The status of the group within cultural logic has fluctuated over time, always in tension with the status of the individual. More often than not, the group appears in cultural discourse as an unstable entity requiring the control—whether positive or negative—of an elite command. The masses need taming by a firm fascist or dictatorial hand; the people need guidance by an enlightened revolutionary vanguard. Historically the collective has rarely been figured as capable of self-control, self-guidance, or self-enlightenment. The singular and unique individual must always rise up and out of the group in order to serve as a driver of human progress. Conversely, where the group oppresses the individual or constrains this potential, the right to freedom becomes the basis for a call to arms.
Although this hierarchy of individual over group may persist as received knowledge, current cultural discourse suggests that both the terms of the relationship between individual and group and the terms of their relative valorization are shifting. Whether the figure of the collective makes its appearance as a direct referent of humanity or as an abstract conceptual category, it tends increasingly to subsume the individual—even to occupy the very position of the individual by being cast as one large body—and to carry a positive epistemological charge. In other words, the group is becoming a vehicle for the conceptualization and articulation of knowledge and the social.
It may be that this shift toward the valorization of the collective has a discrete genealogy—that is, a set of intellectual or public interventions that may be said to have decisively influenced this change. Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976), for example, could be located within such a genealogy for proposing a “gene’s eye view of nature” (xv) that revolutionized biology as a discipline and captured the attention of the mainstream reading public by arguing that organisms be regarded as vehicles for the reproduction of genes and not the other way around. The image of a vast gene pool controlling living beings like a puppet master from behind the scenes—as the unseen collective mastermind of life—begins to approximate the conceptual protagonism that the collective has begun to take on in recent years. In this emerging vision, the collective tends to be cast as a single body with an internal composition on the order of the infinite that propels itself toward self-evolution on the strength of a kind of unthinking—or at least not rational, but rather visceral—intelligence.
Here I will not attempt to establish a definitive genealogical archaeology of the evolving representation of the collective in cultural discourse, but rather to extrapolate a composite working model of how the collective is figured from a diverse sampling of cultural materials culled from major news journals, popular U.S. nonfiction, Latin American film, and U.S. television and advertising. My sources reflect daily life in the U.S. and Latin American cultural mainstream—that is, cultural production that has widespread dissemination and reception, and is in the aggregate representative of big-picture cultural patterns. To be sure, I am not actively seeking out exceptional or minoritarian voices, but, on the contrary, generally privileging the analysis of voices that enjoy, in varying degrees, a broader scale of influence. I am conscious of the persistence of academic canons and their importance for establishing nodes of scholarly knowledge, but I am equally cognizant that the plumbing of a canon will not, on its own, yield the kind of evidentiary data that I am seeking in this study, which is instead conceived as an analysis of lived culture in all its textual heterogeneity across diverse fora and media. Throughout, as the epistemological figure of the collective comes into view, I will argue that its conceptual representation as a feeling soma—as an organism regulated by homeostatic principle—strongly echoes the notion of a society given over—as though it were a soma—to the organic movements of free-market capital and the democratic principle that is their political analogue.
In the classic capitalist imaginary, the accumulation of capital is not fixed and static, but rather contingent and constantly shifting according to the balance of needs that naturally maximizes the welfare of the social order bound by this economy. Society does not create the economy; the economy creates the society. Further, to recall Margaret Thatcher’s words during her guidance of Britain into the throes of neoliberalism, “there is no such thing as society but only individuals” (Harvey 82). One might be inclined to interpret this statement as the ultimate affirmation of individualism—of uniqueness, of idiosyncrasy, of standing out from the crowd. But Thatcher meant for the dissolution of “society” in favor of a mass of “individuals” to underwrite the shift she was engineering toward extreme free-market principles. As such, Thatcher’s was not a liberation of individuals, but only an uprooting from traditional social moorings to facilitate their reimbrication within the economy as a social structure so naturalized as to be equated with the human condition itself (as is evident, for example, in the argument about implicitly neoliberal trade as an adaptive characteristic that I analyze further on in this chapter).
The imaginary of the collective economic soma is one in which two discursive narratives are at odds. In the colonialist-empire-inflected vertical narrative of infinite growth, capitalism legitimates its creation of a rigid social hierarchy and class power differential; in the originary revolutionary narrative of universal harmony, capitalism claims to afford every social element—every individual within its collective corpus—a purely democratic opportunity for prosperity and economic well-being. In this latter narrative, which the present study argues is increasingly the more pervasive of these two threads of self-definition, capitalism thus arranges its constituents in a relationship of perfect horizontality, connecting them as though by force of perfectly distributed resources. This body politic shares the same lifeblood of capital flow. “A rising tide lifts all boats” and the “trickle-down” effect—the latter principally translated for Latin American rhetoric as
goteo (Argentina) or
chorreo (Chile), both meaning a “dripping,” though
chorreo can also imply a flow of greater force—are turns of phrase associated with capitalist philosophy that demonstrate the operative conceptual equivalency between water and capital, in which water acts as a unifying agent, bathing all individuals democratically in the same wealth. Thus conceptualized, the movement of capital as autonomically regulated—and therefore deregulated from rational intervention—is best interpreted on the epistemological level as an affective process. Involuntary processes involved in homeostasis—the body’s unthinking mechanism for achieving a steady-state maximization of well-being—are what metaphorically guide the somatic dynamics of capital: breathing, circulation, sensory perception, emotion, feeling.
The Collective in the News: Crowd Sourcing, Glial Cells, and Ideas That Have Sex
A set of three contemporaneous stories in prominent news sources illustrates the apparent cultural hegemony—or, more precisely, the epistemological ascendance—of this notion of the collective. These three journalistic pieces appeared independently within days of one another, treating diverse subject matter but coinciding in evincing a common conceptual privileging of the group. I selected these stories for analysis as an exemplary cross-section of daily media reports—in this grouping, from the U.S.—that demonstrate the quantitative frequency with which epistemic affect undergirds a diversity of cultural media communication. But this grouping also serves as a qualitative point of entry for the consideration of the politics—or, we might say, economics—of the collective as a discursive trope because it demonstrates the following: a privileging of groups over individuals as sources of information collection and knowledge production, a privileging of interstitial connectivity as the source of communicativity, and the currency of affective metaphor for the description of human affairs understood as such—on the scale of humanity, and, moreover, humanity analyzed in adaptive evolutionary terms, whose diachrony extends the notion of the human collective to its greatest possible dimensions.
