Non-representational marketing theory

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to evaluate and advance tools that marketing and consumer researchers have recently gathered from assemblage and actor–network theories. By distinguishing between two different styles of applying these theories we explain that a ‘representational’, interventionist and problem-solving mode has come to dominate existing uses of assemblage and actor-network theories in our field. We explain that current applications can be supplemented by a non-representational mode of theorising that draws on work pioneered by Nigel Thrift. Specifically, we explain that non-representational marketing theory can expand our ontological sensitivities through improved attention to the minutiae and hitherto unrepresented constituents of life. Towards this end, we offer methodological suggestions to extend attention to flows of everyday marketplace activity, precognitive forms of networked agency, as well as affect and atmosphere in consumption spaces.

Keywords

Actor–network theory affect assemblage theory method non-representational theory onflow precognitive relational ontology

Introduction

Recent marketing and consumer research has drawn on relational ontological frameworks to reconfigure theoretical and practical knowledge of markets and consumption events (Bettany and Kerrane, 2011; Canniford and Shankar, 2013; Epp and Price, 2010; Giesler, 2012; Martin and Schouten, 2014). Relational ontologies can be understood as a set of approaches that understand ‘things in the world’ as taking on form and meaning through their relations with other things, rather than possessing any essential substance (Law, 1999). This position underpins much of our current thinking about assemblages and actor networks as multiplicities of ‘heterogeneous objects, whose unity comes solely from the fact that these items “work” together’ (Patton, 1994: 158). Across diverse fields of inquiry and scales of context, the concept of ‘assemblage’ is used to denote networks of hybrid, ever-shifting and heterogeneous things in which no causal factors or outcomes are invoked beyond the relationships established within and between those networks (Law, 2009a).

Indeed, scholars from fields as diverse as philosophy (DeLanda, 2006; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), anthropology (Rabinow, 2003), sociology (Callon, 1986; Phillips, 2006) and cultural geography (Dewsbury, 2011), all deploy the concept of assemblage to understand the unpredictability and contingency of events, in order to describe action, knowledge and power as emergent effects of networks of things, explore the roles of ‘material culture’ and determine how new cultural forms emerge (see Marcus and Saka, 2006 for a discussion of these diverse applications). Within the broader range of assemblage approaches, the sociology of science has formalised this way of thinking under the rubric of actor–network theory (ANT), a ‘repository of terms and modes of engaging with the world’ (Mol, 2010: 262), that guides the description of how relations between varying resources (i.e. material, cultural, social and technological) come to be assembled or disassembled (Bajde, 2013; Bettany, 2007).

In this article, we focus on how marketing and consumer research has drawn on assemblage and ANTs as tools to extend knowledge of how markets and consumer cultures are constructed. To advance this work, we begin by reviewing the contributions made to marketing and consumer research through theoretical tools offered by assemblage and ANTs. Following this, we argue that a particular mode of using these tools – that we label representational network theories – has come to dominate existing literature. We then explain a complementary mode of conducting relational theories inspired by non-representational theory (NRT) based on the work of Nigel Thrift (1996, 2005, 2008b).

The key difference between these two styles of theorising is that the former tends to reconstruct knowledge of markets and consumption with institutionalised concepts and textual accounts, whereas the latter generates knowledge of assemblages through novel and inventive methods that expand the ways we can conceive of objects of inquiry. Our article then explains some key characteristics of NRT that meet calls for accessing new kinds of actors in our accounts of consumption events (Bajde, 2013; Firat and Dholakia, 2006). Specifically, we suggest researchers examine the often ‘unrepresentable’ details or minutiae of life through post-human phenomenological accounts of culture; ‘precognitive’ explanations of networked agency as well as investigating affective and atmospheric intensities that play a part in the assemblage of markets and consumer cultures. In doing so, we advocate enhanced attention to the unreflexive (and at times involuntary) aspects of consumption events.

Assemblage and ANT in marketing and consumer research

In this section, we review recent contributions to marketing and consumer research afforded by assemblage and ANTs and identify three related sets of tools: first, the concept of relationality as a way to understand how consumption objects change within ongoing assemblages; second, the concepts of translation and betrayal as processes of network formation that often require work to stabilise assemblages and finally, distributed agency as a way to theorise how power and action are enabled by multiple human and non-human elements of assemblages.

Relationality

Relational ontologies have enabled marketing scholars to explore the roles and effects of material culture within consumption spaces. Whereas early work has emphasised the relationality of ‘texts’ (Brown, 2004), more recent accounts have focused on the ‘relational materiality’ of the objects within consumption (see Bettany, 2007). Epp and Price (2010), for example, observe how the meaning, the use and the value of objects are not essential or fixed, but rather how they are established as assemblages emerge. In particular, they describe how a dining table that begins by ‘encompassing the family’ is divested and reinvested with meaning over time within a changing, networked ‘interplay of spaces, objects and practices’ (2010: 829).

