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'Prepping' – the storing of food, water and weapons as well as the development of self-sufficiency skills for the purpose of independently surviving disasters – is an emerging market as well as an expression of generalised anxiety about existential threats (e.g. technological collapse and catastrophic climate change). Whilst accounts of eccentric prepping are common in mainstream media, there is little empirical investigation into how consumers imagine and prepare for a temporary or permanent halt to functioning market systems, and with it, a consumer society. A netnography of European preppers reveals prepping to be an anticipatory mode of practicing for a post-market, post-consumer society before it becomes a reality. We find that preparation is a struggle for cognitive legitimacy through four different modes: vulnerabilising the market, common-sensing market signals, othering civilian consumers and unblackboxing objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we trace the compounding and escalation of frames to try and encompass the reality of climate change. These frames capture significant aspects, revealing new contours and extreme organizational challenges. However, what if climate change is unframeable? We locate three ontological dimensions of climate change – its unboundedness, incalculability and unthinkability – that make this case. This means that climate change is not a problem that organizations can encompass, divide or draw lines around – some 'thing' that can be recuperated into existing institutional, infrastructural and interpersonal frameworks. Instead, it is calling forth forms of organization without any precedent. We argue that the philosophy of speculative realism, specifically the work of Quentin Meillassoux, reveals climate change as a new World for which we do not have categories. We deploy Meillassoux's concepts which are non-human and rational to think through what climate change is ontologically. Meillassoux's work is characterized as the reintroduction of the old philosophical idea of the absolute, and we use it as a possible way to overcome the equivocal status of climate change without succumbing to despondency and passivity. Rather than a negative, overwhelming threat, climate change gives us what we call a bleak optimism: the realization that climate change has already happened, and that human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a creative and just foreclosure of the Earth's organizational forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interactive relationship between intangible, human capabilities (operant resources) and tangible, physical assets (operand resources) in an era of global interconnectedness. It does so within the context of service-dominant logic and the challenge of sustainability in a world of resource scarcity. Introducing object-oriented philosophy as an alternative framework, this paper challenges ideas about the superiority of certain kinds of resources while confronting a pervasive culture of demateriality in marketing and contemporary post-industrial theory – the idea that “stuff” does not count. The article offers a parsimonious model of a more holistic conceptualization of resources. It demonstrates the complex entanglement of operant and operand resources, finding that this entanglement is a precondition to marketing-related issues of natural resource selection, globalization, sustainability, and distributive justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works have explored the concept of posthumanism as a radical decentring of the human, humanism and the humanities in the wake of the complexificaiton of technology and systems, and new insight into nonhuman life (Pettman, 2011; Wolfe, 2009). In this article, we argue that posthumanism is not just an epistemology (Wolfe, 2009), but an aesthetic that blends three elements – the primitive, technology and horror. The interrelation of these three elements produces an aesthetic sensibility, that says three things about non-humanist conceptions of life. First, we draw attention to metamorphosis as an engine that encourages the viewer to recognise life not as being, but as perpetual becoming. However, as an antidote to the liberatory promises of ‘flow’, we specifically argue for a distinction between morphing and mutating, showing how each articulates opposing fantasies of posthumanism. Second, the concept of primal technology is introduced, which injects the humanist understanding of technology with an alternative, subterranean and posthuman supplement. Third, proto-atavism introduces the concept that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life. Ancient and future evolutionary traits exist in the present – both in the aesthetic imagination and in everyday life. Ultimately, we work towards a more wide-ranging idea – a posthuman biology – an ethical imperative which reminds us that, in a technological age, life is no longer containable in ‘simple’ life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A patient with the obstetric defibrination syndrome successfully treated with human fibrinogen is described. The blood not only contained low levels of fibrinogen capable of clotting but also contained an inhibitor of the thrombin-fibrinogen reaction. This was neutralized with protamine but it was not heparin. Neither abnormality was detected by a latex agglutination test for plasma fibrinogen. The use of this test does not therefore exclude the diagnosis of the defibrination syndrome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]