I have recently become quite fascinated with a Nivea advertising campaign that I first encountered in England and France and just hit on again in the States. Below is a photo of the first billboard that I encountered at a train station in the English Midlands.

Have your say on Facebook about what exactly? It struck me that not only is this a rather clumsy attempt to get in on the act with social network market everything, it is also, more interestingly, an attempt to engage the access economy model at the somatic level – between bodies. In the ‘age of access’ (after the Jeremy Rifkin book of that name) one rarely ever buys anything outright. Rather, one buys access – think cell/mobile phone plan, car care plan, internet service. This means that consumers are always tethered to the market, with small incremental payments everywhere for everything. Social networking extends this model to friendship – or at least tries to monetize social relationships through advertising – and indirectly it is also played out via other gateway technologies such as cell phones and internet service providers. This Nivea campaign is an attempt to embed itself within these same social relationships, to make itself necessary. But how does a material product begin to approach anything like the social necessity of Facebook, for example, to make us closer than ever before? It addresses the relationship between body and self.

“The conscious and calculated management, maintenance, modification, and manipulation of our somatic existence throughout the course of our lives and through all vicissitudes has become … the hesitant potential basis of a new ontology. In this sense, our bodies have become ourselves, become central to our expectations, hopes, our individual and collective identities …” Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, p105

Nivea, with its 100 year old wisdom will continue to nourish the surfaces of our bodies, our skin, our interface with the world and with each other. It will provide us with the material solidity that we feel is dissolving around us, and at the same time it will be the conduit to new experiences and forms of participation. It is not between us in the informational ether, it is at the interstice between my body and yours, my life and your life, when I reach out to touch you I touch Nivea first. Hmm that felt good. Get on Facebook and tell the world about it.

But its not sexy, its product lighting clinical – like ads for tampons and toilet paper. You are a product. Your baby is a product. Life is a product. Maintain your product – keep clean, stay touchable.

Another thing that I thought was interesting about this campaign is the placement of the advertisements. In England and France I only ever saw them at train stations. In Paris they were at the entrances to Le Metro, where you enter the zone of transit which is at once the portal between different locations and sets of social relations, and a space in which you are in close proximity to many strangers.

In the States the only advertisement I have seen was covering the anti-theft ‘beepers’ at the entrance to a store. On one side was the ‘two people close’ motif, on the other was Rhianna. If you are virtuous in your use you might even get close to someone famous. Your body is your access pass to fame and fortune. Keep the door open, get closer – buy Nivea.

I have decided to use the rising wave of panic I’m feeling at having to organise and pack up all my worldly possessions to help me overcome the lesser panic of blog avoidance. I have a mental list of ‘blogs waiting to be written’ that has been generating excessive pressure somewhere in my frontal lobe and occluding the flow of action to the finger tips for quite some time. But now the fear of packing has surged on through and I’m running type across the screen as if there were no tomorrow. At least it is a temporary respite from the circular path I have been treading around my workspace stopping to stare in long intervals at one pile of disorder after another.

Looking back over the spotty history of this blog I notice other such moments – can’t pack, blogging. There is also something about having to sort through the accumulated detritus of ones life that lends itself to a ponderous state of mind. For example, why is it that I tolerate certain habits of attachment and not others? My collection of fabric scraps, patches and buttons that I insist on dragging around the world with me, occasionally replacing one scrap with another, but rarely using. And the Thai oboe I bought 15 years ago in Bangkok and never play? The box of audio cables and adapters that seem to get used more often by friends than by me? Why not the items of furniture, or ‘objets d’art’ that other people seem to hold onto? I guess the simple answer is that furniture is usually too big and art, well who needs it…

But more interestingly I start to construct a psychic self-analysis based on my material attachments. There is a great book that I read for a class last year called The Comfort of Things (Daniel Miller) that constructs ethnographic ‘portraits’ of people based on the way in which they relate to their material possessions. Ever since then I’ve been wishing that the author would do the same for me – it was such a fascinating perspective on the way in which we construct ‘selves’ and relationships with others through our things.

