The “Green Consumption” and the Rhizomatic Capital Strategy: Ads and Reports in the Brazilian Media

Abstract

The purpose of this essay, whose theoretical bases are inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is to investigate the relationship between consumption, subjectivity, capital and nature, in the context of the world society of control, the production of the “green” consumption market in Brazil and the representation of the “human having” as an identity proposition, which is revealed through “subjectivity kits” in this market. The research is exploratory, qualitative and theoretical-empirical, carried out through bibliographical (books and authors that dialogue with the subject investigated) and documentary techniques (selected ads and reports in searched journals). Through the conception of the rhizomatic capitalism, the above mentioned relationships are, in principle, articulated within a logic capable of reflecting the “liquefaction” of the concept of sustainability in contemporary times. Thus, the perspective of the theme of “liquid sustainability” (through the concept of “capitalistic culture”) sets up the production of new ways of being (prêt-à-porter identities), the capture of new desires and the creation of new devices of social control, in which all the social actors that are involved in its production participate (and empower) in the ideation of an Ecopower. In particular, the companies and the media, which publicizes and “produtilizes” the nature, are liquefied as a consumer brand and aestheticized with authenticity features on the market, as a brand and marketing modeling of the consumption of appearances, a true simulacrum with speeches of green washing, social washing or green social washing. Through different aesthetic movements of agency, the market of “green consumption” is conceived as a brand that semiotizes and influences the production of subjectivity. An unbearable lightness of having and the “subjectivity kits”—everlasting—that stick, peel off and contradict each other, fed back through the strategic fluidity of the rhizomatic capital in the Brazilian market.

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