SUPERCAPITALISM!!!, or, Why the Man of Steel Gets To Kill Babies

Superman/Clark Kent/Kal-El, played by Henry Cavill in Snyder’s Man of Steel, standing in front of an American flag mural in, like, a totally weird coincidence.

To say Superman is an icon of the American identity is a little bit like saying Jesus is an icon of Christianity or Jerry Seinfeld is an icon of Seinfeld. The Last Son of Krypton has been flying around and punching things in the name of truth, justice, and the American way ever since his birth in 1938. He’s fought Nazis, Communists, aliens, evil corporations, and basically anything that threatens the American subjugation of every global terrain into one enormous liberal capitalist order world peace; you can bet that, if it weren’t so gosh-derned politically incorrect, he’d be pummeling Mexican immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and those pesky cyberspies from the People’s Liberation Army of China, all before breakfast. He’d probably even go locate and pick up and/or airstrike Edward Snowden for us if Obama just dropped him a line.

Plus, if none of that’s making any sense, there’s this:

The “Soldier of Steel” ad series, which includes catchy and so-totally-not-militaristic slogans like “Two American icons who put on the uniform when duty calls” and “One American icon inspires another,” is only a small part of Warner Bros. immense promotional campaign surrounding director Zack Snyder’s and producer Christopher Nolan’s Man of Steel, which reached $125 million domestically on opening weekend (despite middling reviews). Warner Bros. has spent something like $160 million in product placement and tie-ins for the film (more than the notorious Lorax), making it “the most Madison Avenue-friendly film of the summer”; partners include Chrysler, Sears, Kellogg Co., Nokia, Hershey’s, Wal-Mart, and (entertainingly) Gillette, which has raised the extremely reasonable question, “How does Superman shave?” (His stubble should, in theory, be indestructible…)

Suffice it to say that, even today, the Man of Tomorrow seems to be defender par excellence of good old homegrown American capitalism, thank you very much. Which is why the New Yorker’s Richard Brody can get away with bourgeois affectations about the “primordial simplicity, purity, and clarity” of Superman’s moral mythos, and it’s also why the Economist‘s rosy piece on Man of Steel would have us think that in an age of “complicated patriotism” (an ideological Band-Aid if there every was one), Superman’s all about “assuag[ing] some of America’s deepest anxieties” and “keeping faith with the American way.” And indeed, the film’s Superman tells Lois Lane (Amy Adams) that on his home planet, the strange S-like symbol on his costume traditional cultural attire means “hope.”

Economist blogger Lexington calls Man of Steel “a fine movie for an anxious America.” (Image from the Economist)

But the modernist vision of Superman as a bright beacon of hope in American values may no longer be adequate in this day and age — neither for liberals¹ (like that Economist writer) who would canonize him as individualist saint nor for a Left that would criticize him as a fetish of American exceptionalism. After all, in the age of global capital, America is slipping, and it may soon lose the reins of the monstrous system of economic exploitation, political subjection, and social oppression that it has midwived, howling and retching, into existence. (The historians may say that by now it already had.)

No, we’ve got a new Superman on our hands, a postmodern Superman that stands for something more than the old American way. Our Man of Steel is a spirit of what Marxist theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called Empire — a new political formation, they argue, that has arisen to replace the nation-state in the wake of the global flow of bodies, information, and capital. And with his old-fashioned sense of justice and his even-older-fashioned fists, this Superman exhibits one of the most dangerous and destructive new qualities of Empire: a state of continual police intervention.

So first, a quick fly-by of Empire. Hardt and Negri argue that we are not “under” Empire — we are “in” it. The old vertical, one-way model of imperialism (think Family, Church, and State) has given way to a new decentralized, horizontal kind of power they call Empire:

In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barrier . . . Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.²

The postmodern Man of Steel looking steely on the cover of British film magazine Empire.

Instead of being isolated links in a local chain of command (children obey moms, wives obey husbands, workers obey bosses), we are connected to a global multitude: we phone, text, chat, blog, share, post, email, Tweet, Skype; we wear clothing grown in one country, sewed in a second, printed in a third, sold in a fourth; we have new identities (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, brand loyalty) that gerrymander their way around the planet — as do sprawling transnational corporations that are becoming more important than the nations they span. In Empire, life is rapid, multiple, and hybrid, and we’re moving from a world of nation-states to World, Inc. (Which is also the title of a cheery 2007 book by corporate consultant Bruce Piasecki about how “businesses are now more powerful than government.”)

