Dr. Güleser Ekşioğlu studied advertising as an undergraduate and subsequently worked as an advertising copywriter for nearly a decade. Her master's research examined brand discourse through Lacanian psychoanalysis. In July 2025, she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at Marmara University under my supervision: A Deleuzian Analysis of Nomadic Consumption within the Framework of Rhizomatic Brands (Rizomatik Markalar Çerçevesinde Nomadik Tüketime Dair Deleuzeyen Bir Analiz). She is currently a lecturer at İzmir University of Economics.

From Advertising to Deleuze and Guattari

Alparslan Nas: Güleser, you had been thinking about Deleuze since the coursework stage of your doctorate. It is not easy to bring the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari into media and communication studies, and more specifically into the study of brands, advertising, and consumption. How did your academic journey begin, and why were you drawn to these theories?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: My journey began in advertising. I completed my undergraduate degree in the field and then worked as a copywriter for nearly ten years. I built brand stories, designed campaigns, and experienced from within the language that calls people to consume. In time, this practice led me to theory. In my master's research, I brought Lacanian psychoanalysis into dialogue with brand discourse, examining desire, lack, and consumer fantasy. For my doctorate, I turned to Deleuze and studied nomadic consumption practices and rhizomatic brand communication. I would now say that I no longer approach brands through their factory settings, but through desire, flows, and experimentation.

There was also a degree of personal ambition behind this turn. Having worked on Lacan for my master's degree, I did not want to remain in his shadow in my doctoral dissertation. There is a story that Lacan forbade his students from mentioning Deleuze's name. I thought, half-jokingly, "If I am going to move beyond Lacan, who could it be other than Deleuze?" More seriously, I wanted to raise the conceptual stakes. I have been interested in philosophy and psychology since childhood, partly because my mother was an academic. When I entered academia, I became increasingly interested in the philosophical dimensions and sociological effects of an advertising industry in which I had spent years performing intellectual labor.

Even while working in the industry, I kept asking: What am I producing? Who benefits from what I produce, and whom might it harm? How do the stories we construct shape society? Advertising, as anyone familiar with it knows, can be a harsh industry. There is no clear distinction between day and night; you are expected to turn the brand into a fetish object. A peculiar work culture asks you to treat the brand you serve as though it were the most important thing in your life. And this is often precisely the message we pass on to consumers. That troubled me both during and after my time in the industry.

This was one reason I studied Lacan. I focused on the psychoanalytic dimensions of brands such as Apple, Nike, and Starbucks: How is desire produced? How is lack constructed? Why does a consumer carry an object as though it were sacred? But I eventually realized that I was merely analyzing the existing system. I was making a diagnosis without opening up a critical exit or an alternative space of thought. At that point, Deleuze and Guattari felt ideologically closer to me. If the world and advertising were changing, I thought, our concepts also had to change.

When I entered the industry in the 2010s, a campaign usually meant producing a television commercial. By my final years in advertising, however, I could see that a review on Trendyol, a major Turkish e-commerce platform, an entry on the participatory online forum Ekşi Sözlük, or a micro-influencer video could shape a purchasing decision more powerfully than a television spot. Agencies were also trying to enter these spaces. These were new advertising forms: communication was moving away from propagandistic messages directed from brand to consumer and toward a fragmented, dispersed, and rhizomatic structure flowing from consumer to consumer. If advertising was changing ontologically, then the theoretical ontology through which we understood it also needed to change.

Concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari—assemblage, rhizome, the body without organs, the virtual and the actual, desiring-machines, and lines of flight—make it possible to understand the fragmented, distributed, user-generated, participatory, and decentralized condition of advertising today. My dissertation was therefore not merely an academic project; it was also a confrontation with the industry. It allowed me to develop another perspective on advertising and to place the question "Why do we do this work?" on philosophical ground. I encountered Deleuze through a mixture of reckoning, critique, and a desire for liberation. If advertising was taking on a new form, I wanted to work with a new theoretical body.

Alparslan Nas: My own doctoral research examined the concept of the brand community. I considered how social activism and social movements can behave like brand communities when expressing themselves—in other words, how they can engage in practices of branding. There is a contradiction here: even social change cannot entirely escape branding and consumerization. The dynamics of consumption, brand communication, and advertising can penetrate areas that at first appear unrelated to consumption.