Bettany and Kerrane (2011) also explore how an object – in this case a back garden chicken coop system – can take on diverse meanings and uses within a material–semiotic assemblage (Bettany and Kerrane, 2011: 1754). Again, this work abandons any notion of fixed or a priori meanings of objects of consumption and instead attempts to understand the coop as a ‘hybrid object’, the meaning of which is always changeable or ‘at stake’ within the networks in which it is embedded (Latour, 2000). Indeed, Bettany and Kerrane stress that this particular hybrid object demands negotiation over meaning because it sits uncomfortably between a material–semiotic network of meaning that supports ideals of anti-consumption, and one that supports ideals of commercialism. Like Epp and Price’s (2010) table, the value of the chicken coop is established and re-established through both material transformations – altering the site of the object or customising it – and symbolic, political and discursive practices, namely commercial and anti-commercial ideologies.

Translation and betrayal

A second set of relational tools that have enriched the study of markets and consumption are those that deploy Callon’s (1986) concept of translation. Translation describes the success or failure in the establishment of relational meanings and uses as processes in which interested parties seek to enlist other parties (often with different interests) towards the enactment of valuable or useful networks. Giesler (2012) deploys this concept in order to explain how a network of brand narratives delegitimises/legitimises Botox over time. In this way, he explains market formation as ongoing ‘image battles’ in which opposing protagonists advance diverging narrative agendas by manipulating relational elements of an assemblage. Ultimately, the process of forging ‘concrete exchange structures’ requires the alignment of consumers, the product and narratives (Gielser, 2012: 55–56). Hence, by describing the translation of Botox, Giesler replaces a view of brand management as the communication of core benefits, with a perspective that emphasises the need to manage contested marketplace meanings that are relationally built within ongoing material–semiotic networks.

This idea of marketplace translation illustrates that markets are constantly being reconfigured and that continual upkeep is required if markets are to become and remain stabilised structures. This work can be done by marketers who are involved in redefining and stabilizing consumer calculations of products and services (Araujo, 2007). Equally, this transformational work is conducted by consumers, as illustrated by Thomas et al. (2013) who show that individual differences in a consumption community (e.g., group status) are mitigated through the sharing of resources. Drawing on a position that views difference as generative, Thomas et al. (2013) show how tensions within a consumption community are alleviated through the alignment of relational elements such as language, roles and structural frames.

Canniford and Shankar (2013) also attend to the work necessary to hold marketplace and consumption assemblages together. Though not framing the process of consuming nature as translation per se, they deploy Callon’s (1986) notion of ‘betrayals’ to codify and understand the different ways in which heterogeneous consumption resources can fail to gel in relational networks. Canniford and Shankar (2013) determine that such betrayals between objects, discourses and geographies not only prevent consumption experiences of nature from running smoothly but also undermine the ideal that renders nature and culture as opposites, a dualism they explain is of significance especially within experiential markets. In order to preserve the value and continuity of nature as a consumptive category, consumers and managers must perform ‘purifying practices’, to manage and redesign assemblages in ways that overcome betrayals.

Distributed agency

A third contribution to marketing and consumer research gathered from relational theories revolves around the concept of distributed agency. This follows from the idea that ongoing translations of human and non-human objects can succeed or fail (Giesler, 2012), and that this success/failure can be caused by actors that are non-human. For example, Epp and Price (2010) explain their focal table can facilitate or thwart family practices, and Canniford and Shankar (2013) show how small alterations in the weather dramatically alter the meaning and value of all other elements in the assemblage of nature. In this scheme, agency is not understood as the sole intention of any one sovereign actor, but instead, it is seen to be distributed across broad networks of heterogeneous ‘actants’, things that mediate action and agency by modifying other elements of an assemblage (Latour, 2005: 54).

Viewing objects as agentic (Latour, 1993, 2005) blurs the boundaries of human and non-human as well as consumer and material culture. This is not to say that any element of an assemblage – human or non-human – possesses agency per se. Rather, it is to establish that action and intentionality emerge from the networked collectives of both. Bettany and Kerrane (2011: 1746) describe this as an abandonment of theory that views ‘the consumption object as something which is acted on’ by agential consumers, for one in which consumers act through non-human objects. In other words, agency emerges when multiple, heterogeneous things come together (Epp and Price, 2010).

Martin and Schouten’s (2014) description of a mini motorbike material–semiotic milieu illustrates this point that when consumers act, other things must be present to co-produce this action. Indeed, Martin and Schouten (2014) show that as a market emerges from a variety of consumption resources, agency is distributed across a broad assemblage of human and non-human actants. These more-than-human elements, such as magazines and organised races, become vital to the maintenance of social ties, enable the market to grow and ultimately stabilise consumption patterns (Martin and Schouten, 2014).

Representational network theories

In the preceding section, we explained that assemblage and ANTs have offered marketing and consumer researchers a variety of tools for reconsidering the processes by which marketplace phenomena are enabled, mediated or thwarted. Next, we discuss the applications of these tools further in order to establish a general category of representational network theorising that illustrates how existing assemblage and ANT work contributes to our field. In particular, this section illuminates the methodological and epistemological characteristics of representational modes of theorising, before we appraise an alternative non-representational mode.

