[...] ...movement of the simulacrum without address (or, in another idiom, without purpose, point)

Nietzsche was the first philosopher who --Avital-->
1. to think with his body
2. to put out the call for a supramoral imperative


...................................

we are implicated inscribed disarticulated and reresignifed by technological prosthesis
there is no outside to technology
there is no off switch to technology
wonderological tracks of technology

...................................

how much nature has to change before our descendants cease to be human?
about when in the course of evolution our ancestors became human?
(unanswerable good questions)

if the human is not the one consuming, who is?

animals consume
(numinous agentic status of) dead consumer

human aspects of consumption: learning, decision making, reason, perception, ethics, agency, desire and choice --arise--> *between humans and intelligent machines*

[*]posthuman: a move that seeks to locate being, or aliveness, or meaning in the not-quite-human-as-we-know-it

(humanist) epistemology: how we investigate and describe the world
(humanist) ontology: how we understand what constitutes life and objecthood

==Campbell==> help consumer research:
1. expand the range of temporal reference (look into the future of how consumption will look like)
**assumption of the future: the future will be a post-consumption existence**
2. expand the range of physical reference (extraplanetary consumption: what the ***consumption of place*** means; embryonic consumption sites: store your child's cord blood stem cells)
3. interrogation of the roots of humanism (social sciences)


today:
robotic revolution
biotechnology revolution


*posthuman: ideological account of the future of the human species in annexation with info-bio-technologies =/= *posthumanism: (speculative philosophy + material reality) critique of the discourse and epistemologies of *humanism:
•belief in progress
•technological mastery over nature,
•separation of human and animal kingdom
•therapeutic approach to human behavior
•secular approach to scientific inquiry
*humanism = epistemology: a way of investigating the world that is consonant with our human intuition--understand--> life as comprising essentially animate or inanimate, self or other, human or nonhuman** [=/= set of diverse beliefs]

horror of surgically implanted biomedical enhancement --> (persistence of the) inviolability of the body as the seat of identity <-- a classic humanist assumption

posthumanism
•speculative philosophy + material reality
•abstract philosophy + empirical science
•ancient + futuristic
•exotic + specialized (telesurgery, amorphous computing) + banal + ubiquitous (automobility, eyeglasses)
•
--> apocalyptic era (intelligent machine takeover)
--> ecological ethics (human not the most important form of life on earth)

***attempt to overcome humanness is an age-old human tendency***

what constitutes life
•women --> Schiebinger
•slaves --> Douzinas
•computer viruses --> Parikka
•cellular automata --> Delanda
•bacteria --> Haraway
•swarms -->Thacker
•


*brand = living system* (--> distinguish themselves from environment, exclude from it what is not, feedback communication with environment, self replicate, evolve, ) =/= cultural product
@Femke


(Campbell arguing that) the human and the posthuman are (ways to describe the forces that are) already present in the human condition:

1.
computation of life
mid 19th century weaving technologies ==> logic of computation ==ontology==> “universe = giant computer” : attempting to uncover what life itself is through a better understanding and appreciation of the power and seeming omnipresence of computational logic
•a discourse [~ a way of talking about the world] (and not only a claim that people make)
--> an example of how dominant technologies are not just instruments but models (through which the world is understood)
‘clockwork universe’ was the model for the last four millennia: clockwork-like essence of cosmos + state + body (=/= romanticism, galvanism, mesmerism, quantum mechanics)
}==>
•consumer as computer/computational (consumer as information processor, consumer as automatic subject =/= psychological agent) <== science of cybernetics, automaticity, feedback
•information (a new powerful substance in mid 20th century), “raw data ==> decisions, models, theories”, a specialized value-free term (=/= fact, learning, wisdom, understanding, enlightenment) --> second half of 20th century: information began to assume a deep and proved privileges place (in politics, cultural imaginary), to informationalize consumer objects:
◦jeans as “intelligent denim” --> “vector graphics and pixelation as there expression of your individuality” (Jack & Jones)
◦cream as “pro-retinal A nanosomes and Par-Elasty” (L'Oreal)
•

2.
laborization of life
growing sophistication of the previously simple and straightforward categories of aliveness and deadness (<== technologies since the 1970s: stem cell engineering, in vitro fertilization, genomics, virtual surgery, biomaterial engineering)
}==>
•make the range of what constitutes ‘alive’ larger and more complex
•stage the interpenetration of the machinic and the organic
(in the future it will be the) marketers as the most influential groups in re-drawing categories of existence and deciding what is animate or inanimate, natural or technical (not scientists or philosophers)
[***classical marketing strategies: positioning, communication]
==> paradoxes in consumption (for example stem cell engineered meat appears as both identical and radically different from its predecessors) --> postethical consumption models (categorized as vegetarian? how marketing re-enchant food without appeal to a myth of pastoral origin?)
--> commentary consumption acts: organic food market, natural healthcare market

