[...] 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 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 and taxa*
thinkers in social theory --> the entities under investigation are:
•so massive --> Gaya regulatory system of planetary scope
•so dispersed --> climate change
•so ancient --Haraway--> bacterial protist Mixotricha paradoxa (“the paradoxical being with mixed-up hairs”)
•so minute جزئی --> new materials engineered through nanotechnology
•so boundless --Sagan--> metametazoa: human as a multiple afloat in the omnisexuality or bacterial exchange
•so relational --thacker--> swarm, pack, flock, epidemic [go to --> ERG website's epidemic nodes --> *the image of the relational*]
•so
}<==motivation==
1. considering the strangeness of life forms act as a template ==to==> think differently about life by mobilizing new ***prepositions of connection*** (with, alongside, between, sym-, etc.) ==provoke==> different theoretical insights into how society might work
2. ethical political drive to promote radical inclusivity and to challenge mindsets that fixate on identity and difference (<-- Harawayian) [--> Isabel, Sara]
3. work of decentering the human as the premier valance of the universe (may in turn) ==cultivate==> an ethics that is ecological, in the sense of global and interspecies (<-- Mortonian)  [--> Sina]
4. conceiving of the ‘other’ as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mind-body, etc. (maybe) ==lead==> new conceptions of camaraderie, community, society, friendship [--> artistic research, apass, Viveiros de Castro]


bacteria [also: mushroom, swamp] --> poster-creatures of the flat ontology movement --> challenging classification
replacing Tree of Life with DNA-based model of life (homo sapiens: a micro-ingredient of an astonishing bacterial soup of prokaryotes, archaea, eukaryotes)

*bacteria: the ground zero life forms* -->! ***nearest we can get imagining the Lacanian Real***

we are more bacteria than human

(global) bacterial biome: para-collective (=/= “merely” biological)
*our ways of reacting to bacteria are as political as they are scientific*

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

purity & pollution + their deep-seated link with social order and its transgression --Douglas--> {from the idea of poisonous vapours (miasma [unrelated to cleanliness]) --to-->} discovery of pathogenic organisms بيمارى زا ==> modern concept of bacteria

cleansing rituals before the bacteriological age functioned to ward off spirits and restore social order and control (@Elke, @Isabel, the artist as medium)

discovery of germs ==> radical re-conceptualization of dirt (--> it is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of pathogenicity)

if we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt --Douglas--> we are left with the very old definition of [*]dirt: matter out of place

**when we see dirt --> we see a system**
--Campbell--> when we see bacterial images we are seeing something else

***contamination = a violation of some mythical, symbolic, or political system =/= just a physical problem***

bacteria --> symptom of a disturbed system


symptomatic analysis (=/= feedback)
pioneered by Marxist critics, Althusser

symptomatic analysis of X = to open the possibility of there being unspoken, unacknowledged or disavowed content in X

symptomatic analysis --of--> (content of) antibacterial advertisement --laden--> with libidinal intensity or *visual pleasure* (= an image that is visually intense)

**consumption can be read like dreams** (a text that says more than it consciously expresses) --reveal--> repressed material (disavowed fantasies about: purity, gender, race, family, class, disease, displacement, sublimation, etc.)
◦what fantasy is upheld by presenting repressed material as bacteria (or artwork)?
--> reading against the grain of the text (Jamesonian)
--> advertising images can be read like symptoms of repressed libidinal desire

-i did symptomatic reading of Olearius (but not of ajayeb nameh?)

1- accelerating pace of industrial production
2- population growth
}==> first full flourishing of *mass consumption*

*[*]marketing: a sphere of cultural production where image conventions co-evolve with non-marketing imnages as an intertextual constantly reciprocal environment*



1. cuteness
little monsters
infant-like
with freakishly funny features
playground of bacterial frolic

cuteness
a minor aesthetic category (in comparison to its more spectacular counterparts: sublime, beautiful)
(it is minor because it is ambiguous)
•positive affects:
◦desire to protect
◦desire to touch
•negative affects:
◦helplessness
◦pitifulness
◦excessive availability
•secondary relations:
◦resentment at being emotionally manipulated
◦contempt for the weakness of cute --accompany--> desire to:
◾touch
◾clasp
◾dominate
◾destroy
◾
}--> *cute: a site of visual intensity that is both pleasurable & disgusting*

****three objects that are most often rendered cute in consumer aesthetics:
1- women
2- technology
3- children
}<-- (in psychoanalytic terms) inherently dangerous ==> in need of control****

Campbell > why is it useful to see bacteria as cute?
***cuteness as a deep link to violence***
[*]cuteness: aestheticization of powerlessness --> a necessary step in permitting its extinction [to make everybody like unto little children is not such a bad way of disposing of them]

