outsider's insights: (mis)understanding a. fuat fırat on consumption, markets and culture

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Outsider's insights: (mis)understandingA. Fuat Fırat on consumption, marketsand cultureAlan Bradshaw a & Nikhilesh Dholakia ba School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, UKb College of Business Administration, University of Rhode Island,Kingston, USA

Version of record first published: 19 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Alan Bradshaw & Nikhilesh Dholakia (2012): Outsider's insights:(mis)understanding A. Fuat Fırat on consumption, markets and culture, Consumption Markets &Culture, 15:1, 117-131

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Outsider’s insights: (mis)understanding A. Fuat Fırat onconsumption, markets and culture

Alan Bradshawa∗ and Nikhilesh Dholakiab

aSchool of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; bCollege of BusinessAdministration, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, USA

Fuat Fırat has for a long time maintained a radical, outside and critical voice withinmarketing and consumption theory. He was one of the editors of the landmark bookRadical and Philosophical Theory in Marketing, published in 1987, which soughtto develop alternative modes of theorizing and conceptualizing both marketingpractice and the consuming subject. The continuation of that wider project even-tually lead to the foundation of Consumption Markets & Culture, the journal forwhich Fuat served as Editor-in-Chief for its initial 10 years of existence. Fuatalso co-authored the book Consuming People (1998) in collaboration with Nikhi-lesh Dholakia. By that stage, in particular following his seminal article on there-enchantment of consumption, written with Alladi Venkatesh, Fuat had helpedto pioneer the study of postmodernism within consumer culture. In this interview,Fuat Fırat discusses his research projects including consumption patterns, postmo-dernity, theatre, new literacy and also presents more general observations.

Keywords: consumer identity; consumer research; consumption patterns;postmodernism; theatre

As part of a project to explore the theoretical ideas of A. Fuat Fırat, presently professor atthe University of Texas – Pan American, Nikhilesh Dholakia and Alan Bradshawconducted an extended interview with Fırat. The interviewers, based in Rhode Island,connected with Fırat in Texas using Skype and its recording utility over 2 days – 29and 30 June 2009. The following is a somewhat abridged and edited transcript of the2-day interview during which Fuat discusses the development of his ideas over thecourse of his biography, including his involvement with the radical student movementat the University of Istanbul during the 1960s, his doctoral studies at NorthwesternUniversity – the prestigious centre of marketing theory development – and throughthe initial reception of his ideas within the field of marketing.

Nikhilesh: What were you trying to do in your dissertation?Fuat: When I arrived in the United States for my doctoral program the big excite-

ment in marketing was the broadening of the concept of marketing. Kotler and Levyhad just published that [paper on broadening] and as you know, we [addressing Nikhi-lesh Dholakia who was in the doctoral program at Northwestern also] were workingwith them and that was the big excitement at that point. Another thing that was verymuch on everybody’s mind was “who buys what?” I remember at that time, forexample, Frank Bass’s model, which separated the Chevrolet buyers from the Ford

ISSN 1025-3866 print/ISSN 1477-223X online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2011.637751http://www.tandfonline.com

∗Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Consumption Markets & CultureVol. 15, No. 1, March 2012, 117–131

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buyers, was a big deal. So the whole idea was, well, how come some people buy RCAtelevision sets and others buy, I don’t know, Grundig television sets. Why do somepeople buy Chevrolet and others buy Ford; and the broadening of marketing . . . andso on. So those were the kind of things, I think, that were on peoples’ minds andone thing that struck with me – you know I was reading during my very first semesterat Northwestern, I got hold of these two books, there was a wonderful bookstore rightwhere we used to live at Englehart Hall.

Nikhilesh: Oh . . . “Great Expectations”Fuat: Great Expectations. I had got hold of two books there at that time. One of them

was the Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckmann and the other one wasAlthusser’s book For Marx. And so while we were doing our regular readings for theseminars that we were taking, I was reading those two books. What I remember is, Iwas beginning to ask the question: Well, what about the fact that everybody wants tohave a car, everybody wants to have a television? You know, we are so interested inthe fact that some buy this brand and others buy that brand, but what about the factthat everybody wants to have a car and everybody wants to have a refrigerator? Imean why aren’t we interested in that kind of thing? I began to think about that issue:what about the similarities? We are always talking about the differences but whatabout the similarities, where is this similarity coming from? The effect of those twobooks, Althusser was talking about over-determination and of course Berger and Luck-mann were talking about institutionalization and the social construction of reality, so Ithink that question and the influence of those books led me to develop the ideas that Ifinally wrote about in my dissertation, which was called “The Social Construction ofConsumption Patterns.” I was trying to say “well marketing is itself an institution, it’snot just a business activity, it’s not just a business practice in itself; but is an institutionand it institutionalizes the needs that people have and it institutionalizes what peoplethink they need and so consequentially everybody begins to seek to get the samethings’. And then we begin to see differences among people when, in fact, everybodyis consuming exactly basically the same things. And everybody seems to feel thatthey have this individual identity, when what they consume and what they do ispractically very similar to everybody else.