Man of Steel is an unwitting witness to the dawn of Empire — beginning with the fall of imperialism. (A quick summary of the movie is below.³) The film’s Krypton is an image of imperial Europe: social roles are genetically preprogrammed, there’s an aristocratic preoccupation with houses, crests, and noble bloodlines (the “S” symbol is the crest of the House of El), and the now-decadent Kryptonians once commanded a vast interstellar colonial empire. There are also strains of  industrial America — the New York Times compared the backstory scene to “an animated version of a W.P.A. bas-relief mural.” Krypton is the Old World (in more senses than one), a pre-WWII European/American landscape of cutthroat expansion, rapid industrialization, and colonial power, having destabilized its own core in its ruthless search for more resources.

Industrial warlord and Euro-American colonizer extraordinaire General Zod (Michael Shannon), posing for film mag Empire.

But Krypton’s immolation in the forges of its own conquest is only the first death that Euro-American power will die in Man of Steel. Kryptonian imperalism lives on through General Zod and his band of exiles: Zod’s obsession with master bloodlines and threats of human genocide place him squarely in the villains-who-are-supposed-to-remind-us-of-Hitler box, and the Kryptonian practice of assigning strict social roles before birth has undertones of the old Communist bogeyman — the Economist article even called Zod and his troops “ruthless, pre-programmed, collectivist super-competitors.” (I’m assuming that for the Economist, “collectivist” is an insult.) Parroting a militaristic imperialist Western ideology that we’ve all sworn to forget, Zod is a fetish of everything we used to be (or we hope we used to be), safely shed onto an alien (literally) who isn’t “like us.”

And this is where Superman first demonstrates his allegiance to Empire: he intervenes. Empire sustains itself on interventions — not external restrictions or rigid prohibitions, but internal regulations and careful equilibria. There is no absolute king, dictator, or president in Empire; instead, like any good corporation, Empire is self-policing. Hardt and Negri write that even as Empire “casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order,” it also “deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.”⁴ While General Zod and his “new barbarians” — who are actually civilized members of a bygone order — bring a savage, warmongering violence to Earth, Superman’s violence is at worst an exception, a last resort, and an unfortunate necessity — and at best an admirable self-sacrifice. Zod makes war, but Superman makes peace; where Zod wages chemical warfare, Superman administers chemotherapy.

The trick, of course (and this is where the babies come in), is that Empire is a “state of permanent exception and police action.”⁵ The entire second act of Man of Steel is full of good ol’ super-punches, but the film never ceases to remind us what a kind, soft-spoken and peaceful gentle giant Superman is. Even when killing babies. It’s a subject of some controversy and ambiguity, but the Last Son of Krypton appears to live up to his epithet when he destroys an ancient Kryptonian colonial vessel full of unborn fetuses with whom Zod hopes to restart the Kryptonian race. Piloting the ship, Zod protests that the wee colony is Krypton’s last hope, to which Superman grittily responds, “Krypton had its chance,” smashing the vessel into the wreckage of an evacuated Metropolis.

The point is not “whether or not” Superman has “actually” committed a racist atrocity here: the point is that, as a macro version of the officers who kept the peace with bludgeons and pepper spray at Occupy Wall Street, the Man of Steel has carte blanche to maintain a peaceful, thriving world order by policing the globe with whatever kind of nongovernmental humanitarian violence is necessary — even if that should happen to include minor acts of genocide. (Which are not without analogue in the “real world.”) This is all possible, of course, only under the auspices of Empire: those who cling to the old imperial, colonial, or nationalistic models of human life out of which Empire itself was born will be among the “policed” (Islamic “extremists”, Chinese Communists) or “aided” — as NGOs, “some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order,”⁶ are aiding “backwards” African tribes in “corrupt” African nations.

It’s funny ‘cuz one American icon could kick the other’s ass. 

Thus the morally bankrupt Zod, a genocidal caricature of imperialist America itself, is shown no mercy: after an enormously destructive punching battle through the city (it turns out that on Earth, Zod is super too), the Man of Steel, out of options for saving the populace, is forced to snap the imperialist’s neck, falling to his knees in exhaustion and anguish. Superman has killed the old America — and we citizens of Empire erupt in applause.