3.
miniaturization of life
“fast, cheap, and out of control”
autonomous (=/= central, god-like)
}==>
•technology is no more locatable within a machine (a consciousness that envelopes the world) --> dispersed: (a logic of) technology as environment [diffused] =/= tool [discrete]
internet of things : digitally enabled objects share and respond to information
1980s --> processing (of information, microprocessor)
1990s --> networking (world wide web)
2000s --> sensing and controlling
“my consumption patterns worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption” -Hayles
•*cognition = a product* that emerges between the self and its environment (and does not take place exclusively on the brain) --stages--> cognition as a process

4.
complexification of life
complex (feedback loops, emergence, bifurcation) =/= complicated: accurately analysable system having a large number of component and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago

5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)

dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness

--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future

...................................

[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**

(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•

how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***

(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary times has been the extent to which) *advertising enframes everything within its discourse and logic*
--Campbell--> ****if advertising is everything, what is it not?**** [@apass] <-- this is a crucial question about advertising and it is part of a larger global crucial devate about the commodification of life and previously inalienable aspects thereof

scientific advertising ---> go to Haraway

advertising:
1. fascinates us
2. it works

an average person in the western world is exposed to 3000 advertisements per day

everyday, it transforms me from this world to an imaginary one for a moment

(advertising) offers through a *constant stream of visual cameos* برجسته کارى, *implicit standards* of cleanliness, sociality, family life, health, happiness, and a great many other values ==> affect me


****modern advertising works by appearing not to care if it works**** --> when someone utters the immortal phrase “advertising doesn't affect me" = advertising has achieved its ultimate goal --> *****advertising empowers us to feel distant to it*****

Campbell --> advertising: organizs meaning in the most powerful and generic of senses + a symptom of the organization


1920 - 1930
modern advertising's coming of age (creating compelling signs)
(its signs underwent a qualitative shift in) sophistication
personalized testimonials
*participatory tone of voice* [=/= direct imperative command]
consumer goods embodied values (that had normally been attributed to humans and the natural world) [=/= mere economic entities]
(through the system of advertising: *imagining the product as a benefit sought by the consumer* ~ illumination instead of lighting fixtures, prestige instead of automobiles, sex appeal instead of mere soap,,) *products --offer--> mini-solutions to the dilemmas of modernity[= the pace and scale of rationalization, depersonalization and urbanization brought by modern industrial capitalism ==exerted==> هزینه خسارت a toll on the human psyche]

1950 - 1960
(from) public role of sign identification --to--> private and psychological space of one's mind and interior life
rise of *depth men* (--> Mad Men TV series, people in advertising agencies that reportedly used psychological techniques to uncovers the subconscious needs, desires, insecurities, fears of consumers)
*product = unconscious fulfilments, solutions, comforts and fantasies to them*
[Packard's Betty Crocker cake mix and Esso's Tiger in your Tank campaign --> alleged power of small groups of people to organize meaning on a massive and uncontrolled level]
•freezer = a nostalgic site of security in a threatening environment =/= a device for cooling foodstuffs (*giving of food <--~~> love* + insecurity ==> more food than you can eat)
-more sophisticated motivational research and appeals

****advertising: a form of literacy**** (a new and bewildering code)

sign system of advertising is not static
the generations to come will regard contemporary sign systems as rudimentary and easy to decode
ultra-sophisticated images will appear antiquited and perhaps even humorous (@Goda hating contemporary sign system)
-the way in which advertising today visualizes software, the environment, nanotechnology as seemingly *undeconstructible & transparent* will be staple examples in classroom curricula


(the most obvious and immediate way of conceptualizing) advertising: a system that creates signs with the purpose of communicating meaning =/= Campbell

discipline of marketing --support--> investigation of image consumption


early models of advertising (--> **how we understand the philosophy of what information and communication are**)
•1949 Bell Laboratories --> information: universalized component of any system that communicated =/= “information” as rather poetic and sipritual term (at home in philosophy =/= engineering) --advertising--> hierarchy of effects: cognitive --to--> affective --to--> behavioral [--> informationalize and measure aspects of advertising]

