uncoincident with the constant barrage of publications and surveys that insist that
this is the case. Fifth, and finally, corporations have much more diverse workforces
than formerly. The need to negotiate gender, ethnic and other divides has
produced a different corporate ambience, one that speaks to values like creativity
and discovery and mobilizes affects like hope but one which again takes an
emotional toll.
Thus, corporations have become emotional soups, full of (quite understandable)
hopes and anxieties: Jacques’ (1995) so-called ‘paranoiagenic zoo’, in which
anxiety levels are constantly high. At the extreme, the cult of ‘leadership’ currently
found in many organizations, which elevates the charismatic authority of CEOs
and others, in part by investing them with celebrity status, can be seen as a need
to affectively embody the enterprise in the absence of traditional boundaries.
But, more to the point, as they have recognized the power of the affective forces
that push them hither and thither and as affect has made its way up corporate
agendas as an element that is not incidental but can be worked on, so corporations
have also been able to generate new performative knowledges which depend upon
the staging of affect, most of which revolve around generating engagementthrough
the manipulation of mood. Of these, the most important has been making the
maximum affective impact with the commodity by producing what might be
called customized individualization, a collective individuation that draws on the
whole intellect of the consumer in order to induce emotional identification with
the commodity. This process of generating the same wavelength – which is only
strengthened by the Christian–Romantic ideal of personal relations which allows
commodities not just to figure as a part of commitments to a relationship but
to become commitments in their own right (Gray 2002) – has occurred in at
least five ways. When taken together, these five developments have produced a
new ‘flock and flow’ consumer technology which is redefining wanting as insertion
into a steady, continuous stream of low-level imitative excitements, fuelled by all
manner of anxieties and enthusiasms.
First, there has been a massive increase in the mediation of society, producing
a fertile ground for the imitative transmission of affect. Just one example of this
kind of suggestibility will suffice, precisely because it is so powerful. Celebrity has
become a particular means of relating to the world, a form of obsessive contact
and identification with familiar strangers who, through a variety of media, can be
inserted into the fabric of everyday lives, becoming a culturally pervasive aspect
of the affective background, quite literally a means of catching breath (G. Turner
2004 ).
Second, commodities are increasingly elements in the generation of passions,
both through the invocation of ‘sensory design’ (Malnar and Vodvarka 200 4 )
which increases the commodity’s sensory range by producing commodities that
function as phenomenological fishing nets and through the affective extension of
the commodity as a result of devices like the brand and celebrity (Thrift 2006a).
This process of adding affective value is often described in psycho-sexual terms.
For example, most recently, Steinberg (2005) has described commodities as having
a ‘quasi-erotic’ aura because they are sold with promises of ease, fun, sexual
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