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

Iron Man, Commodity Fetishism, & the Production of Virtual Selves

Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) alongside an ego-fetish in Iron Man 3 (2013).

No one can say exactly why the superhero film has proliferated with such vivacity in the recent decade or so — Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) or Sam Raimi’s Spiderman (2002) providing useful (if provisional) points of origin — but it isn’t hard to see the family resemblance between the superhero type and other images of American power: the sovereign individual, the rational scientist, the titan of industry, the youth of the rags-to-riches Bildungsroman, the tech-savvy entrepreneur. Superheroes arise from the wreckage of the death of God, as Nietzsche would have it — the new gods of the new world order (some, like Thor, quite literally). As images of concentrated police power and unbreakable free will, they seem to satisfy the particularly aggressive ego fetishism that has come to characterize liberal capitalism, which even the Right will criticize in religio-moral terms (“materialism”) or Oedipal ones (“narcissism”). The superhero puts the me in America.

The ego fetish is not even necessarily limited to the moral or economic domain: Nietzsche links the image of the ego with the “prejudice of reason,” which for him basically underlies the entire project of Western metaphysics: “unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being”:

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego.¹

For Nietzsche, all the fixed transcendent categories of so-called “reality,” including Identity and Cause, are just rough images formed from an fetishist analogy with the ego — itself little more than an afterimage, a burn-in on the T.V. screen of experience. All of this, for Nietzsche, is a symptom of the will to truth, through which Truth is projected into the world as an autonomous external monolith. It is no large distance, then, between Nietzsche’s account of ego fetishism and Marx’s analysis of “all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities” — i.e., commodity fetishism, in which the commodity achieves a mystical autonomy from the entire process of production itself: “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race.”²

There’s also, of course, something irresistibly violent about this ego fetish, symptomatic of the kind of “continual intervention” that characterizes the decentered global order that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called “Empire”: superheroes are almost always engaged in non-stop, all-out war with their enemies — not in spite of but precisely because of their unfaltering allegiance to order and peace (as transcendent images of Nietzsche’s “prejudice of reason”). This is just war, in which, Hardt and Negri write, “on the one hand, war is reduced to the status of police action, and on the other, the new power that can legitimately exercise ethical functions through war is sacralized.”³ Violence is always the final option, the exception to the rule of peace; thus — with American superheroes and the marauding global peace-keeping of the United States alike — a “state of permanent exception and police action” is declared that lends legitimacy to acts of brutal violence, thus finally reincorporating under the transcendental sign of the Ego.⁴

Which is all to say that in the context of ego fetishism (whether economic or metaphysical), Iron Man — especially the Iron Man of Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, which premiered April 24 — presents a particularly unusual figuration of the American superhero type.

Tony Stark surrounded by a panoply of Iron Man armors.

Iron Man is something of an odd duck in the pantheon of American superheroes (at least, those that end up with their own movies): basically every major superhero (with the exception of Batman, whose lineage is equally in the hard-boiled detective type) finds her- or himself in possession of superpowers: Superman providing the most obvious and canonical example. The origin of these superpowers is highly variable, often (but not always) related to some kind of scientific experiment, development, or accident — Superman’s being an alien, Spiderman’s radioactive spider-bite, Bruce Banner’s gamma-ray experiment gone awry, Captain America’s supersoldier serum, the Fantastic Four’s encounter with cosmic radiation, the X-Men’s extremely personalized X-gene mutations, Thor’s . . . well, being a god (slash alien?).

But what they all have in common is the ego fetish. These heroes’ superpowers are intrinsic, whether inborn, as in Superman or the X-Men, or the permanent result of something external acting on the self, as in Spiderman, the Hulk, etc.; whether she likes it or not, a superhero’s powers are a part of herself, an immutable property of her identity. Which explains, ironically, why so many superhero films have this bizarre resonance with identity politics — this is most overt in the X-Men franchise, where mutants make up a whole new suspect class subject to discrimination (I recently heard that Professor X was modeled after Martin Luther King, Jr.). In many movies, this identity politic takes on a very personal, very Oedipal who-am-I? sort of tone, where heroes struggle to integrate their newfound powers, which are often a source of both personal transcendence and intense social stigmatism, with their so-called “real selves.” Doing so is usually how the bad guy gets beaten and/or the girlfriend acquired/laid.

