For an ontogenesis of the refrain

What happens when the monster becomes simply a sign-post, but a remarkable one of immanent processes of becoming? Recall what Michael Hardt says of the remarkable in Spinoza, Here we are confronted with the Spinozian principle of the singularity of being. As a first approximation, we could say that singularity is the union of monism [...]

The Affect of Precarity

We insist on one thing. Duration. And the diagram. And affect. Ok that’s already quite a crowd, well but isn’t there an entire method in these three vector-concepts: duration, diagram, affect? What is the duration of a habit, say the habit of smoking or the habit of playing a guitar? Remember what Toscano teaches us [...]

Are you with the Occupation?

What is the nature of a connection? I have been influenced by Franco Berardi (Bifo) recently. He points out that definitions have to be approached through multiple strategies because what is important is shocking thought by the reconstitution of a virtual field of sense and sensation. In other words, part of what is at stake [...]

What’s your Virus?

Could a kind of resonance potentially form between post-Prigogine/Bohm-inspired physics and critical management studies? Both share a commitment to materialism and realism. But this assumes the continual transformation of both physics and CMS, given the temporal aspect of both matter and reality. In one sense I would like to argue that at their best, at [...]

The Politics of Affect: Berlant on Affect and Austerity

What are the politics of affect? And is this a well-posed question in the first place? Why affect now? In what sense is a given politics affective? As discourses of shame sweep across dominant media in the UK, what are the implications of naming this discursive coding an affective politics? Is such an affect being [...]

Digital Marketing as Generalized Snooping: On Virilio’s Information Bomb

Let’s begin with some examples that will update aspects of Virilio’s argument in The Information Bomb. 1. “The Reality Mining Dataset: The Reality Mining project represents the largest mobile phone experiment ever attempted in academia. We are collecting an unprecedented amount of data on human behavior and group interactions that we plan on anonymizing and [...]

What is Marketing Ethics, Part Two

In Chapter Three of Levy and Grewal’s Marketing they make the case for ethics explicitly (not just through stop-hand warnings!): “When customers believe that they can no longer trust a company or that the company is not acting responsibly, they will no longer support that company by purchasing its products or services or investing in [...]

What is ‘Marketing Ethics’?

What is the relationship of ethics to marketing (and capitalism more generally)? This opens on to other questions, as I’m fond of saying. Such as where is the social in marketing? Where does the social appear in marketing analysis and textbooks? As I noted in Biopower and Marketing in Grewal and Levy’s marketing textbook, the [...]

Biopower and Marketing

“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, capturing [added by the authors], communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” Dhruv Grewal and Michael Levy, Marketing (London: McGraw-Hill, 2008) i Let us begin with a refrain developed in [...]

On Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code

Hansen writes: “Forging such a cultural image of the body is crucial if we are to forestall the instrumentalization of the body and all that follows from it, above all the foreclosure of being-with or the finitude of our form of life. Far from being a mere ‘instrument’ or the first ‘medium’ (as some versions [...]