Entrepreneurial subjectivation and capitalist desire – affective potentials of ‘expressive videography’

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we explore the productive potential of ‘expressive videography’ in marketing and consumer research by drawing on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theorisation of desire in capitalism. We illustrate how videography both express and take part in the production of affective capitalist tendencies through the project If Your Heart Wants It — an artistic video montage of scenes and conversations from the entrepreneurial event SLUSH. This allows us to theorise how ‘capitalised subjectivation’ is produced, and how desire for accumulation and competition readily overtakes other social relations by channelling cruel forms of enjoyment. We discuss how videography is well-suited for exploring desiring-production that does not lend itself to subjective meaning-making and direct attention to the dark affective horizons which, arguably, are increasingly subsuming us in ever-deepening semiocapitalist and technological life-worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Desire
• expressive videography
• Deleuze and Guattari
• semiocapitalism
• cruelty
• SLUSH

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://vimeo.com/338826170/f14172ff07.

2. https://www.slush.org.

3. There is all kinds of repression going on all the time: the world as overwhelming, repressing the potentials of your body, and the social that forces you into representation and represses your connection to the Body without Organs.

4. For an extended account of this complex psychoanalytical problem, please refer to Schuster (2016) and Hsiao (2003). In succinct and crude fashion, it could be noted that while desire seeks to always intensify its affective cyclicality, it always works against restrictions such as norms and symbols, but even more broadly in Deleuze and Guattari the very fact that the desiring organism (e.g. the human body) is in a constant state of turmoil and breakdown. Desire can only actualise in the condition of this constant breaking down, which paradoxically works against the desiring potential of desire itself. This is why there is an irreducible relationship with desire and the death instinct (as we will see with the Body without Organs).

5. http://www.slush.fi.

6. See http://www.slush.fi.

7. The id, too, was always strikingly silent for Freud.

8. This affective intensity is also illustrated succinctly by Jean Baudrillard (1988) in his remark ‘an anxious anticipation, not that there may not be enough, but that there is too much, and too much for everyone’ (p. 30).

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of the ‘Algorithmic Selves: The algorithmic intensification of societal control’ research project funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, grant number [00210377].

Notes on contributors

Joel Hietanen

Joel Hietanen is Associate Professor at Centre for Consumer Research, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland. Recently he’s been working on post-structural approaches to technological intensities in semiocapitalism, the seductive realm of consumption, the dark side of desire, and videographic methodology.

Mikael Andéhn

Mikael Andéhn is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Marketing, Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interest spans radical online formations, marketization, and the commercial relevance of place.

Alice Wickström

Alice Wickström is a Doctoral Student at Aalto University, School of Business, Helsinki, Finland. Together with her colleagues, she explores organizing and issues related to inequalities, difference, ethics, and inclusion from feminist and post-structural perspectives.

Pilvi Takala

Pilvi Takala is an artist living and working between Berlin and Helsinki. Her video works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific communities in order to process social structures and question the normative rules of our behaviour.