george rossolatos | University of Kassel (original) (raw)

Books by george rossolatos

Advances in Brand Semiotics and Discourse Analysis , 2023

This volume addresses some of the most important conceptual, methodological, and empirical challe... more This volume addresses some of the most important conceptual, methodological, and empirical challenges and opportunities with which the sister disciplines of semiotics and discourse analysis are mutually confronted in the context of considering new avenues of cross-disciplinary application to distinctive branding research streams. In continuation of the collective volume 'Handbook of Brand Semiotics' (Kassel University Press, 2015), which sought to consolidate relevant scholarship and to identify the main territories that have been established at the cross-roads between branding and semiotic research, the current 'Advances in Brand Semiotics & Discourse Analysis' aims at accomplishing further strides in critical areas, such as the exigency for reconsidering the aptness of existing semiotic theories in the face of the radically shifting co-creative landscape of digital branding, the benefits of systematically micro-analyzing brand communities’ discourses by drawing on CAQDAS programs, the combination of big data analytics with discourse theory in corpus analysis, and the epistemological issues that emerge while combining discourse analysis with time-hallowed marketing qualitative and quantitative research methods. At the same time, the volume hosts a resourceful blend of empirical studies and novel conceptual frameworks in burgeoning streams, such as place, heritage, culinary, personal, and political branding.

Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research, 2018

The cultural consumption research landscape of the 21st century is marked by an increasing cross-... more 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.

Handbook of Brand Semiotics (ed.) (2015)

Semiotics of Popular Culture, Kassel University Press 2015

Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics furnishes an innovative conceptual ... more Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics furnishes an innovative conceptual model and methodology for brand equity planning, with view to addressing a crucial gap in the marketing and semiotic literatures concerning how advertising multimodal textual elements may be transformed into brand associations, with an emphasis on rhetorical relata as modes of connectivity between a brand’s surface and depth grammar. The scope of this project is inter-disciplinary, spanning research areas such as brand equity, structuralist semiotics, textual semiotics, visual and film semiotics, multimodal rhetoric, film theory, psychoanalysis. The proposed connectionist conceptual model of the brand trajectory of signification is operationalized through a methodological framework that encompasses a structuralist semiotic interpretative approach to the textual formation of brand equity, supported by quantitative content analysis with the aid of the software Atlas.ti and the application of multivariate mapping techniques.

The aim of this book is to display a conceptual and methodological framework for brand image rese... more The aim of this book is to display a conceptual and methodological framework for brand image research by drawing on the discipline of structuralist semiotics. Upon a critical review of existing research from key authors in the brand semiotics literature and through an engagement with the concept of brand image as formulated by key authors in the marketing literature, a semiotic model is furnished for the formation of brand image and brand identity.

Papers by george rossolatos

Open Semiotics, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2023

The purpose of this chapter is to unearth the conditions that silently buttress the recurrence of... more The purpose of this chapter is to unearth the conditions that silently buttress the recurrence of one of the most violent crimes of our times, namely mass shootings. These conditions are rooted in a religious discourse that thrives on the notions of sacred and sacrifice as a violent act par excellence, yet of inaugural value for the constitution of a community and its symbolic order. The analysis offered draws on Julia Kristeva's semanalytic perspective, in an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociological strands.

Open Semiotics, 2021

The purpose of this chapter is to unearth the cultural conditionals that silently buttress the re... more The purpose of this chapter is to unearth the cultural conditionals that silently buttress the recurrence of one of the most violent crimes of our times, namely mass shootings. These conditionals are rooted in a religious discourse that thrives on the notions of sacred and sacrifice as a violent act par excellence, yet of inaugural value for the constitution of a community and its symbolic order. The offered analysis draws on Kristeva’s semanalytic perspective, in an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociological strands.

