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 [...]

Fractal Decay

We have seen that the world was an infinity of converging series, capable of being extended into each other, around unique points. Thus every individual, every individual monad expresses the same world in its totality although it only clearly expresses a part of this world, a series or even a finite sequence. The result is [...]

The Value of Affect: Perception and Media in India today

reticulation 9.6 copy Abstract: This essay aims to diagram the set of connectivities (or “system of relations”) developing in business outsourcing affective, communicative labor and the value-adding digital image in contemporary Hindi-Urdu cinema. What emerges is a resonant set of nested temporalities constituting a new media assemblage. Throughout, I draw on a set of analyses [...]

More Composite Photos

This video is a montage of the images with their digital “originals.” I think the video helps defetishize the images, that is it makes the compositing processes a little more palpable. Changing the level of detail changes the sharpness of the color transitions. The processes involved in perception traversing these gradients is what I have [...]

Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity: On Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, Part One

Nietzsche and Philosophy (hereafter N+P) is a fantastic work. It deserves all the praise it has received and more: Deleuze is at his most creative in his engagement with Frederich Nietzsche (FN). Both interpretation and concept creation, N+P introduces the reader to some of Deleuze’s lasting concerns: multiplicity, unity, force, sense, becoming, nondialectical difference. These [...]

The Production of Habit: On Two Conceptions of Difference in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

What happens to the body in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (hereafter DP)? Let us specify what body we are speaking of here, because after all it is still such a vague term. The body of docility, but also the productive nexus between capitalism and discipline. The body of the norm, but also the body incited to a microphysics of activity and expression. So already we are speaking of at least two bodies in Foucault: that palimpsest in perpetual dissolution invoked in “Nietzsche Genealogy History,” and the more mundane body of habit, of exercise, of experimentation, and regulation.

On Bergson’s Pure Duration and Suzuki’s Sunyata-Tathata

Bergson writes in Time and Free Will: “To say that the same inner causes will reproduce the same effects is to assume that the same cause can appear a second time on the stage of consciousness. Now, if duration is what we say, deep seated psychic states are radically heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any two of them [...]

Race, Perception, and the Institutionalization of Networks

The aim then, again, to begin again as if at the beginning again. Patricia Clough recently asked me what my object is? I told her I wanted to understand the relationship between the rise of Barak Obama and Osama bin Laden. That’s not really of very great interest. The relation I want to get at [...]

On the Clinamen in Deleuze

From Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense.  According to the way that it is most often presented, Lucretius’s clinamen or the swerve describes a spontaneous and infinitesimally small change of direction in the course of an atom’s downward fall. For Lucretius, the importance of this minute deviation in direction cannot be overstated: “If it were not for [...]