Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which ... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.
Ultraprocessed-food manufacturers have proposed product reformulation as a key strategy to tackle... more Ultraprocessed-food manufacturers have proposed product reformulation as a key strategy to tackle obesity. In determining the impact of reformulation on population dietary behaviors, policy makers often depend on data provided by these manufacturers. Where such data are "gifted" to regulators, there may be an implicit expectation of reciprocity that adversely influences nutrition policies. The authors aimed to assess Europe's industry-led reformulation strategy in five countries deploying critical policy studies as an approach. They found that interim results on industry-led food reformulation did not meet the countries' targets. Information asymmetries exist between food industry and policy makers: the latter are not privy to marketing intelligence and must instead rely on data that are voluntarily donated by food industry actors, which represent a distorted snippet of the marketing intelligence system from whence they came. Because these data indeed bear all the hallmarks of a gift, regulatory and public health authorities operate within a gift economy. The implications of this "data-gift economy" are strategic delay and the need to set goals when the field is not visible. Ultimately, this could diminish the implementation of public health nutrition policies that run counter to the commercial interests of ultraprocessed-food producers.
We present a psychoanalytic reading of 332 images of bacteria in advertising for antibacterial pr... more We present a psychoanalytic reading of 332 images of bacteria in advertising for antibacterial products and in public service announcements since 1848. We identify four dominant and recurring tropes that bring bacteria into the symbolic realm: cuteness, overpopulation, the lower classes and deviant sex. As a first stage of our analysis, we propose that bacteria are symptoms of a capitalist socioeconomic order. Bacteria are repressed fears and fantasies about purity, gender, race, community, pollution, class and sexual promiscuity which are tacitly leveraged by antibacterial brands. We then ask why these fears and fantasies take the form of the bacterial. We trace a movement from the psychoanalytical concept of the symptom to the sinthome. If symptoms can be read as a repressed, extrinsic ideology that can/must be revealed, the sinthome is a fantasy that, when brought to light, does not dissolve, because it structures reality intrinsically. We indicate an emerging body of psychoanalytically informed critical marketing that points to the perverse effects of emancipatory, revelatory critical analysis, where the consumer is made to face their symptom. The sinthome is a useful way to summarize this problem. However, while the sinthome is testimony to the impossibility of redemption through the revelation of our ideological prisons, it has a productive, positive contribution to critical marketing theory. It presents a theory of and a tool for analysing fantasies that focus on the form of their expression, rather than their content. In our case, the fact that fantasy takes the form of the bacterial reveals a surprising confluence between the politics of community and the physiology of (auto)immunity, with important and specific strategies on how ideology can be interrupted. This power of the sinthome to straddle the symbolic, imaginary and real creates ways to conceive marketing phenomena as simultaneously psychoanalytic, political, physical and metaphorical.
In this paper, we trace the compounding and escalation of frames to try and encompass the reality... more In this paper, we trace the compounding and escalation of frames to try and encompass the reality of climate change. These frames capture significant aspects, revealing new contours and extreme organizational challenges. However, what if climate change is unframeable? We locate three ontological dimensions of climate change – its unboundedness, incalculability and unthinkability – that make this case. This means that climate change is not a problem that organizations can encompass, divide or draw lines around – some 'thing' that can be recuperated into existing institutional, infrastructural and interpersonal frameworks. Instead, it is calling forth forms of organization without any precedent. We argue that the philosophy of speculative realism, specifically the work of Quentin Meillassoux, reveals climate change as a new World for which we do not have categories. We deploy Meillassoux's concepts which are non-human and rational to think through what climate change is ontologically. Meillassoux's work is characterized as the reintroduction of the old philosophical idea of the absolute, and we use it as a possible way to overcome the equivocal status of climate change without succumbing to despondency and passivity. Rather than a negative, overwhelming threat, climate change gives us what we call a bleak optimism: the realization that climate change has already happened, and that human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a creative and just foreclosure of the Earth's organizational forms.
Public perceptions of nanotechnology are shaped by sound in surprising ways. Our analysis of the ... more Public perceptions of nanotechnology are shaped by sound in surprising ways. Our analysis of the audiovisual techniques employed by nanotechnology stakeholders shows that well-chosen sounds can help to win public trust, create value and convey the weird reality of objects on the nanoscale.
Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize pro- cesses and phenomena whic... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize pro- cesses and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.
Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which ... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.
Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, huma... more Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue that posthumanism is not just an epistemology (Wolfe, 2009), but an aesthetic that blends three elements – the primitive, technology and horror. The interrelation of these three elements produces an aesthetic sensibility, that says three things about non-humanist conceptions of life. First, we draw attention to metamorphosis as an engine that encourages the viewer to recognise life not as being, but as perpetual becoming. However, as an antidote to the liberatory promises of ‘flow’, we specifically argue for a distinction between morphing and mutating, showing how each articulates opposing fantasies of posthumanism. Second, the concept of primal technology is introduced, which injects the humanist understanding of technology with an alternative, subterranean and posthuman supplement. Third, proto-atavism introduces the concept that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life. Ancient and future evolutionary traits exist in the present – both in the aesthetic imagination and in everyday life. Ultimately, we work towards a more wide-ranging idea – a posthuman biology – an ethical imperative which reminds us that, in a technological age, life is no longer containable in ‘simple’ life.
