Kinetic intensities and moral registers of pandemic place branding

Abstract

Emblematic of late capitalist modes of value creation, place branding draws on semiotic processes as well as on affective mobilization both to structure the representation and fruition of specific locales and to produce publics. Such governmental projects of people and places, however, are always open to possible acts of recontextualization. This article discusses the complex forms of social and semiotic regimentation (and subversion) underlying place-branding projects by exploring two social media campaigns that involved the city of Milan during two key moments of the Covid-19 outbreak. Revolving around different moral discourses of speed, both campaigns resulted in a partial or failed uptake. The initial (February 2020) celebration of fast-paced metropolitan work ethics evoked by #MilanoNonSiFerma (‘Milan doesn’t stop’) – a marketing and political faux pas – was followed (in May 2020) by a reparatory campaign #UnPassoAllaVolta (‘One step at a time’), aimed at endorsing the meditative quality of slow temporality. These morally inflected shifts in kinetic intensity materialized alternative forms of ethical sociality and disciplinary practices, showing how the semiotic regimentation of affects through moral registers and chronotopic formulations plays a key role within the fusion of media and capital characteristic of our post-Fordist present.