) and Thomas Paines Rights ofMan (17911792) posited the idea of anessential humanism that was universal to all,simultaneously undermined the very notion.By defining universal man, the exceptions tothe universal came flooding to the surface; theuniversal rights of woman, or of the slave, hadto be continually repressed in order to protectand enhance the rights of universal man. Sucha dynamic where universal rights andprotection depends on a logic of exclusion is still of course in existence today, from theGuantanamo detention camps to the homelandrights of Palestine.

Ehrenfelds powerful critique of humanismin 1981 argues that humanists take for grantedCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Ja series of fundamental, unproven assumptionsabout the world; assumptions which areingrained in western culture and society:

. . . all problems are soluble. . . All problemsare soluble by people. . . Many problemsare soluble by technology. . . Those pro-blems that are not soluble by technology,

or by technology alone, have solutions in

the social world (of politics, economics etc.)

. . . When the chips are down, we will applyourselves and work together for a solution

before it is too late. . . Some resources thatare finite or limited have substitutes. . .Human civilization will survive

. . . In this Age of Ironies this must be thegreatest irony of all: humanism, which

proclaims and celebrates the critical intel-

ligence of humanity, has in the last

analysis failed to invoke it where it is

needed most, to test humanisms own faith

by appraising the success of our inter-

actions with our environment.

(Ehrenfeld, 1981: 1619)

By the 1980s, it was acknowledged thatembracing the disciplines of the humanitiescould open marketing and consumer researchto new vistas of inquiry, by focusing on someaspect of human nature, creativity or life. Thehumanist turn was singularly responsible for amore ecological attitude in consumer research ecological in the sense of a discipline that isboth expanding and integrating (Hirschman,1986; Stern, 1989: 322; Stern and Schroeder,1994). Humanistic inquiry has opened the fieldof marketing and consumer behaviour to awider field of inquiry; the human in consumerresearch is no longer regarded as a disembo-died information-processor with a rationalisticidentity and a computational approach to themarket. Humans began to be regarded asculturally inflected, psychosocial producers ofand produced by the market. But as we haveseen, humanism contains an implicit world-view. How can interpretative consumerresearch benefit from a perspective whichacknowledges this ideology of humanism?ournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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from posthuman thought is the cybernetic

The posthuman 91The posthuman: The end and thebeginning of the human

The posthuman has been called one of themost important concepts in contemporaryliterary theory, science studies, political phil-osophy, the sociology of the body, cultural andfilm studies, and even art theory (Gane, 2006:431). It is a term associated with celebratorydeclarations of the end of humanity as weknow it, heralding an era when human beingwill be superseded by technical being, which,ironically, promises to vouchsafe human beingfor eternity (Moravec, 1990; Pepperell, 1999;Stelarc, 2006). This blend of posthumanismhas been met with alarm (Fukuyama, 2002;McKibben, 2004; Winner, 2002).

But the term posthuman has been used inmore than this obvious way. The term posthu-man has been used to describe anything whichextends human capacity so, ironically, some-thing as ubiquitous, banal, ancient and humanas tool-use could itself be described as posthu-man (Hayles, 1999; Stiegler, 1998; Wills, 2009).Seen in this way, the posthuman is as ancient asthe human itself. The posthuman is not anEnlightenment-style project to rectify human-isms failure to imagine it repeats a humanisttendency to imagine discrete eras of linearprogressiveness. The posthuman is at once aradical recognition that the technological is anoriginary logic, and an ethical sensibility astepping-out of the enclosure of what is onlyimportant and necessary to the human. Insteadof a temporal, coming-after stage of humanity,posthumanism might be more usefully seen as aconcept that draws attention to the cracks thathave always existed in the water-tight descrip-tions of the human how the human haschanged radically and continues to changeradically over time. Importantly, the term hasalso been used to describe a liberatory ethicswhich radically displaces the human as thecentre of meaning-making (Haraway, 1991;Braidotti, 2006; Wolfe, 2010). The posthumanis the ethical and radical realisation that thehuman only comes into existence by the workof nonhuman Others, both organic and techno-logical. One well-known figuration that emergesCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Jorganism, or cyborg, which, like the posthu-man, has been associated with liberatory modesof identity, as well as repressive ones. We couldthus argue that posthumanism is not new, butthe range of posthumanisms that are producedin this era of high-technology are new, anddeploy new modes of conceptualising human-ness. There exist political and ethical reasons fordoing so. In a very real way, technology decon-structs everyday human experience of agency,free will, choice and self, the repercussions ofwhich extend the sphere of ordinary, daily lifeand of course practices of consumption.