At the same time, as you have said, meanings produced by consumers have become more prominent than the one-way communication of large institutions and brands. We might think, for instance, of communities built around Volkswagen Beetles that are no longer in production. Consumers invest the model with different meanings, socialize through it, and in a sense take possession of the brand. You explain this transformation through the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. Which of their ideas affected you most deeply?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: We should begin with how Deleuze and Guattari understand life and desire. They distance themselves from the classical psychoanalytic approach associated with Freud and Lacan, which continually treats the human subject as a deficient being in search of the object of desire. Even when I was working on Lacan, I was uncomfortable with how tightly the human being was confined within castration and the phallus.

Deleuze and Guattari argue instead that human beings are not lacking but productive, and that desire is not a void but the force of production itself. For me, this was a foundational break. It releases the subject from an approach that pins it to the family, Oedipus, and the narrative of the bourgeois nuclear family, opening it instead to flows, experiences, and becomings. I also detect a Marxist tone here. Production operates not only at the economic level but also at the level of desire. This will to produce points toward the laboring nature of the human being, toward our condition as producers. I found it profoundly liberating to think of desire as a productive force.

Of course, I am not saying that "Deleuze and Guattari are Marxists" or that their thought is simply a new reading of Marx. But I do see this tone and intellectual permeability in what they propose. There is also Žižek's criticism: capitalism can appropriate the very lines of flight that appear to escape it. As a more pessimistic thinker, Žižek develops a dystopian critique from this point. Yet what I appreciate in Deleuze and Guattari is a certain naturalism: anything can become something else at any moment; potentials can be actualized; there is no fixed identity, only becoming. This approach embraces difference and the multiplicity of life. It may strike some readers as optimistic, but I think it offers a possible exit from modern pessimism.

Alparslan Nas: The modernist conception of the self and the individual is relatively stable and unified, but it is also instrumental. Although the individual is one of modernity's central narratives, the subject is expected to realize itself by serving structures larger than itself, such as the nation-state or other ideologies. In Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, we encounter a perspective that dissolves the frameworks fixing the individual in place and opens the subject to different relations and becomings.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Yes. Modern structures tend to establish norms and boundaries that fix the subject. The nation-state narrative, for example, produces an ideal model of the person whose characteristics have already been defined. This model can become a framework that erodes or suppresses a person's singular qualities. From the perspective of multiplicity, however, another view emerges—one that understands society and the individual more fully and allows us to approach different people, ideas, and cultures more openly, perhaps even more compassionately.

Assemblage, Rhizome, and Rhizomatic Brand Communication

Alparslan Nas: Two of the central conceptual strands in your dissertation are the rhizome and the nomad. Let us begin with the rhizome. What do assemblage and rhizome tell us about brand communication?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: It may be useful to explain assemblage first. What we call brands and advertising are mechanisms of desire. We often imagine a brand to be something tangible—a product, a logo, or a store. Yet a brand is very precisely an assemblage. For Deleuze and Guattari, an assemblage is a provisional whole formed by numerous elements that connect with one another without being directed from a single center. It has no essential core and is continually reconstituted according to changing conditions.

A brand, too, is less a tangible essence than an abstract perception produced by different elements. Its logo design, the consumers who experience it, the company's historical position, the political atmosphere of the countries in which it operates, and the popular culture of the period all change over time. The Adidas of the 1990s is therefore not the Adidas of today. Consider Pepsi: at one point it advertised with international pop stars such as Britney Spears, Pink, and Enrique Iglesias; in a different Turkish context, it featured Seda Sayan, a well-known Turkish arabesque singer and television personality. The images, meanings, and strategies are very different. This shows that the brand is not an essence but a contextual constellation with multiple faces.

The assemblage expands further once the consumer enters the picture. The company is no longer the sole producer of a brand's meaning; the meanings consumers attach to it carry the brand from one place to another. Especially since the rise of social media, the brand has become a symbolic element that we insert into our everyday stories. When one person displays Bomonti, a Turkish beer brand, in an Instagram story while another shows Stella Artois, these are not random choices; they communicate identity. The same applies to unboxing videos, posts declaring "I love my new bag," the effort to keep a car's logo visible in a photograph taken from the driver's seat, or the placement of a Starbucks cup within the frame. Influencers are not alone in doing this. We all do it.