In marketing research, Firat and Dholakia (2006: 132) define ‘representation’ as the reproduction of ‘received structures, orders and norms’. With respect to the studies examined above, we wish to flag the existence of this tendency in two ways. First, we highlight research that re-presents consumption events through canonical methods, particularly in terms of the accounts by which consumption events are typically apprehended by lending priority to consumers’ narratives (see Stern, 1998). And second, we direct attention to research that re-presents consumption through canonical theoretical categories, which are targeted at entrenched managerial problems. In both cases, we discuss prior research to illustrate that a representational mode has come to dominate the fields of marketing and consumer research.

Representational accounts

Latham (2003) explains that representational research is often characterised by a focus on particular kinds of accounts of data. Specifically, consumers are often framed as self-reflexive, sovereign agents who are able to recall and recount their engagement in consumption experiences. Marketing and consumer research have a rich tradition of this representational research characterised by in-depth interview methods, which are subsequently used to represent consumers’ voices as illustrative vignettes (see Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Moisander et al., 2009; Thompson et al., 2013). It is unsurprising that many researchers foreground consumers’ lived worlds in this way, since the broader scholarship of marketing and consumer research has framed consumers as individual and agentic subjects (Thompson et al. 2013). In other words, the ontological and epistemological genealogy of our fields can determine the methodological choices and representational devices that researchers employ to access and present consumption events (see Shankar and Patterson, 2001; Tadajewski, 2006; Thompson et al., 2013).

If our research procedures are to some extent dictated by these academic assemblages, however, it might be suggested that fault lines appear with respect to the recent wave of network studies. Taking Epp and Price (2010) as an example of this effect, we note that data destined for relational theorising is mainly derived from autodriving, in-depth interviews and member checks. Hence, when Epp and Price say that ‘objects vie for a place in family members’ daily lives’ (2010: 829), it could be suggested that much of the vying described through their data foregrounds human intentions and reflections over and above how the table modifies the overall assemblage of their focal family.

Similar issues may be noted in Giesler (2012) and Canniford and Shankar (2013) who describe networks of human and non-human things and represent these networks mainly with interview data. We are not suggesting that the theory that these authors develop from their research is flawed, but rather, that in concentrating on the voices of particular elements of networks (namely human voices), scholars risk overemphasising the role of consumers as ‘choosing, experiencing agent[s]’ (Bettany and Kerrane, 2011: 1746). This emphasis on the consumer as a self-reflexive agent is problematic, given the post-humanistic perspectives that these authors expound upon by using these theories (Bajde, 2013).

Below we will suggest some ways to develop more post-human accounts of assemblages through methodological solutions that accommodate a variety of ‘other texts’, ‘things’ and voices that act and constitute consumption assemblages (Canniford, 2012; Hietanen, 2012; Shankar, 2000; Sherry and Schouten, 2002). Prior to this, however, we wish to emphasise that methodology is not the only representational trait that we need to be aware of should we wish to open our assemblage studies to further actants and effects. Hence, we now explain a second aspect of representational theorising, namely the representation of social categories.

Representational categories

As Firat and Dholakia (2006) explain, representational thought tends to work with preordained categories. By using these categories as the ‘building blocks the social world is made of’ (Latour, 2005: 41), researchers explain a set of events through pre-existing language and understandings. Giesler (2012), for example, explains market creation as a process of brand legitimation that is constantly challenged by doppelgänger brand images that draw on existing social norms and values. In doing so, he weaves together categories that prior research has established as being salient in the construction of markets, for example, social norms, myths of technology and brands. As a result, the complex and often fragile transactions between these elements in the enactment of the market are made clear. Similarly, Thomas et al. (2013) explain how consumption communities are assembled through the classic community categories such as shared identity and moral responsibility.

Working with these pre-established research frames enriches our knowledge of how existing categories of consumer culture – be they brands or consumption communities – are reconstructed and intervene in the world we live in (Giesler, 2012; Thomas et al., 2013). In these cases, the focus of relational research is on producing solutions that can be re-presented across other domains as ‘more or less general procedures’ (Law, 2009b: 8). This is what Law (2009b) calls a ‘programme of interference’, the production of nomothetic answers to institutionally pre-established managerial problems. These interfere with the object of study in such a way that solutions are partly predefined by the initial definition of the problem, thereby continuing the terms on which both problems and their solutions can be investigated and understood.

The benefit of using relational tools in this representational mode is that scholars have been able to rethink and ‘combat’ extant managerial problems in new ways. Specifically, ANT and assemblage are expanding the way we see pre-existing categories of say ‘brands’ or ‘nature’ as part of ongoing, contested processes in networked market societies (Canniford and Shankar, 2013; Giesler, 2012). By retaining our categories as a priori conceptions of what markets are made of, however, researchers tend to ‘rebuild the social’ (Latour, 2005). In other words, our research tends to reify established ways of thinking rather than giving actors/actants the opportunity to create their own theories and ontologies (Bajde, 2013). With this statement in mind, we next assess the limits of representational approaches and seek to establish a case for a non-representational marketing theory to complement and extend existing studies.