In the 21st century, we are beginning torealise that technology is at the centre ofcritical thought about culture and aboutnature. It has replaced religion and psychologyas the main source of models for how the mind,body and universe work (Rutsky, 1999; Davis,1999). It has recently been suggested thatconsumer research now needs to think abouttechnology in a manner which reflects itsubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aestheticdimensions and the ways in which it canradically change humanness and human-centred approaches to researching the world(Berthon et al. 2005; Giesler and Venkatesh,2005; Venkatesh and Meamber, 2006; Zwickand Dholakia, 2006; Campbell, 2008; Kozinets2008). Such a shift in theorisation is alreadywell under way in social and cultural theory.

An agenda for posthumanconsumer research

For the most part, consumer research containsan explicit or implicit model of the human either as an information processor, cognitivesubject or cultural subject all of which arederived from humanistic epistemology (Gieslerand Venkatesh, 2005). Indeed, is it not amazingthat after billions of years and an infinity ofpractices, the complexity of life has beensubsumed into just three models?

How could the posthuman as an orientationbe valuable to interpretative consumerresearch? The list detailed below is notournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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major problem. Virgins suborbital travel

92 Norah Campbell et al.exhaustive; it is eclectic, and only addressessome of the range of applications. In it, weargue that a posthuman view asks us to widenthe temporal range of consumer research, andprovide a focus for researchers who areinterested not just in the immediate future,but the deep future, that is the future of theplanet and humanitys role in it in hundreds ofyears from now. Further, the posthuman couldtake the form of an ethical inquiry, where thehuman is no longer the centre of the world. Byconsidering other perspectives that are notpurely human or purely animal or purelymachine, new modalities of existence areproduced that need new methods of examin-ation. This might mean that consumer researchwould concentrate on the objects that humanshave relationships with, and think throughnew methods and theories to account forthem. Also, the posthuman might encourageconsumer research to think about the ontologyof technology. Finally, the posthuman mightcontribute to a debate about the mostprevalent contemporary discourse of therelationship of the human to the nonhuman that of sustainability.

Consumer research and the deepfuture

If the 20th century was the century of thegene (Fox-Keller, 2002), the end of the 21stcentury will be awash with postgeneticmetaphors, materials and philosophies fromwhich to choose a defining moniker. It isimportant to acknowledge that it is as yetimpossible to guess even the nature of whatsuch metaphors might be. Some artificialintelligent theorists declare that the west isnow undergoing two simultaneous revolutionsthat will out-scale the agricultural, industrialand information revolutions put together therobotics revolution and the biotechnologyrevolution, the nascent stages of whichhumanity is only beginning to experience(Brooks, 2002). This realisation is so broad inits effects and so deep in its consequences thatit could come to define consumer research inthis century.Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Jairline Virgin Galactic offers commercial flightsinto suborbital space, with a 2012 start dateand a s200 000 price tag. Virgin Health Banknow offers a public and private storage bankfor consumers stem cells, because while [i]tsimportant to remember that the promise ofregenerative medicine is not here today. . .we and, more importantly, many expert scientistsand doctors passionately believe in itspotential. What does this cursory glance atthe orientation of a few multinationals tell us?In an obvious way, a posthuman approach toconsumer behaviour is indispensable becauseit recognises the technological complexifica-tion of peoples lives, and is oriented toexplore the impact of such deep-futuretechnologies on consumer phenomenology.

Aliveness of things

Russell Belks (1988) article Possessions andthe Extended Self is set against a backdrop ofhumanistic inquiry in marketing and consumerbehaviour one that began to address the areaof agency in nonanimate entities. While theconcept of extension still configures aCartesian subject at the centre of the worldwho imbues nonhuman things with meaning,Belks research constituted a first step inconsumer behaviour towards thinking of theimportance of the object world. Since thistime, consumer researchers have taken the cueAt its most obvious level, a posthumanorientation may be useful because first andforemost it advocates a focus on deep-futureconcerns. Innovation or the development ofincremental advances in products and services is increasingly supplemented with a moreradical focus on deep-future technologies andtheir impact on consumer phenomenology.Take for example BTs Futurology Unit athink-tank within the BT group which for-mulates and assesses views and predictions ofthe future. Its head consultant Ian Pearsonrecently stated that [r]ealistically, by 2050, wewould expect to be able to download yourmind into a machine so when you die it is not aournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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The posthuman 93from bodies of work in new disciplines such asScience and Technology Studies and CulturalStudies (especially cited in consumer researchis the work of Appadurai, 1986; Beck et al.1994 and Lury, 2004), consumer research hasbegun to develop an outlook that things arejust as complex and social as people.