These are not commercials to which we knowingly expose ourselves through traditional advertising media. Everyone has become part of advertising discourse. This decentralizes advertising. We are no longer dealing with a structure controlled by a single director, brand manager, or strategist, but with a rhizome.

The word rhizome refers to plants such as potatoes or ginger that do not grow linearly from a single root but can sprout from multiple points. Deleuze and Guattari use the term for decentralized, horizontal connections capable of branching in every direction. A rhizome is not an arboreal system developing in a straight line from root to tip. It erupts, proliferates, sprouts again where it is cut, and opens lines of flight.

We can distinguish assemblage from rhizome in the following way: assemblage emphasizes the provisional unity of elements that come together, while rhizome emphasizes that unity's capacity for multidirectional proliferation and decentralized expansion. To speak of the rhizome is to speak of a continuous state of becoming.

Advertising communication today operates in precisely this way. The consumer is drawn toward content, content toward the brand, and the brand toward another user. Brands also enter this drift by collaborating with other brands; meanings are continually transferred. This is also a poststructuralist reality: as Derrida suggests, meanings cannot be fixed and are continually deferred. In my research, I call the processes through which everyone speaks about and on behalf of a brand "rhizomatic brand communication." This communicative nomadism has a counterpart in consumption: through rhizomatic brand communication, meanings become nomadic, and we as consumers become nomadic as well. I call this "nomadic consumption."

Alparslan Nas: Another important concept connected to assemblage and rhizome is affect. I understand it as a preconscious force that intensifies in the body before it becomes a distinct emotion—an intensity that moves us and shapes our capacities. How would you define it?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: I understand it in much the same way. It is not identical to libido or drive in psychoanalysis, but it similarly attempts to describe a motivating force. We are speaking of an intensity of feeling that precedes a named emotion. As advertisers, one of the moments we try to capture in consumers is precisely this moment of affect. It is not yet an identifiable emotion, but it has the capacity to move the body and the subject in a particular direction.

Alparslan Nas: In Freudian psychoanalysis, concepts such as libido and drive can be associated with biological reductionism and determinism; they can be universalized as though they were immutable realities. Deleuze and Guattari's account of affect, by contrast, does not presuppose a fixed human nature. It attends instead to the capacities bodies gain or lose through encounters.

From Lack to Production: Desire and Advertising

Alparslan Nas: Desire is one of the most important points of comparison with psychoanalysis. In Lacan, desire is constructed through lack. In the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, separation from the mother produces the subject's constitutive lack. Something must first be absent for it to become an object of desire.

There is an extensive literature explaining consumer society and advertising within this framework. Advertising is said to create a lack and present the product as the object that will remedy it. In Decoding Advertisements, Judith Williamson brings Lacanian psychoanalysis together with Althusser's account of ideological apparatuses to analyze advertising in these terms. You also used this perspective in your master's research. In your doctoral dissertation, however, you move beyond the lack-desire formula. How does desire operate for Deleuze and Guattari, and how does their approach change our understanding of advertising and brands?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: I am not arguing that it is wrong to explain consumer society through Lacan or Freud; it is a matter of perspective. If we define the human being as incomplete, perpetually lacking, and longing for reunion with the mother, then we can read every act of consumption as an attempt to overcome lack or complete the self.

Deleuze and Guattari instead describe desire as a productive flow circulating freely within the system. Rather than an emotion arising from an internal absence and seeking to fill that void, desire is a force operating within social relations of production. The subject participates in this process because it, too, bears a will to produce.

Not every act of consumption necessarily arises from lack or from an effort to reach the stage of self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Sometimes we consume to experience different affects, try out a new self, or constitute ourselves as another kind of subject. We may use a brand that resonates with us and say, "This brand reflects me; I find myself in it." Here, the brand does not fill a hole within us; we move alongside it within the symbolic order. Where we begin in defining the human being changes how we interpret consumption. I think both approaches offer different possibilities of reading.

Alparslan Nas: Classical target-audience analysis in advertising depends on identifying the consumer's need or "pain point." Maslow's hierarchy of needs is frequently used according to the same logic: physiological needs and safety come first, followed by belonging and esteem, with self-actualization at the top. Yet today, from the most affordable product to the luxury brand, everyone seems to speak directly in the language of self-actualization. No one says anymore, "This is simply a piece of clothing; it will keep you warm."

