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.

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