attraction, and the like. Yet, it is difficult to reconcile such accounts with close
ethnographies of consumers which show that consumers very often see through
such appeals, as they do through technologies like brands which are often mooted
as the affective extensions of commodities (Lury 200 4 ). Hence the need to fix on
the automatism: a substrate of the will which is not conscious. One way to describe
this would be through psychoanalysis but I think it is much simpler just to
concentrate on the play of affects like anxiety, transmitted in a semiconscious way
through imitation, and the way that these affects can be boosted. For example,
feminist theorists have shown the way in which corporations are able to produce
or exaggerate anxieties about body image but they have very often taken this to be
a conscious cognitive choice, based on representations. However, it might be
more interesting to think about these anxieties as being transmitted and received
by a moving mind that has been caught up in the business of what Blum (2005)
calls ‘as-if beauty’, the generation of paradigms for others to emulate (based, for
example, on celebrity) and, correspondingly, the assumption of the characteristics
and behaviours of those persons you want to be, which are often fixed in episodes
of childhood imitation before identification becomes permanent. Most recently,
business has become involved in the design of commodities that reach out to
consumers by actually simulating them and this activity is totally bound up with
affect since it involves the imitation of imitation, so to speak. Thus, recent work
in robotics has exactly tried to capture affect. But it has also faced extreme diffi-
culties of characterization and specification of generally vague principles (Fellous
and Arbib 2005).
Third, whom commodities of particular kinds can be sold to has become an
increasingly precise business based on the rise of customized customer intelligence
(including data enrichment, profiling, and data mining); ‘customer intelligence
describes the knowledge that an organization has concerning the likely future
intentions of its customers or prospective customers’ (Kelly 2006: 1). The con-
sequent rise of geodemographics has produced a series of detailed maps of what
might be called susceptibility to particular affective cues amongst an increasingly
fragmented set of consumers which call for mass customization. Thus, most
interestingly, geodemographic descriptions often now include extensive affective
information (e.g. on levels of fear and worry and a corresponding requirement for
safety) (M.J. Weiss 2000).
Fourth, using the internet in particular, corporations have devised new ways
of maintaining constant contact with and cultivating consumers. The result is that
it is now much easier to make consumption into a relationship which gathers,
manages and plays on and with consumer loyalties, engagements, and even
obsessions. Consumers are enabled to become ‘fanatics without convictions’ much
more easily. Thus, interestingly, a search of books on obsession is as likely to
produce books on fell running and other extreme sports, chocolate, lawns, football,
and various kinds of music, religion and automobiles as on conventionally psycho-
sexual topics.
Fifth, as a result of all these processes, commodities are increasingly seen as
unfolding in time. Not only may commodities have a temporal profile, for example
246 Part III