[Air-L] Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research

[george rossolatos]

Announcing the newly released monograph 'Interdiscursive Readings in
Cultural Consumer Research', of direct relevance to new media
researchers.

*Title: *Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research

*Publishing house: *Cambridge Scholars Publishing

*ISBN (print):    *978-1-5275-1372-3

*Author: *George Rossolatos

*Release date: *August 2018

*Pages: *350



The cultural consumption research landscape of the 21st century is marked
by an increasing cross-disciplinary fermentation. At the same time,
cultural theory and analysis have been marked by successive ‘inter-’ turns,
most notably with regard to the Big Four: multimodality (or intermodality),
interdiscursivity, transmediality (or intermediality), and intertextuality.
This book offers an outline of interdiscursivity as an integrative platform
for accommodating these notions. To this end, a call for a return to
Foucault is issued via a critical engagement with the so-called
practice-turn. This re-turn does not seek to reconstitute venerably
Foucauldianism, but to theorize ‘inters-’ as vanishing points that
challenge the integrity of discrete cultural orders in non-convergent
manners. The propounded interdiscursivity approach is offered as a reading
strategy that permeates the contemporary cultural consumption phenomena
that are scrutinized in this book, against a pan-consumptivist framework.
By drawing on qualitative and mixed methods research designs, facilitated
by CAQDAS software, the empirical studies that are hosted here span a vivid
array of topics that are directly relevant to both traditional and new
media researchers, such as the consumption of ideologies in Web 2.0 social
movements, the ability of micro-celebrities to act as cultural
game-changers, the post-loyalty abjective consumption ethos. The
theoretically novel approaches on offer are coupled with methodological
innovations in areas such as user-generated content, artists’ branding, and
experiential consumption.



https://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/64776

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/interdiscursive-readings-in-cultural-consumer-research
<http://www.cambridgescholars.com/interdiscursive-readings-in-cultural-consumer-research%20>

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3163301







*Table of contents*

*Chapter*

*page*

1.      Inter-everything: resuming the discursive turn in cultural consumer
research

*2*

*Consuming experiences, practices and spectacles*



2.      Taking the ‘multimodal turn’ in interpreting consumption experiences

*48*

3.      Mapping cultural consumer engagement in user-generated advertising

*70*

4.      Consuming thanghood: dancing to brand image with Miley Cyrus

*111*

*Consuming oneself and others*



5.      Consuming the limit: Furious Pete and the re-evaluation of all
values

*159*

6.      Consuming antinatalism in social media

*179*

*Consuming the Impossible*



7.      Consuming the Beauty Ideal: a critical argumentation approach to
skin-care advertising

*213*

8.      Consumed by the Real: on abjective consumption and its freaky
vicissitudes

*248*



 *Chapter 1*

*Inter-everything: resuming the discursive turn in cultural consumer
research*



*Abstract *

This chapter sets the introductory stage for the entire book by putting
forward an integrative approach to interdiscursivity whereby the successive
‘inter’ turns are viewed as modes-of-interdiscursivity. To this end, a call
for a return to Foucault is issued, not in order to venerably reconstitute
archeological epistemology in a dogmatic fashion, but with a view to
eschewing the dogmatizing effect of the naively realist assumptions that
buttress the so-called ‘practice-turn’. As extensively argued, this turn
had already been taken by Foucault. The evoked re-turn is historically
situated in a terrain where praxiologists are increasingly challenging
Foucault’s

discursivity in favor of a paradigmatic shift that views the sociocultural
domain as a nexus of self-subsistent social practices where meaning has
been reduced to a fuzzy ‘element’ of practices. However, approaching
cultural consumer phenomena, analyzing, interpreting them, but also, on the
reverse, facilitating culturally informed marketing planning entails
effectively dimensionalizing the cultural context that shelters consumption
practices. In a sense, this perspectival take on interdiscursivity
resembles the deconstructionist program of philosophizing at the limits of
a tradition as repetition of master-signifiers and master-signifieds by
pointing to the fissures in an arhi-text that threaten it with irreparable
dissemination (aporias, tropes, contrived oppositions and exemplarities,
axiomatic sublimations). However, this approach to interdiscursivity does
not assume as its main field of application seminal texts in a
philosophical tradition that have inseminated a plethora of texts, cultural
practices and genres. Its orientation is not arhi-textual, but
ultra-mundane, whence stems the need for engaging critically with the
praxiological turn. Second, its focus does not