Beyond representational theory

Further to the contributions made through representational modes of theorising, we now explain how non-representational network theories offer a complementary style of conducting marketing and consumer research through a novel range of tools and sensitivities. First, we consider calls from within ANT and marketing theory to venture beyond the use of institutionalised palettes of representational tools and practices in favour of a more ideographic programme of description to show how marketplaces are reproduced within ongoing heterogeneous networks (Bajde, 2013). We then explain how this work can occur via NRT’s attentiveness to often imperceptibly fine details of social life, which are often deemed ‘unrepresentable’ (Dewsbury, 2003; Firat and Dholakia, 2006).

Expanding ontologies

In the work reviewed above, we examined some relational approaches that have focused on pre-existing categories such as brands, identities and communities. We explained how marketing and consumer researchers have used ANT and assemblage theories to show how these categories are problematised and re-assembled from heterogeneous consumption resources. Few studies to date, however, have answered Latour’s call to ‘just describe the state of affairs at hand’ (2005: 144) so as to ‘trace differential constructions of reality’ (Bajde, 2013: 229). This is to say that, whilst ANT and assemblage approaches can be used to examine how familiar managerial categories result from heterogeneous networks, they can also be used to abandon these pre-existing categories of explanation and instead seek to understand how ‘multiple heterogeneous networks […] grow their own ontologies’ (Bajde, 2013: 239).

Growing one’s own ontology amounts to doing ‘inventive work’ (e.g. Latour, 2005; Mol, 2010) that captures ‘aspects of reality otherwise obscured by presupposed hierarchies of time, space, subject and object’ (Bajde, 2013: 239) through ‘increased sensitivity to movements that would otherwise likely go unnoticed or be dismissed as minutiae in the “grand scheme”’ of consumption events (Bajde, 2013: 237). By foregrounding the way in which consumption objects are ontologically incomplete and contested (Bettany and Daly, 2008; Zwick and Dholakia, 2006), NRT offers an inventive and ideographic description that directs attention to new (and at times marginal) actors that may have been otherwise missed (Anderson and Harrison, 2010). Thus, whilst currently the reflexive consumer features prominently in accounts of how consumption events materialise, a non-representational sensitivity requires us to pay careful attention to the things that may evade interviewees’ conscious awareness.

This possibility becomes important when we recognise that through immanent ways of theorising (Mol, 2010: 254), ANT and assemblage theory are seen as part and parcel of the construction of reality rather than mirroring a ‘reality out there’ that scientists are privileged to uncover and present to the world (Law, 2004). If this is the case, then different ways of doing relational theories can enable us to construct new realities in interesting ways. This is especially so in a context where the processes of growing one’s own ontology and epistemology are completely intertwined (Bajde, 2013). For example, Canniford (2012: 405) notes how new categories and descriptors ‘cry out’ for further investigation when new ways of creating knowledge are applied. In other words, it is not just ‘researchers [that] have the power to shape consumer stories’ (Stern, 1998: 70) but also the people and things that surround us as researchers. To justify NRT as a means of expanding our ontological conceptions of how consumer culture is assembled, we now consider phenomena that current applications of ANT often conceal or lend less priority to.

Introducing NRT

If theory is involved in the performance of reality as described above, then it is important to acknowledge the limits of particular modes of doing relational scholarship in terms of the different ways that they allow us to access and find out about the world we investigate (Latour, 1999b; Law, 2004). When considering why NRT might be useful, we could note that ANT has been accused of privileging material things over human activities. Newton (2007: 31), for instance, explains that whilst ‘ANT writers exhibit meticulous attention to the historical networks that surround the development of, say, the Kodak automatic camera […] they do not show a similar concern with the interdependency networks that condition human action’. In other words, our applications of ANT tell us a lot about the construction of things, but less about the construction of the people who use those things.

We are not suggesting that ANT leaves humans out. On the contrary, early studies described how networks are manipulated and established by tactical actors, ‘skilful in the art of managing variable and unexpected social forces’ (Callon et al., 1986: 7). Of course, this has generated nuanced descriptions of the negotiated processes of brand management through procedures of translation, for instance (Giesler, 2012). Nevertheless, views of actors who seek to stabilise networks often gloss over the ‘lightning strikes … sharp movements … the flash of the unexpected’ that occur within assemblages, especially as they emerge (Thrift, 2008b: 110). This has led to the notion that ANT has perhaps neglected aspects of life that – although not amenable to typical methodological registers such as interviews and discursive interpretation of interview texts – are nonetheless felt (Blackman, 2007/2008).

In particular ANT tends to gloss over hard to account for human phenomena such as expression and imagination (Castoriadis, 1997), despite these being enablers of new associations and lines of invention within networks (Canniford, 2012; Price, 2013). To recover these features, Thrift (2008b) suggests we require a slightly different ontological outlook that can expand what we know about how the social is ‘made-up’ in everyday life. In the next section, therefore, we suggest that researchers wishing to ‘grow their ontologies’ and make inventive use of relational theories can do so through the sensitivities of NRT. This is an assemblage inspired approach that is well suited to describe the continual movement and processes of everyday life, especially with respect to the affective and sensual registers of the human body.

