[...] a prominent spectacle ---> go to Devil wears prada movie)

blurring of genres in news programs (Vox news), soap operas (), games ()

decontextualization + spectacle

the duality of ‘appearance =/= essence’ is dead in postmodernity --> cereal strategic decision-making in marketing : ****image = positioning****

-consumer always seeks an essence (in adopting a product)
-consumer of postmodern culture play the game of “surface” (they increasingly acquire the skills of recognizing the images and the positions these images offer)

[*]marketing: institution of simulation, imaginary, hype
(forms of) persuasive communication : transformational propositions ==> simulating potential experiences (=/= true or false discourse)


2- [*]fragmentation: the consumer engages in a series of independent, separate, unconnected acts --each--> require a different product
+ fleeting moments of exciting scenes and images

(postmodern) transcendence of the (modernist) necessity to *understand connections*

***artists of all kinds are increasingly assuming the role of marketing institutions***

the consumers (of postmodernity) are encouraged to play the game of *image-switching* (caring mother, efficient manager, elegant partner, gourmet homemaker --each--> require a different style {labeled as consumer liberation}) =/= central character
[---> go to Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenia of late capitalism]

disconnected from authentic self ==> (enormous potential for) creativity in manufactured representations
~~--> market becomes a pastiche

postsuburban transformation
complex interaction of high-technology production + socio-spatial configuration + spectacular shopping environment = ubiquitous shopping malls (--acquired--> postmodern theatrical character, fragmented experience of all cultures)

unrestricted ability to use signifiers [?pushed back by some emerging sensibilities of cultural appropriation, political correctness, gender policing, religious, etc.]
--> marketing competition rests on the creation of images (meanings) removed from any history, context, origin =/= excellence and sophistication in form and technique
[---> go to contemporary artists anti-excellence attitude and the celebration of failure and failing]
--> **each instance of communication becomes a spectacle**

purposefully decontextualized + rendered free floating ==> marketable product
(surrealist artists made use of this --now--> shop window designer)
Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Warhol (ready-made)

***themes of postmodern culture:
irreverence
nonconformity
noncommitment
detachment
difference
fragmentation

(paradoxically) what seems to be difference at the level of symbolic culture stems from an underlying uniformity <-- ***heterogeneity has its origins in homogeneity*** : cultures where market and marketing are less developed exhibit greater variance in both the quality and kinds of life patterns

literacy:
•in modernity --> to read + discover connections among seemingly unrelated objects ==> understanding
•in postmodernity --> watching : recognizing images (exposing oneself to innumerable images and recognize what they stand for ~ attach meaning to them) <-- this is what i did in my telegram bestiary text!

literacy in consumption culture ~/=? established nortons of education


3- [*]reversal of production and'>& consumption
•modernist: value is created in production (meaningful) and destroyed in consumption (profane)
•postmodern: production continues during the moment of consumption, value is created during consumption: a process through which individuals define themselves, status, image (=/= common) --> a social act, symbolic meaning ==> an individual with certain tastes, mentality, values (a type of humanity)

production and'>& consumption prove to be different moments of the same cycle

•during production: producers are human beings, products are commodities
•during consumption: producers are images, products are human beings


4- [*]decentering subject
•modernist: the subject is in the pursuit of its goals, constituted in the separation of body and mind, to graduate from the *state of being* (existential) to the *state of knowing* (cognitive) : distance oneself from a pure existence of being (its context and condition) in order to develop a cognitive understanding
•postmodern: the subject is not in control, role of the human is to allow products perform their functions

marketing orientation
•positioning of the products (in the market)
•positioning of the consumer (in the social market)

(today's) body culture: self-objectification (==> to be consumed)
distancing of one's own gaze from one's own body to view one's self and scrutinize one's own images
--> ***fashion becomes the metaphor for culture***


5- [*]juxtaposition of anything with anything (its name?)
•opposing emotions: love and'>& hate, contempt and'>& annotation
•opposing cognitions: belief and'>& doubt, reverence and'>& ridicule
--> in advertisement a product is simultaneously made fun of and prompted, or making credibility by discrediting advertising
*high art and mundane consumption*
}<== growing acceptance of *doublethink* (~=? double bond) : the metagame of playing along as if the rules are what they seem on the surface while having the knowledge the rules of the game played are quite different from what that appear to be
•in advertisement: the consumer thinks while other people are persuaded, they themselves are not
•in politics: the consumers (voters) listen as if the politicians are espousing genuinely personal views
•in media: stating the role of the polls + reflecting the politicians view with utmost seriousness
•ethnic restaurants --> delicious life styles of which food is just a manifestation --> **simulated adventure in a theatrical society**
•
}--> the postmodern consumer does not judge the experience from a foundational perspective
*it recognizes only difference*, only fragments (=/= inequality, conflict)

anything is at once acceptable and suspect ( مجاز majaz)

