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What is the power of the monstrous? Where does it get this power? Jacques Derrida, who in his early work associated the future as such with a certain monstrosity (cf Derrida’s preface to Of Grammatology), said in an interview: A monster may be obviously a composite figure of heterogenous organisms that are grafted onto each [...]

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 [...]

Ingression

How does one engage an event? The event has gone through torsions in this blog. But we shouldn’t confuse an event with a blog. What is happening as I write in Libya is an event that changes the contours of everything, but not for everyone in the same way, or for the same duration, or [...]

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 [...]

Deleuze on Affect, Guattari on Virtual Ecologies

Throughout these blog entries I have continued to specify, define, differentiate, complexify, and diagram Gilles Deleuze’s conception of affect. Here is a further attempt, this one taken from Deleuze’s fine book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Robert Hurley, trans. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988) 48-51. Deleuze makes some crucial distinctions in the definition of “Affections, Affects” [...]

Deleuze and Foucault on Marketing as Control

Gilles Deleuze never to my knowledge wrote extensively on marketing, but he had some choice words for it in “Postscript on Societies of Control.” I quote them below. I lectured today, minutes ago actually, on Foucault’s panopticism and Deleuze’s modulated control to my first year marketing and communication course at QMUL. I tried to make [...]

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 [...]

Perception and Attention in Marketing: A Bergsonian Detour

Let’s look at another take on consumer behaviour. In “Understanding consumer behaviour,” David Jobber specifies further why perception is crucial for marketing (Jobber, Principles and Practice of Marketing [London: McGraw-Hill, 2010] 108-143). Jobber claims that an understanding of customers can be gained by answering the following questions (109): 1. Who is important in the buying [...]