The film concludes some time after Zod’s defeat, when Superman has struck down a drone he caught trying to find the Fortress of Solitude (his secret hideout). “I’m here to help,” he tells an exasperated American military officer, “but on my terms.” When the officer questions his loyalty, Supes replies: “I grew up in Kansas. I’m about as American as it gets.” The scene may look like a pointed critique of the Obama administration’s controversial use of drone strikes in Pakistan (good ol’ Hollywood muckraking, alive and well!), but we’re missing something if we don’t notice that it’s the Man of Steel who’s a thousand times more dangerous than any drone strike, and he’s bound by no law but his own — and so are we.

The scene’s there almost as if Zack Snyder and the folks over at Warner Bros. know that there’s something radically un-American about their film, as hard as they’re trying with the “Soldier of Steel” campaign to evoke images of American power. Not because Superman is Chinese or Russian (as in the 2003 comic book mini-series Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar, which answered the question, “What if Kal-El had landed in Soviet Russia?”), but because the Man of Steel is a rogue supranational force flying high above national boundaries, borne on the accelerating global flows of capital, information, affects, and human bodies. Man of Steel is categorically not, as our dear Economist suggests, a “paean to immigrant success” in America; Superman is rather a “specter of migration,”⁷ of the growing groundlessness of human life on our planet and the universal corporatization of the globe. Superman will soon be no more American than McDonald’s is your friendly neighborhood burger joint.

This new Superman does retain, for the moment, some shreds of Americana, and the “S” really does stand for “hope” — but hope for Empire and the complex exploitative machines of global capitalism, not for “America” (and good riddance). He may have been a Kansas boy, but what this Man of Steel signifies is that it is only a matter of time until America goes the way of the old Greek Titans and is slaughtered by its own children.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane… No, it’s SUPERCAPITALISM!!!

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1And by “liberals” (as opposed to “the Left”), I mean more or less the entire political spectrum in America, at least insofar as Democrats and Republicans alike remain committed to liberalist notions of individual liberties, individual rights, personal identity, free will, rationalism, overlapping consensus, private property, the social contract, the free market (regulated or not), and the essential superiority of capital. Two wrongs may indeed may a Right, but two liberals certainly don’t make a Left.
² Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, pp. xii-xiii.
³On the planet Krypton, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) launches his infant son Kal-El into space en route to Earth just before Krypton collapses due to instability in its core brought on by the aggressive extraction of resources. Kal-El is found by a Kansas couple (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) and raised as Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) on Earth, where radiation from our yellow sun grants him extraordinary abilities, including super strength, laser vision, X-ray vision, super hearing, indestructibility, and supersonic flight. At the Jesus-like age of 33, after visiting a 20,000-year-old colonial Kryptonian vessel buried beneath the ice caps (complete with a chamber full of Kryptonian test tube babies), Kal-El is visited by his father’s consciousness (uploaded onto the ship’s mainframe), which explains his Kryptonian origins and gives him the cape and tights. Soon the Earth falls under attack from General Zod (Michael Shannon), Krypton’s exiled military leader, who believes that Kal-El holds the key to rebuilding Kryptonian civilization (which is true, because Jor-El stole Krypton’s genetic registry and imprinted it in his son’s cells just before sending him to Earth). And so Kal-El, dubbed “Superman” by the American media and assisted (mostly pitifully) by the U.S. military, saves the world from the alien invaders, sending them back into the Phantom Zone (space jail) with the exception of Zod, whose neck he is forced to snap only after an enormous punch battle proves ineffective. And yes, Superman catches Lois Lane (Amy Adams), the hardboiled, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist for the Daily Planet who is also famous for falling off of stuff.
⁴Hardt and Negri, op. cit., p. 20.
⁵Ibid., p. 38.
⁶Ibid., p. 36.
⁷Ibid., p. 213.

“Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”: Pretty Little Liars & the Feminine, Pt. 1: sexuAlized immAture hysteric-pArAnoiAcs

The “pretty” “little” “liars”: from left to right, Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), Hanna Marin (Ashley Benson), Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale), and Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario).

So I’ve become fascinated by Pretty Little Liars. ABC Family’s hit mystery/thriller teenage drama is flying high right now: about 3 million people tuned in for the fourth season premiere on June 11, and two days ago the second episode ranked as TV’s #1 Scripted Telecast in Women 18-34 and Key 12-34. The show’s also got a massive social media following, with 10 million likes on Facebook and over a million followers on Twitter, plus millions more when you factor in the Twitter handles of the show’s stars. And by now, this kind of popularity isn’t unexpected for Pretty Little Liars: the show had already been picked up for a fifth season before shooting for the fourth was even finished.