This idea got strengthened when I went back to Europe at the end of my first yearand I realized everybody in Europe was also into the same kind of thing. They allwanted an automobile, they all wanted television sets, and so on. That strengthenedmy feeling that this was an issue that needed to be studied. And so that is what Ibegan to do and you might remember, Nikhilesh, we used to have these brown bagspractically every week or every other week and I said “I would like to make a presen-tation.” Usually the faculty members used to make the presentations, and I made thispresentation about this idea that I had; that this is what marketing was doing, that itwas making everybody think that they needed these things. When I finished the pres-entation, I remember Gerry Zaltman was interested in it and he said “This is interesting,Fuat” and just as we were leaving the room, Phil Kotler said to me “This isn’t market-ing, what you are doing. This is more like anthropology or sociology, Fuat. So I don’tthink this can be a dissertation.” Until that moment when he said that, I wasn’t thinkingabout this as a Ph.D. dissertation necessarily. I was just thinking about this as someideas but when he [Kotler] said that, I said “well, maybe I could turn this into a disser-tation” (laughs). That’s how things came up or this is my memory of all these things.But I began to be interested in marketing as an institution in society that basically turnsthings in ways that makes people need things, and want things that the economy

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requires that they think they need, and so on. So I think that’s where I began my ideasabout this radical ways of thinking about marketing. Of course, I was very influencedby Marxist works that I had read throughout my university years at Istanbul University.I mean we came out of the 1960s. My university education at Istanbul University was1966 to 1970. And in 1968 you know those big movements that occurred all over theworld, I was part of this movement at Istanbul University. As students of Istanbul Uni-versity, we went and we took over the university and for five days I was in that move-ment but then the leaders of the movement began to become destructive, I thought [itwas taking a wrong turn] . . . and so I left the movement. I was coming from a very . . .this kind of revolutionary and informed by Marxism . . . kind of background, I think [as]I was always looking at marketing.

I really wanted to become a Professor in Macroeconomics when I finished mystudies at Istanbul University but the two people who were supposed to become Associ-ate Professors were not promoted. So no positions opened. I [was] married and I had achild and needed a job. They had positions open at the new faculty that was founded atIstanbul University, the Faculty of Business Administration. And so I decided that Icould go into marketing and study marketing from a macroeconomic point of view. Iwas already coming from those kinds of points of view, and I was trying to study mar-keting from kind of macro-societal points of view and I think that all these kinds ofthings probably led me into the kind of work that I do.

Nikhilesh: Why do you think that this idea – of trying to study similarities or whypeople buy in categories and fall into a pattern of consumption – why was it radical?

Fuat: At that point of time in marketing, as I said, people were looking at differencesand they were thinking of individual human beings as truly individual. Human beingswere making decisions for themselves and everybody was an individual and everybodyhad an independent mind. And you know in marketing there was this big idea that con-sumers are sovereign and people were free and wonderful and the market systemenabled people to have this sort of free-will and freedom and the like. What I wasseeing was, it looked like everybody was free and everybody was making their owndecisions but in fact what was happening was that there was an institutionalizingsystem in society that was the marketing institution, which as a matter of fact, endedup making people feel like they needed these things, rather than them making theirown minds up individually and independent of everybody else. That’s why I thoughtit was radical; it radically changed the point of view at that point in time as how market-ers were thinking. Marketers were thinking, as you know very well, that the consumerswere sovereign and it was the consumers who decided what they needed and that thisguided what people produced. And so the consumers were sovereign, they werekings and so on. It didn’t seem to me to be the case. In that sense it was radical; itwas a radically different point of view to how things were then otherwise perceived.

Nikhilesh: Yeah, but obviously beyond your dissertation and a couple of articles,what you were trying to do in the sense of having an impact, I don’t think it had animpact, right?

Fuat: What I was doing? No, it did not have an impact because, for example, when Icompleted my dissertation and wanted to publish, I remember I sent it to Journal ofMarketing, and it was rejected. Then I sent it to Journal of Macromarketing. At thatpoint of time, Stanley Shapiro was Editor of the Journal of Macromarketing and Istill keep that review letter. It was a five-page review letter. It basically said two ofthe reviewers really like this but one reviewer, who is a big-shot of the field, has realconcerns, etc. etc. and so he [Shapiro] wasn’t going to publish it. And he ended that

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letter by saying, I thought in a very honest way, “Fuat, you have to learn to writeaccording to the North-American mindset” (laughs). So, the way I was thinking justdidn’t fit that mindset. And so consequentially, this kind of work wasn’t beingheard. It wasn’t getting anywhere. And this is why, you will remember, we began tothink of what we could do and that’s how we came up with the idea of editing andpublishing that book, Philosophical and Radical Thought in Marketing.

In those years, the mid-80s, you might remember there was this big issue betweenthe positivists and the relativists, [Paul] Anderson being [on] the critical relativism sideand Shelby Hunt being [on] the positivist side.

Anyway this group, this Anderson group, did a roundtable at Virginia Tech and atthat point of time I was at Appalachian State University. I was at driving distance [fromVirginia Tech] and a young faculty member had just joined us. His name was RajivDant. Rajiv had done his dissertation at Virginia Tech and I said “Well, let’s get intothe car, Rajiv, and go and join them at the roundtable.” And so we went to the round-table. And they had set it so that there was a round table in the middle and then anothercircle outside and then a third circle outside. And I was in one of the outer circles, ofcourse. The people in the middle were talking, talking, talking . . . but you know how Iwas . . . I wanted to speak up so I raised my hand, and I would say this thing, and so on.And at that point, the man who was the editor of Marketing Science said “well, youhave some good ideas but where are you from? – Appalachian State? You have nosource credibility,” he said to me, you know, in the midst of everybody! And that iswhen I thought we have to create our own sources that give us source credibilitybecause these people – I mean the mindset of these people is so set, it is so crusted,they cannot think outside, even when they do think these ideas might be good, theyjust can’t see it, you know, somehow.