Posthumanism is used as a collective term to understand ''any discursive or bodily configuration ... more Posthumanism is used as a collective term to understand ''any discursive or bodily configuration that displaces the human, humanism, and the humanities'' (Halberstam and Livingston 1995:vii, emphasis added). There are compelling reasons for introducing posthumanism to consumer research. Consumer research often theorises technology as an externalised instrument that the human creates, uses, and controls. In the 21 st century we are beginning to realise that, far from being a mere tool, technology is the centre of critical thought about culture and about nature. It has recently been suggested that marketing and consumer research now need to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, and the ways in which it can radically change humanness and human-centred approaches to researching the world. Posthumanism is fundamental to theorising humanness in an era that is witnessing the complexification of new technologies. To follow a posthuman mode of thinking will lead to important ethical and metaphysical insights.
Qualitative Research in Organization and Management, 2012
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emeral... more If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service. Information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.
This article is concerned with what a technological gaze might mean; what regimes of truth and wh... more This article is concerned with what a technological gaze might mean; what regimes of truth and what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through it. By drawing on television and print advertising, we can see the pervasiveness of a gaze that is technological in contemporary western consumer culture. This article argues that, far from being a simple “high-tech” effect, a technological gaze is a way of seeing that may be deconstructed. To this end, it will call on visual culture studies, feminism, film theory and Derridean deconstruction to highlight how high-tech images are cultural artefacts, which underscore contemporary imaginings about bodies and environments. The technological gaze uses specific methods to put its meaning together – impossible subject–positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualisation of scientific narratives and the aestheticisation of information – all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology.
Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which ... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.
Ultraprocessed-food manufacturers have proposed product reformulation as a key strategy to tackle... more Ultraprocessed-food manufacturers have proposed product reformulation as a key strategy to tackle obesity. In determining the impact of reformulation on population dietary behaviors, policy makers often depend on data provided by these manufacturers. Where such data are "gifted" to regulators, there may be an implicit expectation of reciprocity that adversely influences nutrition policies. The authors aimed to assess Europe's industry-led reformulation strategy in five countries deploying critical policy studies as an approach. They found that interim results on industry-led food reformulation did not meet the countries' targets. Information asymmetries exist between food industry and policy makers: the latter are not privy to marketing intelligence and must instead rely on data that are voluntarily donated by food industry actors, which represent a distorted snippet of the marketing intelligence system from whence they came. Because these data indeed bear all the hallmarks of a gift, regulatory and public health authorities operate within a gift economy. The implications of this "data-gift economy" are strategic delay and the need to set goals when the field is not visible. Ultimately, this could diminish the implementation of public health nutrition policies that run counter to the commercial interests of ultraprocessed-food producers.
We present a psychoanalytic reading of 332 images of bacteria in advertising for antibacterial pr... more We present a psychoanalytic reading of 332 images of bacteria in advertising for antibacterial products and in public service announcements since 1848. We identify four dominant and recurring tropes that bring bacteria into the symbolic realm: cuteness, overpopulation, the lower classes and deviant sex. As a first stage of our analysis, we propose that bacteria are symptoms of a capitalist socioeconomic order. Bacteria are repressed fears and fantasies about purity, gender, race, community, pollution, class and sexual promiscuity which are tacitly leveraged by antibacterial brands. We then ask why these fears and fantasies take the form of the bacterial. We trace a movement from the psychoanalytical concept of the symptom to the sinthome. If symptoms can be read as a repressed, extrinsic ideology that can/must be revealed, the sinthome is a fantasy that, when brought to light, does not dissolve, because it structures reality intrinsically. We indicate an emerging body of psychoanalytically informed critical marketing that points to the perverse effects of emancipatory, revelatory critical analysis, where the consumer is made to face their symptom. The sinthome is a useful way to summarize this problem. However, while the sinthome is testimony to the impossibility of redemption through the revelation of our ideological prisons, it has a productive, positive contribution to critical marketing theory. It presents a theory of and a tool for analysing fantasies that focus on the form of their expression, rather than their content. In our case, the fact that fantasy takes the form of the bacterial reveals a surprising confluence between the politics of community and the physiology of (auto)immunity, with important and specific strategies on how ideology can be interrupted. This power of the sinthome to straddle the symbolic, imaginary and real creates ways to conceive marketing phenomena as simultaneously psychoanalytic, political, physical and metaphorical.