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Because we have moved beyond that stage. If we look at the history of brand communication, functional benefits came first: "Eat this and you will be full; wear this and you will be warm." Emotional narratives followed: "Buy this and you will feel a certain way." As feminist criticism in particular has shown, narratives such as "Use this product and you will become the most beautiful woman or the best mother" addressed another level of need.

I think we have now largely exhausted emotions as well and entered the stage of experience. Happiness became the central discourse of countless brands, from Ülker, one of Turkey's largest food manufacturers, to Coca-Cola. Happiness itself became an object of consumption, as though we were obliged to be happy all the time. Yet experiencing other emotions is also part of being human. Capital selected and commodified certain feelings and aspirations: being approved of, being liked, looking beautiful, and being happy.

Today, narratives about "living in the moment," "being present," and having experiences have come to the fore. Brands have embraced them. At the heart of nomadic consumption lies experiential marketing—or the marketing of experiences.

Alparslan Nas: Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "desiring-machines" becomes especially meaningful here. The machine metaphor reveals the system of these flows: the connections that produce desire, the individual, and social relations. Even people in the lowest socioeconomic groups can feel, within brand flows, as though they occupy the highest level of the hierarchy of needs. This also influences how people perceive their economic position. Someone who is poor according to measures of absolute poverty may not identify as poor; gaining access to a brand—for instance, using an iPhone, even an older model—can produce a sense of status and enable a different subject position.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Much as white-collar employees may not perceive themselves as workers. They may be aware of the terminology, but their way of life, concerns, and collective practices do not always reflect a consciousness of belonging to the working class. Consumption can make that position easier to forget.

Alparslan Nas: This is where Marx's concepts of class consciousness, collective action, and mobilization become necessary. At precisely this point, consumer society and advertising play a contradictory role. On the one hand, they open a space in which people can construct their existence through desire and multiply their possible selves; on the other, they organize this possibility within the boundaries of capitalism.

To use another of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts, consumption deterritorializes us: it gives us the impression that we can exceed our boundaries and opens us to another territory and another mode of existence. Yet in the same movement, it reterritorializes us, enclosing us once again within consumer society.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Yes. Žižek's critique enters at this point: he argues that capitalism can reconnect the lines of flight opened by Deleuze and Guattari to itself. Deleuze and Guattari also acknowledge that every deterritorialization carries the possibility of reterritorialization. When rhizomes encounter one another, one displaces the other, but at the same time transforms it into a different configuration.

Alparslan Nas: One point that may distinguish Deleuze and Guattari from classical Marxist analyses is that they do not see capitalism as an entirely one-directional and exclusively malign structure. Possibilities of deterritorialization, affects, and flows of desire arise within capitalism, but they do so alongside the redrawing of our boundaries. Advertising and brand communication therefore emerge as unstable fields marked by contradictions and fluctuations.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Absolutely. The capitalist system, or the system of free enterprise, can turn almost every point of departure into a channel that reconnects to itself. This is something we continually experience not only at the theoretical level but also in everyday life.

The Migration of Ownership and Nomadic Consumption

Alparslan Nas: In your dissertation, you examine this contradiction through access-based consumption practices that we might describe as "use and leave behind." Could you explain the concept of nomadic consumption together with the findings from your fieldwork?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: We can begin the discussion of consumption with a small reality check. In 2016, Danish politician Ida Auken published a future scenario on the World Economic Forum's website that later came to be widely summarized as "You will own nothing and be happy." Put simply, it suggested that a shift from individual ownership of goods to service-based use might create a more sustainable world. At first glance, this seems entirely reasonable, perhaps even utopian and socialist. Yet the same discourse also points toward a radical transformation of the modern understanding of ownership.

Rhizomatic communication appears democratizing because the brand is no longer the only voice; everyone speaks. Objects of consumption seem similarly democratized: a product will exist, but no one will own it permanently; we will merely have access to it. Yet there is also a catch.

This model did not remain at the level of discourse; it has already entered everyday life. In Turkey, shared-mobility platforms such as the scooter services Martı and BinBin and car-rental or car-sharing services such as TikTak, YoYo, and GetirAraç are visible examples of access-based consumption. They operate according to a pay-as-you-use model. Airbnb is slightly different because it also has a peer-to-peer structure: the property often belongs not to the company but to another user. TikTak and Martı, by contrast, operate large corporate vehicle fleets. What is offered to the consumer is not a product but the right to access it.