Apart from the small personal things that I keep (like kids drawings and cards) most of the things that I hold onto are ‘useful’ – they have the potential to be activated in some way, or made into something else. And they are fragments of places I have been, clothing I once wore, projects I have undertaken. They are elements of a narrative that have the potential to be reanimated, or woven back into new narratives, new ‘doings’ in the world. And they are small and portable – they are bits of the world easily carried along on new journeys. Other life props (like furniture) are easily acquired and discarded back along the side of the road as the need arises.

The nature of my attachments also have much to do with the patterns of relation to the material world that I established as a child, when the sewing box provided hours of entertainment and there were always musical instruments lying around to be fiddled with. Furniture for my poor and (in the early years) peripatetic parents was also something that you came by rather than chose, or got too attached to. The decor and furnishings changed every time we moved and always felt somewhat extraneous to the action of living there.

I would like to think that one day in the not too distant future I will stay somewhere long enough that my collection of useful, and used, objects will sediment into something more conventionally recognisable as home. Although I fear the overabundance of empty plastic containers and bottles which even now accumulate faster than functions can be found for them.

I have a list of ‘things of interest’ and some half written posts that I never got to finish. Perhaps if I were really part of the Facebook generation I would be better at sending scraps into cyberspace, but the old dame in me still craves considered text. And where does the time for some quiet consideration hide out these days?

Instead this collection of longed after thoughts, loosely woven:

Australia pays big bucks to advertise itself live on Oprah Winfrey – corporation trumps nation in the global bazaar. A great coup for Tourism Australia as, at measly price of AUD 4 million, Australia gets the PR boost of a decade. I know the idea of nation branding is not entirely new but this has really got me thinking about the extent to which it is now the exigencies of maintaining the global brand not the idea of ‘national essence’ that drives the political process. From that wonderful source of wisdom,The Age:

AUSTRALIA is viewed as the ”dumb blonde” of the world, attractive but shallow and unintelligent, according to a visiting British branding expert. …

”What you have is an image of a country that is considered to be very decorative, but not very useful” … ”Rather than waste time fiddling around with promotional campaigns, what Australia needs to do is to invest in the sectors which demonstrate its seriousness and its capability and education is one of them.”

Another such area was culture. Mr Anholt said Australia was unusual among developed nations in not having an organisation devoted to the promotion of culture, such as Germany’s Goethe Institute or France’s Alliance Francaise. Mr Anholt said the US did not have such an organisation, but arguably did not need one because of the global reach of its entertainment industry.

‘Attractive’ is important for the tourism industry – the dumb blonde obviously enterprises-up well. However, the essence of a good brand is not its surface sparkle, but a sense of depth, longevity, excellence, quality – all of which inspire consumer confidence and loyalty. But confidence in and loyalty to what exactly? Australia as a good business destination? The Australian Dollar? Invest more in education and culture to develop the depth of brand Australia and add buoyancy to the Dollar as it fights its valiant fight on the high seas of the global currency market.

And if at any moment one should feel like the odds are too high for one’s brand of choice, merely stop off at the local gold vending machine to exchange some flaky currency for an older more reliable brand – “something real”. Yet not real. A spectre of the gold standard tailored to meet the market demand for individual security in the swirling maelstrom of globalisation. Something solid, material, weighty, to hold on to – a psychic anchor – that, despite its tangible dimensions, is nonetheless just another piece of flotsam on the same seas.

I am reminded, in this instance, of the SI base units – those things to which we anchor all our most real and proper calculations of the material world – and in particular the beautifully poetic standard for the ampere:

“The ampere is that constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross-section, and placed 1 metre apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 × 10?7 newton per metre of length.”

Our world is built teetering upon the impossible and the infinite.

Now I wouldn’t normally consider myself to be part of the Facebook generation – online all the time, do not exist when phone is turned off, can’t remember before the internet – but when I finally log on to half a year of no posts I do get to thinking ‘and what have I been doing, exactly? No document = no claim to existence.

It has taken its time, but I do believe that there is a transformation is afoot – I am slowly but surely turning into my mother… The proof is in the pickling (and the gardening).