In the first instance, the
Chronicle of Higher Education—the premiere academic news journal in the United States, boasting a monthly online readership of almost two million users—announced a shift in scientific research paradigm as a move away from individual inquiry and toward “large-scale collaborations” (Young, May 28, 2010). This new “crowd science,” as the author dubs it, engages a broad base of data collectors (“crowd sourcing”) and makes the focus of the principal investigator’s work the interpretation of the large body of data that results from its collaborative capture. Although academia continues to assign merit and promotion based on the model of individual achievement, one of the furthest-reaching implications of the article is that crowd science will force a change of paradigm in institutional assessment toward the recognition of shared knowledge as more and more disciplines embrace this model—astronomy, genetics, and oceanography are cited, along with interest from pharmaceutical companies, thus indirectly acknowledging capitalist business as a nonacademic driver of this new trend in information sharing as the basis of scientific inquiry. “If only Newton, Planck, and Einstein had had any idea of the possibilities inhering in not going it alone,” one reader comments, evincing the belief that group investigation may be capable of bringing human genius to untold heights.
A story on glial cells that aired on NPR—the U.S.’s most prestigious nonprofit news source with over twenty million listeners weekly—less than a week after the crowd science report suggests that it is not only the method of conducting scientific inquiry that has assumed collective proportions but also the manner of conceiving the inquiry itself (June 2, 2010). Whereas the crowd science article commentator wondered how Einstein’s discoveries would have been shaped had he conducted his research through “crowd sourcing,” here—in a poetic coincidence—it is Einstein’s brain that is cited at the root of a new way of formulating central questions in neurobiology. The story discusses the findings of a twenty-year sequence of research that originates with the claim that Einstein’s brain had more glial—connective—cells than average, giving rise to the possibility that his genius was not, contrary to all expectation, a result of exceptional neuronal capacity, but rather of an abundance of cells that R. Douglas Fields, the most recent in the line of these researchers, describes as having been heretofore considered inconsequential. Fields’s findings, published in
The Other Brain (2009), successfully reproduce a landmark 1990 experiment that showed that glial cells were “eavesdropping on the chemical conversations between neurons, and rebroadcasting them to distant areas of the brain…. [Says Fields,] ‘I just wish I could get across the amazement of that finding—that these cells that were thought to be stuffing between neurons were communicating’” (Hamilton). That the neuron, the longtime protagonist of neurobiological study, should be displaced by newfound interest in its supporting cells—cells that serve to shoulder and maintain neurons, as well as to communicate neuronal activity through their own chemical signals—would seem to indicate a new open-mindedness in setting the parameters of scientific inquiry. Indeed, as Fields remarks with respect to the evidence of glial cell communicativity, their chemical signals are “easy to miss if you’re not looking for them” (Hamilton). In order to look for them, one has to start out with the notion of communication as a full-brained phenomenon in which every kind of tissue is engaged.
Within this model of participatory communication, the verticality of the old premise of neuronal superiority with respect to other cerebral matter becomes outmoded; epistemological hierarchy gives way to horizontality in which a democratic conceptualization of the brain has allowed the glial “plebians” to claim a functional and investigative significance equal or greater to that of the cells they support. The final step in this epistemological movement from verticality to horizontality, from the privileging of powerful “kings” of the brain to a holistic valuing of the scientific and physiological worthiness of the entire “body politic,” would be to progress on a mainstream disciplinary level from the democratization of the brain to the democratization of the entire body. That is, to cease to privilege the brain above the rest of the body, instead beginning to formulate investigative questions that seek to prove how, as neuroimmunologist Candace Pert argues from an iconoclastic position in Molecules of Emotion (1997), the entire body—and not just the brain—constitutes an interconnected “information highway.” Pert, accordingly, vociferously challenges Cartesian brain-body dualism—which has found institutional hypostasization, she argues, in a jealously guarded divide of purview in the United States between the National Institutes of Health and the National Institutes of Mental Health. In Pert’s view, Cartesian dualism continues to thwart the necessarily interdisciplinary research that could yield a unified theory of the body as an integrated set of systems. Pert’s position may as yet occupy outlier status with respect to the scientific establishment, but it nevertheless serves as an indicator of the cutting edge of future inquiry that resonates with the conceptual comeuppance of the collective.
Just prior to these two reports, the
Wall Street Journal—among the top daily business journals in the world with a daily circulation to over two million paid subscribers—featured a story likewise privileging the group over the individual, this time claiming collective intelligence as the explanation for the triumph of humans over other species (Ridley, May 22, 2010). Just as crowd science effectively expands the individual investigator to group proportions, and glial cell research turns its focus away from the neuron and toward its mass of connective tissue, here the theory of human triumph abandons the biology of the brain and embraces species behavior. Matt Ridley, prominent British science writer, former banker, and author of the human triumph story—which he subsequently gave as a TED talk on the same subject that has been seen over two million times—writes, “Scientists have so far been looking for an answer to this riddle [of why humans prevailed over other species] in the wrong place: inside human heads…. But the sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination…. The answer lies in a new idea, borrowed from economics, known as collective intelligence: the notion that what determines the inventiveness and rate of cultural change of a population is the amount of interaction between individuals.”
Here the collective is defined as an unquantifiable set—on the order of the species in absolute diachrony—of “interaction between individuals.” How are we to understand this “interaction between individuals”? Is the quality, intensity, or specificity of this interaction significant in giving rise to the adaptive benefits of collective intelligence? Does or must the interaction have a particular telos? Ridley does not explicitly define the group interaction in these terms, but rather shifts metonymically among implicit equivalencies in a way that allows his reader to appreciate his underlying assumptions. Thus we may piece together the tacit assertion that the “sophistication of the modern world” results from an “interaction between individuals” that constitutes a “collective enterprise.” Even without knowing how Ridley defines “sophistication,” we already surmise that it is the end result—and possibly the teleological objective—of a collective human project across time and space. That Ridley should use the word enterprise to characterize human interaction suggests that if there is indeed a teleology of the collective to be discovered, it is one associated with business and economic activity. The further characterization of this “interaction” in terms of its effects, “innovation,” “invention,” and “discovery”—a set of contemporary business catchwords—only strengthens the implication that business, and perhaps science in its service, is the organically arising product of human interaction and synonymous with “collective enterprise.”