Transformations and consequences in society due to covid-19 pandemic. International Academic Conference| AAB College, Pristina, Kosovo, Sep 5 2020., 2020

This paper furnishes a brand storytelling account of the Covid-19 pandemic. By adopting a fiction... more This paper furnishes a brand storytelling account of the Covid-19 pandemic. By
adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ narrative space is mapped out by
recourse to metaphorical modeling. The disease imagery stems from global mainstream
media in the context of Covid-19’s brand globalization, as increasing
interconnectedness of and interdependence between social, cultural and economic
discourses. The main narrative components (actors, settings, actions, relationships) are
outlined as episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality, against the background
of a reading grid. Subsequently, a nexus of ontological (deep) metaphors is identified
as the virus’ master narrative, by identifying transfers between the global mediascape
and the brand’s narrative space. Deep metaphors are equivalent to cultural archetypes
or mythopoetic structures which make up a collective structural unconscious. Deep
metaphors stem from reducing surface metaphors to their most universal semantic
dimensions by identifying permeating themes. Instead of ascribing primacy to the
medical discourse, this analysis demonstrates that the medical discourse actually
derives from a metaphorological discursive order. This flip of the coin as regards the
ontological primacy of Covid19’s sociocultural discourse over its biological correlate
legitimates Virilio’s remarks about virulent globalitarianism. In unearthing the cultural
complexities of the new pandemic, this study contributes to the brand storytelling and
narrative analytic camps of marketing and cultural research.

Journal of Place Branding & Public Diplomacy, 2020

This paper offers a social phenomenological reading of the globally binding practice of 'social d... more This paper offers a social phenomenological reading of the globally binding practice of 'social distancing' in light of the precautionary measures against the spreading of the Covid-19 virus. Amid speculation about the far-reaching effects of temporarily applicable measures and foresights about the advent of an ethos that has been heralded by the media as the 'new normal', the ubiquitous phenomenon of social distancing calls for a fundamental ontological elucidation. The purported hermeneutic that is situated in the broader place branding and experiential marketing literatures places Covid-19 in the shoes of Being, and, therefore, imagines how Being would behave ontologically if it were a virus. By positing that the virus does operate like Being, five these are formulated as experiential interpretive categories with regard to the ontological status of Covid-19. The adopted approach makes the following contributions to the extant literature: First, it addresses a wholly new phenomenon in place branding, namely a pre-branded place that is non-negotiable, globally applicable and seemingly equivalent to pure void. Second, it advances the application of phenomenological research in experiential consumption by highlighting the aptness of the so far peripheral (in the marketing discipline) strand of Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Third, it expands the notion of place in the place branding literature, by showing how spatialization is the outcome of temporalization, in line with the adopted phenomenological perspective.

Journal of Destination Marketing & Management (Vol.18, Dec 2020)

This paper offers a brand storytelling or narratological account of the Covid-19 pandemic’s emerg... more This paper offers a brand storytelling or narratological account of the Covid-19 pandemic’s emergence phase. By
adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ deploying media-storyworld is identified with a process of
narrative spacing. Subsequently, the brand’s personality is analyzed as a narrative place brand. The advanced
narrative model aims to outline the main episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality as process and
structural components (actors, settings, actions, and relationships). A series of deep or ontological metaphors are
identified as the core DNA of this place brand by applying metaphorical modeling to the tropic articulation of
Covid-19’s narrative. The virus is fundamentally identified with terror as a menacing force that wipes out
existing regimes of signification due to its uncertain motives, origins, and operational mode. In this context,
familiar urban spaces, cultural practices, and intersubjective communications are redefined, repurposed, and
reprogrammed. This process is called terrorealization, as the desertification and metaphorical sublation of all
prior territorial significations. This study contributes to the narrative sub-stream of place branding by
approaching a globally relevant socio-cultural phenomenon from a brand storytelling perspective.