One of the clearest manifestations of this logic can be found in digital platforms. With services such as Spotify, Netflix, and Game Pass, temporary access has replaced the album, cassette, CD, DVD, or game we once physically possessed. We can use the content only for as long as we continue to pay. More striking examples appear in the technology and automotive sectors. A subscription or micropayment may be required to activate a feature already physically present in a car's hardware. Even when the object is in your possession, control of its software remains with the manufacturer. If a phone can be slowed down or its functions altered through an update, to whom does the product truly belong?

In the practice I call "nomadic consumption," nomadology does not refer only to geographical movement. For Deleuze and Guattari, a concept, a mode of existence, or an object can also migrate. In my study, what was migrating was the ontological ground of ownership.

The access economy looks highly democratic, as though everyone has the opportunity to use everything. Yet this is also where the catch lies: ultimately, companies make money, while the consumer purchases an experience through access but retains no asset of their own. The consumer simply becomes part of the flow. Why, then, do consumers willingly accept this arrangement? How are they captured by such a desire? Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of desiring-machines, affect, and especially the body without organs enter the analysis at this point.

The Body without Organs and Resistance to Consumption

Alparslan Nas: The body without organs is one of Deleuze and Guattari's most difficult concepts. I understand it as a field of intensities and potentials—the sum of what a body might become. It departs from a terrain predetermined by the functions of organs, social rules, ideologies, and hierarchies, and gives priority to possibilities. How do you explain the concept?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: In fact, all of us experience something like the body without organs at certain moments in our lives. Deleuze and Guattari construct a highly visual account. The same is true of their tendency to see everything as a machine: we can picture gears that connect and work together while retaining spaces between them. The body here is not merely the organic human body; it is better understood as a plane or surface.

The term "body without organs" was not invented by Deleuze and Guattari; they borrow it from Antonin Artaud. But they take it in an intriguing direction. We can understand it as a plane on which the subject can develop resistance, open another interval of existence, and recover potential. It may sound unsettling, but it describes the body's liberation from the functional organs imposed on it by society.

We can also approach the concept through Deleuze's Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, which discusses masochism in a more sexual and erotic register. Classical psychoanalysis tends to treat the human being as programmed to avoid pain; Deleuze asks why the masochistic subject pursues pain and derives pleasure from it. The example shows that the subject can escape the fixed functions attributed to it and a predetermined regime of pleasure.

Returning to our field, we can make the metaphor of the organ more concrete. Everyone attaches historical, cultural, and economic organs to the body: the organs that say "You will shop," "You must own," "You will define yourself through consumption," "You will realize yourself," and "The shopping mall is your natural habitat." The body without organs is the courage to reject these organs; it is the space in which we say "Wait a moment" to the desires imposed by society.

This resistance to consumption was clearly visible in my field interviews. Most participants said that they felt overwhelmed by consumption: "Why should I own so many things?"; "I do not enjoy shopping"; "I panic when I enter a shopping mall"; "I feel as though the stores are swallowing me." Some avoided shopping, some rejected attachment to possessions, and others tended to render ownership itself meaningless.

The system in which we live tells us: "Buy, consume, own." These participants responded: "I do not want to own so many things; I want to experience life." They were resisting the system's prescribed mode of desire and searching for another path, another line of flight. Brands offering access-based services market precisely this line of flight: "You do not have to own; use it and leave it. Do not let the commodity attach itself to you or become a burden."

One TikTak advertisement, for example, was built around the question: "Why pay so much for a car that will spend most of its time sitting outside your door?" A car brings taxes, maintenance, and other expenses, yet it may be used for only a few hours each day. On one level, this is a thoroughly Deleuzian message: "Remove the organ that taught you that you must own a car; put down the burden and join another flow." The brand offers the consumer a different practice based on temporary use.

In our research, however, the body without organs meant more than a desire to own less. It involved redesigning the politics of desire, escaping the norm of consumption, and experimenting with another field of existence. This was the most powerful point of appeal in the access economy. In the interviews, I repeatedly heard statements such as: "I enjoy experiences; I do not have an ambition to make things mine." It was particularly striking to encounter these responses in relation to homes and cars, categories in which the sense of ownership has traditionally been strongest.

