Regimes of meaning and forms of mediation in post-digital marketing strategies

In the short story that, in the Portuguese translation, lends the title of the book — Absolutamente nada e outras histórias (Absolutely nothing and other stories) —, Robert Walser introduces us to a woman who goes into town to buy herself and her husband something good for dinner. But since her head is elsewhere, the woman carefully considers what she could buy that is both special and delicious for herself and her husband, but she cannot decide. She had no lack of good will or good intentions, but with her mind elsewhere she could only browse what to buy and, because of such a difficult choice, she did not buy anything. When she gets home, her husband asks her what she has bought for dinner, and she says that she hasn’t bought anything at all. So, they ate absolutely nothing and were very satisfied, as it was extraordinarily delicious. And they contented themselves with absolutely nothing, although it is likely that many other things would please them more than absolutely nothing. Although this tale of the German-speaking Swiss was written at the beginning of the 20th century, therefore before the consolidation of marketing as a guiding mechanism for capitalist companies and even before the full structuring of the mass market, it already presents consumption as a practice that follows modern life almost structurally. It is true that, in Walser’s narratives, social customs, hu- man dreams and relationships are relegated to a smaller category, to an almost unimportance, but the purchasing process is presented by him as a complex exercise, which demands a competence whose modal structure of wanting and having to get something good for dinner is conditioned to a type of knowledge that requires full dedication and exclusive attention — and that does not allow the train of thought to vanish in a direction other than absolute devotion to the act of consuming.