But it’s not just the show’s popularity that’s intriguing to me: despite (and because of) its poppy-cum-melodramatic texture, Pretty Little Liars is a polymorphic nexus of different and diverging images of women in American culture. Now I’ve never watched a full episode of Pretty Little Liars, and I can’t claim to have any deep familiarity with its specific aesthetics beyond what I’ve gleaned from clips, summaries, and a few experiences being in the same room while my sister and cousin were watching it. Nevertheless I want to sketch out here, in broader terms, a few of the feminist readings that emerge out of the show for me, especially because the sheer polysemy of the show’s representation of women really strikes at the tensions (both restrictive and productive, within and without feminism) that are indexed by the question, What is the feminine?

First a brief overview for those unfamiliar with the show (minor spoilers): In an affluent Pennsylvania town, a year after the mysterious disappearance of their “Queen Bee” Alison DiLaurentis, a clique of four secretive WASPy high-school girls (played by actresses in their mid- to late twenties) are stalked, manipulated, and tormented by a mysterious “A” whose motives are unclear but nefarious. In fact, as the show develops, we find out there’s a whole “A” Team led by “Red Coat,” a shrouded red lady who may actually be the girls’ not-so-deceased friend Alison (or at least looks a whole lot like her). The show follows these “pretty little liars” as they struggle to survive high-school, dating, and the apparently intricate network of bourgeois terrorists out to ruin their lives.

Sigmund Freud (left), “father” of psychoanalysis, theorized all desire as masculine, writing that “the little girl is a little man,” desiring a husband/son to satisfy her lack of a penis (“penis envy”); Jacques Lacan (right) revolutionized psychoanalysis in the 60s and 70s by focusing on the “Symbolic order” of (still masculine) desire, where man desires to possess the Phallus (the sign of the paternal law) by possessing the feminine Other.

I take it as obvious that a show like Pretty Little Liars would never exist if the main characters were teenage boys, or at least that such a show would never get picked up by a major T.V. network. The reason for this is built into the show’s title: the intense mythic resonances among the three terms pretty, little, and liars. As Simone de Beauvoir notes in The Second Sex, “a number of incompatible myths exist” under the sign of the “Eternal Feminine,” and as a result “it will be said sometimes that the Mother equals Life, sometimes that the Mother equals Death, that every virgin is pure in spirit or flesh dedicated to the devil.”¹ These myths of the feminine include, in no particular order: beauty as seduction, beauty as deception; female sexuality as false, promiscuous, duplicitous; female desire as empty, parasitic, even nonexistent; the feminine as mystic, beyond understanding, sublime, as a goddess or sphinx; woman (Eve) as the first lied-to (too trusting) and the first liar (untrustworthy); the female body as small, diminished, unstable; the female libido as a lie, the clitoris as a diminished penis (Freud) — psychoanalysis and its legacies in psychology, literature, and pop culture can take credit here — the vagina as unknown, unknowable, unstable, unreal, as absence, as abscess, as the original/originary no-thing…

We could go on ad nauseam (nausea itself being feminine) — and all that’s even before we take into account the heavy-handed allusions to The Scarlet Letter and all of the imagery that evokes. (The show’s really enamored of the whole “A” motif; the second and third season finale’s titles are “unmAsked” and “A dAngerous gAme,” and one can find droves of stylized mAteriAl mAde by fAns.) The point is that Pretty Little Liars isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. That notorious sexist-but-also-maybe-occasionally-feminist? Friedrich Nietzsche is continually linking femininity with superficiality, instability, and deception — and yet also, in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, with “truth”:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. ²

Nietzsche’s playing on dangerous ground here: on the one hand, he’s dipping into thousands of years of sexist imagery (malevolent and benevolent), setting up Truth as the elusive, attractive woman-object just waiting to be dominated by a masculine, phallocratic will to power³; but on the other, it is the “dogmatists” whom Nietzsche attacks — for Nietzsche, these are the Platonists, the Christians, the scientists, the rationalists, and especially the liberals — precisely for presuming (and failing) to define woman-truth, to set up woman-truth as an Object: both an idea to be logically categorized and a commodity to be consumed.

And it’s just along these lines — woman as object and woman as that-which-cannot-be-objectified — that a feminist reading of Pretty Little Liars splits into (at least) two. So again, we should ask: “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?”