*juxtaposition of opposites ==> total irony + ambiguity --> pastiche*

marketing --> *incorporation: pulling the contradictory (country cultural) movements into market economy : emptying expressions (music, fashion) of rebellion (for example punk) of their content ==> commodities them

society historical process is affairs through politics and social relations --✕--> market mediates social conflicts (for example the content and the looks of news program in VOX news)

*marketization (of politics): the possibility of representing them through electronically manipulated images (for example USA's 1991 gulf war was run more as a marketing campaign)
~=> *management of consent*

“authentic” traditional cultures in order to survive have to become marketable --> touristic attractions

•marketing taking the center stage in most western institutions
•market = locus (dominant mediator) of legitimation


marketing: a cultural process representing the post-


transnational (corporation) : postmodern cultural change agent


in traditional world of commerce ‘commercial space and'>& time =/= programming space and'>& time’

modernist vacuum created by obsolete notions of what is good or bad (sacred or profane) --> filled by marketing (enters --into--> culture)


fragmentation ==require==> use of many different styles and forms

(ideas and movements which already have made) sensational impact --> spectacle --> commodities


(marketing helped in entrenching) artist selebrity setting new trends and values <-- a postmodern phenomena with its roots in 1960s “anti-” movements
•not challenging or endorsing or committing to any one style, but rebelling by doing “one's own thing” (Madonna's rebellion 1991 --> she will continue to find large audiences as long as she represents and combines the postmodern aspects of critique of the metanarrative and the marketable commercial sensationalism of the fragmented spectacle)

paradoxical nature of postmodern culture <-- fragmentation and discontinuity of their experience
not owning a TV (conscious rejection) + driving a car (integrated into mainstream)


merging of education and marketing
*televisual generation*
(in north america and western europe) the education is taking place mostly outside of three classroom

(modern) institutionalized education --> (postmodern) marketing system : the individual of the postmodern encounters the institutionalized education as obligation, drudgery, and the means to achieve positions

(from) a process of reading issues and questions for exploration --to--> a process of persuasively communicating the necessities of knowing (and following efficient ways of doing things) --> literacy: being able to manipulate and construct (recognize and grasp multi-layered multi-faceted multi-media images --> to impress upon all senses) }<-- marketing is best situated to educate this
[-can a true critical deconstruction of postmodernism start from literacy? ---> go to telegram bestiary text]


***the consumer is also a signifier***
(constructed in the images that are culturally signified, for example the female)
(even metaphorically) putting somebody on the pedestal (stage) ==> exposure to voyeuristic gaze ==> objectification ~=> commodification }--Baudrillard-->
•a liberation (the subject is the object which has the powers of seduction as the focus of desire --> in control)
•a loss of freedom (the subject is culturally signified and constructed for fonctions determined outside its own power --> a property of the other)

*decoupling of culturally signified categories (of gender, etc.)* --marketing--> (postmodern stance and trend:) male model/actors who represent emotional, nurturing, and sensitive + female model/actors who represent aggressive, powerful, rational (in American advertisement and TV series)
==> “i shop, therefore i am” becomes applicable to men
==> both men and women become ideal consumers --> flourish of market exchange

* * (both male and female) seek authentic self --> (get caught up in) objectification + fragmentation * *

pattern quest: imaging (representing) =/= being, knowing

[image marketing]
*the image does not represent the product, but the product represents the image* -->
•consumers are essentially consumers of symbols
•consumption culture = construction of symbolic environment
}==> tourism as the largest industry in the world (translate your culture images into marketable products ~= consumer fetishes) --> *global culturalism*

[manipulation of symbols]
(from) ethical issue (modern) --to--> stylistic issue (phenomenological, postmodern)

[*]globalization: (create fragmented heterogenized market -->) serve the locals with global universal signs
--> transnational: a highly symbolic communication system that is timeless, contextless, diffused in space, located anonymously, with no known history


marketing is the first institution that adapt to postmodernism

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

consumer (--impulse--> “i want”) =/= citizen (“we need”)

