[...]
}--> *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 dissipate ==> symptom was a constitutive core of their own subjectivity
•Zizek --> ideology: fantasy structuring out social reality itself =/= an illusion masking the real state of things
•Marx, Freud, Zizek --> symptom =/= a thing behind which secret content is hidden
for Marx *the secret is in hte form of commodity itself** (<--but-- commodity as a central symptom of capitalism) --Sina--> in the form of the hair-styles in The Magicians TV series


from symptom (veil) --to--> sinthome (screen)

*sinthome* is not directly analysable --Campbell--> images of bacteria are symptoms of the Real, not the symbiotic order, because the Real unsymbolizable
sinthomes organize the subject (without them the subject would be obliterated, Zizek)

(psychoanalytic paradigm --> emerging research in marketing:)
•sustainability practices’ fetishistic disavowal of reality can serve to exacerbate ecological catastrophe
•the inherently narcissistic nature of the consumer needs others to suffer in order to derive pleasure from (consumer) objects
•reinvestigation of consumer desire as jouissance --> a perverse pleasure in the “mad destruction” of our bodies and minds
}--> examples of critical marketing pursuing emancipatory unveiling procedures
--✕--> sinthome can offer:
1. an *analytic strategy for feeling out* the contours of symptoms
2. directing us to a new *question we may ask of texts of all kinds* --> ***why do they take the form that they do?*** [=/= what ideology is beneath them --> at the level of the latent contents (meaning) of a symptom] --bacteria-->
◦why do fantasies about community, sex, death, deviance take the form of the bacteria?
◦what is it about bacteria that is so compelling that it provides a structure for this array of phenomena? (<-- we can ask that at art/artists use of biology)

***the problem of bacteria for humans = the problem of living with others***

bacteria --think--> the problem of surviving in large, alienating, cross-infecting, co-dependent populations --> *metonymy between immunity & community*
•مجازمرسل metonymy =/= structural similarity تشابه
==reveal==> disciplines of *biology* and that of *political[...]