A message from “A” — in lipstick.

The first reading is perhaps the more apparent. The show is, even from a cursory viewing, a shameless melodrama, complete with pregnant pauses, baleful foreshadows, and ominous musical cues. The “pretty” “little” “liars” themselves are the same familiar images from our culture’s phallic menagerie: gorgeous young (mostly) white bourgeois females attending what must be the most attractive high-school in America. (Emily, played by Filipino/Irish actress Shannon Mitchell, is lesbian — perhaps a commendable splash of “diversity”? — but then again, she’s also the athlete…)

In this reading, woman is object — hysteric-paranoiac object. These are stereotypes, pure and simple: prefab, Easy-Bake fetishes of irrational duplicitous femininity, manipulative and untrustworthy at one turn, helpless and naïve at the next. The girls meet in secret, snoop around at night, conceal themselves from each other and from adults; plot twists follow reversals follow betrayals; secrets once thought sustainable deepen, multiply, come to control their keepers; and no one and nothing is to be trusted, not even one’s own senses, one’s own body (“A” once tries to drive Hanna back to bulimia). The tropes are obvious: What’s remarkable is just how little pretense the show’s producers have made about this. The show’s description on the ABC Family website: the “ugliest” secrets belong to “the prettiest girls in town,” and their “darkest secrets are about to unravel.” The narrative properly finds its drive not in secrecy but in unraveling: the exposure of the ancient feminine lie and the disastrous consequences that ensue. (Garden of Eden, anyone?)

The brilliant trick here in this first reading — the pretty little lie — is that this fetishist portrait of hysteric femininity acknowledges and justifies itself with the presence of “A” (and later the “A” Team) as an external force of torment and mystery. “No, these aren’t irrational women,” the producers and writers protest, “These are just ordinary girls trying to make things work out in the face of extraordinary danger — and get dates to the prom!” The irrational feminine is just an exception — all women aren’t like that, right? Of course this is nonsense to us, unless someone wants to defend the claim that more or less every representation of women since the beginning of television has been an exception to the rule. But the trick is cunning, nonetheless: the girls are cast as detectives, essentially rational at heart, for whom irrationality is merely an object of investigation — only the difference between them and the cast of Law and Order: SUV or CSI: Miami is that the “pretty” “little” “liars” actually embody the scene of their own crime, as “rational” investigators of their own irrationality.

It’s funny because bitches be crazy.

So this is our first reading: woman as object, woman’s essence as irrational — just waiting to be mastered and redeemed by some phallocratic force of truth (as in Nietzsche-the-sexist). Here the menace of “A” is imaginary, a hysterical-paranoid fantasy of the drama queen: after all, we know that “real” “girls” worry about school, clothes, and boys as if they were engaged in clandestine operations against an anonymous terrorist organization.

But we should (much like our protagonists) be cautious of having found an “answer.” There are serious structural risks in this first interpretation, especially when one gets the impulse to “fix” a show like Pretty Little Liars. The typical liberal response to sexist representations of women in the media is reform: make the women in question “realer,” “stronger,” more independent,  less bitchy, less crazy, etc.

And there’s merit in that response. American pop culture is full enough of crazy, bitchy women as it is (here’s lookin’ at you, Homeland), and that’s if they’re lucky enough to get a T.V. show or film about them in the first place. Linda Holmes, who runs NPR’s pop culture and entertainment blog Monkey See, wrote an excellent piece last Friday calculating that 90 percent of the films available on that day in her area (metropolitan DC) were about men:

Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.

The point is well-made: women are either arm candy, fuck toys, controlling moms, dead prostitutes — or they’re absent altogether.  Simone de Beauvoir thought that since “in pure subjectivity, the human being is not anything” but rather “is to be measured by his acts,” and since women are not permitted to participate in public life except as objects, the Feminine Mystery really just represents the enormous void of woman’s forced inactivity. Thus, for Beauvoir, let women act alongside men, let women be transcendent subjects instead of objects, and the Feminine Mystery will dissipate.⁴ The success of movies like Bridesmaids and Pitch Perfect seem to indicate that, indeed, there is an audience for films about women who act (pun!), which means that, as Jezebel blogger Madeleine Davies writes about Holmes’ piece, studio execs aren’t just failing us: “They’re failing capitalism!”