Alparslan Nas: Graduating, finding a job, working, buying a car, and, if possible, a home were the central aspirations of the conventional life narrative. Today, we are moving toward a different regime of desire.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Yes. One of the attractions for consumers in Turkey is the opportunity to experience a different "self" through a different product each time. One of my interviewees described an Airbnb she had rented in Italy by saying, "For that week, I lived like an Italian." She had actualized the virtual possibility of becoming-Italian within herself; she had brought an internal potential into actuality. This is a vivid everyday expression of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the virtual and the actual. In temporary-use consumption practices, a potential within us seeps into reality.

Becoming and Rented Identities

Alparslan Nas: This brings us to the concept of becoming. Becoming does not describe a fixed identity but an escape from identity—the dissolution of majoritarian and unified identities imposed on us. Concepts such as becoming-woman or becoming-animal open possibilities for new relations with marginalized modes of existence. Can we say that consumption also offers different becomings in this sense?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Yes. Becoming emerges when affect begins to operate. In our context, every purchase, every instance of access, and every experience is an experiment in becoming: becoming-Italian, becoming-driver, becoming-local, becoming-free. This is the attraction of the access economy. You do not acquire something; you become something. You enter a becoming.

Modern consumption has developed into an ontology in which identities can also be rented, used temporarily, and left behind. This corresponds to the postmodern concept of the fragmented subject: a person can experience another self at any moment and often does so through consumption. The acceleration of consumption and the compression of fashion cycles into weekly or even daily periods intensify this process. When I began the research, I had limited the topic to transportation. During the project, however, Turkish platforms such as Kiralabunu.com began extending the temporary-use model to everyday consumer goods. We did not include them in the study, but the same experience-centered conception of consumption can be observed there.

Becoming is never completed; it is a continuous movement toward another possibility. The person who says, "I lived like an Italian" in an Airbnb today may wonder tomorrow what it would be like to live as a Spaniard or a Japanese person. Someone who uses a Martı scooter today may move toward becoming-motorcyclist tomorrow. Someone who chooses content on Netflix today may experience a different intensity of identity on MUBI tomorrow. Every experience produces a new potential, and every potential generates a new desire.

Alparslan Nas: Even a change in the route you follow or the place where you park a rented scooter can direct you toward different becomings through the spontaneity of everyday life. Moreover, you do not rent the same scooter every day; even if the brand remains the same, you connect with a different device.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: This is the heart of nomadic consumption. People and objects connect like gears, separate, and reconnect. Each time, as organ-machines, we connect with different machines. There are also imaginary dimensions for the consumer: going to work in a Mini Cooper one day and a Mercedes the next is not merely transportation; it communicates different messages about our identity to those around us.

Research Assemblage and Experimental Academic Writing

Alparslan Nas: Another aspect of your dissertation that is particularly striking for younger researchers is its language and method. You develop a poetic and experimental mode of narration outside mainstream academic writing. How did this way of writing emerge?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: The method we used led us toward this language. The research-assemblage approach opened a path toward a poetic style and lyrical narration. When the subject is Deleuze, it is already difficult to remain within the boundaries of conventional methodology. A positivist method based on predefined, fixed variables would have reproduced the very forms of determinism that Deleuze and Guattari opposed.

One of their fundamental gestures is to blur the boundary between theory and practice and dismantle the hierarchy separating subject and object. In fields such as sociology and communication, researchers cannot entirely detach themselves from the worlds they study. I study consumption, but I am also a consumer. I inhabit the same political and economic atmosphere and encounter the same advertisements. To position myself as an all-seeing observer seemed both impossible and insincere.

We therefore adopted a research-assemblage approach in the dissertation. We understood assemblage as the organization of multiplicities that come together provisionally. Subject, object, researcher, field, data, and theory produced temporary connections within a single whole. During the fieldwork, I moved through the field not only as an outside researcher but also as a consumer. I personally experienced temporary-use practices and gathered data from my own body. In the in-depth interviews, I spoke with participants not as an external expert but as another consumer—a gear within the same machine.