But not so with Iron Man. Tony Stark, first and foremost, has no superpowers — unless you count alcoholism or womanizing. His “power,” we gather, is his intellect and expertise — he refers to himself multiple times in Iron Man 3 as “the Mechanic.” But this is nothing on the level of web-slinging, indestructibility, or an enormous green musculature; this isn’t even about Tony Stark’s ego, exactly, in any kind of fixed or transcendental sense, despite his rampant egotism. This is commodity production, pure and simple: Tony Stark is in the business of the production of virtual selves. In fact, it’s the relation between virtual selves and the ego fetish that makes Iron Man so critically interesting.

Like all commodities, virtual selves are, almost by definition, images of images, symptoms of symptoms: they are reproductions and representations of the ego, which itself (if we follow Nietzsche) is just an image. They are copies without an original. And despite the level of abstraction here, we are no strangers to virtual selves; Hardt and Negri write about the “social production of subjectivity”:

First, subjectivity is a constant social process of generation. When the boss hails you on the shop floor, or the high school principal hails you in the school corridor, a subjectivity is formed. The material practices set out for the subject in the context of the institution (be they kneeling down to pray or changing hundred of diapers) are the production processes of subjectivity . . . Second, the institutions provide above all a discrete place (the home, the chapel, the classroom, the shop floor) where the production of subjectivity is enacted. The various institutions of modern society should be viewed as an archipelago of factories of subjectivity.

However, the deterritorializing and decentering forces of Empire, they argue, have driven institutions from which our selves are derived into nothing less than an “omni-crisis” in which “[i]nside and outside are becoming indistinguishable.” The old Althusserian Institutions — the State, the Family, the School, the Church, etc. — have become as incestuous as they have promiscuous, interpenetrating each other to an extreme degree: “the boundaries between private and public have fractured, unleashing circuits of control throughout the ‘intimate public sphere.'”⁵

As the borders between institutions breakdown — in the form of transnational online communities, networks of information, the circulation of global capital, whatever — there is a progressive Marxian alienation between self-producers (institutions) and the self-consumers (us). The larger this displacement becomes, the more virtual our selves become. In some cases, this is extremely literal: geographic displacement gives way to the so-called “virtual realities” of Facebook, YouTube, Skype, chatrooms, forums, and blogs (including this one). These virtual selves are not unreal, in any sense; rather they are virtual because of the great distance between what is directly and indirectly consumed: their consumable image-reality (sounds, pictures, dialects, social networks) and their non-consumable actual reality (wires, sensors, electrical signals, servers, satellites, and, of course, human organs). (While virtuality may seem less tangible than actual reality, both of these, as we’ll see soon, are very much materially real.)

But virtual selves span far beyond social media: social displacements of all kinds create new, fluid pseudoinstitutions like race, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality, diet, consumer habits, brand loyalties, etc. that are constantly producing new virtual selves that continually absorb us one moment and eject us the next — always growing both intensively, in specialization and differentiation from one another, and extensively, in their magnitude and overlap of their reach. Thus, both virtual selves and the virtuality of selves are proliferating at accelerating rates.

And it is precisely the production of virtual selves which is Tony Stark’s superpower. Tony Stark is not actually a hero — his long list of character flaws (alcoholism, sexism, superiority complex, general assholery, etc.) would attest the very opposite. He is instead the very conditions through which the heroism which he “himself” does not possess is made possible: Tony Stark is an anti-heroic field of potentials. He is the actual reality of his own self-production — and in that state he is not actually “useful”: neither superpowerful (the requisite for fighting supervillains) nor consumable (the requisite for getting us to pay to watch it). He lacks the reality of the virtual.

The “House Party Protocol“

Stark’s virtual selves, of course, are his iconic metallic exoskeletons — completely real and material, but also virtual and consumable. After all, what is consumed in the society of the spectacle is not a product but an image of a product; the “spectacle,” as Guy Debord writes, “is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.” Like a risky science experiment gone horribly wrong, the image takes on a life of its own:

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. ⁶

By time of Iron Man 3, Stark has constructed 50 different versions of the Iron Man exoskeleton (not including the crude original), many with very specific specializations — an Iron Bureaucracy of Images, which exhibits “the autonomous movement of the non-living” to an extremely literal degree. Stark’s latest model, Mark LXII, can be piloted remotely, fragments into autonomous individual components (rather like the famous interchangeable parts of industrial capitalism), and can be instructed to articulate itself around the body of even persons other than Stark himself through sensors that Stark has injected into his left arm. At the climax of the film, Stark summons the entire lot of them by instructing his supercomputing artificial intelligence J.A.R.V.I.S. (another [literally] virtual self) to execute the “House Party Protocol” — a fitting name, considering how Stark plays host (in both hospitable and parasitic senses) to a number of different sets of armor throughout the final battle, switching exoskeletons with great speed and variability.

