The women’s magazine operates as a model of bio-power through manufactured double binds.

Evidence

It is bio-control and the model for that is the women’s magazine. It is about reducing a certain anxiety. It is not about saying you must do this one thing. It is about on one page Geri Halliwell is happy with her curves. The next month she is feeling much better because she has lost weight. You get these double binds being issued all the time by these magazines. The function of which is to destabilise and keep people in a state of anxiety and also add on solutions to every problem which is always that a consumer object will resolve this for you. Dieting is bio-power, a form of body control. What we have got with this digital culture now is this weird thing of hyperordinariness. You have got people who are done up to the nines but it isn’t like David Bowie where you are playing with some abstract aestheticisation. We have got people who have this uber ordinariness — it is a normative model: perfect teeth, right skin tone. An utterly conservative artificiality. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2248

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the magazine regime as bio-power and names the digital successor phenomenon ‘hyperordinariness’ — a stylized, normative artificiality with no play.
• DEEPTHINKING: Extends the double-bind insight beyond dieting to a whole cultural logic of destabilization-plus-consumer-solution, anticipating Instagram-era beauty normativity.
• XREF: connects to: Women’s magazines issue shifting double binds that destabilise readers into anxiety

Broader Connections

• Women’s magazines issue shifting double binds that destabilise readers into anxiety #expands (0.90)