Indeed, as Ridley develops his argument, he posits that “exchange” and “trade” are at the root of human success, even pointedly arguing that, contrary to the sequence of social evolution that has become common wisdom, commerce precedes—and even foundationally paves the way for—agriculture. Of interest here is not the veracity of Ridley’s anthropological assumptions, but what their assertion reveals about the contemporary cultural narrative in which they participate. The reader of Ridley’s intervention will come away with the unspoken thesis that capitalism has been the social telos of humanity and its adaptive strength. The species evolved to do business; business is at once its vehicle and reason for being. Humans, in other words, were born to trade—a term that becomes loosely and implicitly synonymous with free-market capitalism in the course of Ridley’s intervention. Ridley makes no rigorous historical periodization of the development of trade, but, precisely because he does not enter into historiography, his treatment of trade as a continuum across the whole of human history—indeed, on the premise that trade is what marked the end of prehistory and ushered humanity into the self-conscious phase of its existence—has the effect of casting business as we know it as a force of human nature. The unproblematized relationship of equivalency between Ridley’s examples of objects of “trade”—from ancient obsidian tools to pencils, computers, and camera pills—culminates in a paragraph that portrays the defining characteristics of capitalism as the result of adaptive evolution, rather than as a contingently arising social system:
Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.
In this view, capitalism is no longer a product of historical circumstance, and of class power and privilege, nor is it driven by ideology (this implicit position serves to affirm the assertion by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that capitalist “Empire” claims an atemporal status for itself: “this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be” [xiv]). Divisions of labor become voluntary and intelligent, rather than exploitative and calculated. Prosperity (well-being) is definitionally correlated with a high capacity to produce and consume, poverty (ill-being—or at least a less than desirable state of being) with the inverse capacity, as though collective knowledge, innovation, new tools, and specialization and exchange could not possibly be destined—be content—to engineer, deliberately, a modest way of life. But the question of engineering—of deliberate intent, that is—does not enter into Ridley’s manner of conceiving of the “collective enterprise.” It is as if humans were programmed by nature itself to engage in capitalist trade as though on evolutionary autopilot: capitalism emerges as the structural behavior of the species. No executive function or higher power must intervene; simply by congregating as social animals, it seems, humans naturally interact in a way that constitutes collective intelligence and yields trade—for trade is cast as the practical expression of human thought. Foucault’s “homo œconomicus,” the social state proper to modernity, in which economics eclipse politics, takes on atavistic dimensions in Ridley’s evolutionary argument. In other words, whereas in Foucault’s vision homo œconomicus is a historically specific modality of social epistemology, in Ridley’s, homo œconomicus becomes interchangeable with homo sapiens itself: the “knowing” that sets humans mightily apart from other species is that of trade.
Here the very manner of “knowing” experiences a shift in this new context of the collective. Although Ridley’s insistence that ideas are what beget innovation and trade is in apparent consonance with the traditional view of knowledge and ideas as rational and consciously produced, it is essential to underscore Ridley’s categorical treatment of the idea as something spontaneously arising in an unthinking fashion on the level of the collective. In other words, as a species there need be no deliberate determination to undertake this kind of trade-producing thought. That is, if we think of the species as a collective body, then trade is, in this view, the social behavior resulting from that body’s autonomic system. Capitalism is tantamount to a parasympathetic social reflex.
The metaphor of the body of the species is mine, but its use is not gratuitous; on the contrary, it is intended to anticipate and make sense of the corporal imagery of Ridley’s own rhetoric where, in the final resting point of his argument, trade is produced by the “sexual” relationship between ideas (“Trade is to culture as sex is to biology…. The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex.”) Ridley may employ the catchy turn of phrase of ideas “having sex” for the sake of titillating his audience into captivity. It is, after all, far more engaging to say that ideas are having sex rather than to say simply that they are multiplying exponentially as a result of their contact. Indeed, Ridley entitled the TEDGlobal talk that this article would become in July 2010 simply, “When Ideas Have Sex,” which has been viewed two million times.
But I would argue that there is more to his reproductive metaphor than sensationalist appeal. The concept of ideas having sex is one in which ideas—thoughts, the expression of Cartesian rationalism par excellence—assume affective dimensions, arising and combining by force of libidinous and carnal desire rather than by force of rational or intellectual compatibility. This is not to say that the latter scenario is not, in practical terms, a requisite for the fusion of disparate ideas into a singular composite idea constitutive of innovation or discovery. I seek to emphasize the discursive presentation of this highly rational operation in affective terms, as though ideas—as though avatars of their human authors—roamed the earth fornicating, driven by the affects. I do not mean to claim that Ridley’s argument about the ways that ideas travel and culture reproduces itself is, in its structural aspects, new. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the reproduction of social class through cultural transmission in educational institutions is but one example of an exploration of how culture and society reproduce themselves (see, e.g., Bourdieu and Passeron,
Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture). What I would like to emphasize here is not the novelty of Ridley’s own ideas, but rather the rhetorical specificities with which he frames his meditations on an established theme. The notion of “ideas having sex” is not just a colorful ear bender; discursively, it insists on the biology of the metaphor to the point of rhetorically anthropomorphizing trade—as literal human intercourse—in which ideas interact affectively rather than rationally.
Ridley’s intervention figures the longevity of capitalism as an inevitability tantamount to human reproduction. Nothing, arguably, besides the autonomic functions requires less thought, planning, foresight, rationalization, or conscious care than sex. Sex is impulsive, instinctive, automatic, desired, and, on a species level, unstoppable, and guaranteed—“inexorable,” to employ the same term with which Ridley characterizes “progress,” the long-standing teleological euphemism for capitalism, which, here, because of Ridley’s references to global economy and technology (search engines, mobile phones, container shipping) effectively becomes neoliberalism: “There’s a cheery modern lesson in this theory about ancient events. Given that progress is inexorable, cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and specialize, then globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic progress in the coming century—despite the usual setbacks from recessions, wars, spendthrift governments and natural disasters…. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.” If collective intelligence equals progress and progress equals neoliberal capitalism, then adding sex to that set of equivalencies imbues them all with the certitude and stability of visceral homeostasis through reproduction, as though the collective human body worked toward its own well-being and survival by generating—in a libidinal flood of pleasure—capitalist trade.