“Capitalism conserves shit” (credit: atari_elle)

But there’s the rub, because if we work that phrase in reverse, we might find that making more movies about women, making stronger women characters in film and television, “fixing” the kind of feminine mystique encasing shows like Pretty Little Liars — which is all to say, rationalizing woman into some kind of autonomous, transcendent subject — all that might actually be good for capitalism. Capitalism’s forte, after all, is the miracle of the loaves and fish, but perverted: capitalism feeds one hungry person and creates five thousand starving. As Guy Debord writes, in the “permanent opium war” of advanced capitalism, even survival is just another commodity, and “[c]onsumable survival must constantly expand.”⁵ And what better place to expand to than the untapped resources of female subjects, who make rational consumer choices, participate rationally in production, legitimate a rational state, and educate their children to rationally do the same — that is, female subjects who behave “like men”?

Of course bourgeois rationalist feminism has had its successes: the benefits of the entry of women into the workforce, the government, and the marketplace (as producers and consumers instead of products) have been many. But the point is that to escape from irrationality into rationality isn’t really much of an escape in the end: it’s reform, not revolution, and it’s not going to end patriachy. To “fix” the representation of women in Pretty Little Liars — keep the suspense, ditch the stereotypes — wouldn’t really fix anything, because we’d be stopping short of interrogating the whole concept of “representing” something in the first place, privileging what a representation “means” over how it functions: socially, politically, economically.

So while we can condemn the images of the irrational, hysteric-paranoiac feminine in Pretty Little Liars all we like, we can’t just turn blindly back to “reason” and the “subject” — they may be too poisoned by capitalism and patriarchy to be worth salvaging. So maybe there’s a third option, somewhere outside the matrix of reason/unreason — what Deleuze and Guattari call a ligne de fuite⁶, a line of flight that escapes from the territory of reason altogether towards something new and still without form.

And perhaps our second reading of Pretty Little Liars will give us a glimpse of it…

(Stay tuned for Pretty Little Liars & the Feminine, Part 2: incendiAry clAndestine provocAteurs!)

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¹Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, p. 260-1.
²Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, p. 2.
³It is an infuriating and shameful fact that so much of the dominant (white bourgeois male) scholarship on Nietzsche (including leftists like Deleuze) either quietly ignores the blatant sexism of Nietzsche’s work or embarrassingly attempts to craft mincing apologies of Nietzsche’s thoughts on women (especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) by invoking pitiful and patriarchal images of love and romance. Laurence Lampert’s unbearable book Nietzsche’s Teaching offers a facile analytic reading of Zarathustra that concludes with a rhapsodic and sexist valorization of Zarathustra’s “marriage” to Life — personified as a wild, inconstant woman whose reluctance is the very sign of her eroticism (“no means yes”) and whom the phallic prophet accordingly subordinates with his whip.
⁴Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 264.
⁵Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb.
⁶Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi, p. 9.

Advertising, Freedom, & Political Practice

I recently strolled into a hip little pizza place — “Slice” — in New Orleans. It’s a pleasant joint, but, like most restaurants bearing monosyllabic titles (“Spoon,” “Sprig,” “Salt,” etc.), it’s the kind of place where the walls are a patchwork of exposed brick and unfinished wood and everything comes with goat cheese. When I arrived at “Slice,” eagerly awaiting a pie that would surely come with caramelized onions or some other artfully burnt legume, the server asked if I would like a drink. “Yes, I would,” I replied, and promptly ordered a Coke.

I never drink Coke. Before this moment, I hadn’t willfully consumed a (non-beer) carbonated beverage in years, but there I was, slurping down a liquid the color and toxicity of the nearby Mississippi River. As I quaffed the syrupy fluid and munched on my artisan pizza (there were indeed caramelized onions), I wracked my brain, trying to figure out what could have forced the word “Coke” out of my mouth. After several bites and many sips, I remembered, somewhat horrified, that I had seen an advertisement for Coke earlier that day, as I had driven along Interstate 10 through downtown New Orleans. I don’t remember what the ad said; I only remember being hot, thirsty, and almost cruelly tantalized by the droplets of condensation running down a 15-foot tall glass bottle of Coca-Cola.

