William Mazzarella

DIVAn inside look at the creation of several ad campaigns in the major Bombay ad agency and what they say about Indian national identity./div

Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India

Shoveling Smoke

Media is often associated with magic. We hear of "the magic of advertising" or the spells cast by charismatic public figures. In The Mana of Mass Society, anthropologist William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take these metaphors literally. In particular, he trains his eye on past and present attempts to make sense of the "collective forces of society"--the vital and volatile energies of public life--and uses the concept of mana (a Melanesian word for supernatural power) to explore advertising and propaganda, charismatic leadership, and mass persuasion in general. Questions of authority, commitment, engagement, identification, and desire coalesce around the concept of mana, the emergence of which the author connects to broader concerns about mass mediated publics. Through masterful engagements with some of the twentieth century's most supple thinkers, including Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and Adorno, Mazzarella articulates his own original 'anthropological philosophy', while redefining key notions such as sovereignty, fetish, immanence, subject formation, and others. The Mana of Mass Society sets a compelling agenda for the future of anthropological theory, media theory, and the study of public social life.

The Mana of Mass Society

In the world of globalized media, provocative images trigger culture wars between traditionalists and cosmopolitans, between censors and defenders of free expression. But are images censored because of what they mean, what they do, or what they might become? And must audiences be protected because of what they understand, what they feel, or what they might imagine? At the intersection of anthropology, media studies, and critical theory, Censorium is a pathbreaking analysis of Indian film censorship. The book encompasses two moments of moral panic: the consolidation of the cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, and the global avalanche of images unleashed by liberalization since the early 1990s. Exploring breaks and continuities in film censorship across colonial and postcolonial moments, William Mazzarella argues that the censors' obsessive focus on the unacceptable content of certain images and the unruly behavior of particular audiences displaces a problem that they constantly confront yet cannot directly acknowledge: the volatile relation between mass affect and collective meaning. Grounded in a close analysis of cinema regulation in the world's largest democracy, Censorium ultimately brings light to the elusive foundations of political and cultural sovereignty in mass-mediated societies.

Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity

Censorium

We often invoke the “magic” of mass media to describe seductive advertising or charismatic politicians. In The Mana of Mass Society, William Mazzarella asks what happens to social theory if we take that idea seriously. How would it change our understanding of publicity, propaganda, love, and power? Mazzarella reconsiders the concept of “mana,” which served in early anthropology as a troubled bridge between “primitive” ritual and the fascination of mass media. Thinking about mana, Mazzarella shows, means rethinking some of our most fundamental questions: What powers authority? What in us responds to it? Is the mana that animates an Aboriginal ritual the same as the mana that energizes a revolutionary crowd, a consumer public, or an art encounter? At the intersection of anthropology and critical theory, The Mana of Mass Society brings recent conversations around affect, sovereignty, and emergence into creative contact with classic debates on religion, charisma, ideology, and aesthetics.

Raminder Kaur

'Censorship in South Asia' explores the cultural politics behind the debate, from colonial paintings to onscreen kisses and nuclear secrets.

Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction

Censorship in South Asia

Eric L. Santner

Aaron Schuster

What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue, then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary activity is the compulsive work of self-branding—such is the new sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or not, we are all “incorporated.” Drawing on anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty. Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and economics, warning against all too easy laments about the corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present, shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc., forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump’s political presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of contemporary politics.

Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment

Sovereignty, Inc.

The cultural politics of censorship, from colonial paintings to onscreen kisses and nuclear secrets

William Mazzarella

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