So I think it was there that this feeling of “we have to get something out” becamereally strong. So at the next ACR [Association for Consumer Research] meeting that Iwent to, I went and talked to Kotler and Levy and Zaltman and Holbrook and Belk andso on and I invited them to send things to a book that we wanted to edit called Philo-sophical and Radical Thought in Marketing. I remember Morris Holbrook saying “whydon’t you say radical first, and then philosophical,” I remember. And Sidney Levy said“no, I don’t think that radical is the way to go, no I don’t want to be associated.” Butothers did contribute. And so what we did, you will remember this because we did thistogether, we got these names like Phil Kotler and so on and then also we had the youngpeople that we thought were writing interesting things. There was, for example,Raymond Benton, he was at Loyola University and was writing some interestingleft-wing articles, then there was Bill Kilbourne – now at Clemson University – hestill writes about green marketing, Anil Pandya who is at Illinois, and so on. We hadthese people who we thought were interesting and were pushing the boundaries. Wegot them to contribute to the book and we put some well-established names to getthe book out there. And I think that book really made a dent in the field, not somuch in North America but I remember when the book sales were coming in fromthe publisher, in Japan and Europe that book was selling. And it was interesting howmany years later, when we went to Japan and when I met this Japanese professorOkuda, and I realized how much people in Japan were aware of that book. That wasinteresting. So that was basically what we tried to do. We said “ok, then, what we’lldo is create our own media and put our ideas in there” and that’s how we got theword out there . . . and there [are] a lot of things that a lot of people are doing [that]we were already saying and doing at that point in time; it’s interesting.


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Nikhilesh: Tell me about the time you decided to pick up postmodernity as a majortheme.

Fuat: I remember where that happened very well. You know my dissertation wasabout the social construction of consumption patterns. The dissertation question was“why is [it] that there are certain things that people want.” So I saw that there werecertain things that people want – like an automobile, like the television set, like therefrigerator and so on – that I thought they [these things] had certain dimensions inthem that made them similar. And I came up with four dimensions, which later youand I wrote some papers on. So I had this idea that there were cultural dimensionsand these began to be sought culturally, that it was a cultural construction ofpeoples’ desires, and so on. That’s what I was thinking.

Now at the end of the 1980s, I think it might have been 1989, I went to one of theseAmerican Marketing Association (AMA) Summer conferences. Alladi Venkatesh, whois at University of California, Irvine, had begun to work with some people, the key onebeing Mark Poster, who is a historian. Mark Poster did the first translation of Baudril-lard into English . . . so for example he took certain chapters from Baudrillard’s initialworks and translated them. So Alladi had met these people and in a session that wasorganized [at AMA], he had invited Mark Poster to talk about Baudrillard. Now atthat point I had never heard the word “postmodernism.” I had never heard ofBaudrillard. But Mark Poster made this presentation about Baudrillard, and I wasthinking “well, what Baudrillard seems to be saying is what I had been saying in mydissertation and later works about dimensions of consumption.”

I remember there were five bookstores in Washington, D.C., that I used to love andgo to. One of them is still there. It’s called Bridge Street Books. It’s at the very begin-ning of where Georgetown starts. So whenever I go back to Washington D.C., I go backto that store. But there were four other bookstores. So what I did was say “Linda, we’vegot to go to Washington.” So we went and I went to those bookstores and boughtsomething like almost 100 books on postmodernism and connected to postmodernism.And I tried to find all the books I could get in English by Baudrillard and so on. I cameback home and I read those books and I wrote that piece that later on Alladi joined in,that became the piece called Postmodernity: The Age of Marketing.

So that is where I started to say there are these dimensions of postmodernity, hyper-reality and so on, that’s where that came from. Later on when I go to places and whenpeople see me, they say “oh postmodernism, right? These are the five dimensions” and Isay, “well, these are how I was originally able to conceptualize these things but don’thold me to those five dimensions’. But that’s where my interest in postmodernism startsand what I began to see was that this concept of postmodernity does enable us to crys-tallize certain ideas for us to be able to have insights into humanity in ways that wecould not have before. I felt that it really contributed to our understanding of our con-dition and so that is why I have been working with that concept, although that concepthas been bastardized and polluted. And a lot of people now run away from that [post-modernism], just as when people [were] running away from ideas of Marxism; it was anuntouchable idea. I still keep this little note . . . when I was in Denmark in 1995 and1996, a leading scholar sent me a paper he wrote, and on a Post-It note he had said,“you will see that I didn’t reference any of your work . . . to stay away from thatM-word.” That was Marxism!

But I still think that Marx’s critique of western capitalism is the best analysis ofmodernity from within modernity. So I am still very much informed by Marxist analysisbut I think there are still certain things missing, even from his analysis . . . which [is] so


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wonderful [otherwise]; because they [Marx’s writings] are from within modernity, andwe need to get outside of that.

Nikhilesh: Right . . . because it was so many decades ago. And had it to be limitedby its conditions.

Fuat: Exactly. So that is why I took on this thing called the postmodern. And nowthe postmodern has become untouchable . . .! And I guess I like being untouchable, youknow, because whatever is untouchable, I am into it.

I think that we need a completely new vocabulary because when we work with wordslike production and consumption and so on, no matter how much we want to analyze it –for example I wrote a piece called “Rethinking Consumption,” trying to say thatconsumption itself is a production of desires and philosophies and experiences – so itis a productive moment, a moment of production – but when we use those words,still they have this historic baggage that they carry with them. You can’t get out if itsomehow. We have to create a new vocabulary and some people are very good at creat-ing new vocabulary and they come up with new words that catch on. I’m not good at that.

So what I think is that we need to get outside of the historic box that we have gotcaught into, rejuvenate vocabularies and rethink our human condition and provide trulyradical analyses of what humanity is about and how historically it has reached this pointthat we are in now. That is my idea of the radical at this point of time. I perceive thepostmodern, while many people would disagree with it, to be the radical thought ofthis time because it goes outside of that old-fashioned way of thinking and it enablesus to see things that we cannot otherwise perceive. So I do see a lot of potential in post-modernist thinking as long as it’s radical. Otherwise we are caught in this modernistcage and we have to get out of this modernist cage.