Such a theoretical position allows alternative,surprising perspectives to emerge. For example,brands are now sometimes understood in thisposthumanist way as entities that talk to andinteract with other brands (Schroeder andSalzer-Morling, 2006), or entities that formrelationships with humans (Fournier, 1998).Through anthropomorphism, interpretivist con-sumer researchers have found a way to imbuebrands and other consumption objects withhuman or life-like qualities. This is important,because it troubles the border between the aliveand the nonalive worlds, which leads us toquestion a humanist framework which con-ceives them as separate. However, there arelimits to anthropomorphism. By subsuming all(nonhuman) worlds into our very limited andhumanist notions of life, there is the possibilitythat we miss the point again. For example,Haraway and Gane (2006) acknowledges thatcritical work which anthropomorphises thenonhuman is vital, (here we could think aboutthe work of animal rights activism or envir-onmentalism), but, as she points out, we do notyet know how to access, let alone account for,the whole nonhuman world except through therather old, unwieldy and undeveloped strategyof anthropomorphism. Radically new strategiesof doing this, new category work, needs to beinitiated (Haraway, 2008). For consumerresearch, we must ask ourselves whether wecan think of the living beyond the narrowconception of humanist life. Many forms of lifeexist in the world of consumption that cannotbe adequately explained through anthropo-morphism. How can we imagine the differentlives that seem to exist in on the edges ofsimple humanist life? For example, the massivelife of the market, the excessive life of thebrand image or the virtual life of Facebook?

Despite isolated attempts to theorise theimportance of nonhuman entities such asCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Jconsumer objects and brands, a theory of theconsumption object itself still eludes consumerresearch (Zwick and Dholakia, 2006: 456). AsBorgerson (2005) correctly points out, inter-pretative consumer research has not yetengaged with what the consumer actually is,what consumer objects actually are. Forexample, when we say that consumers aretransformed or emancipated by consumerobjects, what does this actually mean? (Borger-son, 2005: 439). Zwick and Dholakia (2006: 456) point out that [w]ithout exception, relation-ships between consumers and objects aretheorized from the perspective of the consumer,and from that vantage point, the ontologicalstatus of the object depends on the needs,desires and characteristics of the consu-mer. . .dependent on the personal history andcultural heritage. . .. While there are exceptionsto this claim, as we will examine shortly, thepoint Zwick and Dholakia make still stands: toan overwhelming extent, consumer researchfocuses on the ontological and epistemologicalgivens of only one entity: the consumer.

The sociologist of technology Turkle (1985,1996) adopts an alternative conceptualhorizon to theorising how consumers changethrough their relationship with the nonhuman.The technologies she studies change thenature of knowledge and consciousness ofthe younger generations with whom sheengages a change that is fundamentallydifferent to older generations. For examplethat children view certain objects in the worldaround them as having degrees of aliveness.Children who have grown up with computersdo not experience a dichotomy betweenbiological and computational processes. Whenchildren play with objects like the Transfor-mer toy, the toy shift[s] from being machinesto being robots to being animals (and some-times people). Children playing with thesetoys are learning about the potentially fluidboundaries between mechanism and flesh(Turkle, 1996: 62).

Objects existing in the world like thecomputer and the television are emblematicof how humanistic inquiry with its separationof human and nonhuman, bounded andournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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94 Norah Campbell et al.unbounded, material and discursive is aninadequate analytical philosophy. Turkle(1996: 22) for example notes the ontologicalstickiness of the computer, which is a mindthat is not yet a mind. . .inanimate yet inter-active. . .It does not think, yet neither is itexternal to thought. For their part, Menser andAronowitz (1996: 18) show how the televisionis a complex object, constituted by and relatedto many fields, from solid-state physics topolitics (see also ; Latour, 1992; Kittler, 1999;Sconce, 2000). Such a way of theorising is notmerely interesting; it is a precondition of an erawhere radically new technologies produceentities as indefinable, complex and global asthe Human Genome Project, biofuel, supply-chains or climate change models. The job ofseparating the human from the nonhuman inan attempt to show how each affects theother, seems increasingly untenable.