Coke ad (photo credit: ianturton)

We encounter advertising daily, and, compared to the scarily sophisticated targeted marketing tactics deployed by facebook and other major corporations, the ad that duped me was extremely primitive. It worked nonetheless, reminding me that, although we often imagine ourselves free to choose certain goods and services over others, the choices we make — not only about what and how we consume, but also about how we live our lives — are severely constrained by innumerable, interpenetrating, and compounding factors, most of which reside firmly outside of our control. Although we may always already be without genuine agency, targeted manipulation tactics like those employed by advertisements conspire to strip from us any scraps of free will we may have salvaged from the junkyard of determinism.

Scholars have filled volumes with the case against free will. But, because this is a blog and pith is paramount, I will limit myself to a short discussion of Raymond Williams’s theory of advertising and attempt to illustrate how marketing erodes our, perhaps illusory, freedom.

I will note that, while I am certainly concerned with free will as a philosophical problem, I am more interested here in determining how, in any given situation, advertising limits our ability to evaluate a specific set of options with reference to certain criteria. I am presupposing that agency is not absolute, but instead exists on a continuum — that we can have more or less of it depending on the type and force of the constraints on our will. Let’s suppose I am someone who values my health. (Bracket, for now, all of the genetic and environmental factors that have made me a health-conscious person.) I will, as a healthy person, evaluate my beverage choices with reference to their healthiness and select the beverage that best satisfies that criterion. Certain constraints can limit my ability to make that evaluation. It is with these constrains that I take issue.

Suggesting that agency is not an absolute is a tendentious claim, but it is (a) one maintained, both directly and indirectly, by a sizeable clutch of thinkers, including Raymond Williams and (b) a claim we in fact must make if we hope to make normative pronouncements. After all, if we aren’t free, why waste our time thinking about how we ought to behave?

Raymond Williams (photo credit: Wikipedia)

Raymond Williams, in his brilliant and accessible essay “Advertising: the Magic System,” traces the history of modern advertising from the huckstery of 17th century England all the way to the highly refined marketing techniques of the modern era. For Williams, advertising as we know it emerged in the decades before and during the First World War, when it abandoned more or less straightforward inducements to buy — emphasizing a product’s positive qualities and drawing relatively simple associations between a commodity and desirable emotions or states of mind — and embraced an increasingly sophisticated understanding of human psychology and social relationships to apply more precise pressure on shoppers as they browsed newspapers and storefronts. This new form of advertising, aimed not at convincing but at subtly coercing, made a qualitative leap from encouragement to manipulation, and Williams contends that advertising, armed with new, potent, and dangerously effective marketing tactics, evolved, at that moment, into a tool for social organization.

“The need to control nominally free men, like the need to control nominally free customers,” Williams observes, “lay very deep in the new kind of society.”^[1]

The “new kind of society” to which Williams refers is that brand of bourgeois social organization exemplified by the United States and Western Europe: a liberal (ostensibly democratic) society governed systems of exchange for which “the maintenance of the economic system becomes the main factual purpose of all social activity.” For these societies, in which citizens are “nominally free” and yet must be constantly cornered and cowed, prodded and hoodwinked into reproducing the dominant system of exchange and production, advertising represents a nearly ideal form of social control. Advertisements present the illusion of choice — producers do not, after all, “force” individuals to buy the goods they peddle — while numbing our faculties of reason and limiting our already severely constrained ability to choose one thing over another.

According to Williams, advertising coaxes us into purchasing certain products by convincing us that a certain product — let’s say Coke — will increase our “utility” (to use the painfully vague term employed by economists). However, it does so not through good-faith persuasion (the possibility of which is itself dubious), but by drawing an illusory causal relationship between Coke and some kind of higher-order good (for Coke, usually, “enjoyment”). These higher order goods generally fall into the categories of pleasure, personality, and power, such that advertising associates products with a positive emotion or state of mind — coke/enjoyment; an identity that a consumer desires or imagines she already has — hemp shirts/environmentally conscious; or status and influence — rolex/wealth.

