The skins we live in

Bradshaw, Alan; Chatzidakis, Andreas

doi:10.1177/1470593116636662

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…In a late capitalist mode of mass production that has come to occlude any stable authentic relations (Baudrillard, 2007; also Hietanen et al, 2020a), retro is unable to denote any “real” connection with a past. The very form of retro thus becomes spectral —a desiring relation seeking to retain a belief in inhabitable futures, an act of disavowal (also Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016), all the more haunting as it emerges through fantasy (also Gabriel, 2015). The production of a consumer culture and the promise of a materially “happy” future has seemingly arrived at an aesthetic impasse (also Shankar et al, 2006), where artistic forms such as electronic music production have turned to continuously recycle the old rather than invent any new energizing alternatives (e.g.…”

Section: Retromarketing: the Necromancer Of Temporalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The haunting specter of retro consumption

2020

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We propose to intensify theorizing on retromarketing and nostalgic consumption by further developing “hauntology” as a conceptual lens for assessing the retro aesthetic as a commodified affective excess of meaning. This allows us to explore the consumption of marketized retrospective signs not from the perspective of personal experiences or creative meaning-makings but rather as affective encounters that desire in consumption desperately latches onto. In our view, it is thus not an aesthetic satisfaction, nostalgic comfort, or playful emancipations that are offered to us by retro consumption. Following a darker development of hauntology, we find ourselves instead thrust into spectral presences that we can never quite articulate, a haunting within us in an atmosphere of late capitalism where temporal belief in the future has been “cancelled.”

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Section: Retromarketing: the Necromancer Of Temporalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The haunting specter of retro consumption

2020

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“…As skin modification practices have expanded, skin’s role in embodiment and identity has attracted fine-grained scholarly attention (e.g. Bradshaw and Chatzidakis, 2016; Howson, 2013; Shilling, 2012; Turner, 2008). Social theorist Marc Lafrance argues that increased clinical interest in skin responds to greater incidences of ‘self-inflicted violence’ involving the skin that relate to disturbances ‘over the skin’s role as boundary and container’ (Lafrance, 2009: 5).…”

Section: Skin and The Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Skin Visible

Borgerson

Schroeder

2018

Body & Society

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Human skin, photography, and consumer culture combine to produce striking images designed to promote visions of the good life. Branding and marketing imagery mobilize skin to resonate and communicate with consumers, which influences the meaning-making possibilities of skin more broadly. Representations of skin in consumer culture, including marketing communications, are anything but ‘blank’ backgrounds or ‘neutral’ meaning spaces. We analyse how skin ‘appears’ to work, and how its appearance in consumer culture imagery reveals ideological and pedagogical aspects of skin. Building upon psychodynamic and interdisciplinary understandings of skin, we discuss dimensions of the body that feed marketing communications and branding. We highlight representational fetishization and the epidermal schema as conceptual tools to interrogate the commodification of skin and as constitutive elements in processes of skin commodification. We provide theoretical insights to address the ways in which skin is implicated in new and emerging concerns of digital representational practices.

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“…As has long been recognized, contamination is thus not just a physical problem but a violation of some mythical, symbolic or political system (Bradshaw and Chatzidakis, 2016). If bacteria have a connection to reality, it is as symptom of a disturbed system (Cluley, 2015).…”

Section: A Symptomatic Reading Of Bacteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Bacteria and the market

Campbell

Deane

2018

Marketing Theory

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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.

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The skins we live in

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

The haunting specter of retro consumption

The haunting specter of retro consumption

Making Skin Visible

Bacteria and the market

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