revolve around the discernment of regularities that may account en masse
for social order, as assumed by praxiologists, but around vanishing points
as random guerilla-like rhizomatic intrusions, both commonalities and
discrepancies in the seemingly neatly woven edifice of social practices. It
is by dint of such random intrusions that the cultural, only thinly
conceived as system and far from being organized as an arborescent
structure, continues to operate as the force that animates repetitive,
mechanistic patterns as encountered in monolithic, automated social
practices, as well as why a turn away from the cultural is untenable.







*Consuming experiences, practices and spectacles*

*Chapter 2*

*Taking the ‘multimodal turn’ in interpreting consumption experiences*

*Abstract *

This chapter addresses the potential contributions of sociosemiotically
informed multimodal analysis to framing and systematically interpreting
experiential consumption phenomena. By dint of tried and tested
sociosemiotic methods, cultural consumer researchers may benefit
considerably from the modal segmentation of cultural practices, with a view
to yielding stratified accounts of experiences in terms of discursive
configurations comprising metafunctions, modes and semiotic resources. The
adoption of a multimodal approach in cultural consumer research allows for
comparisons across studies, of seamlessness and of maximal integration
along different analytical/interpretive levels, thus constituting a
potentially indispensable device for modeling consumption experiences.



*Chapter 3*

*Mapping cultural consumer engagement in user-generated advertising*

*Abstract*

User-generated advertising (UGA) has been blossoming over the past few
years as marketers are actively seeking to tighten bonds with consumers
through engagement methods. Despite the rampant availability of listening
technologies and the ever more nuanced mining of social media through Big
Data applications, our understanding of the implications and the potential
of UGA from a digital humanities point of view remains limited. This study
ventures into mapping the interdiscursive cultural terrain of UGA with a
view to furnishing a systematic account of how it affords to flesh out
co-creatively a brand vision.  To this end, a sociosemiotic approach is
adopted that dimensionalizes the cultural resources employed in UGA as a
nested structure that combines macrocultural aspects of cultural order/type
with microcultural ones, such as genre and concrete cultural
representations. The conceptual model is exemplified by recourse to a UGA
corpus from the 10th and final wave of Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl
promotion, undergirded by a mixed methods research design that features a
grounded theoretical procedure, facilitated by quantitative analyses.



*Chapter 4*

*Consuming thanghood: dancing to brand image with Miley Cyrus*



*Abstract*

This chapter scrutinizes how Miley Cyrus’s brand values are projected
through the multimodal semiotic structure of the live performance of the
song “Do my thang” (from the *Bangerz* album [2013]). It is shown how a
brand image is enscripted in Cyrus’s spectacle as ‘script within script’ in
various modes (other than the verbal and sonic ones that are defining of
the recorded song), as well as in the interaction among modes, with an
emphasis on the dance mode (as composite mode made up of the kinesic and
haptic ones). A sociosemiotic conceptual framework is adopted in
conjunction with an interpretive videographic method of analysis,
facilitated by the multimodal qualitative discourse analytic software
atlas.ti.  Attending to structural couplings between signs and modes in the
context of bespoke artists’ brand languages constitutes a priority for
managing an artist as brand, and, concomitantly, for safeguarding relevance
for a fandom. A multimodal reading grid is offered to this end.
Furthermore, it is shown how Cyrus construes an imaginary, neo-burlesque
brand space of hyperdifferentiation, narcissistic play and polymorphous
sexuality that she and her dancing crew project onto an evoked audience.
This is the first study that theorizes the live show spectacle as the
manifest discourse whereupon brand image and brand values are edified,
with an emphasis on the dance mode,  over and above the verbal/ visual
modes that prevail in the advertising/branding literatures.