Raymond Williams discusses the power of advertising in terms of magic:

If the consumption of individual goods leaves that whole area of human need unsatisfied, the attempt is made, by magic, to associate this consumption with human desires to which it has no real reference. You do not only buy an object: you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, power to control your environment. The magic obscures the real sources of general satisfaction because their discovery would involve radical change in the whole common way of life. ^[2]

I will note here that a number of Marxist theorists, including radical geographer David Harvey*, contend that advertising is a product of capitalism’s incessant need to expand. According to Harvey, the expansionary tendency of capitalist accumulation creates periodic crises in which rapid growth in production saturates the market, shrinking profits. Harvey suggests that, in addition to expanding geographically, producers can solve the waning demand for existing goods by “creating new social wants needs” [3]. Although neither Williams nor Harvey link capitalism’s need to create new “wants and needs” with advertising’s “magic,” it seems likely to me that advertising aims to sell intangible (and, in some ways, almost essential) goods like identity and “social respect” because there is no limit to the quantity of those goods consumable by any one individual. I can have a sufficient number of shirts to clothe me, but I can never have enough respect or confirmation that I am a hip person. Given the effectively inexhaustible demand for these immaterial goods, advertising’s “magic” offers producers a way to avoid constantly “creating new social wants and needs” by allowing them simply to develop new products that (partially) satisfy the extant and insatiable needs of human beings in a bourgeois society.

What is perhaps most insidious about the “magic” of advertising, however, is that it reinforces an understanding of political agency that equates freedom — in a political sense — with consumer choice. Companies like Whole Foods, for instance, recognize, as Williams does, that their customers do not simply want cereal and milk; they want to feel politically engaged — to end animal cruelty, slow global warming, and ensure liberty and justice for all. To that end, these companies market their products in a way that promises their customers the satisfaction of ethical action with every purchase, reducing, in the process, political and ethical practice to certain patterns of consumption.

Enjoy.

The consequences of this “ethical consumerism” are threefold. First, genuine political agency dips even further below the horizon of the possible. When we imagine political liberty to find its highest expression in the kind of cereal we buy for breakfast, we not only delude ourselves, but we also ratify the dominant mode of production and exchange. Consumer choice is always circumscribed within the strictures of capitalist production, such that, no matter what brand of cereal we choose, our choice necessarily endorses capitalism as a legitimate social and economic arrangement. This is, in my view, the most dangerous consequence of the “nominal freedom” of capitalism.

Moreover, believing that the aggregate of our individual consumption choices can prompt meaningful political change precludes action that might have real political consequences. Not only does ethical consumerism convince us that we’ve somehow done our duty to “do good,” but, because it attempts to promote political change through capitalism, it also suggests that it is not the economic system that is flawed but the way individuals have been interacting with that system. When we promote these patterns of ethical consumption we fail to recognize, however, that, in many cases, it is the logic of capitalist production — the cold cost-benefit calculus that subordinates ethical concerns to the singular goal of maximizing profit — that produces the very problems we think we can solve by buying organic tomatoes.

Ethical consumerism also treats political and ethical action as the exclusive province of the wealthy. If leading an ethical life or advocating for political change requires purchasing organic, sustainable, green, fair-trade, etc. goods (which are almost always more expensive than “unethical” brands), then only those few with the time, knowledge, and purchasing power to seek out and consume those goods can be ethical and politically relevant actors. Those who do not have this privilege — namely, the poor and the uneducated — are, by contrast, unethical and politically powerless. Resembling, in many ways, laws stipulating property ownership as a condition of suffrage, the growing tendency to equate purchasing power with political agency is patently undemocratic.

In effect, ethical consumerism allows us to feel politically engaged, while simply reproducing the status quo. In this way, the advertising that sustains the architecture of ethical consumption behaves as an agent of cultural hegemony. According to Antonio Gramsci, hegemony consists in a process of social domination that operates through a subtle and non-forceful coercion intended to convince the masses that the dominant social arrangement represents the only sensible way to organize society. As Gramsci indicates in the Prison Notebooks,

the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as “domination” and as “intellectual and moral leadership” . . . the “normal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterized by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent. [4]

Because advertising functions by eliciting consensual participation in the market economy, it forwards the cultural hegemony of capitalist relations of production.

With the rise of big data and the proliferation of advertisements targeted at specific individuals based on past consumption habits, the hegemonic power of advertising has grown dramatically in the last decade. In my view, this new era of advertising represents not a change in kind but in scale. Advertisers can now use personal information to convince us with a greater degree of success that we ought to buy their product. But the logic remains the same. Advertisers continue to cast a captivating spell, selling us not a product but an identity, purporting to offer us choice while further constricting our freedom.

*Radical geography refers to the study of space and spatial representation as it relates to social and economic organization, patterns of human settlement and movement, and the distribution of power.

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^[1]Raymond Williams, “Advertising: The Magic System,” p. 321. PDF
[2] Ibid., p. ??.
[3] David Harvey, The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory, p. 11. PDF
[4] Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 215. PDF