Non-representational sensitivities

In the previous section, we suggested that some aspects of the ‘human’ have been overlooked within the extant ANT discourse and that as a result, particular alterations in the construction of consumption assemblages may have been overlooked. We now explain how NRT can help to overcome some of these limitations through ‘attempts to make different things significant and worthy of notice’ (Thrift, 2000a: 224). To approach this goal, we explain that in addition to existing relational approaches, NRT can be used to introduce ‘new actors, forces and entities’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 2) in our accounts of the world, especially with respect to theorising and understanding embodied life.

Like assemblage theories and ANT, NRT does not seek to render explanations of culture through uncovering ‘meanings and values that apparently await our […] interpretation, judgment and ultimate representation’ (Lorimer, 2005: 84). On the contrary, a hallmark of non-representational work is the ideographic presentation of detailed descriptions gathered from a variety of sensitivities. In particular, details of life that are seldom valued, quickly forgotten or that remain uncaptured altogether by traditional research methods should be represenced (Dewsbury, 2003: 1907) to allow a new range of human and non-human actors to be examined (Anderson and Harrison, 2010). To action this call, we now describe three characteristics of NRT and showcase where and how these can contribute to marketing and consumer research. For each characteristic, we establish links to extant studies in our field and suggest ways to implement NRT in our research.

Onflow of the everyday

NRT is particularly concerned with ongoing performances of culture. Complementing the advances made through actor–network studies, NRT focuses on a different range of human experiences that occur in ‘more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds’ (Lorimer, 2005: 83). Put simply, NRT seeks to understand the human experience as part of broad post-human, material–semiotic networks (Campbell et al., 2010), in which subjectivity emerges within wider geographic environments (Thrift, 2008b). This shift explains why NRT authors trade qualitative post-event interviews used for representations of everyday life with the concept of onflow.

Onflow accounts seek to offer a ‘highly detailed rendition of experience from within’ (Pred, 2005: 1), extending personal accounts gathered through interview texts outwards to include a wider network of actants. This network gathers a range of ‘more than human’ voices (Lorimer, 2005) through ‘parallel interviewing’ a variety of different human and non-human entities (Newton, 2007). As such, these methods can complement research that draws upon retrospective sense making of consumers, by chronicling events as they unfold in manners that allow sampling procedures and research sites to remain fluid, always at stake, ready to respond to material objects and flows that demand closer attention.

How can this detailed rendition of a post-human network be practiced and presented in our research? First, as the name suggests, onflow accounts should describe experiences of consumption in a manner that recognises the ongoing movements of bodies, spaces and objects together. Canniford’s (2012) concept of ‘poetic witness’ enacts this viewpoint by enlisting respondents’ poetry and introspections to weave together the ‘voices’ of a variety of elements in a consumption experience at the beach. In so doing, he is not suggesting that things have agency or voice in and of themselves, but rather that researchers can become sensitive to and then ‘present’ a very broad assemblage of things through which action and experience emerge.

There is, however, a potential problem with building onflow accounts from these broad assemblages of consumers, materials and discourses in which everything flows from and into everything else. In short, one cannot escape the need for research boundaries in terms of sites and samples. Without these boundaries, we risk obliging ourselves to account for everything that goes on in daily life. How can we legitimately set the boundaries of our research domains? Paradoxically, we need institutionalised categories that represent specific research domains, which help to cordon off a specific site of inquiry.¹ It is important to note here, therefore, that NRT is not anti-representational as if seeking to supplant representationalist lines of inquiry. Rather, NRT seeks to enrich accounts that are embedded in representational thought (Anderson and Harrison, 2010). Thus, using onflow as a conceptual tool implies that when examining particular categories of interest, we always need to recognise the incompleteness of the things, categories and practices that make up daily life.

NRT research achieves this goal by retaining important sense-making categories; but rather than taking them as given, constantly looks to expand the conceptualisations of these things. For instance, despite insisting on a radical anti-biographical position on subjectivity, Thrift acknowledges that the human will be retained as a ‘sense-making category’ in the social sciences. What we understand to constitute ‘the human’, however, will be ceded to a broader, more than human assemblage (Campbell et al., 2010). In other words, onflow accounts should track consumers and then experimentally extend what we conceive of as, for instance, ‘the consumer body’ or ‘consumer identity’ (see Price, 2013). Likewise, in choosing certain objects as focal categories and then tracing the wider figurations (Bettany and Daly, 2008) through which these are assembled and reassembled, we can expand how we conceive of those objects.

In the context of community research for instance, while we might continue to investigate marketplace cultures such as tribes or brand communities, onflow accounts of these cultures would expand upon research sites and sampling procedures that slice life into discrete moments for analytic or representational purposes. Since life is not lived intermittently in a series of punctuated intervals, we must follow actors in ways that encompass a continuous flow of movement (Law, 2004). Applying this idea to Kozinets’ (2002) Burning Man research, for example, it would be interesting to examine the flows of goods, symbols and consumers before, during and after the event. Whilst not the purpose of his original study, accounting for these ongoing movements might have informed us about the overarching consumption assemblage in which Burning Man’s gift economy is embedded. In other words, we would know more about the things that are later gifted in surprising ways, in terms of where they originated from and what markets they later flowed into. It is this entrainment of apparently disjunctive consumption events that onflow accounts can reveal.