The line up of tomato kasundi and bottled fruit that I made this week from the organic dumpster cornucopia of Palo Alto.

And studio garden with chicken coop at back.

I’m currently working on a piece that involves gall stones and while doing some research I drifted off topic in true peripatetic googler form and arrived at this beauty – the tobacco smoke enema. Apparently, a tobacco smoke enema can be used to stimulate respiration. It was originally employed in this manner by native americans and in 18th Century Europe was an accepted technique for reviving victims of drowning. “On the advice of a passing sailor, the woman’s husband inserted the stem of the sailor’s pipe into her rectum, covered the bowl with a piece of perforated paper, and “blew hard”. The woman was apparently revived.” Now while this may sound kinky and exotic to our 21st Century ears, it was mundane enough back in the day that in “the 1780s the Royal Humane Society installed resuscitation kits, including smoke enemas, at various points along the River Thames.” Public smoke enema stations – I just love that image.

The older one gets the faster time goes, or so it seems. But we are not talking about absolute time here, for how can we? We are talking about an experience of time. As the percentage of one’s life represented by a year grows smaller, so our experience of that interval of time feels shorter. The passing of time is experienced in relation to the extent of one’s lived time. This much I have thought many times before – and I hate to think how fast a year will go when I am 60. However, today in the laundromat with some time on my hands, I began to wonder if the experience of time is also a function of habituation. A child’s time is one filled with wonder at each moment, but the older one gets the more one becomes habituated to certain repetitive daily functions – like washing clothes – hence the less one is caught up with the present and the more one’s mind wanders to past experience and future possibility. This functions to evacuate the everyday and as we all know a plastic bag evacuated of air crumples into a much smaller bundle of matter than one that is full. So it follows that a day evacuated of presence to the passing moment is one that passes more quickly, as if barely noticed. A life slips by.

Now moving on from hard to soft copy, which tends to be in even more of a mess by the time I get around to cleaning – usually when my hard drive runs out of space. In the digital corners I found a random selection of photos taken on my phone. This one I thought was particularly worthy:

No doubt for UK locals its nothing out of the ordinary, but in the Australian vernacular it triggered lewd and bestial imaginings…

Scribbling notes, thoughts, rambles on random scraps of paper is a habit that dies hard despite the many notebooks that I have bought over the years to try and bribe myself into a more regular pattern of expression. I always put off sorting through these scraps until the end of the yearly filing extravaganza – what does one do with a page full of jottings about membranes, for example?

The thin membrane of a condom in the stomach of a mule that, if all goes according to plan, passes in a timely manner by the membranous columns and folds of the anal canal. The nasal mucous membrane through which the fine white powder diffuses to the brain.

The mucous membrane of the foreskin that protects the mucous membrane of the glans, that retracts and slides inside the hand. The removal of the foreskin that studies in Africa have shown offers to protect against the transfer of HIV.

The membrane filter through which the syringe plunges liquid media to remove microbial contamination.

The synthetic polymer membrane of the reverse osmosis plant through which the synthetic oestrogens of a collective contraception slide unchecked. The mucous membranes of the large intestine that reabsorbs them.

A gruff gasp of flatulence hits the tympanic membrane. Your air vibrates mine.

The differential diffusion space of the material world. A membranous architecture of density gradients, global commerce, individual bodies, energy transduction, and whole populations.

Caught out once again. Between recitations of

address,
phone number,
social security number,
member ID number,
claim number,
date of birth,
date of service,
date of last period,
middle name,
mother’s maiden name,
family cat name,
four digit password,
eight digit password – alphanumeric characters only,

I have sinned. I yelled at the customer service representative. I feel terrible. Like an animal provoked for sport I did what was expected of me and attacked my cornered opponent. I wish I could jump the ring and wreak some real havoc amongst the punters, betting and vying over my vital statistics. Instead I waste a little more of my vital time to join with the millions of other agrieved in the chorus AMERICAN HEALTH CARE SUCKS. Repeat 20 times with rosary.