*Consuming oneself and others*

*Chapter 5*

*Consuming the limit: Furious Pete and the re-evaluation of all values*

*Abstract*

Micro-celebrities have been proliferating alongside the increasing
importance of social media as avenues for self branding in a participatory
cultural predicament. This chapter adopts a storytelling approach for
canvassing how the brand identity of Furious Pete, a competitive
speed-eating icon, is shaped coherently through the micro-narratives that
populate his vlogs.  By drawing on the social positioning perspective on
storytelling that emphasizes how a persona, others and culture at large are
discursively produced through situated positionings, enhanced by
psychoanalytic insights (cf. De Fina, 2015, p.382), it is shown how this
micro-celebrity may constitute a game-changer with regard to entrenched
consumptive mores. This is achieved by adopting a narrative strategy of
re-evaluation of all cultural values according to the ethos of speed-eating
or, as tagged here, ‘limeating’ as ‘consuming (to) the limit’, and by
delivering consumptive desire to an unbound orality whereby differentially
valorized gastronomic offerings are annihilated in the face of
cannibalistic drives.



*Chapter 6*

*Consuming antinatalism in social media*

*Abstract*

Antinatalism, a relatively recent moral philosophical perspective and
ideology that avows ‘it is better not to have ever existed’, has spawned a
new social movement with an active presence in social media. This study
draws on the discourse historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse
analysis for offering a firm understanding as to how the collective
identity of the Facebook antinatalist NSM is formed. By focusing narrowly
on how this ideology is consumed in the situated interaction among the
NSM’s members it is shown that collective identity is a dynamic schema,
rather than a uniform construct, enshrouding a plethora of
micro-interactions. Individuals constantly negotiate its meaning in
context, as they seek to streamline interdiscursively the antinatalist
system of ideas with their lifeworld through a web of interlocking
schemata, discursive and rhetorical strategies. Finally, antinatalism is
identified as a peculiar case of post-modern metanarrative  and
conceptually elaborated as a new type of ‘metametanarrative’.



*Consuming the Impossible*

*Chapter 7*

*Consuming the Beauty Ideal: *

*A critical argumentation approach to skin-care advertising*



*Abstract *

This chapter introduces critical argumentation theory and analysis to
cultural consumer research with a view to affording a cultural
understanding of advertising discourse. Although rhetorical figures and
rhetorical appeals have been amply scrutinized in the marketing discipline,
argumentation schemes remain as yet untapped as regards their potential for
offering nuanced insights about advertising claims by attending to the
multiple layers of ad texts’ argumentative structuration. In order to
illustrate the areas of contribution of critical argumentation, a corpus of
print ads from the anti-ageing product category is drawn upon. The analysis
unearths layers of argumentation by attending to latent statements, hidden
premises and logical fallacies. The implications for critical marketing and
for policy-making are highlighted amidst an external marketing environment
where anti-ageing claims are attracting heavy criticism.



*Chapter 8*

*Consumed by the Real: *

*on abjective consumption and its freaky vicissitudes*



*Abstract *

In this chapter the concept of abjection is extended to cultural consumer
research by offering a conceptual framework of abjective consumption that
rests on three pillars, namely irrationality, meaninglessness, dissolution
of selfhood. By critically reflecting on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic
insights, it is argued that abjective consumption constitutes more than a
peculiar case of uncontrollable desire, far removed from an affirmative
quest for (sub)alternative cultural identities. The existentially
affirmative phenomenon of abjective consumption and its cultural
ramifications are interpreted by pursuing a psychoanalytically informed
discourse analytic route. Its modus operandi is illustrated by drawing on a
corpus of 50 documentary episodes from the TV series “My Strange Addiction”
and “Freaky Eaters.” The findings from this analysis point to different,
simultaneously operative discursive complexes (e.g. moralizing, medical),
none of which is commensurate to abjective consumption.

George Rossolatos MSc, MBA, PhD

http://uni-kassel.academia.edu/georgerossolatos

www.ijmarketingsemiotics.com

*https://www.researchgate.net/profile/George_Rossolatos/publications
<https://www.researchgate.net/profile/George_Rossolatos/publications>*

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1784311

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