One way to build more flowing and open research accounts is through ethnographies that follow different kinds of actors for extended periods of time as they move through everyday life (Marcus, 1995). To be sure, ANT can also do such work (see Latour, 1996b). However, onflow accounts are particularly interested in recognising the ‘messiness’ of life in manners that highlight novel human aspects of assemblages that we may otherwise miss. We mentioned before how representational modes of network theorising have tended to use pre-existing categories of the social in order to explain how market phenomena are reconstructed. For example, consider the effects of discursive interpretations that seek to uncover meaning systems in their description of artefacts and events. Taussig (1992: 147) argues that these lines of research often end up reifying images of ‘contemplative’ and ‘ideational’ subjects who constantly process symbolic meanings in everyday consumption, thereby again reproducing a priori discursive concepts.

Instead, by relying less on discursive categories, Taussig (1992: 141) argues that the onflow of the everyday should be sensed as an ‘embodied and somewhat automatic ‘knowledge’ that functions like peripheral vision’. In short, it is worth developing our sensitivities to consumers’ habits, routines and embodied rhythmic attunements to the environment, the kinds of activity that take place without contemplation (Lefebvre, 2004). NRT attempts to incorporate these aspects of the onflow of everyday life by augmenting regular interview procedures (Highmore, 2011; Latham, 2003) with a fuller range of methodological tools that can include introspective methods (see Holbrook, 1995; Shankar, 2000), poetry (Sherry and Schouten, 2002) and videographies (Hietanen, 2012). In order to help researchers to realise this agenda and focus in on some of these aspects of our ‘automatic worlds’, we now consider the precognitive aspects of consumer life in more detail.

The precognitive

A drive to the local shops or morning bathroom rituals often leave us wondering, ‘how on earth did I get here?’ Habitual, unreflexive and non-contemplative experiences of action on ‘autopilot’ like these indicate how our bodies are often prepared for action within broad spatial assemblages before the reflexive self becomes aware² (Thrift, 2008b). NRT therefore places emphasis on an ‘automatic knowledge’ through which much of our lives is mediated. Accordingly, action is seen less as a result of discursive identity work and more as an outcome of the onflow of interactions between environments and bodies. NRT uses this interaction approach to examine and foreground ‘what bodies of various kinds can do before they get to knowing what they are doing’ (Laurier, 2011: 71).

Attempts to research bodily energies (Gould, 1991) and sensual and tactile embodied experiences of consumption have begun to uncover these tacit realms of action (Joy and Sherry, 2003). Hewer and Hamilton (2010: 119), for example, explain how salsa dancing is ‘engraved into your muscle memory’, as corporeal knowledge that resists cognitive contemplation. Likewise, Goulding et al. (2009: 768) describe the ‘obligatory rhythms’ that direct groups of consumers’ embodiment without recourse to conscious will. So too do Wood and Brown (2011) present how the movement of rock climbing rests in subconscious embodied knowledge over and above contemplative decision-making. Indeed, if the climber has to resort to conscious thought, he is likely to meet a premature end. However, discovering what goes on at a pre-reflexive level whilst making sense of the common, the ordinary and the everyday that constitute much of our consumption practices is an arduous task. As Polanyi (1966) argues, certain embodied processes – such as learning to ride a bike – are very hard to codify, as this bodily knowledge effectively exists within the non-representational and extra-discursive domain. In other words, you can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book about it; you just have to do it.

Fortunately, NRT offers some methodological ways to increase our sensitivities to these aspects of life. As with onflow, the practice of research through which we can investigate these issues requires a different set of techniques and sensitivities. In particular, this work involves ‘represencing’ phenomena that would otherwise remain hidden (Dewsbury, 2003: 1907). Rather like knowing the unconscious mind, this goal is difficult in that it involves pushing back the ‘tide’ of the subconscious world. Foregrounding this automatic knowledge, therefore, requires a change in style, perhaps towards a mode of description more attuned to a consumer who allows herself or himself to be orchestrated not through representations of meaning only, but also through sets of habits in constant dialogue with the environment (Highmore, 2011).

One effective way to access this distributed precognitive realm is to look for instances when everyday life breaks down (Thrift, 2000b). Looking out for ‘breaches’ in consumption and marketplace assemblages is somewhat akin to the practices of ethnomethodology in which disruptions to the ordinary actions of everyday life help researchers to detect the ‘unnoticed backgrounds of everyday activities’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 37). Epp and Price (2010) present a simple example of this style of research through photographs of their focal family that illustrate the process of replacing the large table in a new room. In so doing, we would say that they succeed in offering an alternative kind of text to their interview transcripts that significantly enhances their theorisation of distributed object agency.

Extending this example, we suggest that researchers attend to breaches and problematisations in the material environments through which we flow as consumers when elements of assemblages betray each other (Canniford and Shankar, 2013). A telling example that represences precognitive aspects of consumption is the experience of getting on a broken-down escalator. You will recall how your balance is thrown by this still object that we usually expect to be moving, often to the extent that we end up clinging to the handrail with more force than if the machinery were working properly. Such breaches in assemblages represence the role of a material cultural object that many of us barely notice on a day-to-day basis as well as the habituated precognitive ‘movement programs’ that accompany these objects (Fukui et al., 2009). These are embodied and distributed forms of knowledge and action that, although unimportant in reflexive identity work (until they break down), nevertheless help to perform daily life and consumption.