Ridley not only gives an affective characterization of capitalism by defining it as a product of “promiscuous” ideas but also invites his reader to evaluate his argument in similarly affective terms. In his introduction, Ridley claims that this “sex”-driven collective intelligence “holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead”; in his conclusion he recapitulates this sentiment by asserting a “cheery modern lesson” in his argument. “Hope” and “cheer” are understandably called for at the historical juncture of global capitalist crisis in which Ridley writes, but they are more than moral states apt for the rallying of social morale; they are also the affective disposition with which Ridley expects his own ideas to be received. As readers, it is with an affective, rather than a rational, sensibility that we are meant to evaluate the long-term prospects of capitalism. In this model of reception, Ridley’s argument presents itself as one that works curatively toward well-being. Accordingly, we are primed to receive this argument on the autonomic level, according to homeostatic criteria of acceptance or rejection. In other words, the affective treatment of capitalist trade as the result of unthinking visceral interaction mirrors the affective expectations that this conceptual content will be received unthinkingly and viscerally—and acritically—on the strength of having occasioned a positive emotional state in the reading public, thereby appealing to affective, rather than rational, criteria of acceptance.
Ridley’s model of humanity as a species born for conceptual fornication of a variety that foundationally yields a capitalist social system echoes the notion of a mass of interstitial matter that provides organic integrity by gluing and communicating, and the idea that investigations conducted on a massive level of participation can produce the surest knowledge. In all three cases the collective functions discursively on the logic of the soma: a set of diverse and innumerable parts find organic integration within an overarching structure of unity; this organic integration functions through a flow—of information, in every case—that binds the parts together into a harmonious whole. Although it is information—data, neuronal impulses, ideas that spark trade—that flows like lifeblood through the collective, this information does not have the rational status that one might expect. That is, information does not appear here as the foundation of complex higher-order reasoning or intelligence; the kind of intelligence this information flow represents is markedly affective in the conceptual framework granted to the figure of the collective in these stories—affective insofar as the emphasis regarding the flow of information is on its transmission, which occurs through some force of affinity. For Ridley, this affinity is represented through the metaphor of sexual contact and reproduction; in the other cases, though such explicit rubric is not assigned to the mechanism of transmission, it is implicitly one that also follows an unthinkingly visceral flow—information converges and amasses as though carried through a bloodstream to nodes of mutual interest, ebbing and flowing in a way that maximizes knowledge by virtue of immanent and horizontal contact rather than transcendent and vertical reasoning.
Capitalist Uses of the Collective: We Are Smarter Than Me and the Harmony Prius Campaign
The model of collective social protagonism animated by an organic flow of information—capital for the global technological age—resonates strongly with the archetypal vision of the movement of capital. What has shifted since the classical model of capitalism in its inception is the size of the collective, which has experienced a dramatic expansion in scale toward the ahistorical and unquantifiable. We might comprehend this discursive gesturing toward infinity as a reflection of the triumph of Western capitalism that styles itself as universal in the post-Soviet era. Ridley’s argument about capitalist trade as an adaptive characteristic takes the collective to the level of the species; unsurprisingly, this species collective is strongly echoed in neoliberal business methodology and narrative marketing strategy, as well as in the contestation of this global capitalist discourse.
The opening in 2006 of a Center for Collective Intelligence by MIT, its direction by a business management professor, Thomas W. Malone, and the fact of its first major project being a book about the possibilities of collective intelligence for business demonstrate the extent to which the notion of “group think”—once a derogatory term for conformist brainwashing—has become the model for inquiry across disciplines, but especially championed and driven by business. The book project migrated to an autonomous Wiki-based community at wearesmarter.org, where a community of four thousand participants developed from over a million invitations to cowrite the book extended to faculty and alumni of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as management and technology experts. The result,
We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business (2007), stands as a testament to the current epistemological hegemony of the notion of collective intelligence. Its monumental stature at the cutting edge of business research and knowledge also suggests that business discourse is beginning to shape business practice. In other words, if there has been a disconnect between the two, with affective business discourse being at odds with rationalized business practice, then
We Are Smarter Than Me may indicate—along with the countless business titles about harnessing emotional power for the purpose of increasing profit and efficiency—a decisive shift toward affect in the epistemological contest internal to business. Crowd sourcing as a method of interdisciplinary inquiry and the collective as the guiding concept structuring the parameters of that inquiry should be understood as symptoms of this shift across fields of knowledge and practice.
The self-promoting online description of
We Are Smarter Than Me claims that the book “will help you transform the promise of social networking into a profitable reality” (“
We Are Smarter Than Me: About the Book”). In an NPR interview, lead authors Barry Libert and Jon Spector cite one such “success story” as that of Goldcorp, a company that discovered untapped stores of gold worth three billion dollars by crowd sourcing its mining data online. Although Libert and Spector insist on the ostensibly democratizing practice of bringing all individuals associated with a business into the fold of its crowd—employees, customers, partners, distributors, investors—there is a deafening absence of any discussion of the equally democratic distribution of resulting profits. Business problems find solutions in the crowd, yet the crowd derives no benefit from its contributions to the profit-making machine. In this sense it would seem that crowd sourcing only serves to generate an even greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands than ever before, further increasing the asymmetrical distribution of capital that characterizes colonialist economic practice—whether proper to formal imperialism or informal neocolonialism. As a cultural text, the singling out of a gold company as the representative example of the profitability of crowd sourcing evokes the centuries-old history of exploitative colonialist extraction, a negative symbolism most recently and conspicuously updated for current cultural consciousness in the form of the “unobtanium” brutally mined at the cost of life and nature by the profit-driven and generically named RDA company in James Cameron’s blockbuster film
Avatar (2009)—a plot device that demonstrates the extent to which neocolonialism persists as a structure of oppression in our current cultural psyche.
Yet the emergent “we are smarter than me” mantra of capitalist discourse does not admit any relationship of asymmetry. It plays upon the idea of a perfectly democratic relationship between people in their pursuit of prosperity—a perfectly harmonious engagement among all the participants in this group that grows more intelligent and capable in the same measure as its limits go to zero. The perfectly intelligent “we,” this model of profit-making suggests, encompasses all of humanity itself, if we are to take the imagery that supports this notion of a profit-generating group to its ultimate consequences. Libert, Spector, and their four-thousand-strong Wiki group of authors echo Ridley in their implicit core assertion that the species is tantamount to a single-minded collective driven to participate in the operation of capitalist moneymaking. I argue that it is more accurate to say that this is a single-bodied collective in that these visions of humanity treat the species as one large organism whose billions of internal actors all cooperate—collaborate—in perfect autonomic harmony with one another.