International Journal of Marketing Semiotics & Discourse Studies, 2020

Mass shootings constitute a recurrent and most violent phenomenon in the U.S. and elsewhere. This... more Mass shootings constitute a recurrent and most violent phenomenon in the U.S. and elsewhere. This paper challenges the ready-made, solipsistically contained metanarratives on offer by mainstream media and formal institutions with regard to the psychological antecedents of the perpetrating social actors, while theorizing mass shootings as acts of violence that are systemically inscribed in the foundations of communities. These foundations abide by the logic of sacrifice which is propagated in instances of collective traumatism. It is argued that the cultural trauma that emanates from events of mass shootings, inasmuch as the commemorative events that are performed on regular occasions, constitute re-enactments of the death drive that sustains communities. The cultural analytic deploys against a CDA reading of longitudinal studies on mass shootings, coupled with psychoanalytic discourse analysis, prior to submitting mass shootings to a deconstructive line of reasoning as systemically necessary transcendental violence. Ultimately, it is shown that the intertextual institutional chain that informs the mediatized representation of this social phenomenon merely attains to obliterate and, hence, to propagate cultural traumatism and the sacrificial logic that underpins it. The terms micrometanarrative, parafunction and expropriating ipseity are introduced and operationalized in this context.

Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal (advance online publishing June 2020), 2020

Purpose: The principal purpose of this paper is to contribute to the augmenting literature on con... more Purpose: The principal purpose of this paper is to contribute to the augmenting literature on consumer/brand engagement (CBE) in social media brand communities (SMBCs) by offering the model of Depth of Brand Engagement Funnel (DOBEF). The model is intended to complement the multi-dimensional conceptualization of CBE in the extant consumer behavior literature, as well as to critically address some of its foundational tenets, by adopting a computer-mediated discourse analytic (CMDA) approach. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs a mixed methods research design whereby qualitative data are quantified with a view to enhancing the robustness of the interpretive procedure, in line with the CMDA research protocol. A netnographic approach is adopted in data collection, while data analysis/synthesis proceeds with the application of the laddering technique with the aid of the CAQDAS software atlas.ti. Findings: By shifting focus in identifying CBE levels in SMBCs from attitudinal/behavioral antecedents/outcomes towards the content of interaction, a nuanced perspective is offered as regards the depth of interaction, by addressing posted comments not only in terms of valencing, but also of valorization. Moreover, by conducting analyses on coded data alongside DOBEF’s strata, rather than treating consumer comments as raw data, we are capable of narrowing down the semantic focus of posted comments in a thread-specific fashion, thus meeting the narrow contextualization criterion that is lacking from various studies in the extant literature. Research limitations/implications: Although the primary data that are sourced from SMBCs posted comments have not been generated by following a laddering procedure, dimensionalizing them on laddering strata offers a unique window of opportunity for gauging diachronically and comparatively, on intra- and inter-brand levels, depth of engagement. This data collection limitation presents unique opportunities and challenges to SMBCs moderators in terms of enhancing depth of engagement with consumers, while minimizing the incidence of brand hatred. Practical implications: The managerial implications from the application of the DOBEF model are potentially far-reaching. Indicatively, the model’s application is likely to (i) minimize irrelevant and/or negative comments that infuse messiness in potentially informative brand community settings (ii) aid in setting actionable KPIs with regard to the intended interaction levels according to the propounded model’s stratum, as well as conversion rates (iii) monitor comments in SMBC settings in a meaningful manner, rather than by drawing on an abstract typology (i.e. public sentiment analyses). Originality/value: This is a salient step towards both disambiguating the meaning of engagement and rendering it operationally concrete and relevant in SMBC interaction settings. If integrated in research frameworks that examine antecedents and outcomes from participation in SMBCs, it may yield valuable feedback for brand managerial decision-making on a day-to-day basis. Paper type: Research paper Keywords: consumer engagement, social media brand communities, CMDA, laddering technique, atlas.ti, netnography, mixed methods