And this is finally where Iron Man intersects most crucially with the American superhero type — that is, where virtuality and the ego fetish meet. The ego fetish of, say, Superman is a unified, centralized, exclusive territory — one of what Nietzsche calls “concept mummies,” a dried-out fixity of a lifeless taxonomy.⁷ In a sense, Superman represents an image of the world what is all-too-quickly disappearing from postmodernity: centralized authority, rigid social codes, the old despotic symbology. Superman is reminiscent of the time before the death of God, an image of contemporary fundamentalism — what Slavoj Zizek calls “the violent return of the immediate belief.”⁸ Superman is Actual, in a fullness of that term rarely evident in our world today.

Iron Man, on the other hand, has all but dismantled the ego fetish (at least on the surface) through its extensive deterritorialization: his virtual selves proliferate and articulate themselves with a power that is diffuse, decentered, and dispersed — something made clearest when Stark’s seaside Malibu home is bombed and Iron Man sinks, caught in the wreckage, to the ocean floor. Sensing that Stark is losing consciousness, one the armor’s gauntlets detaches from Stark’s arm and — apparently equipped with a motor and a camera — proceeds to turn itself around, grab Stark by the hand, and pull the unconscious superhero out of the underwater rubble in a gesture that almost smacks of something “democratic.”

Stark’s girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) wearing Mark LVII

So the question arises, as it must: Does Tony Stark really represent the death of the ego (the infamous “death of the subject”) — or merely its displacement? To which the answer must be, unequivocally: The latter. It is not simply a matter of identifying either Stark’s genius or narcissism; on the contrary, it is the autonomy of the armor from Stark “himself” — manifest in the fact that so many other characters wear a suit at some point during the film — which speaks to its commodification as a virtual self. The actual ego is, without question, reduced to a faint memory in Iron Man; in its place arise a whole host of virtualities in which the Ego itself has become a commodity. We are back, then, at the dark trinity of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, where the will to truth, the ego, and the commodity flow into one another and are crystallized into the same crude fetishism evident in Superman and other superpowered superheroes. Stark’s last line of the movie — “I am Iron Man” — is the clearest symptom of this.

Only, in Iron Man, this fetishism functions by way of a negation and a displacement–just as the fluid Institutions of Empire function through overflowing boundaries and interpenetration. Thus, the true “Iron Man” would seem not to reside anywhere, neither in Stark himself, nor in the suits, which at some points in Iron Man 3 seem practically disposable. Iron Man is fully negated–and yet somehow even more affirmed than in a character like Superman (at least until Man of Steel premieres this June). Zizek calls this phenomenon the “fetishist disavowal of belief”:

That is to say, what if one kneels down and prays not so much to regain one’s own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of one’s belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal distance towards it? To believe – to believe “directly,” without the externalizing mediation of a ritual – is a heavy, oppressing, traumatic burden, which, through exerting a ritual, one has a chance of transferring it onto an Other…⁹

Iron Man is drawn up along these lines, through the “externalizing mediation” of the exoskeleton. Stark’s superpower resides not in his actual self but dispersed among the Others of his many virtual creations: unlike Superman, who is a product, Stark is the owner of the means of production (not the least of which would include the seemingly limitless supply of capital which finances the Iron Man technology — and which we may suspect is the result of his father’s and his own war-profiteering).

So when Tony Stark says, “I am Iron Man,” what is crucial to bear in mind is that it is only by not being Iron Man that Stark is truly Iron Man. The old purity of belief and direct knowledge is gone. In the culture of advanced capitalism — the age of Empire — it is only through the its own negation that the ego finally rises again, virtually, to the throne of the transcendental image: only far more immanent, powerful, and brutally violent than it was before.

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¹Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale.
²Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling.
³Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire. p. 12.
⁴Ibid., p. 38.
⁵Ibid., pp. 195-8.
⁶Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb.
⁷Nietzsche, op. cit.
⁸Slavoj Žižek, “With or Without Passion.”
⁹Ibid.