An example from advertising that builds its message on the conceptual foundation of this perfectly autonomic relationship among people figured as one limitless collective soma is the line of 2010 commercials for the Toyota Prius, arguably the world’s premiere hybrid-energy car, whose global sales reached three million in 2011 and eight million in 2015 (Toyota, August 21, 2015).
1 The three commercials in the 2010 campaign—the aptly named “Harmony,” “MPG,” and “Solar”—show the third-generation hybrid-energy Prius driving through a landscape constructed exclusively of human bodies acting the part of nature. That is, hundreds of extras dressed as natural elements—rivers, tree trunks, leaves, stones, flowers, butterflies, clouds, the sun, Earth itself as seen from space—portray in synchrony the natural world. In each ad it is the coordinated movement of this human collective that produces the effect of rivers flowing, grass waving, flowers bursting open, trees growing, clouds floating, sun rays shining down. Just as in the case of “we are more intelligent than me,” where the four thousand Wiki coauthors stand as a representative sampling of the larger pool of one million potential authors by original invitation, here, as we are told in the “Making of the Prius ‘Harmony’ Commercial,” two hundred extras were used to generate over one million human elements in the final visual landscape. The human bodies that enact nature are not particular or individuated but general and interchangeable—that is, they are not meant to connote unique individuality, but rather generic interconnectedness. Each individual gestures toward a collective whole on a scale so large as to hint at the infinite, as we appreciate when the anthropomorphic depiction of nature culminates in the outer-space representation of Earth in “Solar.”
The tagline of the Prius commercial series—delivered in a voice-over message at the close of each ad—is “It’s harmony between man, nature, and machine.” But the situation in these ads is one in which man and nature are not separable terms; as a category, nature is fully subsumed by humanity. This does not mean that humans are a synecdoche for the rest of the natural world, but that humans are their own natural world. The “world” in these Toyota commercials functions like one tremendous human organism comprised of countless constituent parts working seamlessly—organically, autonomically—to produce the basic stuff of natural life. Just as Ridley posited that out of the naturally occurring intercourse of humans comes trade, here, out of this human-made collective constitutive of its own habitat comes a product—the “machine,” in Toyota’s language—as though the Prius were the natural and causal result of the life-generating efforts of this collective. The theme song of these commercials, Petra Haden’s 2009 a cappella cover version of the Bellamy Brothers 1976 hit “Let Your Love Flow,” reinforces through both form and content the idea of an anthropomorphized habitat: in form because Haden creates all the song’s lines of melody, harmony, and instrumentation with her voice alone, just as humans create all the elements of the “world” into which the Prius emerges; in content because the song’s lyrics posit love as a metaphor for the homology between humanity and the natural world.
In the ads’ theme song, love is the implicit reason for the very existence of the natural world—its reason for being—a world lyrically composed of the same main elements anthropomorphized within the visual content of the ads (the sun, mountains, birds). In the imagery of the song’s lyrics, love is capable of feats of nature: love is what can flow, grow, fly, and shine, as though it were water, a living organism, a bird, or the sun. Within the commercials’ diegesis, the lyrical protagonism of love as the creative agent of the natural world becomes homologous with the visual protagonism of humans as the creative agents of the natural world. A certain equivalency emerges: love is humanity. Love is the emotional manifestation of human agency, the force that unites humans and nature in a homeostatic relationship on the planetary, and even cosmic, level. Love flows like blood, connecting constituent parts, supporting life and promoting well-being. The song renders love as a kind of interstitial adhesive that creates one seamless unit of life out of the diverse elements of the natural world—including humans. Love has a status analogous to that of the interconnective tissue of glial cells or the ability to join all of humanity together in a relationship of trade on the strength of “sexually” reproduced ideas. Love is the ultimate expression of the human condition, the perfect synecdoche. Further, a humanity driven by love (or, to overlay Ridley’s terminology, by ideas having sex) produces innovative products for consumption. In other words, a loving humanity is the natural agent of capitalist enterprise.
Born to Run: The Human Collective as Anticapitalist
The proposition that a loving humanity is the natural agent of capitalist enterprise could not be more anathema to the quietly anticapitalist thesis of the U.S. nonfiction bestseller
Born to Run (2009), which, in its own way, also turns its gaze on all of humanity, even from an evolutionary perspective. Yet despite this difference of conclusion regarding the relationship between economics and human nature, the components of the anticapitalist argument in
Born to Run do not differ from those of the Toyota Prius commercial. On the contrary, we find that the same basic figure of the single-bodied autonomic collective is in play, but instead of figuring this collective in the service of capitalism, the text uses the collective to discredit capitalist culture. Part extended anecdote of footraces and their colorful protagonists, part historiography of ultrarunning as sport and cultural practice, part disquisition into the role of running in human evolution,
Born to Run ultimately sets forth the proposition that running may be the central adaptive characteristic of human evolution, the sine qua non of humanity that allowed for species triumph. Sports and war journalist Christopher McDougall builds toward this thesis through the optic of his research on the enigmatic and solitary Tarahumara of Northern Mexico, known in their native tongue as the Rarámuri—“running people.”
2 McDougall exalts this tribe as the epitome of well-being, not only physiologically but also socially; their lifestyle predicated on ultra long-distance running (as much as hundreds of miles at a stretch) has, in his estimation, yielded a peaceful, fair, equitable community that lives in loving harmony without materialism or avarice:
Left alone in their mysterious [North Mexican] canyon hideaway, this small tribe of recluses had solved nearly every problem known to man….
The Tarahumara geniuses had even branched into economics, creating a one-of-a-kind financial system based on booze and random acts of kindness: instead of money, they traded favors and big tubs or corn beer.
You’d expect an economic engine fueled by alcohol and freebies to spiral into a drunken grab-fest, everyone double-fisting for themselves like bankrupt gamblers at a casino buffet, but in Tarahumara Land, it works…. The Tarahumara are industrious and inhumanly honest….
And if being the kindest, happiest people on the planet wasn’t enough, the Tarahumara were also the toughest.
(14–15)
Once again, it bears repeating that the object of this analysis is not to ascertain the merits of McDougall’s glorification of the Tarahumara, but rather to read that glorification as a cultural text idealizing a certain model of social behavior. McDougall’s introductory elegy to the Tarahumara makes clear that his admiration rests in the tribe’s peripheral relationship to global capitalist culture and its litany of discontents: Western disease patterns, social strife and crime, human-induced climate change, and selfish materialism. This last difference in the propensity to engage in capitalist consumption is what McDougall seems to privilege above all others as most illustrative of the cultural clash he is narrating. In one instance, McDougall tells of a Tarahumara runner who, on a fluke, enters and wins a California marathon; yet, marvels McDougall, “even though he’d found a surefire way to make cash, he’d never returned to race again” (28).