Trauma and Consumption, 2020

This volume aims at opening new theoretical vistas in conceptualizing how the notion of trauma ma... more This volume aims at opening new theoretical vistas in conceptualizing how the notion of trauma may be fruitfully applied to consumer research, as well as offering fresh perspectives on how traumatism may modify, moderate, reorient and re-evaluate consumption experiences. The increasing emphasis in consumer research that has been laid over the past few years on the unconscious in an attempt to identify and account for psychological processes that pass under the radar of a homeostatic ego that is driven by the pleasure principle calls for an extensive and multi-faceted scrutiny of the notion of trauma. This volume adopts a pan-consumptivist approach to social phenomena, by endorsing the thesis that consumption is not necessarily dependent on organized markets, while extending it to ideologies, belief-systems, sociocultural practices. Furthermore, it adopts a non-clinical orientation in theorizing, accounting for and empirically investigating trauma-related consumption phenomena. It does not seek to pass pathologizing judgments (Parker 2014, 2015), and even less to ascribe symptoms causally to solipsistically self-enclosed entities. This would contravene both Freudian and Lacanian premises that have been most influential in trauma theory, as, for the former, the cause of traumatism may not even rest on a determinate object, but on the overdetermination of the pleasure principle by the death drive, while the latter, allegedly, never sought to ‘cure’ patients, i.e. reinstate them to a symbolic order which is responsible for the generation of symptoms in the first place. By recognizing the paramount importance of trauma theory as a cultural hermeneutic tool (Alexander 2012), we seek to map its ramifications vis-à-vis consumption phenomena, but also to challenge salient facets, and, above all, to advance existing theories in the light of concrete cases.
We endorse both disciplinary, as well as methodological diversity by being particularly receptive to submissions from researchers in various humanities and social scientific disciplines who are keen on applying either quantitative or qualitative or mixed methods research designs, encompassing, but not being restricted to, cultural analysis, interviews, videography, ethnography, online ethnography/netnography, conversation analysis, phenomenological research, semiotic analysis, DA/CDA, to name a few indicative avenues.
The following constitute indicative (and by no means exhaustive) areas for framing and analyzing the relationship between trauma-related theories and consumption studies:
- Traumatic experiences as antecedents and/or moderating factors in the purchase and usage decision making process of products and services
- Compulsive purchase behaviors that may be attributed to traumatic experiences
- Autoethnohgraphic accounts of consumption related experiences in the light of traumatic events
- How traumatic experiences are represented in entertainment products and how they are decoded by audiences
- How PTSD has impacted the purchase and consumption behaviors of specific segments (e.g. war veterans)
- Conceptual approaches to the operationalization of the concept of trauma as outlined in specific psychoanalytic theories
- How the death drive is inscribed in repetitively enacted harmful consumptive acts
- How cultural traumas that affected local or global populations are experienced through simulative re-enactment events
- Psychoanalytic discourse analysis of movies, TV shows, music lyrics and other popular cultural artefacts that leverage facets of traumatism
- The semiotics of traumatic advertising
- How culturally traumatic events are transformed into consumable media spectacles
- Traumatism and the memory of trauma as entry requirement in the constitution of imaginary collectives or the symbolic order of social collectives
Manuscripts should be submitted to the volume’s editor, Dr. George Rossolatos, Chief-Editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics & Discourse Studies (University of Kassel, Germany) via email @ georgerossolatos123@gmail.com no later than February 29, 2020, by using APA formatting style. Authors are encouraged to contact the editor for an informal discussion of their selected topic. The authors will receive further information about the volume upon acceptance of their manuscript.
Project milestones
Deadline for initial manuscript submission: Feb 29 2020
Deadline for notification of acceptance: Mar 30 2020
Deadline for revisions: June 30 2020
Expected publication: End of Q4 2020

