Hi, I’m Florencia Lujani and this is a new edition of Cultural Patterns, a newsletter on brands, culture and strategy. My posting schedule is a bit random at the moment, so if this is the first email you receive from me, welcome! Feel free to reply to this email and get in touch, I’m keen to hear your thoughts. Florencia x
I started this newsletter a year ago and oh, boy things have ~changed~. The first edition went out the same week I started a Master’s degree in Cultural and Critical Studies. This newsletter was born as a place for me to apply all the interesting questions and analysis from cultural studies to brands and creativity, and long-time subscribers will remember when it used to be published *weekly*. That seems crazy to me now but back then I wasn’t feeling a sense of impending doom (I’m fine, btw) Say ‘👋 Aye’ if you’ve felt the same.
Even though I would’ve liked to be much more prolific with my writing (the cultural changes in the past six months are enough material for years of writing), that didn’t happen. Instead of trying to process everything quickly and jump into conclusions every week, I’ve decided to just sit with it and take it all in. Then last week in a lecture I learnt about the work of Timothy Morton and the concept of ‘Hyperobjects’, which helped me a understand a little bit more about why I’d been feeling that way.
‘Hyperobjects’ are objects so large and encompassing, they’re distributed in time and space and transcend localisation.
These entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue—hyperobjects seem to force something on us, something that affects some core ideas of what it means to exist, what Earth is, what society is. Hyperobjects makes us realise that humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured. (p.20)
It occurred to me that this is a year of three pandemics: covid-19, racism and the climate emergency. These are all hyperobjects: they’ve had a significant impact on human social and psychic space, they’re global, they defy time, and their precise scope remains uncertain while their reality is verified beyond question.
Hyperobjects act a little bit like the gigantic boot at the end of the Monty Python credits, they are symptoms of a fundamental shaking of being, a being-quake. The ground of being is shaken. There we were, trolling along in the age of industry, capitalism, and technology, and all of a sudden we receive information that even the most hardheaded could not ignore. (p.23)
In the book, Morton says that ‘what we desperately need is an appropriate level of shock and anxiety’. I think we had that this year, at least I’ve had that in my personal life. The Black Lives Matter movement continued to grow its cultural power, winning more allies than ever and reminding us that after 400 or 500 years of racism ‘The past is alive, even if transformed, in the present’. Covid-19 slapped us in the face to reevaluate what we deem essential and the climate emergency welcomed the year as if it was asking us ‘Do you see me NOW?’.
Some events are for action, some others are for reflection. Sometimes these emails might have been a bit random, but they were coming from a genuine place and looking for conversation and connection. A year later, impostor syndrome and all, I’m still trying and you’re still here, so for that … ❤️my gratitude to you 💕 I’m excited to see what the next year will bring.
Thank you for reading. Here’s to another year! Hit reply to get in touch or say hi on Twitter / Linkedin :) Until next time
If this the first email you’ve received from me, here are some other articles you might like:
#28 Relaunching Brands with a Cultural lens
#26 Building Global Brands, One Market at a Time
#18 How to Identify Cultural Patterns and Improve your Strategic Thinking
See you next time.
Florencia x