Conversely, a Tarahumara village by the name of Yerbabuena offers a cautionary tale about the impact of institutionalized capitalism—state-run and criminal alike. McDougall recounts this story of such noxious effects of “chabochis” (trouble-causing outsiders [29 passim]) on the Rarámuri way of life in the form of a dialogue between a Tarahumara schoolteacher and the guide whom McDougall has contracted in the U.S. Southwest. In this anecdote, the schoolteacher explains how the domino effect of “progress” did away with the traditional way of life in one village: the clearing and paving of a road, which permitted the introduction of a new food commodities market based around “soda, chocolate, rice, sugar, butter, flour,” led to the Tarahumara entry into the local labor economy in order to be able to buy these commodities; they stopped running when their lives began to revolve around consumption and the low-wage labor necessary to engage in it (37–38).
Consumption—addiction to consumption, and, in particular, addiction to the sugar-salt-fat food additive triumvirate that has been recently decried as the profit-generating culprit of global obesity and disease
3—is the face of ill-being; the autochthonous way of life as a running society that eschews it, the face of well-being. McDougall does not posit a direct connection between a life—and, specifically, a diet—of capitalist consumption and other agents implicated in the literal paving of the way for that consumption culture. Yet his anecdote implicitly posits that the consumer culture that exploits paved roads, on the one hand, and the loggers, drug traffickers, and politicians who have a vested interest in their paving, on the other, are simply different aspects of the same capitalist circumstance (38). The anecdote that McDougall selects to close his book underscores the protagonic role of consumer culture as the pernicious agent of capitalism. In it, a character called Caballo Blanco (White Horse)—a U.S. expatriate and honorary Tarahumara runner who serves as the cultural renegade vertebral to the entire narrative and embodying the possible salvation of the First World much in the way that the human-to-Na’vi convert Jake Sully does in
Avatar—rejects the offer of a contract from the sporting goods company North Face, saying, in the words that close the book, “Running isn’t about making people buy stuff. Running should be free, man” (287).
Throughout the text McDougall underscores the collectivist culture of the Tarahumara as the tribe’s core characteristic that distinguishes it—and, to some degree, barring an onslaught of consumer goods or narcotrafficking interests, safeguards it—from capitalist assimilation. This collectivism is synonymous with antimaterialism in the economic sphere, as evidenced by the exchange system of “korima,” the moral “obligation to share whatever you can spare, instantly and with no expectations,” which McDougall calls the “cornerstone of Tarahumara culture” (37).
McDougall’s description of
korima evokes Evo Morales’s credo of the indigenous way of life as “vivir bien” (live well) in opposition to the capitalist “vivir mejor” (live better—connoting not self-improvement, but an unjust hierarchy among fellow beings). This same dichotomy is shown to be operative in the differing cultural conceptions of running itself. For the Tarahumara—whose indigenous name signals running as the foundational attribute of the people—running is a mirror for their
korima “economy,” and their collectivist antimaterialistic society. For the
chabochi interlopers, on the other hand, running is an individualistic activity from which to extract personal gain. One passage of McDougall’s text illustrates this opposition in particular clarity, during the discussion of how U.S. sports enthusiast and promoter Rick Fisher sponsored the entry of a group of Tarahumara runners for the first time in an annual one-hundred-mile race in Leadville, Colorado by treating the race as a divisive competition rather than as an exercise in unity, earning himself the nickname Pescador, a literal Spanish translation of Fisher’s name that insinuates his greedy self-interest (75).
The Tarahumara treatment of running as a collective activity dashes McDougall’s preconceived notions of running as a solipsistic exercise. The organization of his narrative suggests that this central hypothesis of running as a collective activity motivated him to investigate running as an atavistic behavior. This line of inquiry culminates in McDougall’s exposition of biological theories of running as a physiological evolutionary adaptation that allowed humans to engage in persistence hunting—the running down of their prey over long distances that coincide with the length of a marathon (238)—and thereby to triumph as a species (see chapter 28, 214–44).
This species-level optic on the idea that “humans evolved to go running” (217) in order to become the most successful hunters resonates strongly with the dimensions of Ridley’s perspective on trade as both motor and telos of human evolution. It is also significant that the ideological difference of perspective does not remit to a modernist primitivism-versus-civilization debate. McDougall considers running culture to be the basis of innovation—the same kind of innovation that Ridley prizes as the basis of trade culture. McDougall makes this case in the figure of Louis Liebenberg, a mathematician and physicist who ventured into the African bush in search of the answers to evolution’s mysteries, which Liebenberg believed to have solved in the presence of a persistence hunt by the handful of Bushmen who had resisted assimilation within the cultural mainstream. According to Liebenberg, persistence running demands a set of skills (and develops “speculative hunting”) including “visualization[,] empathy[,] abstract thinking and forward projection.” Liebenberg muses, “Isn’t that exactly the mental engineering we now use for science, medicine, the creative arts?” (235). Yet these attributes, McDougall’s text suggests, are maximally developed in a collectivist society that stands outside their exploitative capitalist application. Whereas Ridley argues that humans use these competencies to produce a capitalist social system, McDougall argues that humans use these same competencies precisely to resist it—or, perhaps more precisely, that our capitalist culture beset by the ills that McDougall lists in his introductory pages would do well to heal itself on the model of the Tarahumara (much like the Na’vi of
Avatar).
McDougall does not assert that humanity would have fared better had it forsworn technology for subsistence living; he argues—like Colin Beavan of No Impact Man (2009)—that the life of global capitalist-driven technology lacks heart. Like the Prius commercial in which love serves as the synthetic concept unifying what it means to be a species homologous with nature, and generative of technologically sophisticated consumer products that purport to protect that nature, love also makes a central appearance in McDougall’s discussion of a species “born to run”:
The real secret of the Tarahumara [was that] they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running or you wouldn’t live to love anything else. And like everything else we love—everything we sentimentally call our “passions” and “desires”—it’s really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.