Like Sherry Turkle, interpretivist consumerresearchers are creating new concepts andfigurations in order to expand the borders ofwhat constitutes life. Kajzer and Sarens (2000,2001) use of the living-product metaphorworks to re-conceptualise the relationship ofthe human to its nonhuman colleagues. Thereis an obvious ethical dimension to this. As theauthors point out, managerial thought oftenhas a narrow definition of life, conceiving lifeitself as being human. The concept of a livingproduct shows how products are not justdecontextualised objects that appear out ofnowhere, but material testimonies to the veryreal conditions of the world we live in (see alsoBennett, 2007).

The problem with the ontological division ofthe consumer from the world of objects, as faras Bettany and Daly (2008) are concerned, isthat it constitutes an ideological move whichprivileges the human. Meaning, as it is under-stood by the human, becomes the only sourceof analytical attention the human is the onlything doing the consuming, having theexperience and making the meaning (Bettanyand Daly, 2008: 410). Extending existingtheory on consumerobject relations, Bettanyand Daly argue that everyday consumerpractices, such as grooming your dog, areCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Jnot mere consumerobject interactions, butfigures which are difficult to assign to the sideof the human or the side of the nonhuman. Intheir research, figures emerge which are notbounded, easily understood and separatebodies of humans, dogs and technologies,but rather constructions of identities, bodies,practices and objects that make up how aparticular cultural actor (in this case theAfghan hound) takes shape as a specific entity(Bettany and Daly, 2008: 410). The amalgam ofhu/dog is an example of such a figure anentity which is produced through humans,dogs and technologies (Haraway, 2003, 2008).The hu/dog is a figure that repositions humansnot as static, distinct entities, but mutualbecomings a way of understanding thatseems more precise and realistic than separateentities that have a relationship with eachother where the analytical focus is on themeaning drawn from this relationship by theconsuming human subject (Bettany and Daly,2008: 410).

Two terms are critical from this discussionthat will become increasingly important inconsumer research figuration and becom-ing. Figurations are new ways of takingaccount of the world. They are different fromanthropomorphism because they express enti-ties not by a simple ascription of humannessonto the other thing, but by refusing thehumanist sleight-of-hand which relentlesslymakes us separate the world into human/nonhuman, practice/discourse, material/con-ceptual. A figuration asks us to collapse theseinherited distinctions and see what happens.As well as this it goes beyond metaphorbecause it speaks about practices that createknots of material-semiotic actors (Haraway,2008). At the coalface of the practice ofeveryday life, interpretivist consumer researchwill make the most realistic figurations of thiscentury.

Becoming is a term that has become pivotalin contemporary philosophy, sociology andethics (Braidotti, 2005). At its most basic, itasks us to realise that the world is not made upof fixed entities, but rather that it is better tothink of things as constantly evolving, con-ournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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databases, RFID tags and GPS systems is

The posthuman 95stantly in transit to becoming something else.Some have argued that this reflects a shifttowards a process metaphysics that is lessabout being and more about becoming(Sobchack, 2002: xii). Such a metaphysics isapparent in interpretivist consumer research.Take for example Parsons and Maclaransrecent call for papers on a special issue ondisposal for this journal (Parsons and Maclaran,2009). Following recent moves in sociology,they conceive that items of disposal do not failto exist after the consumer expels them, butrather they are moved along, to other spaces,politics and become other things whether iton the way to becoming a precious antique, awater blockage, a source of marine death, amaterially precious thing in another part of theworld. Such a stance avoids seeing the objectas the outcome by which one structure out of aset of predefined forms acquires reality (Lashand Lury, 2007: 19). Instead, it is concernedwith how things actually move, how theytransition between many states (Lash andLury, 2007: 19).

High-technology revises the establishedhumanistic psychological models used expli-citly and implicitly by consumer researchers.Take for example the taken-for-granted huma-nistic tendency to associate the human as thesource of cognition and decision-making, andhow information-intensive environments areradically changing this. By making objects aswell as people centres of meaning-making,technology has moved out of the box and intothe environment (Hayles, 2009: 48). In thenear future, all objects will be embedded withradio frequency identification devices (RFID) miniscule microchips that contain a passiveand active radio wave which enables thestorage and transmission of information aboutthat particular object (its location in time andspace, changes in its environment, and a hostof other data). Each RFID tag is coded with aunique identification number the tags cangenerate 296 different codes, enough to code80 000 trillion objects, whose unique numberscould be attached to every single man-madeobject on the planet (Hayles, 2009). What thiswill to is create an ambient, lively environ-Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Janother level of reality about the object whichis not addressed in consumerobject relationsresearch.