Alan: Are we in an age of modernity?Fuat: Well, that’s another deep question. First of all, [I am] in disagreement with a

lot of people who do [postmodern analysis] or who have studied [postmodernism],because not a lot of people are thinking postmodern anymore . . . there are peoplesaying it is post-postmodern and postmodernism has become a dirty word. So notmany people are into postmodernism anymore. You don’t hear that word unless youturn on MTV and look at postmodern videos, or something like that. First of all, in dis-agreement with a lot of people who have studied postmodern issues, I do not think thatwe are in a postmodern world at this point of time. I try to express that especially in thatpaper that I wrote with Alladi Venkatesh on the birth of postmodernism . . . I think weare in a transition period. And this transition is going to occur, if it does occur, in a waythat both discourses, modern and postmodern, intellectual discourses and social struc-tures, are going to merge into each other. I don’t think that it is one or the other; it’s awhole cultural evolution. Especially, we can really think of a movement into a postmo-dern time as momentous as it was a transition from traditional society to modernsociety. I mean look at this: we call one a traditional society, and another a modernsociety. And we don’t have a new epoch. We still talk about post-modern or what-ever . . . we don’t even have a word because we don’t know what it is, where it is,how it is, when it is going to happen.

But I also don’t think that we are postmodern because one idea is that the market isstill very hegemonic in our lives. And the market is a modern phenomenon; it is aninstitution of modernity. It’s the medium or the institution through which the economicis practiced in modern society and that is why it is so central. It became so central tomodernity and it is still very central in human lives. So as long as the market holdssuch a central position in our lives, we cannot say that we have transcended modernity.


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I think we are still in, by different people’s words, high modernity, late modernity, youknow . . . whatever; but we are not in postmodernity because modernity is still verymuch with us.

Nikhilesh: And this process, at least the way I look at it, is . . . to go on for maybemore than a century because my estimate is that about a hundred million people a yearare entering into the market system. But even at that rate, we [will] have about eight ornine billion people, so it will take decades for even the marketization to be pervasive.

Fuat: Yes of course, this is an epochal change that we are talking about. If we nowbuy into this new hybridization of traditional society, modern society and then the nextepoch, whatever we will end up calling it – let’s call it postmodern for now – if it is anepochal change, then this change won’t happen over fifty years. It takes an age. Some-thing is happening, some transformations are occurring; and these transformations aregoing to take hold when both intellectual discourses and social structures begin tomerge [into] each other. And it isn’t going to happen as one or the other; it is goingto happen as a whole cultural phenomenon.

Nikhilesh: A part of the changes also come from politics, and if we look at themajor political revolutions, starting with the Americans and then the French and thenthe Russian – I think maybe with the exception of the French - in comparison totheir peer nations, they were in relatively less developed settings – so we have nothad, in the history of modernity, a revolution that has happened in the centre of themost advanced or most highly evolved system.

Fuat: I have a hypothesis that if transition to postmodernity is going to occur, it isgoing to occur not in places where the market is completely entrenched but where themarket is dominant but not completely entrenched. So I see, for example, the postmo-dern really coming out in places like India and Turkey – just for the reason that youhave just mentioned now. These are places where we already see more postmodernisticthings like the multiplicity of orders.

I remember when I went to India with you and Alladi, being so enchanted by themultiplicity of orders and how people could move from one to the other without anykind of major psychotic reaction like saying “oh, who am I now, who am I now?” InIndia I remember Alladi had this lawyer friend, who died recently, and that man . . .for example, he was a very much-westernized man. I remember when he was the inter-locutor at IBM, he was completely westernized, if you like. And then when he camehome his wife was belonging to a certain religious – I can’t remember the name ofthe sect – and he got into that mode. I remember going to the bazaar with him whenhe was buying the oranges, he could become these different people so easily withouthaving this identity conflict. I see this in Turkey too, people can move from one wayof thinking and order to another. And that is a very key thing in the coming postmoder-nity: the capability to accept and maybe even appreciate different orders, and not feelthe need to say “this is the best way to be, and this is the only way I want to be.” I thinkthe postmodern is in that possibility.

Nikhilesh: Can you talk about how the market co-opts opposition and rejuvenatesitself?

Fuat: The market is a very resilient institution of modernity and it has this capabilityof taking things that seem to be in opposition, emptying them of their content, and thenturning them into commodities that can be commercially successful and [be] sold andmarketable; it turns things into marketable things. What we are seeing now is basicallyglimpses of things, possibilities of potentials of an epochal change. But I don’t see any-thing that has completely taken root, where we can say here is a true change. But we do


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see a lot of glimpses of possibilities, of potentials, and that is what I am exploring:Where are these potentials and – as potentials – what do they indicate to us? Whatdirections might we be seeing in this potentially coming new epoch? The key thingthat I am working on now, the key epochal distinction if you like, is that while intraditional and modern society what humanity was seeking was an order that was thebest, the order that would take humanity to its great potential and great future. Wewere always looking for an order, one order, the best that would allow humanity torealize all its potential and so on.

But the real big difference in what may be coming . . . in postmodernity – if that isthe word that we are to use – is that what we will see is a multiplicity of orders. Anorder of multiple orders is the key distinction, I think. That is what I am lookinginto; by focusing in a microscopic way on these potentials, or what seem to looklike potentials, that might be giving us ideas about what the possible futures are . . .and trying to understand what might be the key aspects and key characteristics ofthat epoch. That’s what I’m trying to understand at this point of time. You know, aswe said in our last chapter of the book, Consuming People, the new radicalism that Isee is the radicalism of allowing people to experience multiple orders, instead oftrying to change an order and turn it into another order. The true radical of our dayis the one who, if you like, struggles for the capability of humanity to experiencemultiple orders.