In this paper, we trace the compounding and escalation of frames to try and encompass the reality... more In this paper, we trace the compounding and escalation of frames to try and encompass the reality of climate change. These frames capture significant aspects, revealing new contours and extreme organizational challenges. However, what if climate change is unframeable? We locate three ontological dimensions of climate change – its unboundedness, incalculability and unthinkability – that make this case. This means that climate change is not a problem that organizations can encompass, divide or draw lines around – some 'thing' that can be recuperated into existing institutional, infrastructural and interpersonal frameworks. Instead, it is calling forth forms of organization without any precedent. We argue that the philosophy of speculative realism, specifically the work of Quentin Meillassoux, reveals climate change as a new World for which we do not have categories. We deploy Meillassoux's concepts which are non-human and rational to think through what climate change is ontologically. Meillassoux's work is characterized as the reintroduction of the old philosophical idea of the absolute, and we use it as a possible way to overcome the equivocal status of climate change without succumbing to despondency and passivity. Rather than a negative, overwhelming threat, climate change gives us what we call a bleak optimism: the realization that climate change has already happened, and that human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a creative and just foreclosure of the Earth's organizational forms.
Public perceptions of nanotechnology are shaped by sound in surprising ways. Our analysis of the ... more Public perceptions of nanotechnology are shaped by sound in surprising ways. Our analysis of the audiovisual techniques employed by nanotechnology stakeholders shows that well-chosen sounds can help to win public trust, create value and convey the weird reality of objects on the nanoscale.
Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize pro- cesses and phenomena whic... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize pro- cesses and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.
Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which ... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.
Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, huma... more Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue that posthumanism is not just an epistemology (Wolfe, 2009), but an aesthetic that blends three elements – the primitive, technology and horror. The interrelation of these three elements produces an aesthetic sensibility, that says three things about non-humanist conceptions of life. First, we draw attention to metamorphosis as an engine that encourages the viewer to recognise life not as being, but as perpetual becoming. However, as an antidote to the liberatory promises of ‘flow’, we specifically argue for a distinction between morphing and mutating, showing how each articulates opposing fantasies of posthumanism. Second, the concept of primal technology is introduced, which injects the humanist understanding of technology with an alternative, subterranean and posthuman supplement. Third, proto-atavism introduces the concept that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life. Ancient and future evolutionary traits exist in the present – both in the aesthetic imagination and in everyday life. Ultimately, we work towards a more wide-ranging idea – a posthuman biology – an ethical imperative which reminds us that, in a technological age, life is no longer containable in ‘simple’ life.
Posthumanism is used as a collective term to understand ''any discursive or bodily configuration ... more Posthumanism is used as a collective term to understand ''any discursive or bodily configuration that displaces the human, humanism, and the humanities'' (Halberstam and Livingston 1995:vii, emphasis added). There are compelling reasons for introducing posthumanism to consumer research. Consumer research often theorises technology as an externalised instrument that the human creates, uses, and controls. In the 21 st century we are beginning to realise that, far from being a mere tool, technology is the centre of critical thought about culture and about nature. It has recently been suggested that marketing and consumer research now need to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, and the ways in which it can radically change humanness and human-centred approaches to researching the world. Posthumanism is fundamental to theorising humanness in an era that is witnessing the complexification of new technologies. To follow a posthuman mode of thinking will lead to important ethical and metaphysical insights.
Qualitative Research in Organization and Management, 2012
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emeral... more If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service. Information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.
This article is concerned with what a technological gaze might mean; what regimes of truth and wh... more This article is concerned with what a technological gaze might mean; what regimes of truth and what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through it. By drawing on television and print advertising, we can see the pervasiveness of a gaze that is technological in contemporary western consumer culture. This article argues that, far from being a simple “high-tech” effect, a technological gaze is a way of seeing that may be deconstructed. To this end, it will call on visual culture studies, feminism, film theory and Derridean deconstruction to highlight how high-tech images are cultural artefacts, which underscore contemporary imaginings about bodies and environments. The technological gaze uses specific methods to put its meaning together – impossible subject–positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualisation of scientific narratives and the aestheticisation of information – all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology.
This chapter is divided into two main sections. We begin by introducing the ideas that Meillassou... more This chapter is divided into two main sections. We begin by introducing the ideas that Meillassoux’s develops in his book After Finitude. In doing so, we explore the massively important legacy of Kantian idealism on our thinking, and explain the dilemma that Meillassoux believes it has left for knowledge claims. We conclude the section by introducing in broad outline his philosophy of speculative realism. In the subsequent section we explore what speculative realism might have to say within the social sciences, especially consumption theory. We do this by introducing the work of Timothy Morton on hyperobjects – a project that Morton acknowledges has its foundations in speculative realism. From there we go on to suggest how research in consumption theory might benefit from loosening the constraints that continental philosophy has placed on us.
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and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.
and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.