(92–93)
Once again, love is cast in the rhetorical position of representing humanity itself by virtue of constituting its deepest motivational—and even adaptive—drive (“everything … we love—everything we sentimentally call our ‘passions’ and ‘desires’—[is] really an encoded ancestral necessity”). Love of running—love of “mankind’s first fine art”—allows humans to “spread across the planet” in pursuit of all forms of love (“You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else”) in an image evocative of the current global culture. McDougall does not enter into any sustained discussion of how love of running constitutes the core characteristic that allowed humans to become the citizens of global capitalist culture that we have become, but, like Ridley, his inference is that innovation stemming from the “first fine art” of running—coalescing in “science, medicine, the creative arts”—has propelled us toward our triumph as a species.
4Yet, whereas Ridley champions capitalist trade as the manifestation of innately innovative collectivism, McDougall devotes significant attention in his text to the discussion of the negative impact of capitalism on running. Not only does he pit the forces of commodification against the Tarahumara way of life; he also asserts that the same forces have adversely affected U.S. culture, specifically the culture of running. “American distance running went into a death spiral when cash entered the equation” (94), McDougall argues, because it lost its joyful collectivist aspect of a group given over to the love of running for the sake of running: “the American approach—ugh. Rotten at its core. It was too artificial and grabby … too much about getting stuff and getting it now: medals, Nike deals, a cute butt. It wasn’t art; it was business, a hard-nosed quid pro quo” (93).
Nike is a particular target of McDougall’s criticisms, not only for its role in turning running into an industry but also for having created a product—the cushioned orthotics-inspired running shoe—that duped runners worldwide into forsaking their own natural physiology for artificial commodity, yielding decades of chronic injury. “Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy—but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault,” McDougall alleges. “Before [the founders of the company] got together, the modern running shoe didn’t exist. Neither did most modern running injuries” (179; extended historiography of Nike’s running shoe research and development, chapter 25, 168–83). McDougall cites Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman himself as having become disillusioned with the company for “distributing a lot of crap” and effectively having abandoned its original mission of creating the best—and safest—athletics products for the single-minded objective of “[m]ak[ing] money” (182). Neoliberal critique takes shape as an indictment of profit making as working inexorably to the detriment of the consumer, effectively spreading ill-being on a global scale.
In its own marketing, Nike crafts precisely the opposite discourse, obscuring all reference to profit making and emphasizing exclusively the well-being of the consumer. This language of well-being does not limit itself to simple claims of specific health benefits of specific products, but rather extends, once again, into the sphere of species discourse, manipulating the same conceptual topoi that we have seen in play in other collectivist arguments. The annual “Nike+ Human Race,” inaugurated August 31, 2008, and repeated October 24, 2009, is a worldwide ten-kilometer footrace whose name intentionally creates a double entendre through its evocation of the species itself. Billed as the “world’s largest running event,” the Nike+ Human Race coordinates registered participation on a single day across the globe (twenty-five cities in 2008, thirty cities in 2009), with remote participation through the digital upload of off-site running data from other locations. The Nike+ web page for the 2009 event features a world map constructed of photographed faces, with pop-up dialogue boxes indicating names of cities, numbers of runners, and average racing time. A bold caption spanning the width of the page—and therefore, also, of the visual representation of the globe—reads:
Congratulations, Runners!
Together the world ran 802,242 miles.
This cumulative number of miles run as a collective of untold proportions is only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of miles run day in and day out by the international members of Nikeplus.com, self-described as the world’s biggest online running community. The self-reported goal of the community is for each of its members to “become a better runner,” and the site purports to help with this goal by serving as an archive for each member’s running data—distance, speed, and frequency objectives; calories burned in the process; and a coaching program. There is a group messaging board that seeks to build virtual relationships through the posing of running and fitness challenges among members. The website’s claim of having logged over ten thousand “laps around the world” generates the image of the entire world population running in simultaneity—in conversation, in community—across the surface of the globe. Yet, in perfect opposition to McDougall’s credo that “running should be free,” the Nike+ community has a nonnegotiable price of membership. In order to join, the ineluctable “first step” is to “get the gear”: a pair of Nike+ sensor-ready shoes, the Nike+ Sensor that slips into the shoes, and the Nike+ SportBand (or Nike+ iPod Sport Kit) that reads the data from the sensor and uploads the information to Nikeplus.com through a detachable USB port. There is also an entry fee for any ten-kilometer run in a participating city on the day of the Human Race. Nike has commodified the discursive figure of the species affectively engaged in a collective drive toward its own well-being. In spite of detractors like McDougall who charge Nike with producing real-world effects that are the inverse of the company’s discursive claims—that is, the delivery of ill-being under the guise of well-being—Nike has nevertheless successfully exploited the discourse of species consciousness for profit.
Technological Superorganism
If we attempt to assemble a composite portrait of this discursive protagonism of the figure of the collective in our current cultural production, we are able to distill recurrent motifs: interest in the fact of connectivity and the stuff of connectedness above and beyond the salient, the unique, the differentiated; democratic horizontality over hierarchical verticality; a dynamism generated by instinct and affect—love being the most frequent metonym of this motor; cultural activity on the order of the species; a concern for relative well-being versus ill-being, as though this cultural activity on the order of the species could be assessed by the self-governing homeostatic principle of the soma.
Robert Wright, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and sometime professor of philosophy and religion, speaks of this discursive figure of this soma of the species collective in ontological terms as a “superorganism,” arguing that our global media and technology have brought humanity to a new stage of evolution: “Could it be that in some sense, the
point of evolution—both the biological evolution that created an intelligent species and the technological evolution that a sufficiently intelligent species is bound to unleash—has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain? Kind of in the way that the
point of the maturation of an organism is to create an adult organism?” Ridley tells us that humanity is born to trade, McDougall that humanity is born to run. Now Wright posits the hypothesis that we are born to create and then to corporeally inhabit—again, the metaphor of the soma—our own technology. If Ridley implicitly argues that humans are innate capitalists and McDougall that humans are innate antimaterialistic sharers (essentially commune-ists, but obviating the political stigma of communism), then Wright’s political analysis of the superorganism frames the debate in terms that help to shed light on how the homeostatic principle of the collective may be related to the question of capitalism in the first place, as I shall argue here.