Nikhilesh: Let me bring this back to the other idea, the ability of the market to co-opt and rejuvenate. When that happens – let’s says something new comes up and thenis co-opted as part of the marketing system – do we then reduce the multiplicity oforders back to one order?

Fuat: Yes, that’s what the market does. The market is a uni-dimensionalizingsystem because the only dimension that it cares about is the commercial dimension;everything must be turned into and expressed in economic exchange-value terms.That is why historically it became the central institution of modernity. That was itsrole: to make things into commodified, commercialized, individualized entities;because that is where – in modern economic thinking – people saw freedom. Theidea was to make people independent of all kinds of ties and obligations so that theycould act according to their own free will: that was the vision and idea. So whathappens is that, in that way of thinking, when you buy something in the market, youdon’t have to relate to the person from whom you are buying or selling to. Themarket completely isolates people and that was supposedly to give you the freedom,the freedom from obligation from anything and anybody. In that way you couldexperience your own complete free will because you had no obligation to anybody.That is the whole idea of the market. It tries to bring everything to that one [obli-gation-free state] . . .

Nikhilesh: But isn’t that, from a progressive point of view, a problem . . . becausethe only way that some people see as opposing that, or overcoming that, is to goback to some kind of religious fundamentalism because those obligations are there?So that [fundamentalist] view is about the only thing that can sustain itself to somedegree against the market.

Fuat: Those are the anti-modern movements. The anti-modern movements are theones that say “no, this modern order is not good, so we have to find this other to replaceit with” whereas the postmodern way is to say “no, we are not going to replace this withone order but we will allow ourselves to experience multiple orders.” And that is whereI see the anti-modern versus postmodern distinction. And you know, I think in the


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postmodern way of thinking there isn’t necessarily an anti-ness to the market: it’s justan anti-ness to the market being the only way. The market is fine as long as it is not theonly way.

Nikhilesh: It’s just that when we try to think in terms of actual situations, it becomesmuch more difficult to envisage this.

Fuat: We are living in a period also where this modern economy is very much incrisis. When this crisis happened, several people started to say “maybe the marketdoesn’t work”; but it was forgotten. As soon as people started to feel the crisis wasover, that idea – that maybe the market is an institution, maybe it is not somethingwhich is out there, like some kind of invisible hand – will be forgotten very soon,because that is the nature of the beast. People will just fall back into thinking that themarket is wonderful and [it] will arrange and organize things in a way that everybodywill be happy and be prosperous. But right now, the radical way of thinking is to say“no, we cannot resolve economic problems by throwing more economic solutions onthem.” It is like people recognizing that technology is causing problems and saying“ok, let us throw some more technology on this to resolve it,” and it never is resolved.The modern society and discourses lead us to say that the market will resolve everything– and it will give us our freedoms – as it will clear us of obligations. And so the idea isnow that when it [the market economy] breaks, let’s throw more economics on it.

Right now we have to say: What are the solutions and possibilities that are notsolely economic? We have to go back to culture and recognize that culture is multidi-mensional and that economics is only one of those dimensions. The radical solution isthe one that will look for solutions beyond economics. If we keep seeing the economicand its infrastructure as the thing –in the last analysis that determines everything – thenwe will never be able to get out of the ills we are experiencing today. Radical thinkingtoday requires outside-of-economic thinking.

Another very interesting idea that we have to involve in our analysis is fromBataille, the idea of excess or the excrement. Even when the market co-opts and pro-duces the commercial, there is always part of that production that is not pre-determined,pre-commercialized and therefore . . . the excess. That is where real possibility ofchange is. The transformation will be in the excess. So we have to recognize wherethe excess is and how it is working. We are products of modernist thinking and mod-ernist science and, consequentially, we always seek conclusions and to bring closure.While I agree about the issue of the resilience of the market – because I have beensaying this for a long time – it doesn’t mean that it has a 100% success. There isalways a remnant. That is what I try to do with the Las Vegas analysis; to show thatLas Vegas was the excess, the excrement of modernity, and that is why we had tolook there to see potentials and possibilities. If you look only at the part that hasclosure, you cannot see the possibilities of the new, you cannot be radical, you justbecome a conformist of what is, and you cannot get into what can be.

I think a lot of our colleagues get caught into doing science where they bring closureand want to close the book on something whereas what brings us our radicalism is tolook into the excess, the exception and so on.

Alan: Fuat, one thing that distinguishes you from other people in the field is howyou tend to think in terms of wider perspectives, as opposed to a mid-range approachwhich seeks to conceptualize contextual areas. Can you talk about that please?

Fuat: I have never liked that mid-range theory, that-is-what-we-have-to-do talk. Ithink it comes from almost an inferiority complex, “oh we are marketers so wecannot do what sociologists and historians did.” They are human beings, we are


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human beings too. So why shouldn’t we be able to do grand theory, little theory, ormid-range theory, or any theory we want? I don’t get that idea, I don’t understand it;it is another limitation. What do we see our strengths to be? Whatever our strengthis, let us make sure that that strength is the only thing that we will allow everybodyto see. So let us pull everybody into that. That is the kind of turf war that people getinto. Instead of opening the horizons for everybody else so that everybody else canget beyond what you are, it is this closure again. So I don’t care, I just want toanalyze, and whatever level of analysis is required for what I want to do is fine withme, and I don’t feel like I can’t do very macro level observations. If it requires that,then that is what we should be doing. That is one of the reasons why the CCT [Con-sumer Culture Theory] movement and the mid-range theory movement is what I callthe new dogma of the field and I don’t like it. My friends don’t like me calling themthe “new dogma” but that is what it is, it is dogmatic: “things have to be mid-range,things have to have this range.” No! Whatever range . . . why do we have to limit it?I don’t know . . . that is my answer to that question.