International Journal of Marketing Semiotics & Discourse Studies , 2020

Shopper’s Paradise traces the dominant and emergent shopper’s ethos in contemporary American cons... more Shopper’s Paradise traces the dominant and emergent shopper’s ethos in contemporary American consumption culture by reflecting culturologically on the functional aspects of various retail formats. Undoubtedly we are living in exciting, and at the same highly volatile times. In fact, volatility and liquidity constitute the mantras of contemporary consumption culture that is marked by experimentalism, decreasing loyalty and malleable demand patterns. It is a smooth consumption space, relieved from the rigidities of traditional market segmentation. This space is largely shaped by technological convergence across the purchase and consumption journey, by the progressive virtualization of the real (or, more aptly, the physical) and the reification of the virtual. This hybrid hyperreal space where the contemporary retail landscape is situated has been detrimental for time-hallowed retail formats, such as the mall, while having spawned new retail formats, such as Amazon Go.
In this monograph which recontextualizes and extends previous works such as Marketing and American Consumer Culture and Ads, Fads and Consumer Culture, Arthur Asa Berger adopts a cultural hermeneutic approach in unearthing deep and recurrent structures beneath manifest and shifting retail experiential patterns. This is achieved in an accessible manner that contains and distills the essence of the argumentation without the vagaries and complexities that are defining of pedantic scholarship, thus rendering the work appealing to a broader audience. This is a much needed enterprise insofar as academic concepts have always functioned as a pivotal resource for animating the popular imaginary, by providing reflections on the directly lived experience which are then used by mediators of cultural production for stage setting experiences anew in a simulacral fashion.

Psychology & Marketing

Social media brand communities (SMBCs) have been heralded for their co-creative, participatory po... more Social media brand communities (SMBCs) have been heralded for their co-creative, participatory potential whereby consumers actively contribute to the proliferation of meaningful brand avenues in a virtuously circular relationship with brands. Elevated loyalty and enhanced brand equity have been repeatedly posited as likely outcomes of a positively engaged community of brand aficionados. However, evidence to the contrary as negative brand co-creation or brand co-destruction has been progressively piling up in the extant literature. This paper contributes to the meaning co-creation in SMBCs literature primarily on two grounds: first, by offering a methodological framework for adapting the laddering research technique in a mixed-methods vein to SMBCs data in a thread-specific context, by leveraging the analytical capabilities of NVivo CAQDAS software; second, by addressing bottlenecks in the applicability of the proposed methodology in the light of negative brand co-creation.
Keywords: social media, brand communities, laddering technique, brand meaning co-creation, NVivo

The Qualitative Report, 2019

Antinatalism, a relatively recent moral philosophical perspective and ideology that avows “it is ... more 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. The findings from
the analysis of the situated interaction among the NSM’s members demonstrate that collective identity is far
from a knitty-gritty concept, but a dynamic schema that includes a plethora of micro-interactions. Individuals
constantly negotiate its meaning in context, as they seek to streamline the antinatalist system of ideas with
their lifeworld through a web of interlocking schemata, discursive and rhetorical strategies.

Advances in Brand Semiotics and Discourse Analysis , 2023

Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research, 2018

Handbook of Brand Semiotics (ed.) (2015)

Semiotics of Popular Culture, Kassel University Press 2015

Open Semiotics, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2023

Open Semiotics, 2021

Transformations and consequences in society due to covid-19 pandemic. International Academic Conference| AAB College, Pristina, Kosovo, Sep 5 2020., 2020

Journal of Place Branding & Public Diplomacy, 2020

Journal of Destination Marketing & Management (Vol.18, Dec 2020)

International Journal of Marketing Semiotics & Discourse Studies, 2020

Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal (advance online publishing June 2020), 2020

Trauma and Consumption, 2020

International Journal of Marketing Semiotics & Discourse Studies , 2020

Psychology & Marketing

The Qualitative Report, 2019

Marketing Theory, 2018

If this is not blatant theft of 1/10 of the conceptual argumentation presented in my paper "Post-... more If this is not blatant theft of 1/10 of the conceptual argumentation presented in my paper "Post-place Branding as Nomadic Experiencing" then I shall willingly submit to Moloch.

Journal of Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (advance online publishing Jul 2019

Amidst the constantly augmenting gastronomic capital of celebrity chefs, this study scrutinizes f... more Amidst the constantly augmenting gastronomic capital of celebrity chefs, this study scrutinizes from a critical discourse analytic angle how Jamie Oliver has managed to carve a global brand identity through a process that is termed (dis)placed branding. A roadmap is furnished as to how Italy as place brand and Italianness are discursively articulated, (dis)placed and appropriated in Jamie Oliver’s travelogues which are reflected in his global brand identity. By enriching the CDA methodological toolbox with a deconstructive reading strategy, it is shown that Oliver’s celebrity equity ultimately boils down to supplementing the localized meaning of place of origin with a simulacral, hyperreal place of origin. In this manner, the celebrity’s recipes become more original than the original or doubly original. The (dis)placed branding process that is outlined in the face of Oliver’s global branding strategy is critically discussed with reference to the employed discursive strategies, lexicogrammatical and multimodal choices.