(to understand) *information theory of communication as a reflection of larger scientific and philosophical aims of the time*
***information theory of communication ==>
•providing codified models that predict response
•enframe communication within a logic of relative effectiveness or ineffectiveness
}=/= my lectures


brand memories
brand equity

boundary between advertising and everyday life

[Campbell =/=]
the idea that qualitative advertising research has a managerialist axiology
a priori assumption of “advertising = information communication” (=/= people incorporate advertising so that it functions as a *social glue* within groups)

(vernacular specter of advertising)
spectacular vernacular of social fabric

site of investigation:
1. site of consumption = reception (the field of meaning from a consumer's perspective)
2. site of production = processes involved in making ads (favoured in media studies and ethnographic approaches to advertising)
3. site of the image: analysis of the meaning of the image itself (independent of intention and reception) are the most powerful way to show what images include and exclude (drawing influence primarily from the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology and linguistics)

how meaning moved from *the world of advertising* --to--> *the world of the consumer* : ways in which advertising is integrated into the life-world of people

****advertising: a powerful translator of the cultural world**** & داور a central arbiter of meaning in consumer worlds (--> this is why advertising concerns me)


Barthes + Saussure + Peirce + Jacobsen --> semiotics can be regarded as one of the most comprehensive studies of sign system ~ advertisement: bundle of signs that formed finely constructed conventions ==> ‘image = text’ (its grammar:)
1. micro-level: tiny units, vectors, colors, forms (within the visual plane)
2. mid-level: human-level characteristics of gender, hairstyle, posture, facial expression, buildings, rhetorical devices in the image (such as metaphor and troping)
3. meta-level: narrative structure, mythic in nature, to see embodied in the properties and dynamics of the image the macro properties and fynamics of social world (<-- business of semiotic)

Barthes --> (new medium of) photographic advertisement = a codified structure =/= a transparent reflection of the world


-*Barthes reading of Citroen DS car
impossible newness
it appears at first sight as a superlative object صفت عالی
object which appear at first sight as completely finished present to us at once a perfection and an absence of origin, closure and a brilliance, *a transformation of life into matter*, a silence that belongs to the realm of fairy tales
*smoothness is not a property of material, but a social value*
-Christ's robe was seamless, science fiction, made of unbroken metal, phenomenology of assembling, hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape ==> the idea of benign nature
}--learn--> (to make) lines of connection: visual convention + religious painting, science fiction film, politics of nature (constructed over the past 2000 years of western culture) [<-- to understand this in your own work #feedback @apass]


-*Haraway
neutral images of (high-tech) science --> stock of Renaissance visual analogues ==> legitimate lineage + origin story (for technical revolutions)

(Barthes > Campbell) **what sign constructions do westerners use to tell the story of how technology comes to be present in the world?**


-*Campbell reading of Simens’ ad “builing blocks” (2005)
Simens products float into space, as naturally and as pure white snowflake falling to the earth
absence of labor ==herald==> a universe of self-organizing invisible agency
“technology = invisible force that is lighter than air, rearranging itself into whatever seems to be needed” (=/= fashioned, melted, hammered , soldered and generally forced into the natural order)
==> the agency that organizes is non-pollutant, non-disruptive, non-energetic
(from) cacophonous --to--> harmonious [<-- technology seeks its home]
sky above, supra-structure =/= [*]infrastructure: structure from below
--Simens--> [*]technology: apotheosized (تکريم) by extending its self-organizing capabilities, lending it a divinity which is universal, inevitable, natural and just (Simens’ ad ==> Iron Man image)


supra-structure --> new / Star Trek
                             |
infrastructure --> old / planets they visit


the human body: the most depicted object in advertising
--> research tradition:
humans have more synapses for interprting face
depiction of female body
male body
sex in advertising
racial marked body
(boring questions:)
•whether advertising reflects the world or shape it
•how signs reproduce, create, normalize or subvert the often unequal power structures that exist between male and female bodies
--> **despite potential ambiguity in images we as visual consumers are always presented with a “preferred reading”** @Pierre, Goda --> “image is controlled by discursive limits” (--Sina--> fable of ‘subtlest ideological weapon of advertising’) --Campbell--> paradox of identity construction: the consuming subject chooses among a limited repertoire of “iterated” or preexisting identities provided by marketing and adertising, steering viewers in preferred directions [<-- a fable]
[*]coopt: advertising pretends to acknowledge a competing discourse or ideology, but only pays lip service to it, ignoring its real radical challenge

the idea of advertising: a system that instils (القا، کم کم تزریق کردن) products and services with cultural and social values that are not intrinsic to them [~ magic]
--> highly visible display of ruling-class interests
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetics*
advertising: the pre-eminent way in which the interest of the powerful minority maintain the docility, alienation, or servitude of the majority (--> Goda's understanding of pop culture)

