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What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the
production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue,
then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary
activity is the compulsive work of self-branding--such is the new
sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or
not, we are all "incorporated." Drawing on anthropology, political
theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William
Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics
in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and
convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies
that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political
moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally
revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy
that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner
analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of
authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps
us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty.
Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and
political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and
economics, warning against all too easy laments about the
corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the
extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present,
shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust
and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed
decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc.,
forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump's political
presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of
contemporary politics.
What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the
production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue,
then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary
activity is the compulsive work of self-branding--such is the new
sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or
not, we are all "incorporated." Drawing on anthropology, political
theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William
Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics
in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and
convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies
that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political
moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally
revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy
that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner
analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of
authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps
us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty.
Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and
political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and
economics, warning against all too easy laments about the
corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the
extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present,
shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust
and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed
decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc.,
forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump's political
presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of
contemporary politics.
In the world of globalized media, provocative images trigger
culture wars between traditionalists and cosmopolitans, between
censors and defenders of free expression. But are images censored
because of what they mean, what they do, or what they might become?
And must audiences be protected because of what they understand,
what they feel, or what they might imagine? At the intersection of
anthropology, media studies, and critical theory, Censorium is a
pathbreaking analysis of Indian film censorship. The book
encompasses two moments of moral panic: the consolidation of the
cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, and the global avalanche of images
unleashed by liberalization since the early 1990s. Exploring breaks
and continuities in film censorship across colonial and
postcolonial moments, William Mazzarella argues that the censors'
obsessive focus on the unacceptable content of certain images and
the unruly behavior of particular audiences displaces a problem
that they constantly confront yet cannot directly acknowledge: the
volatile relation between mass affect and collective meaning.
Grounded in a close analysis of cinema regulation in the world's
largest democracy, Censorium ultimately brings light to the elusive
foundations of political and cultural sovereignty in mass-mediated
societies.
We often invoke the "magic" of mass media to describe seductive
advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass
Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if
we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding
of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders
the concept of "mana," which served in early anthropology as a
troubled bridge between "primitive" ritual and the fascination of
mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking
some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What
in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal
ritual the same as the mana that infuses a rioting crowd, a
television audience, or an internet public? At the intersection of
anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings
recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into
creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma,
ideology, and aesthetics.
Censorship in South Asia offers an expansive and comparative
exploration of cultural regulation in contemporary and colonial
South Asia. These provocative essays by leading scholars broaden
our understanding of what censorship might mean beyond the simple
restriction and silencing of public communication by considering
censorship's productive potential and its intimate relation to its
apparent opposite, "publicity." The contributors investigate a wide
range of public cultural phenomena, from the cinema to advertising,
from street politics to political communication, and from the
adjudication of blasphemy to the management of obscenity."
A leading Bombay advertising agency justifies as traditionally
Indian the highly eroticized images it produces to promote the
KamaSutra condom brand. Another agency struggles to reconcile the
global ambitions of a cellular-phone service provider with the
ambivalently local connotations of the client's corporate brand.
When the dream of the 250 million-strong "Indian middle class" goes
sour, Indian advertising and marketing professionals search for new
ways to market "the Indian consumer"-now with added cultural
difference-to multinational clients.An examination of the complex
cultural politics of mass consumerism in a globalized marketplace,
Shoveling Smoke is a pathbreaking and detailed ethnography of the
contemporary Indian advertising industry. It is also a critical and
innovative intervention into current theoretical debates on the
intersection of consumerist globalization, aesthetic politics, and
visual culture. William Mazzarella traces the rise in India during
the 1980s of mass consumption as a self-consciously sensuous
challenge to the austerities of state-led developmentalism. He
shows how the decisive opening of Indian markets to foreign brands
in the 1990s refigured established models of the relationship
between the local and the global and, ironically, turned
advertising professionals into custodians of cultural integrity.
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