The question concerningtechnology

The posthuman is a key term in the con-temporary western postindustrialised era, andit is a term that has been used to describe ahighly technologised future existence. So inorder to appreciate the concept of the posthu-man, we need to first understand some thingsabout technology. There exists a persuasiveconception of technology as a set of mono-lithic, often homogeneous claims about thenovel historical moment in the west, be itagricultural, industrial or informational. Otherstories about technology exist which refute (i)the claim of novelty of this historical moment(ii) that technology is a sterile instrument and(iii) that it aids the human in his ascent to evergreater degrees of humanity. In order to tellthese stories, we have to think quite counter-intuitively about technology not as a thingment, where objects can talk to other objects,making decisions, which may be low in level,but will be huge in scale and create the contextin and through which higher level decisionsare made. These are the next generation ofobjects to inhabit the world, dubbed SPIMEsby science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling, whereSPIME connotes the transition from thinkingof the object as the primary reality toperceiving it as data in computational environ-ments, through which it is designed, accessed,managed and recycled into other objects. TheSPIME is a set of relationships first and always,and an object now and then. . . (Sterling,2005: 77, in Hayles, 2009: 48, emphasisadded). This will of course lead to radicalshifts in theorising consumer behaviour,because the nature of the object has changed.As Hayles (2009), Zwick and Denegri-Knott(2009) and others have pointed out, an objectis no longer just the tangible thing, but thedata about the object. These data, resident inournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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96 Norah Campbell et al.that we humans use in order to make life moreefficient or enjoyable. In order to think deeplyabout technology, we have to think about itsontology. There are many important theoristswho have contributed to this discourse fromdifferent disciplinary viewpoints; from thetechno-sociology of Bruno Latour, to theecological feminism of Donna Haraway andthe post-Marxism of Tiziana Terranova. How-ever for brevity we will make only one, short,examination of Martin Heideggers philosophyof technology.

For Heidegger (1977: 3), technology is notjust a thing one finds in technological objects;in fact, the most dangerous thing we can do isto think of technology as something neutral.According to Heidegger, we often make twointuitive, yet ideological jumps of reason whenwe think of technology. We often think of it as(i) a means to an end (ii) created by humans.But this is only one dimension of truth abouttechnology. It is an anthropological truth (i.e. itis a truth as it appears to human being) and it isan instrumental truth (i.e. a truth aimed atgetting things done, or making things work).But there is another mode of truth thatHeidegger asks us to consider; technology isthe mode by which realities are brought intoexistence in the world; technology is a mode ofunconcealing [her-vor-bringen] reality (Hei-degger, 1977: 10). However, we must remem-ber that every unconcealment of reality is alsoby necessity a concealment of another reality:Bringing-forth-hither brings hither out ofconcealment, forth into unconcealment (Hei-degger, 1977: 10). Such a process Heideggercalls poiesis, from the Greek concept ofbringing-forth. The ancient Greeks realisedthis profundity about technology, arguesHeidegger, and he points out that the Greekword techne meant technology and art,derived from the term episteme, or epistem-ology (which of course involves the ways inwhich one can know reality). Thus, technologyis a type of epistemology, or a way of knowing,which leads Heidegger to maintain that[t]echnology is therefore no mere means.Technology is a way of revealing (Heidegger,1977: 12).Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. JWhat can we learn from this foray intoHeideggers conception of technology? Thereare a number of changes in perspective that adeep technology can encourage, perhaps toomany to detail here, so let us mention only two.Technology needs to be understood beyond itsinstrumentalist, humanist history. This mightfirst entail seeing it historically as an ancientphenomenon, as old as (human) being itself.For example, the absence of technology hasoften served as an indicator of primitivismwithout any sort of reflexivity about what onemight mean firstly by technology and secondlyabout the primitive. The so-called primitivesocieties such as paleolithic hunters have beenshown to be affluent and technologicallyadvanced (Sahlins, 1976). McQuire (2006)argues that technology is read through auniquely western historical lens: the presenceor absence of specific technologies has oftenbeen read as a marker of cultural back-wardness. . .Technology is [thought of as]something that comes from the West and doessomething to other people in other places,such as the Third World a frameworkwhich, even when well-intentioned, deniesboth agency and contemporaneity to theother (McQuire, 2006: 255, see Rutsky1999: 23). Edgeton (2005) speaks of tech-nologies of poverty, such as the bidonvilles inparts of India, which are overlooked becausewe favour rich-world technologies. An atten-tion to the ontological in technology mightsecondly encourage us to see technology as amode of unconcealing or revealing reality,which in turn acts to conceal other realities.For example, we are often told that the era weexist in is the Information Age, that the worldis networked; or that marketing is service-dominant. What we should be suspiciousabout is the fact that such concepts aredescribed in universally positive terms. Whatrealities do the terms information networkand service-dominant create, or unconceal?And, importantly, what do they conceal?