[*]magic: conjure an object from its immediate material rootedness and animate it with a much more potent energy ==> erase human experience of the monotony of consumption with its transient satisfactions and reinvigorate it anew with fresh promise-claims
for example advertisement for mobile phone = *suggestion* (about a certain design aesthetic + a certain tole in professional life + a certain sexual appeal + a certain social network) =/= *announcement* (about a technical device)
(announcement =/= suggestion: the act of advertising)

}--1--> the idea that advertising's signs = carefully constructed highly selective and distortive ways of seeing [=/= simple reflections of the state of the world] ==(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Klein, Curtis, Jhally, @apass, Pierre)==>
•false consciousness
•commodity fetishism
•docility
•passivity
•manipulation of unconscious desire
•environmental degradation

}--2--> the idea that signs actually achieve their aims (through mortise and framing work, cropping, reification, interpellation, cooption, the gaze, face-ism, individuation) --> [Althusser's] interpellation: process by which we are called or hailed into subjecthood through practices imposed onto us from outside interests, subjects are created through material practices (going to church and kneeling down to pray precedes my subjecthood as a spiritual person)
•recruitment advertisement: interpellative genre par excellence ~ through the practice of response we enter into the predefined parameters of relation with the organization {Microsoft's “we want you!” --> 1: act of defining the subject: one who is special, unique, an individual among the masses. 2: collective pronoun: “we” serves to close the subject and the organization within a circuit of common purpose. 3: what is missing: a concrete visualization of working life in the organization, an absence which allows the reader to project his/her own fantasy onto space : ‘infantilize the organization ==> empower the subject’ --represent--> an imaginary relationship =/= real conditions of our existence}

}--✕--> (Campbell) ****images are ontologically cryptic**** : we conceive images to be both agentic & passive, residing in and affecting many spheres simultaneously
•image: visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, figurality, exist within a distinctive socio-legal environment --> **multiple ontologies [Ihde's multistable] move images beyond simple categories of analysis (<-- that is why i am still a visual artist, @Pierre)
***images are extra-organizational entities*** (they are designed by organization but become) *quixotic* and *uncontrollable*
*fable of complex: there is something about the image that is beyond analytic investigation (--Mitchell--> every image theorist seems to find some residue (surplus value) that goes beyond communication, signification, persuassion (there is an extra in images) --> images are complex {
1. they are constantly mutating in meaning and significance
2. they cross aesthetic borders and are not confinable to a particular domain (image = aesthetic + political + social)
3. they act on all domains recursively --impossible--> how the aesthetic life of images affects the political life of images }--Mitchell--> *image as species* (co-evolutionary entities, quasi life-form depend on a host organism) ==>
◦something not fully under human control
◦spread through the host organicism
◦some die some become pandemic


aesthetic --affect--> politic --affect--> aesthetic --affect--> politic


#workshop make an ad for apass


advertising trend
1. information: (from) traditional forms of print & television --to--> intensification and hybridization in oblique ways + through new media (adver-gaming, twitter-piccing, virtual-worlding, Corridor Crew's product placement)
2. persuasion: [as a rhetorical force] (from) information-heavy selling --to--> dramatic persuasion
3. entertainment: communication through entertainment =/= information, persuasion
•(from) staging products in films --to--> embedding of brands so deeply into the fabric of the film's narrative as object-actors that propel the plot
(Corridor Crew's unobtrusive embedding of branded goods and services in storytelling, hybrid both staging and embedding)

brand --> creativity of consumers to create artistic output in the form of art (Star Wars world, Marina Abramovic) --advertising--> rhetorical purpose: *entertain* =/= inform (announcement), persuade, *warn*[old original function of advertising]

*to warn = to inform* [<-- 15th century advertising ==> journalism]


ever growing impetus of advertising to reproduce itself in new forms ==> different account of the evolution of new media : advertising creates new media to propagate itself (*two globally pervasive and path-changing forms of media that would not exist without advertising revenue:)
•search engine
•social networking site

(McLuhan's “medium = message” --> that we should look at the structural nature of media rather than what it contains =/=) *message = medium* (in 20th century)--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and put in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]


[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]

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