Becoming Through Contiguity and Lines of Flight: The Four Faces of Celebrity-Proximate Assemblages

Abstract

Prior consumer studies examined consumers in extraordinary contexts role playing and transforming using magical thinking. This study investigates consumers becoming in everyday life using celebrities and explores the dynamic relations between consumers and social media. Individual and group interviews and mobile digital data were collected. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) theory of becoming, four faces of celebrity-proximate assemblages were inductively derived to explore the range of dynamic states that can emerge at any moment. The celebrity-proximate assemblage includes the body without organization that is virtual and contiguous with diverting assemblages and forms fluid lines o..