In their overview of the past 20 years ofinterpretivist consumer research and reflec-tions on its future, Arnould and Thompson(2005) do not once mention the wordournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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demonstrate this by analysing a number of

The posthuman 97technology, or how technological changerevisits questions as fundamentally as (i) whatthe consumer is, (ii) the nature of consumerconsciousness, knowledge and desire. Mickand Fournier (1998) acknowledge thatalthough technological products are prolificin contemporary consumer culture, very littleresearch has concentrated on how the con-sumer relates to technology in a deeper sensebeyond its use-value. Studies in technology andconsumer research have been limited to theantecedents, rates and act of technologyadoption (Mick and Fournier, 1998: 123). Farfrom being a neutral, uncomplicated relation-ship, consumers develop strategic behavioursfor coping with technology that is bothparadoxical, fantastical, ideological and multi-dimensional (Kozinets, 2008). For example,when Watson and Shove (2008) examineconsumers interested in DIY, they find thatnew DIY technologies (water-based varnishes,plastic plumb fittings) do not simply de-skillthe human, but rather it is better to see thisprocess as forms of competence redefined andredistributed between hardware and humans(Watson, 2008: 9). While identity is a muchtheorized concept in consumer research, verylittle work has been undertaken on theimportant ways in which technology andidentity interpolate each other. Why mightsuch a project be important? We argue that themost important global debates today the fearof genetic determinism, the nature of con-sciousness and the similarities and differencesbetween computation and (human) being areintimately concerned with the status ofhumanness.

During the 1990s, a deeper appreciation ofthe role of technology in the meaning ofconsumers lives became not only useful butfundamental, as cyberspace revealed consu-mer behaviours that challenged establishedtheory, as in for example, gift-giving (Giesler,2006), or possession, labour, and self-concept(Schau and Gilly, 2003; Zwick and Dholakia,2004). Erik Davis highlights the importance ofthe virtual world in his vision of posthumanconsumption as the circulation of desire andcommodities in environments that are soCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Jtechnological phenomena, such as the car cupholder. While many sociological and psycho-logical factors are used to explain rising obesity,the incorporation of the nonhuman and tech-nological is often never accounted for. Forexample, the car cup holder used to be anonessential feature in a car but is now intrinsicto it. An estimated one in five meals in the US iseaten in the car, critically stimulating the growthof fast-food drive-thru, which in turn has led toan auto-centric, sedentary population. Acknowl-edging the nonhuman, and perhaps seeminglyinconsequential, in the world of the humanrecognises the complex, recursive effectstechnologies have effects which reverberatethrough multiple dimensions of the human andthe nonhuman. At the beginning of the thirdmillennium, some marketing theory has begunto discern that a cultural approach to technologynecessarily involves accepting precisely thismultidimensionality of human and nonhumanactors, or what Sherry (2000: 272) has calledthe numinous dimensions of technology.

Critiquing sustainability

The concept of sustainability has accruedmuch currency in business in recent years.At its most basic, it represents the realisationthat humanness is a major threat to allnonhuman planetary existence. But there aretwo meanings of sustain: one implies rest, andeven retreat. In other words, the radical threatsto nonhumanness (animal life, oceans, atmos-pheres, geology and so on) must be warded offhighly mediated and technological that itbegins to generate behaviour and situationsthat are quite foreign to existing thinking aboutwhat markets are and what consumers want(Davis, cited in Giesler 2004: 400).