In the analysis, we used descriptive methods but did not draw sharp boundaries between "me" and "them." As I wrote, I wanted us to become a temporary chorus: voices exposed to the same advertisements, experiencing the same crises of consumption, and developing similar forms of resistance. If they were nomads, I was a nomad; if they were consumption-machines, so was I. This was the essence of the assemblage: subjects, concepts, experiences, and bodies connecting with one another for a time.

Alparslan Nas: Readers of the dissertation will sometimes encounter the interview participants almost as characters. Their voices are placed alongside one another without being forced into a unified explanation; at times, they seem to speak to one another on a theatrical stage. This method allowed you to establish Deleuzian connections with the phenomenon you were studying and to make writing itself part of the methodology. Bringing the analysis of findings and the poetics of writing into the same perspective also generated a new writing energy—a new becoming—for you.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Absolutely. Deleuze and Guattari's texts are literary as well as academic. They have shifts in intensity, rhythms, and lyricism; at times they proceed like sermons, monologues, or dialogues. The reader moves through the mental topology of the authors. I did not avoid this, nor did I want to.

One source of my desire to write was the possibility of entering into an assemblage with these thinkers. I moved not only with Deleuze and Guattari but also with Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, whose work nourished their thought. I imagined all of us as machines with interlocking gears. Together, we set the main machine—A Deleuzian Analysis of Nomadic Consumption within the Framework of Rhizomatic Brands—in motion, and I think it produced a beautiful sound. My hope is that this machine will connect with other machines and proliferate through other becomings. What more could a Deleuzian study ask for?

Alparslan Nas: This approach further problematized consumption, brands, and advertising. I find it important that a doctoral dissertation should produce new questions rather than merely claim to provide explanations. Deleuzian thought, and poststructuralist theory more broadly, remains wary of totalizing accounts. In Donna Haraway's terms, we can construct more limited, local, and situated knowledges. Your dissertation does this while also offering readers a powerful perspective through the concepts of nomadic consumption and rhizomatic brand communication.

What Comes Next

Alparslan Nas: In Turkey's academic advancement system, researchers are often expected to leave their doctoral dissertations behind after graduation and move quickly to a new topic. What are you planning for your future research?

Güleser Ekşioğlu: I do not think I can easily leave Deleuze and Guattari behind; they genuinely changed my way of looking at life. But I would like to connect this thought more closely with the courses I teach and experiment with it in different fields. Recently, I have become interested in animal studies. Living with an animal companion and my concern for animal rights have also shaped this interest. I would like to study representations of animals in advertising and communication.

Deleuze and Guattari have also tired me somewhat. Although I love their work, I want to gain a little distance, pose other philosophical questions to advertising, and examine experiential marketing from different perspectives. Even so, I do not think I will abandon the critical and philosophical dimensions of communication. Our task is less to offer universalizing and normative explanations that declare "This is what something is" than to provoke further questions.

A creative professional in advertising or a copywriter reading the dissertation might also ask: "How can we encourage consumers to talk about our brand?" Rather than thinking only in terms of radio or television commercials, they might consider how to generate more commentary and participation on e-commerce platforms. Critique can also be useful to industry professionals who are willing to learn from it.

Alparslan Nas: Advertising is a field that continually redirects itself. Over the past fifteen or twenty years, influencer marketing, real-time advertising, native advertising, and many other forms have emerged. Everything is in flux. Critical research can also help the industry understand the atmosphere in which it operates. Creative teams that fail to grasp these transformations move forward half-blind, without fully understanding the conditions of their own work.

Güleser, thank you very much for joining me. I hope this conversation opens a different window for researchers, graduate students, and advertising professionals. I consider your dissertation a pioneering study in Turkey for bringing brand communication into dialogue with the thought of Deleuze and Guattari on this scale.

Güleser Ekşioğlu: Thank you as well. This dissertation showed that supervision can become more than a formal relationship; it can develop into a genuine intellectual partnership. I hope the work continues to proliferate by connecting with other researchers and other studies.

Dissertation record and abstract: Güleser Ekşioğlu, Rizomatik Markalar Çerçevesinde Nomadik Tüketime Dair Deleuzeyen Bir Analiz [A Deleuzian Analysis of Nomadic Consumption within the Framework of Rhizomatic Brands], Marmara University, 2025. https://openaccess.marmara.edu.tr/entities/publication/023d15e4-b387-4820-bf7e-0e17bef38829