Sunstein
consumer sovereignty (matters of personal taste, “are they getting what they want?”, ‘freedom: satisfaction of private preferences’, ) =/= political sovereignty (*government by discussion* + reason-giving in the public domain <-- many/most citizens should have a range of common experiences =/= filtering of information, customizing information to fit)

**unplanned unanticipated encounters <-- central to democracy**

(pseudo-democratic) participation interactivity : invitation to participate in one's own manipulation by providing increasingly detailed information about personal preferences (Andrejevic, noted by Hubert)

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

*misattunement:
--Stern--> a parental technique for modifying the behaviour (+ affective experience) of the child
--Ahmed--> being out of synch with a world (“of whiteness” that aims to be in harmony)

*attunement: a technique for occupying space
---> go to #integration {for Ahmed: becoming a citizen (= nationalism) ~= the work of attunement =/= stranger: the body we are not with}

clumsiness: being in the way of yourself (to lack the coordination to coordinate yourself with yourself)
--registers--> as the loss of a possibility

(in art, performed clumsiness as strategically antagonistic?)

(Ahmed's) emotional work: closing the gap between ‘how one does feel’ and ‘how one should feel’ <-- a labour (when) is successful, it disappears as labour

how flight attendants (and teachers?) become responsible for collective moods --Hochschild--> ability to preserve the mood of a situation requires working not only on feelings, but drawing on tactic knowledge about how moods are shaped

(bad mood of a shopkeeper in Brussels...)

*histories that linger as mood*

diversity work --involves-->
•the effort to minimize differences so that those who arrive can appear more ‘in tune’ with those who are already here
•
•
--✕--> bodies do not arrive at the same time [---> go to Sina's trans-lateness lecture performance series for Akademie der Künste der Welt 2014: being late is precisely the condition for which translation is needed + critique of universal translator]


...atmospheric qualities of the market

Ahmed's criticism of hopeful performativity [<-- in her text “not in the mood” Ahmed privileges ‘bad mood’ as the emblem of marginality --> emotional misfit]


public mood: prevailing public sentiment as to what constitutes appropriate matters for governmental attention <-- thermostatic understanding of mood
--Ahmed--> fabrication of feeling (& consumer satisfaction)


*to find = to form*

the idea of the national body acquires coherence through a systems of belief ==> separate the nation from race
•“requiring those who embody diversity to give their allegiance to its body” (for example a nation can love diversity whilst demanding that Muslim women unveil)


Marxist model of commodity fetishism --Ahmed--> feelings come to reside (magically) in objects [by cutting those objects off from a wider economy of labour and production. it is then as if fear originates with the arrival of others whose bodies become containers of our fear]


(for Ahmed) happiness: a technique of distraction (a cover-up)
--> for her: potency is in the rage
(Ahmed is too fast to celebrate lesbian ‘affect alien’ =/= heterosexual marriage)

good weather --> (showing) safety and wisdom of prediction

the idea of “your unfeeling masks a disbelief”

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

interesting =/= appealling --> most satisfying videos

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

elite consumption
country house

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

dirt
waste
stink
microbes


Campbell on bacteria and market


tropes that bring bacteria into the symbolic realm:
1. cuteness
2. overpopulation
3. lower classes
4. deviant sex
}--channel--> utterances that (indirectly [political discourse of establishment neoliberalism cannot address such things in direct ways]) express fantasies about:
•purity
•gender
•race
•community
•family
•pollution
•class
•disease
•sexual promiscuity (deviancy)
}<--Campbell-- symptoms of a capitalist socio-economic order --> they are found in:
◦explicit rhetoric of anti-establishment politics (the alt-right, anti-immigrant movements)
◦implicit content of the marketing material of globalized and globalizing multinationals



bacteria: symptoms of a capitalist socio-economic order --> repressed fears and fantasies about purity, gender, race, community, pollution, class, sexual promiscuity <-- leveraged by antibacterial brands

from (psychoanalytical concept of) symptom --to--> sinthome
[*]symptom: repressed extrinsic ideology that must be revealed =/= [*]sinthome: a fantasy that does not dissolve when brought to light <== it structures reality intrinsically

a *psychoanalytically informed critical marketing* --> *consumer is made to trace their symptoms* (<-- the perverse effects of emancipatory revelatory critical analysis)

--Campbell--> sinthome presents a tool for[...]