Alan: As opposed to new dogmas, what about old dogmas? Do you think there is arole for a leftist perspective within the field?

Fuat: Always! I see myself as a leftist. I am telling you, I am very much stillinformed by Marxist thought. I see its limitations, but I don’t reject it. It’s still veryinformative. Even [in] some of the analysis that Marx did, you could say that therewere postmodern analyses and nuances in there. I mean these are people who hadincredible insight. These people looked at the world – they didn’t go out and dothese surveys or empirical studies or whatever – but they observed the world. Onthe basis of these observations they had these keen insights. And I think that is a poss-ible way of understanding the world. But now we are kind of . . . “if you don’t go outthere and do this in that way, then you are not doing science.” These are all limitationsthat the system tries to put upon us. And we have to understand where these concernsare coming from and why those limitations may be important at certain points in timebut we must also see other possibilities.

Maybe it’s also a certain trait that I have. Whenever I am told to buy into something,I don’t want to buy into it [laughs]. I am a rebel at heart I guess. I mean that’s how it hasbeen! I have found a lot of joy in the struggle, in being the one who disagrees. I don’tknow, maybe it is my personality fault, that I love being the outsider. Why do I likebeing the outsider? I don’t know. Maybe things that happened in my childhood andso on.

I know when the liberatory postmodernism paper won the Best Paper Award in theJCR, I was really a little concerned. I was thinking “Oh, no! Boy, what does this mean?I don’t like it!”

Alan: How can we conceive political economy in a context of multiplicities?Fuat: That’s a question that I don’t have an answer for, really, because . . . it will be

constructed. It will be built in the process of this world. When I encounter questions likethat, my impulse is to say: Can you imagine before we had these nation-states, when wehad monarchies, and it was 200 years before anybody began to build what we nowregard as democracies, that somebody had said “you know we could have a systemwhere we could elect representatives who make decisions”? People would think thiswas impossible: “Ha, you think there will not be one person who makes decisions,there will be all these people who try to make decisions? They could never come todecisions! This could never happen . . .!!” Until we begin to organize ourselves andthink about how we can achieve that, I cannot say “an order of multiple orders will


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have these kinds of institutions, and these will rule in these ways, and respond to issuesin these ways.” It will have to construct itself.

Nikhilesh: I think you are right, the future can only be imperfectly imagined and thefarther away you are, the more imperfect it is. And the way things play out can only beunderstood with reference to history. So I agree with all of that and yet, if you go backto say, Marx, he obviously did develop a fairly elaborate description of what he thoughtwould be a wonderful order. There was an envisioned political economy of the future.Most of it did not come to pass but . . . I’m trying to say that, while you are right that itis very difficult to do, but it has not prevented others. There have been attempts to visu-alize the future.

Fuat: And if somebody did visualize it they would be subject to ridicule.Nikhilesh: I can see that point. But at the same time . . . I am sure those who were

reading what Karl Marx was visualizing thought it was bunkum. Yet, it didn’t play outthe way he visualized it but it did influence huge numbers of things.

Fuat: It was very attractive. That vision was very attractive because – as humanbeings – we want to see everybody in circumstances that they were not discriminatedagainst. We wanted to see people living lives that were decent . . . That’s why thosekinds of visions are attractive. That’s why we still think about what the world couldbe like because the world today is so unhappy, there is so much indecency that wewant all people to be able to have decent lives. So that’s what’s attractive. We lookaround and see some people living like this, having all that [wealth], and otherpeople dying of the simplest sicknesses, or dying out of hunger [while] at the sametime food that cannot be sold at a marketable price is being dumped into the sea. Allthese inequalities that make people say “what can we look for?” “How can weimprove things?” Behind the attractiveness of these ideas lay these cultural feelings.

Nikhilesh: Maybe we should try and move the conversation more towards –obviously we are moving to larger issues like political economy and social organiz-ation . . . – to consumption and markets, the field that we are interested in. Anotheridea you have – and we spent a bit of time on in Consuming People – is the performa-tive idea of a stage; and market actions, consumptive actions, performed on the stagebut the stage controlled by the corporation. Technology opens up ways for consumersto move onto the stage, consumers as active participants in symbolic processes. A lot ofyour work looked at this in one way or another. You want to talk about that?

Fuat: What we were trying to do in the book was to take the concept of moderntheater as a means to express the organization of life at this moment. But here’s thething . . . this subject, this construction of the human that we call the consumer, is theconstruction of a modern society. So in the future, the way the subjectivity will be con-structed, will not be in the form of a consumer. People will not be consumers in thevisualized future that I see. So the moment we call somebody consumer, we arealready imposing upon that a certain historical construction. So you know . . . consu-merization of people was the result of a specific economic organization of life.People became consumers, which meant that they lived on the basis of what wasbeing produced by others, and bought certain things in the market and consumedthem. This is a process of “consumerizing” humans and this is – therefore – aproduct of a specific order that occurred at a certain point in history.

So if new orders are going to arise – and I’m not saying that, for example an order inwhich the market organizes life is necessarily going to die . . . – the order is going to beone of the many orders that people can learn from, and find meaning, but also have theirlives organized in different ways as well, so they are not captivated by a single way of


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living. Then the people in these orders will not be consumers but performers. They willbe not be choosers of alternatives that are put in front of them, but they will be partici-pants in the designing and the production and construction of alternatives throughwhich they can find experiences. And through those experiences they can findmeaning. So that is why, I identify the necessity of finding new vocabulariesbecause the moment we talk about people as consumers, that means we are alreadyaccepting that way of constructing their subjectivity. We have to be able to get outof it. The question is what word or term can we find that can get us out of this construct,because these words pull us back into that mindset. I guess my answer to your questionis that the consumer is an historic animal. It’s an animal of a certain history. And we aregoing to construct different animals because people’s subjectivities will have to be dif-ferently constructed when they are in different orders. While I know that it is general, Ihope it gets us to what I am trying to say. I am trying to say that the consumer is onesubjectivity, one way of being.