The role that technology has played inrevealing, eliciting and creating new realitieshas received little attention in consumerresearch (Berthon et al., 2005: 112). Berthonet al.s article considers technology not just apassive substance, but an active force that bothconsumes and creates consumers. Theyournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

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98 Norah Campbell et al.by radical decreases in human population,consumption and normative standards ofliving. It is difficult to imagine how such avision of sustainability could ever be embracedin the western world. In fact, more than theecological crisis or human inequality, morethan the threat of terrorism or nuclearproliferation, this notion of sustainability existsradically, fundamentally, at the limits of humancapability. This takes us to a second notion ofsustainability. To sustain also means tolengthen, to extend or to strengthen adefinition that is by far the most common todebates on sustainability in business theoryand practice in general. Briefly, its underlyingimplication is that humans constitute theworth of the planet; if we are not here thennothing on the planet has worth; if humans

do not exist, then the earth does not exist.Thus, our efforts of ecological sustainability areintrinsically human-centred, seeking to address(human-initiated) diverse problems with non-humanness (carbon rates in the atmosphere,glacial erosion, species extinction and so on)with the sole goal of prolonging humanness.

Obviously, there is nothing intrinsicallyobjectionable in this; it is a survival instinctcommon to most life forms. The problem of thisimplicit attitude is that it encourages the beliefthat the ecological problem is a short-term,albeit serious, matter hence the designation ofthe term crisis to describe it a word whichsuggests an intense, short-lived episode inhuman history. It also implies that this crisiswill be solved by high-technology solutions,whether nuclear power (John Gray, BjrnLomborg), synthetic foods (James Lovelock),carbon scrubbers (see Broecker and Kunzig,2008) and so on. High-technology is a criticallyvital mindset that the human race must nowadopt in order to limit ecological crisis (whichincludes the use of all the above technologies,and much more), and yet it is this same high-technology mindset that encourages the age-oldhuman illusion of mastery over the nonhuman,as well as the belief that nonhumanness existssolely as a resource for the human. Posthumanhigh-technologies now constitute the only wayto prolong human life on earth, but they alsoCopyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Jreaffirm a humanistic relationship with nature;the belief that nature can be brought undercontrol again and that, through technology, allproblems are soluble. A posthuman perspectiveproblematises the notion of sustainability.

Conclusion

We have abbreviated a set of wide-ranging andcomplex arguments in this article essentiallytrying to question the humanist underpinningof interpretivist consumer research, while alsohoping to take technology more seriously.There is something deeply unsatisfying abouthow we think of the technological in con-sumer research. It always seems to exist inexcess of the ways we have to describe it, andthere is a strong case for suggesting that weshould find radically different ways to do so. AsHayles (2005) argues that there could neverhave been any simple separation of the naturaland the technological, because technology hasco-evolved with being throughout billions ofyears and helped in myriad profound andsubtle ways to make human nature what it is.We can discern a paradox here it is humannature to use technology, while technologychanges human nature. Humanisms attemptto separate the two becomes increasinglyuntenable in an age where technology andhumanness co-evolve in complex ways. To thisend, we have argued that while not everythingis technical, everything is technological. Wehave suggested that a posthuman stance mightdo a range of things it is strategically orientedtowards the deep future, a temporality that isnot represented in consumer research; it paysattention to the lives of nonhuman others, butforces us to do more than anthropomorphise; itgets ontological with technology; it problema-tises the anthropological basis of some inter-pretivist consumer research methodologies andit critiques the human-centred notion ofsustainability. We hope that it can do more.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymousreviewers for their detailed and insightful con-tributions to this article.ournal of Consumer Behaviour, Mar.Apr. 2010

DOI: 10.1002/cb

Biographical notes

Ethics. Polity Press: Cambridge.

Campbell N. 2008. The technologised gaze in

The posthuman 99Braidotti R. 2005. Metamorphoses: Towards a

Materialist Theory of Becoming. Polity Press:

Cambridge.

Broecker WS, Kunzig R. 2008. Fixing Climate:

What Past CLimate Changes Reveal About the

Current Climate Threat And How to Counter

It. Hill and Wang: New York.

Brooks RA. 2002. Robot: The Future of Flesh and

Machines. Penguin: Harmondsworth.Norah Campbell is a lecturer in Marketing inTrinity School of Business, Trinity CollegeDublin.

Aidan ODriscoll is a senior lecturer inStrategic Management in Dublin Institute ofTechnology.

Michael Saren is Professor of Marketing,University of Leicester.

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