•representing the Other (the enemy) as despicable --> powerful effect
•representing the Other as domesticated + infantalized:
◦demonstrates the sublime Otherness of bacteria
◦we are relieved of guilt <== the bacteria is rendered beneath the threshold of ethical consideration



2. overpopulation
cramming of many life forms into tiny spaces ~= (literally) an uncanny microcosm of the imagined and feared socio-economic order

***new technologies to visualize the world ==produce==> new imaginateis of life itself*** [<-- my research on bestiaries]

microscope (19th century) --> microbial visuality --Latour--> new modes of interacting with and ingesting/consuming the world

bacteriology as a discipline emerged at the same time as the (so-called) transformation “from industrial capitalism --to--> market society”
•overpopulation
•bacterial proliferation
--> a trope in visualizing contemporary bacteria

bacteria live in obscene proximity to each other --> *bacterial intimacy =/= individualizing force of modernity*

the fantasy of there is some sort of “away” which can absorb what we overproduce

removal of excrement (in all its quises) --> demonstrating the urbanites class distinction --> (an apparent) desire to reorganize urban space according to a logic of repugnance مغايرت (--> this is why i am so uncomfortable with “clean” streets)
•the idea that a veritable subterranean system delivering *shit-free cleanliness* ==> citizen's physical, moral, sipritual cleanliness --with--> materila markers of the civilized society: cubicles, toilets, drains, sewers

(Lacan > Morton > Campbell >) the problem of human society : what to do with one's shit

anti-bacterial advertising --> fantasy of awayness

keeping nature at a distance ==Morton==> (act out an imagined preservation -->) dumps on the rest of the world
[sadistic admiration] putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar (for the environment) ~= what patriarchy does for the figure of the woman

bacteria adhere to each other and to their environment --> *they make any environment cohere as itself* : without bacteria there is no environment



3. lower classes
overweigth
bad skin
bad teech
criminally deviant

griminess سياهى
slick sheen ليز
dinginess چرکى
slouch اويخته
decay

in advertisement:
bacterium suicide bomber
ear-picking homeless man: the incarnation of bacterial cross-infection

**community <--> infection**
(health of the community is theatened by undesirable members)

*bacteria ==> community can come into full self-expression*
bacteria = disruption of social order ~-=> bacteria stabilizes the social order

***bacterial threat = biological model for a political necessity***

(familiar terrain of) hand: a vast and foreign bacterial colony

in a world of microbial resistance [in which common infections and minor injuries can kill <-- real possibility for 21st century and not a apocalyptic fantasy] --> *antibacterials carve out spaces of near-perfect security*

bacteria:
•overwhelm us
•outnumber us
•outclassify us
•exceed us
•pre-date us
}--> concealed by antibacterial discourse

good bacteria exists in the gut: their market-sanctioned place
*good bacteria: fantasy of the efficient worker*



4. deviant sex
bacterial sex

bacteria **propagate in the most ancient way : they have sex by contagion** = endosymbiosis, symbiogenesis --> ‘prolonged symbiotic associations ==> appearance of new organism’ (massive contagion that moves across phyla and lineages across biotic and abiotic spaces ~/= Darwinian natural selection)

1940s --> monomorphism: (in bacteria sex, proposing that) male and female are separate but visually indistinguishable

categories of inside/outside, host/guest, parent/child, original/copy, female/male --> organize civil life =/= bacteria
==> in advertising bacteria propagation appears “deviant” (in non-productive forms) --> antibacterials confer moral righteousness

Karin's germ management ♥

(Karin) “good germ management =/= good parenting”
(Dettol:) “good germ management = good parenting” [when a mother at home protects children from contact with the floor]

(in iran:) contact is contagion

Campbell assuming women tolerate germs more than men --> not in iran

**staging the unbacterial woman**

*body is a closed private property =/= contagion emanates from bodies that are not properly closed or private*

“community = the single biggest source of threat” (our sovereign cleanliness) --> *bacteria as other people* مجاز مرسل metonymically (not just metaphorically)
•degenerate human
•homeless man
•transvestite
•street sweeper
•

(cleanliness is always sovereign)


if ”(deep) ideology =/= (critical) thought” --then--> fantasy =/= ?

‘deviant’ mobilizes deep-seated fears and fantasies ==> images that are visually intense + build exceedingly successful brands

critical analysis can move from thinking about symptoms as indirect expressions of deep ideology (paranoia) --to--> *indirect expressinos of structurating fantasies*

(brands know that) ***fantasy =/= ideology***
•Lacan --> even when patients could articulate their symptoms it didn't seem to diss[...]