Alan: I am wondering, within a context of multiplicities, somebody is sooner orlater going to have a heart attack or war will break out; and this will cause a returnto some kind of singular order system. What do you think?

Fuat: In all societies, human history is alive. While we, for example in modernsociety, say we have transcended society, traditional ideas and ways of life are stillwith us. So [if] we ever move beyond modernity, the traditional and the modern willstill be with us. I doubt that this idea – that we can always [seek] and should beable to find one order and go back to one order – will ever die; there will always bethat. I am sure there will be forces and some people trying to recreate and reconstructthat “one order” of humanity. How cultures and people, at that point in time, will reactto those . . . for example traditional ideas are always with us and we can see how thosetraditional ideas, such as the issue of religion is always responded to within modernsociety. There are different responses to it at different times.

Here’s another thing, technologies are developing that even this issue of death is inquestion, don’t you think? For example this idea of cloning which scared people whenthey thought “oh, they are going to have another Alan, they are going to have anotherNikhilesh, and another Fuat; and then they are going to use these people, these crea-tures, these organs to extend life.” But really, cloning is not like that, but more like agrafting. So we die because our organs begin to deteriorate, so for example the cellsin our heart get old and can no longer regenerate themselves or our skin begins tobecome loose because the young cells are not regenerating themselves sufficiently.But through grafting, they will be able to do this. So I do not see it as impossiblethat at some point in the future, that people may live forever. I don’t know but some-times we take our experience as what will always have to be [around us]. Yet in historywe find again and again, that experiences in the past will change. Yet we don’t seem tobe able to see things in a wide horizon and see possibilities. We get stuck with certainways of seeing things. I think it is possible that in five, six generations from now, deathwill be something of the past.

Nikhilesh: Let’s pull back from the farther future, to a more contemporary context.Right now the market system has very large and very well-resourced and endowed cor-porations and the consumers are relatively much less powerful. So there is a whole issueof them meeting in the marketplace on an unequal basis. And this has been an ongoingissue that is a feature of the market system. Yet you are working currently on projectswhere this issue of agency and power and relationship are being reopened. There areissues of agency of even entities others than consumers and corporations – we may


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leave that for the time being – but what do you think of that, the corporation and theconsumer?

Fuat: When I talk in my classes, when I am teaching principles of marketing and Iam trying to get the students to conceptualize things, I do talk about information thatcorporations have, which means they know more about people than people knowabout themselves. They know what moves people and how people’s strings arepulled and so, for example, despite the fact that we all know that this is fiction –when we go to the movie and we see these scenes, we know that it is all fictionalstuff – but in our hearts we are pulled along. Many times these large movie corporationshave multiple endings and test them with audiences to see which makes the biggestimpression and then end it that way. So they know a lot. They have a lot of resourcesand know a lot about human beings that people might not know about themselves.So there is this power in the hands of those who have these kinds of resources to doall this research and find out. Plus this also returns us to the issue of literacy that youmentioned. They [corporations] know how to play with all these different signs: themusic, the visual, the words. And many individuals cannot completely decipher thismultimedia construction sufficiently because – in order to really “read” behind thelines of what is written and understand what is written – you must also be a “writer.”You must be a writer to be able to read well and read between-the-lines.

Similarly if people don’t know the old techniques and the science, if you like, ofputting together all these visuals and sounds and smells and tastes and so on, then itis difficult for people to really understand what and how the composers of all the multi-media effects are trying to do. When we cannot understand it, then we cannot seebetween-the-lines; and we are a helpless audience to all of this. There is a lot in oursociety that as individuals we should be aware of, we should know that we do notknow. And so consequently that [lack of awareness] also makes the ground unequal.When there are those corporations that have all of this knowledge, and there areaudiences who do not have this knowledge, this also creates an inequality.

That is why finding new forms of literacy is so important, to be able to be not justconsumers – you see these makes us consumers because they are put in front of you,you just become an audience to it, you become a consumer of it – but to become per-formers. People have to become knowledgeable about how to read these, which meansthat our education system needs to be changed so it is not just in terms of reading andwriting but in terms of putting all the signs together. Multi-sign-efficacy is the term Ihave come up with to express what we need to turn literacy into. So, yes, there aremany inequalities [out] there that are created by how this life has been organized,specifically in modern market society. Many people have been talking about thesethings, all the way from Vance Packard to David Caplowitz. Many people have beenpointing to these inequalities in the marketplace, but people don’t have manyanswers to what to do about them.

Alan: You mentioned earlier [in the conversation] that when you finished yourseminar at Northwestern, that Philip Kotler told you that it looked more like anthropol-ogy. Do you ever think that maybe he was right, and you should have become ananthropologist rather than remain in the business school?