Affect and atmosphere

The precognitive world emphasised by NRT also stresses additional sensitivity to the non-discursive registers of the body that Thrift refers to as ‘affect’ and ‘atmosphere’ (see Thrift, 2008b, 2009, 2010a, 2010b). Affect in NRT is defined against theories of emotion that emphasise an individual and reflexive experience of happiness, sadness, disgust, and so on. Instead, affect within NRT refers to what comes before emotion, namely embodied forces and intensities that pass between people and objects in ways that produce changes and push assemblages into motion (Wetherall, 2012).

Once again, consumers are seen as having ‘porous boundaries’ (Thrift, 2008a: 85) in which the energies, moods and feelings of others can become our own (Blackman, 2008; Brennan, 2004). Affect, therefore, is another source of precognitive action (Seyfert, 2012; Wetherall, 2012), more often sensed than consciously known (Blackman, 2012). These ‘energetic flows’ between bodies (Thrift, 2008b: 236) are another facet of consumption assemblages that ANT might overlook because of the priority it gives to non-human actors. Through its focus on affect, NRT can be a powerful tool by which we can enrich our research and widen the range of influences in terms of how we understand how consumer experiences and markets cultures are assembled (Conradson and Latham, 2007).

With respect to the power of affect in the assemblage of space, Brennan (2004: 1) asks, ‘[i]s there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere”?’ The point she makes here emphasises that affect flows around material environments and produces bodily responses to the atmospheres that result from these flows. Indeed, affect is often our first window through which we encounter the environments of consumption. Recent marketing and consumer research has begun to attend to this concept of atmosphere and emphasises it is another aspect of consumer culture that extends beyond the discursive world familiar in marketing and consumer research. Askegaard and Linnet (2011: 390), for instance, state, ‘the atmosphere of a place […] is to some extent not a matter of cultural coding or discursive framing’. Likewise, Biehl-Missal and Saren (2012: 170) explain the force of atmospheres in an embodied sense by highlighting ‘how atmospheres touch, invade and permeate people’s bodies’.

Atmospheres, therefore, are the result of collections of affective bodies and spaces through which those affects flow. As a concept then, atmosphere is useful to describe how affect can leap between and take hold of bodies without an individual’s volition (Anderson, 2009; Bissell, 2010) and can therefore be described as being ‘contagious’ (Gibbs, 2008). As with understanding precognitive habits, however, researching affect and atmosphere is a difficult task. Given that atmospheres have been described as ‘immaterial hazes’ (Böhme, 1993), ‘ethereal’ (McCormack, 2008) and even ‘pre-personal’ (Massumi, 2002), how can we capture these aspects of consumption assemblages and make them intelligible in our writing?

To be sure, traditional interviews can gain access to emic descriptions of the power of atmospheres and the contagion of affect. For instance, interviews from the first author’s research into sports crowds show that consumers recognise the power of atmospheres that take hold of their bodies. In a conversation about the feeling of being in a crowd that carries an atmosphere, a participant, Nev, says:

It must be primeval because it evokes a different response. People talk about a herd mentality and this that and the other, [tenses up and sits up in chair] it can be quite intoxicating and, you know, [drops his shoulders while exhaling] you do become not true to your normal self. You almost betray your thoughts and things you have outside the football match, but when you become involved in that crowd situation, it is almost like, [sits on edge of chair] almost like you give a piece of yourself away to people next to you.… It is really, really powerful [intensely looks at me, I ‘get’ the feeling he is feeling]. It is just intoxicating… You’ve got to pull yourself back sometimes [and] … have a level of self-control. Interview ‘Nev’ 2013

This transcript highlights how consumers can reflect on powerful atmospheres and the impact these atmospheres have on the way they feel, act and behave. However, interviews make it difficult to draw out not only this amount of self-reflection but also the difficult-to-represent intensity of these atmospheres as they are lived. Note, for example, the instances where Nev struggles to put into words the power of what he is talking about; the way he uses his body to try to convey what he can’t put into words and how the intensity of this experience is transferred to the interviewer. It is clear that interviews can help explain the genesis of atmospheres and how these somatically felt states are passed on. However, to enrich accounts of atmosphere further, we suggest that some of the more avant-garde methodologies previously explored by marketing and consumer researchers can be brought to bear if we wish to consider affective influences within consumption assemblages.

Introspective techniques, for example, can build descriptions of the inbetween-ness of atmospheres and affects (Bissell, 2010; Dholakia, 2005) by permitting researchers to become particularly sensitive to the way that affect moves around environments and builds atmospheres. Further still, videographic methods (Hietanen, 2012; Kozinets and Belk, 2005) that capture bodies in action may also be used to assess the movement of affect, especially in crowd situations. In particular, ‘audiencing methods’ (Merchant, 2011: 53) – videoing consumers and then playing the footage back to them – can highlight affect and atmospheres by foregrounding viewers’ ‘action tendencies’ in particular contexts (Hietanen, 2012: 128). This is to say that when we view film footage of ourselves, we often feel embodied responses similar to those originally experienced such that research can ‘study the senses in the act of sensing’ (Merchant, 2011: 55).

