ABSTRACT
There is something which seems fundamentally human about the act of consumption. Presented with the concept of consumption, most people intuitively think of all the ways in which we humans assimilate or act on objects. The idea of ‘posthuman consumption’ stops us in our tracks, and raises immediate questions; ‘If the human is not the one consuming, who is?’, ‘Is this about animals consuming, or the dead consuming?’, ‘Is posthuman consumption something to do with the use of futuristic technologies?’ And of course, ‘Why is any of this important to consumer research?’ In consumer research, we take for granted that our starting point is the human consumer;
investigations into how animals themselves consume (Bettany and Daly 2008), or indeed the numinous agentic status of the dead consumer (Turley and O’Donohoe 2010) are few and far between. However, in this chapter I am going to use the term ‘posthuman’ to describe how late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century technosciences – in particular computation, artificial life sciences, biotechnology and nanotechnology – have radically changed and continue to change the everyday conception of what the human is. More pertinently, they make the fundamentally ‘human’ aspects of consumption such as learning, decision-making, reason, perception, ethics, agency, desire and choice, less centred in a discrete human brain and body, and more accurately as something that arises in new spaces between humans and intelligent machines. In other words, the posthuman can be thought of as a move which seeks to locate being, or aliveness, or
meaning, not in the realm of the exclusively biological or technological but in the not-quitehuman-as-we-know-it. Thought of this way, the posthuman calls for changes in humanist epistemology, that is, how we investigate and describe the world, and also in humanist ontology, that is, how we understand what constitutes life and objecthood. This could help consumer research in three ways. First, it expands its range of temporal
reference. While most consumer research deals with present or (recently) past phenomena, little emphasis is placed on considering what consumption will look like in, for example, one hundred, or one thousand years from now. Why is this important? Some artificial intelligent theorists declare that today the (Western) world is undergoing two simultaneous revolutions that will out-scale the agricultural, industrial and information revolutions put together – these are the robotic and the biotechnology revolutions. Imagine if such a vision were even partially true. It would call for changes in theorizing humans and their consumption in ways which would be as profound as those that came with previous revolutions. Prognoses of what future human will be abound. Hans Moravec (1990) envisages the
twenty-first century as the era when human consciousness will be uploaded and run on computer programs, while Marvin Minsky (1988) predicts that within a hundred years humans will have created ‘mind children’ – sentient computer programs with an evolutionary capability faster (10 billion times faster!) than Darwinian evolution. Many discuss the moment of a technological ‘singularity’, where humans will reach a point in the future when they create a machine more intelligent than a human being, which in turn will create yet more sophisticated machines (Chalmers 2010). Very interestingly, what unites many accounts of the future is the implicit assumption that the future will herald a post-consumption existence, where the messy, materially intensive, wasteful, pleasurable, and human act of consumption will be consigned to an atavistic trait of human history. We as consumer researchers know that the idea of a post-consumption future is most likely a techno-utopian fantasy. But it does mean that it is up to us to provide more nuanced accounts of the future of consumption. Second, the term ‘posthuman consumption’ may expand the range of physical reference in
consumer research. Presently focussed on the meso-level of the human body and mind, with its attendant human discourses, theories, and sites of investigation, posthuman consumption may expand the focus of consumption. Consider the case of space travel, which is a form of extraplanetary consumption. The sudden proliferation of private enterprise has led to space travel becoming a heavily invested and much-anticipated consumption experience. Consumer researchers are well placed to investigate beyond the hype and novelty of sub-orbital travel, because they have experience in researching what the consumption of place means. Further, posthuman consumption could shift the focus to subcutaneous concerns. Just think of the Virgin Health Bank – a consumer service that allows people to store their child’s stem cells. The website states that while there is no practical use for such stem cells at present,
Many scientists and medical experts believe that there will be breakthroughs in the future reliant on an individual having access to his or her own stored cord blood stem cells … All we can say with absolute certainty is that the rate of advances in medical science has never been faster and that around the world hundreds of clinical trials are taking place using stem cells to treat conditions.
