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.

Public perceptions of nanotechnology are shaped by sound in surprising ways. Our analysis of the audiovisual techniques employed by nanotechnology stakeholders shows that well-chosen sounds can help win public trust, create value, and convey the weird reality of objects at the nanoscale.Most research centres and other stakeholders in nanotechnology produce informational videos about their work to help the public understand what they do.Along with documentaries about nanotechnology, these are the main sources of images that people have of what science is capable of at the scale of a billionth of a metre.But these videos have soundtracks too, and it's worth listening to them carefully. We conducted a survey of 108 videos and other audiovisual experiences from 21 countries in the areas of education, advertising, TV, film and art (see DOI). We noted their salient aural characteristics, such as music, tone, voiceover and materializing sound indicators, so that we could identify precisely what aspects of nanosoundscapes are important for achieving key aims in nanoscience education: to envelop the viewerlistener into the scale of the nanocosm, to create economic value, and to induce desirable psychological and cognitive states.To understand what's going on, we examined what we were hearing with the help of scholarship in the fields of sonic branding, embodied cognition, and film studies. What we found was that these sounds can tell us a lot about the hopes and expectations that are aroused by nanotechnology, as well as the public's niggling unease about this strange new world. Sonic branding research alerts us to the incentive for commercial organizations to associate desirable sounds with their products, while insights from embodied cognition help us understand that human sense perception can be manipulated to give the impression that the nanoscale can not only be seen and heard, but physically experienced. And film studies research provides the best tool for calibrating the various ways that exist to link visual information with sonic information. The sounds of the nanocosmSo, what do nano-objects sound like? Obviously, the answer is that they make no sound that can be picked up by human ears. We should point out here that we are not

Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.

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