[...]ralism*

[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

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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”

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interesting =/= appealling --> most satisfying videos

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elite consumption
country house

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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 analysing *fantasies that focus on the form of their expression, rather than their content*
•in the case of (fantasy takes the form of) bacteria --reveal--> (a confluence between) *the politics of community & the physiology of (auto)immunity* [--> clean and dirty]


dilemma of modern subject : how to live with the unsettling truths given to us by new sciences
•my mother about fake honey
•bacteriology ==> everything (including our very selves) is terrifyingly coated in bacteria

a moment of marketing in Joyce's Ulysses character Bloom -->
•overwhelmed by the teeming bacteria <--> ingesting a different set of cultured bacteria: wine, cheese, bread
•the city and its germs envelop and simultaneously individuate him --> ****his subjectivity can only be expressed in terms of the dialectic of alienation and belonging that is at the foundation of our social world****


***living in modernity = being in constant contact with the mass of beings***
<== uncontrollable overwhelming disintegrative forces of otherness (the problem of living in a community in modern metropolis)
<-- *multiplicity of strange strangers through whom the healthy subject finds his or her sense of self*

(@Femke, analysing political arrangments of X) *market society* =/= looking at the way that we come (and invited to come) into contact with X (in Campbell's case: bacteria)


[*]sinthome: why X (symptoms) appear to us as such =/= what X mean
sinthome --> (mode of analysis) aiming to identify ***what fantasies are permitted to be sustained when the symptom take the form of X*** (in this case bacteria) =/= seeking to find what ideology lies hidden beneath the symptom [=/=! problem of artists]

Campbell mode of analysis (with sinthome) =/= a revelatory mode of critique (where our illusions arre laid bare) [<-- artists’ symptom]

advertisements offer striking evidence of *autoimmune tendecies* in contemporary market society : the body politic misrecognizes its own boundaries and attacks parts of itself
@Femke

(Joyce's Bloom) first thing that we see or feel is not in fact ourselves, but bacteria [---> go to body image] --> (his solution:) avoiding one kind of bacteria by embracing another (<-- psychoanalytically effective ***non-solution***)


(in social sciences [Ereshefsky]) *species pluralism : how various biopolitical forces use segmentation strategies in the organic world to produce competing species’ hierarchies a[...]