Fuat: Ha, ha . . .! Well you see that’s another thing . . . when we put out the journalConsumption Markets & Culture, part of the contribution that I made to the first edi-torial was about how we must not compartmentalize knowledge. You see I think thatpart of the way that we keep ourselves uninformed is to say “this is what sociologydoes,” “this is what economics does,” “this is what anthropology does,” and so on;


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and I think that’s a mistake because then we never see an issue and we never analyze anissue completely, we only look at it from the marketing point of view or from the econ-omics point of view, and we never completely understand the condition. So I am againstthis compartmentalization and the splitting of knowledge. What discipline we are inwill determine, to an extent, what question that we raise. But then, when we aretrying to analyze that question and trying to come up with different responses to thatquestion, we should be able to take from all knowledge and not become a disciplinarian.I am against compartmentalization. I really don’t see myself as a sociologist or ananthropologist or a marketer or a consumer researcher or whatever. I see myself assomebody trying to develop some knowledge and understand my life and understandmy world. So in the broader sense I see myself as a social scientist. I don’t seemyself as a marketing person, and I don’t think anybody should see themselves asjust this or that. They should say “here are issues, given my life and where I am,how I have to come to be in this department or this company or whatever, and hereis a question that comes from who I have become, then let me try to respond to thisquestion the best way that I can.” And that means taking from all; from physics and,if necessary biology, or whatever. So that’s my answer to that. Who cares that I ama marketing professor? The important thing is that if I have a question, I shouldattempt to respond to it in the best way that I can. And if I limit myself to onlyreading the marketing and consumer research literature, which unfortunately many ofour colleagues do, then our answers are not going to be that meaningful in my mind.So we have to open ourselves to sociology and anthropology and psychology and pol-itical science and all those kinds of things.

Nikhilesh: So do you think there is a fundamental problem with how academia isorganized and are there ways out of that?

Fuat: There are problems with the way that academia is organized, yes. But there isthat saying that is also in my mind; “jack of all trades but master of none.” So that is aconcern we should have too. Between what I was saying and that concern, one has tofind a balance. This term balance is now very big in my thinking. We often – and this isagain a result of modernist thinking because modernist thinking, as you know, is inbipolar categories, masculine-feminine, production-consumption, and so on – wefeel like we have to either accomplish this end or we have to achieve that end. No, Ithink we should find balances because otherwise we lose the sense of the whole bymoving in one direction too much. It’s not an easy thing to find balances but that iswhat we must try to achieve.

For example, remember the way we discussed freedom in the [book] ConsumingPeople. In modernity freedom to has been focused upon: I must have the freedom todo what I want to do, where my independent “free will” leads me. But then whenyou go in that direction too much, you become entrapped: you have yourself, as a par-ticipant, constructed [the trap of individualism] and become trapped into it. A completefreedom requires that you have some freedom from as well. Otherwise you becomeentrapped in freedom to. But if you go all the way towards freedom from, then youbecome an escapist. Then you can never become part of any construction. Thereforefreedom requires a balancing of these freedom to and freedom from. Going in onlyone direction and seeing that as freedom doesn’t do it, because you either becomeentrapped or you become an escapist; and you don’t therefore find freedom. That iswhat life is like and we have to find these balances. Different orders that humanitywill construct will have different balances of things, because to say that there is onesingle balance that is the best is also, perhaps, not correct. Different balances and


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different orders will be found so that people can experience and decide how thesebalances can contribute to a richer life.

Alan: I remember in Odense [at the University of Southern Denmark] somebodywas presenting their doctoral work and cited you as saying that we were in the ageof the postmodern. He eventually said “I hope I’m not misquoting you” and yousaid “It doesn’t matter. I have accepted it as my destiny to be misunderstood.” Canyou talk about a destiny of being misunderstood?

Fuat: Many times I find when people, for example, talk about what I have said ordone – in their work – I see that people interpret me differently than how I have inter-preted it myself. Maybe it’s the way I express things. English is my second language,maybe there is a problem I am having. Maybe Stanley Shapiro was right when he saidI’m not talking the right kind of English. A lot of the time, when I talk about these post-modern issues, I talk in terms of possibilities and potentials but I see that when peopletalk about what I said, they talk as if I said “this was the case,” when in fact I am saying,“this might be a potential.” Another thing I was saying at that seminar – that it is ok, itis my destiny to be misunderstood – is because I came into the field of marketing andimmediately – because of my being informed by Marxist thought, and I do like Marxistthought quite a lot – I was immediately labeled as a Marxist and so people were afraidof saying “I reference Fırat.” Now that I am trying to start studying and understand thepostmodern condition, people now label me as a postmodernist and I’m not sure I’meither a Marxist or a postmodernist. I’m just trying to understand things and use thebest tools I see out there. But people put me in these boxes and that is a misunder-standing. I guess I am to be misunderstood because I am viewed as either a Marxistor a postmodernist and when people begin to think of you in that way then –instead of really trying to read and understand what you are saying – they just seeyou as whatever they have visualized as, and that is a misunderstanding.

I guess when you are an outsider, you are always to be misunderstood in some ways,but you can keep hoping that finally one day, somebody will understand something. Idon’t know, Alan, of course when I say that – and I do say that – but when Nikhileshtold me that this interview is about understanding Fuat, I thought isn’t that animpossibility? (laughs).!

Nikhilesh: Ha, ha . . .! Maybe we should – in the style that you sometimes use – put“mis” parenthetically before the word “understanding”. . ..ha, ha, ha. . .!

Fuat: That’s right (laughs).

Selected bibliographyFırat, Fuat A. 1997. Welcome to CMC. Consumption Markets & Culture 1, no. 1: 1–6.Fırat, Fuat A., Nikhilesh Dholakia, and Richard P. Bagozzi, eds. 1987. Radical and philosophi-

cal thought in marketing. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.Fırat, Fuat A., and Nikhilesh Dholakia. 1998. Consuming people: From political economy to

theatres of consumption. London: Routledge.Fırat, Fuat A., and Alladi Venkatesh. 1995. Libratory postmodernism and the reenchantment of

consumption. Journal of Consumer Research 22, no. 3: 239–67.Mikkonen, Ilona, Johanna Moisander, and Fuat A. Fırat. 2011. Cynical identity projects as

consumer resistance – the Scrooge as a social critic?. Consumption Markets & Culture 14,no. 1: 99–116.


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outsider's insights: (mis)understanding a. fuat fırat on consumption, markets and culture

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