Bacteria and the market

Abstract

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 socio-economic 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.

Lunch of the last human: Nutritionally complete food and the fantasies of market-based progress

“…The first point to note is that the ideology of market-based progress operates in accordance with its subjects’ complicity. Here, our article dovetails with a nascent body of psychoanalytically informed work that treats marketer-generated materials and initiatives as symptomatic of consumers’ own fantasies (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Campbell and Deane, 2019; Cluley and Dunne 2012; Lambert, 2019). Unpacking the fantasies at work within and around brands like Huel should not be read as some grand ‘emancipatory unveiling procedure’ (Campbell and Deane, 2019: 252).…”

“…Here, our article dovetails with a nascent body of psychoanalytically informed work that treats marketer-generated materials and initiatives as symptomatic of consumers’ own fantasies (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Campbell and Deane, 2019; Cluley and Dunne 2012; Lambert, 2019). Unpacking the fantasies at work within and around brands like Huel should not be read as some grand ‘emancipatory unveiling procedure’ (Campbell and Deane, 2019: 252). Brands such as Huel are symptoms rather than producers of an overarching fantasmatic framework at the heart of consumer culture that enables consumers to continue to consume with impunity.…”

“…First, we contribute to the nascent stream of ideological inquiry into markets, marketing and consumer culture (Bajde, 2013; Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Campbell and Deane, 2019; Carrington et al, 2016; Fitchett et al, 2014), with the view that market actors succeed not because they are able to induce consumers to believe that what is false is true but quite the reverse: They achieve much more ideological power by allowing consumers to consider the truth as false and unreal. By this, we mean theorists must approach the collective functioning of the market as a realm of conceivability that shelters consumers from the absolute objective state of things including the hard truth that not all problems can be solved by the market.…”

It’s no joke: The critical power of a laughing chorus

“…Let me sketch out a difference. In critical marketing, we start with a market or consumption phenomenon, peel away the layers of meanings and work through different articulations to reveal its essence and/or uncover the underlying political-economical structures and ideology (see Caruana et al, 2008) We often take a historical perspective to trace the ‘how’ and ‘why’ and tease out the nuances that gave it this or that material form (see Campbell and Deane, 2018). In contrast, as the episodes show, the critique that emerges through repetition does not make a phenomenon more comprehensible.…”

Tickling tensions: Gazing into the parallax gap of the multicultural imaginary

“…But, to emphasize the ideo-affective dimensions, in this article I will make use of Žižek’s (2004) conceptualization of ideology and his Lacanian psychoanalysis (Žižek, 2007) and treat the therapeutic visuality in cultural branding as ideological fantasies of the market’s multicultural imaginary . This approach to market texts dovetails with an ongoing conversation in critical marketing that uses psychoanalytical theory to debate the ideological functioning of the market, marketing and consumer culture (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016; Campbell and Deane, 2019; Carrington et al, 2016; Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Cronin and Fitchett, 2020). By unpacking marketing fantasies about the multicultural, one should better understand what ideologies are at work in these market texts and their role in (not) producing political inertia (Humphreys and Thompson, 2014) as well as in (not) solving the unrest emerging from sociocultural contradictions and conflicts.…”