Without audiencing, Merchant (2011: 59) explains that she would not have been able to capture the ‘sensations, embodied fleeting feelings, acts and thoughts’ that circulate amongst a group of learner scuba divers. Audiencing, therefore, is a powerful method to capture how the preconscious, somatically felt force of affective atmospheres impinges on the body. It also offers an opportunity for researchers to inquire how atmospheres emerge and are passed on within collective consumption spaces such as bars, cafes, clubs or football stadiums. Again, this is a way of represencing embodied phenomena that ‘are not always consciously reflected upon’ (Rose, 2007: 248) or are so fleeting that they might go unnoticed. In allowing us access to these phenomena, videography, audiencing, introspection and a range of other techniques can help us to flesh out the investigation of atmospheres, the precognitive and onflow in consumption (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Biehl-Missal and Saren, 2012; Goulding et al., 2009).

Discussion

The theoretical tools that marketing and consumer researchers have imported from assemblage and ANTs have emphasised the relationality of objects, the ongoing socio-material translations through which markets are constructed as well as the distributed character of agency in these processes. In categorising a stream of work as ‘representational network theories’, we have suggested that the style of much assemblage and actor–network research to date has tended to represent consumers’ voices and established research categories in manners designed to solve problems of institutionalised interest within the broader context of marketing research. Whilst these problems are of undeniable importance, we have introduced NRT as a way to expand future uses and developments of ANT and assemblage theories. In so doing, we meet Bajde’s (2013) call in this journal to ‘flatten’ the way we use relational theories. Indeed, this initial excursion into NRT, a style of doing research that seeks to represence often occluded or overlooked elements of assemblages encourages and offers ways for researchers to seek out novel categories of knowledge and expand our ontological outlooks (Bajde 2013; Bettany and Daly, 2008; Zwick and Dholakia, 2006).

It should be emphasised that NRT is deliberately experimental in the language, methods and ontologies it uses to examine and present its findings (Thrift, 2008b). Indeed, whilst the language offered by ANT has been described as stable, formalised and transportable,³ the language generated by NRT authors is often characterised by dense (and at times verbose) prose designed to present and ‘perform’ findings, such that the text is different for each reader at every moment and thus pregnant with possibilities (Canniford, 2012). Whilst potentially creative, these kinds of research presentations can be notoriously difficult to follow. Used skilfully, however, NRT can alter the way we think about thought and action; it encourages empirical engagement with the often unnoticed and unreflexive details of consumption events that demand innovative research procedures to be detected.

Related to this, the negative prefix of ‘non-’ in NRT has been considered to be rather misleading (see Anderson and Harrison, 2010; Lorimer, 2005). In response, Lorimer (2005) suggests that NRT could be more accurately labelled as ‘more-than-representational theory’ (Lorimer, 2005), thus highlighting the desire of expanding ontologies beyond accepted categories, by using novel and experimental methods. Towards this goal, our article has described some of the novel sensitivities afforded by non-representational styles of working that may be deployed in a variety of contexts. In particular, we have suggested that NRT can draw together and build on the broad range of methodological innovations explored in our field hitherto that attempt to capture the ongoing flow of everyday life. Related to this, we have argued for ethnographies that seek to expand on research sites, contexts and samples by seeking out novel ways to describe and track the distributed world of consumption. NRT specifically recommends attention to the automatic and precognitive aspects of market societies as well as the atmospheres and affect that circulate in consumption spaces. This being the case, we have offered some suggestions for researchers wishing to incorporate these aspects of markets and consumption into their research.

A further contribution is related to the scales of assemblages. As consumer researchers we are inherently dealing with nested contexts (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011). Rabinow (2003) describes the work that assemblage theorists face in joining large-scale, longue durée social orders such as capitalism with accounts of impactful but smaller scale shifts and impromptu ‘problematisations’ such as financial crises, all the way down to the quotidian, everyday contexts through which these larger events are both felt and reproduced. Askegaard and Linnet (2011) have made a case to justify placing our contextual studies in these larger global flows and shifts. In a sense, what we contribute in this article is similar to this appeal, but opposite in scale. Whilst Askegaard and Linnet suggest looking into broader assemblages, we contribute a perspective that examines the minutiae underpinning various consumption contexts and that offers to connect these minutiae to larger scale events.

We suggest therefore that non-representational work can be placed alongside existing representational styles of relational theorising. To be sure, our research projects are themselves, hybrid objects, open to both representational and non-representational sensibilities. As such, we have noted both the representational and non-representational traits that emerge in Epp and Price’s (2010) work. Likewise, we recognise both aspects in how Kozinets reassembles his Burning Man project through a variety of media, some serving representational ends (Kozinets, 2002) whilst others open up new spaces of inquiry at the edge of consumer culture theory (Kozinets, 2003). Finally, therefore, we would recommend that non-representational work should occur in conjunction with representational lines of research such that experimental spaces can be explored within extant paradigms of inquiry so as to refresh and drive our field forward in innovative ways.

Footnotes

Notes

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