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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 [...]

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” [...]

Information, Perception, and the Medium

According to Grewal and Levy, marketing information systems create value for firms and customers. Information is data that crosses a threshold of pattern formation. Here I am thinking of distributed networked databases that interface events up and down the supply and distribution chain. When certain activities become volatile and unpredictable or dense and viscous, then [...]

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 [...]

Arco Madrid

It was my first, and I hope not last, visit to ARCO, an international arts market. It was interesting, if only because of the anxiety of being a part of an institutional machinery for assigning an exchange value to what should have no fixed exchange or use value. The discursive context fed into my project [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]