International Journal of Marketing Semiotics Vol. VI 2018 (full issue)

International Journal of Marketing Semiotics Vol. VI, 2018, pp. 52-72, 2018

Globalization allegedly constitutes one of the most used and abused concepts in the contemporary ... more Globalization allegedly constitutes one of the most used and abused concepts in the contemporary academic and lay lexicons alike. This chapter pursues a deconstructive avenue for canvassing the semiotic economy of cultural globalization. The variegated ways whereby ideology has been framed in different semiotic perspectives (Peircean, structuralist, post-structuralist, neo-Marxist) are laid out. By engaging with the post-structuralist semiotic terrain, cultural globalization is identified with a transition from Baudrillard's Political Economy of Signs towards a spectral ideology where signs give way to traces of différance. Subsequently, the process whereby globalization materializes is conceived as a social hauntology. In this context, global citizens engage in a constant retracing of the meaning of signs of globalization that crystallize as translocally flowing mediascapes. The propounded thesis is exemplified by recourse to cultural consumption phenomena from the domains of cinematic discourse, food and social gaming.

The introduction opens up with an impressive misuse (mash up, more aptly) of 'semiotic systems' t... more The introduction opens up with an impressive misuse (mash up, more aptly) of 'semiotic systems' that is ascribed to semiotic resources and/or modes. The 'term' is repeated twice in the same passage and recurs consistently throughout the editorial, probably for the sake of confirming Nietszche's term 'history of errors'. Overall, the editors appear to be vaguely and remotely familiar with distinctive semiotic schools of thinking. As a result, they have forgotten a massive stream called visual semiotics which also happens to be represented by the International Association for Visual Semiotic Studies where significant research has been consistently produced prior to the advent of the sociosemiotically inclined 'visual grammar'. As regards social semiotics as the semiotic school that popularized multimodality (without implying that all multimodally oriented analyses and interpretive studies also carry adjacent sociosemiotic conceptual baggage), it is not acknowledged as such, although the adjacent term semiotic resources is used throughout the editorial. This is further compounded by the expressed reluctance by the editors to engage with the definitional polyphony that circumscribes the term multimodality (which is unduly likened to a snake-pit). Although, obviously, multimodality is an overarching theme, the authors refrain from exposing alternative definitions that have been amply offered in the extant literature, save for listing some of the most often used modes in multimodal analyses. They call this un-scholarly 'fleeing' a 'practical solution', although they don't seem to be adopting equally practical solutions when it comes to defining foundational terms such as argumentation. Instead, multimodal argumentation is identified as 'rational' or 'social', which are at least vague and at most vacuous, not to mention that 'rationality' is not quite the province of informal reasoning and argumentation (prior to questioning the meaning of 'rationality', provided that there is merit in doing so outside of a pragmatic communicative framework). But what is even more provoking in this 'take' on multimodality is that whereas the editors recognize that in the majority of instances where multimodality is evoked in scholarly analyses it tends to be confined in verbo-visual modes, quite strikingly (especially as concerns TV advertising discourse) to the exclusion of music, they also focus largely on verbo-visual modes, in utter disregard for music. Furthermore, although I have argued for this elsewhere, it merits repeating that none of the editors (or the contributors in the same respect), apparently due to lack of professional experience, appear to be cognizant of the fact that that the argumentative function of visuals has been customarily taken into consideration by ad agencies since time immemorial. That visuals function argumentatively in advertising discourse and that the verbal is in constant interaction with the visual, to an advertising practitioner or to a marketer amounts to stating the obvious. In this respect, what would be of value in academic analyses is the magnification of the involved processes, rather than the problematization of the argumentative function of visuals. If such a problematization were valid, then it should also apply to verbal discourse in the first place. Does advertising discourse in verbal mode appear in an unadulterated propositional form? Hardly so. Advertising verbal discourse is suffused with rhetorical figures whose formulation and interaction transgress the propositional form.

Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research

Despite Lyotard’s proclaimed end of metanarratives in a post-modern predicament, metanarratives a... more Despite Lyotard’s proclaimed end of metanarratives in a post-modern predicament, metanarratives appear to be making a comeback. This is the case for antinatalism, a relatively recent ideological formation or moral philosophical perspective that has spawned a new
social movement with an active presence in social media. The organizational and structural aspects of NSMs render them amenable to being labeled as ‘post-modern’. In this context, the emergence of ideologies as moral philosophies, such as antinatalism, loom like an outsider, or like a retro fissure in a plastic canvass. The reason is that antinatalism shares the holistic, fundamentalist and totalizing discursive traits of modernist metanarratives that were heralded by Lyotard (1984) as being outmoded in a post-modern condition. Yet, this metanarrative is
also different in fundamental aspects from traditional metanarratives. These aspects pertain to its rhetorical self-reflexivity and to its pre-occupation with rooting the propounded arguments
in empirical particulars, rather than in a metaphysical or transcendentalist realm. This new form of metanarrative I call metametanarrative as it constitutes a philosophical regression, so
to speak, in a pre post-modernist cultural milieu.

Interdiscursive Readings in Cultural Consumer Research

Antinatalism, a relatively recent moral philosophical perspective and ideology that avows ‘it is ... more 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. The findings from the analysis of the situated interaction among the NSM’s members demonstrate that collective identity is far from a knitty-gritty concept, but a dynamic schema that includes a plethora of micro-interactions. Individuals constantly negotiate its meaning in context, as they seek to streamline the antinatalist system of ideas with their lifeworld through a web of interlocking schemata, discursive and rhetorical strategies.

Sign Systems Studies, 2018

This paper aims at unearthing the appeals, the argumentative schemes and the modes of rhetorical ... more This paper aims at unearthing the appeals, the argumentative schemes and the modes of rhetorical configuration that make up the rhetorical structure of the anti-ageing skin care product category’s print advertising discourse. To this end, the pragma-ontological approach is put forward as an offshoot of the pragma-dialectical perspective in rhetorical analysis and criticism. The pragma-ontological approach adds interpretative depth to the overt argumentation structure of anti-ageing products’ ads on the grounds of fundamental ontology/existential phenomenology. The analysis points to three levels where the ads’ arguments function: an overt level and two covert ones. On the overt level the ads function against the background of mixed ethos/pathos/logos appeals that buttress an argumentation scheme from values. On a primary covert level, the ads appear to be functioning through an indirect appeal to fear, while resting on an argumentation scheme from consequences. On a secondary covert level, the ads are shown to be appealing indirectly to ontological angst, while manifesting an argumentation scheme per impossibile. The cultural implications for policy-making are highlighted amidst a predicament where anti-ageing claims are attracting heavy criticism.

Mass shootings constitute a recurrent and most violent phenomenon in the U.S. This paper intends ... more Mass shootings constitute a recurrent and most violent phenomenon in the U.S. This paper intends to break the mould of solipsistically contained, ready-made metanarratives on offer by formal institutions with regard to the psychological antecedents of the perpetrating social actors. Instead, it theorizes mass-shootings as acts of violence that are systemically inscribed in the foundations of communities that are premised on the suppression of murderous impulses. It is argued that the cultural trauma that ensues upon acts of mass shootings, inasmuch as the commemorative events that are performed on regular occasions, constitute re-enactments of the death drive that underpins collective traumatism as an essential condition for the sustenance of communities. The argumentation follows a deconstructive line of reasoning by opening up the notion of violence from empirically identifiable acts to foundational aspects of representation that are part and parcel of what Derrida calls transcendental violence, while engaging critically with institutionally available apologetic discourses which merely attain to obliterate and, hence, to propagate this manifestation of cultural traumatism.