Wrestling with the position enunciated by the likes of Paul Virilio, who theorizes informatics as the new medium of social control and speaks of the “information bomb” as the new atomic bomb (1998)—a position seemingly affirmed by news reports of the need for increased “cyberwarriors” to protect U.S. (or any nation’s) security in the global age (Gjelten) or by the vision of total human subordination to technology in the Matrix film trilogy—Wright rejects the notion that technology must be firmly associated with social control: “But at least the superorganism that seems to be emerging, though in some ways demanding, isn’t the totalitarian monster that [George] Orwell feared; it’s more diffuse, more decentralized, more reconcilable, in principle—at least—with liberty.” Gently characterizing the technological superorganism as “demanding,” but certainly not “totalitarian,” Wright lays out an alternative set of concepts to be associated with its social hegemony: diffusion, decentralization, liberty. This latter conceptual imaginary resonates both with the flow of capital theorized by the neoliberal school as optimal—deregulated and free—and with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s vision of global-age empire as a circumstance of control brought about by the fact of capitalist globalization:
Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.
(xi)
Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.
(xii)
The construction of the paths and limits of these new global flows has been accompanied by a transformation of the dominant productive processes themselves, with the result that … priority [is] given … to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor.
(xiii)
The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire “civilized” world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things will always be and the way they were always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with no temporal boundaries and in this sense outside of history or at the end of history. Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down to the depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.
(xiv–xv)
Wright’s technological superorganism—diffuse, decentralized, and free—mirrors the vertebral description given by Hardt and Negri of the sovereignty of capital, wherein the question of the global collective also emerges (“the object of its rule is social life in its entirety”) in the context of ahistorical atavism (“this is the way things will always be and the way they were meant to be”). Hardt and Negri’s attribution of this landscape of cultural control to capitalist (neoliberal) empire itself allows us to glimpse and hypothesize a causal connection between global capitalist culture and the diverse expression of the metaphor of the species collective as a homeostatically managed superorganism. That is, if we admit Hardt and Negri’s description of capitalist empire as a symptomatic cultural analysis—an analysis informed by the culture it diagnoses—then we may begin to entertain the notion that the recurrent image of the universal human subject (timeless, universal, driven by affect, adhered by communication, peaceful, and free) is given by capitalist discourse itself.
If we reflect on Lev Manovich’s meditation on the rise of the World Wide Web (and adding to this the subsequent development of new media technologies) as the technology most adequately reflective of post–cold war political and economic sensibilities—which, properly described, are hegemonically capitalist—we might begin to ask if we should invert the directionality of our commonly held assumption of the relationship between capitalism and technology in which the technological advance simply propels capitalism without capitalism’s having any influence over the direction of technological development. But if we consider capitalism as a source of epistemological narrative guiding and shaping the very ideation of what technologies would be desirable or even possible, perhaps we might hypothesize a connection between the discursive ideals of capitalism and the kinds of technologies that are developed to realize them.
Returning to Wright and his view of the technological superorganism as a monism—that is, as a singular entity of uncompromised integrity, whose homeostatic regulation is working successfully toward well-being—it is, from the perspective of a technology developing according to the dictates of capitalism and not vice versa, striking that Wright should ascribe an organic inevitability to that superorganism, casting it as essential for the fate of humanity; this perspective allows us to understand the fate of the superorganism as conceptually interchangeable with that of capitalism, if capitalism may in fact be posited as its originary epistemological author. Should the well-being of this superorganism reverse course toward ill-being—should the “fairly unified body” of the superorganism fracture into division and therefore divisiveness—the homeostatic harmony of the superorganism’s parts will, Wright concludes, devolve into “chaos”: “I do think we ultimately have to embrace a superorganism of
some kind—not because it’s inevitable, but because the alternative is worse. If technological progress grinds to a halt, it will be because chaos has engulfed the world; and if we don’t use technology to weave people together and turn our species into a fairly unified body, chaos will probably engulf the world because technology offers so much destructive power that a sharply divided human species can’t flourish.”
Children of Men: Reproduction as the Salvation of the Collective
Children of Men (2006),
5 a film by the preeminent Mexican director and three-time Academy Award nominee Alfonso Cuarón, envisions precisely such a scenario of apocalyptic human affairs.
6 Although the film follows the intimate story of a handful of people, that small group represents the hope of humanity in its entirety against the backdrop of imminent species extinction. This circumstance of a gravely—and, apparently, terminally—imperiled human race has given way to the kind of chaos Wright imagines should the superorganism collapse. Here it is not because technological progress has ground to a halt, as Wright fears, but because humanity itself has suddenly and inexplicably lost the ability to procreate. The result is, nevertheless, tantamount to the dissolution of the superorganism—in the sense that people are no longer woven together into a fairly unified body—and the engulfing of the world by chaos. In this sense
Children of Men is a negative portrait of the species collective, one that takes humanity in all its extension as its central topos but explores its demise and possible salvation. Although this is a collective in the throes of violent disintegration, the same constellation of associated concepts comes to the fore in the conceptual narrative framework: well-being and ill-being as the evaluative poles for a homeostatic assessment of the social state of affairs, the politics and products of capitalist commodification and their contestation as the target of this homeostatic assessment, and love as the emotional extract of the human condition—with sexual reproduction as the sole viable telos for the near-defunct species.
The central problem afflicting the human race is a sudden loss of fertility in the early twenty-first century, and the film is scathing showing how this unhappy pandemic has resulted in precisely the kinds of “global civil war” symptoms predicted by analysts of rising temperatures (this is the homicidal dog-eat-dog world of compatriot Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2000 film
Amores perros brought to the edge of apocalpyse). A photomontage early on in the film shows in rapid-fire succession images of cities the world over that have succumbed to lawless violence: flames, death, and destruction give us to understand there is no longer any social compact of which to speak. At times we know that terrible and massive devastation has taken place simply by its elliptical mention, such as the cryptic but meaning-laden offering of condolences about people lost by virtue of their having been in New York “when it happened” or rueful lamentations about not being “in time” to salvage more than a handful of masterpieces from Madrid’s Prado Museum before civil rule disintegrated into chaos. “The world has collapsed,” propaganda advises and “only Britain soldiers on.” The rest of the world has flocked in droves to Britain in the same kind of “large-scale migration” anticipated by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee when envisioning the effects of reduced resources on world demographics. At various points of the film, we see extended traveling takes that span the lengths of seemingly endless metal holding pens into which “refugees” from countries all over the globe are crammed, their hands spilling out and multilingual cries for succor falling on deaf ears of the indifferent British soldiers who coldly vigil their containment. And, later on, in full and unmitigated Abu Ghraib–style atrocity, we see these British soldiers debase, rob, torture, and summarily execute the illegal immigrants at will and on a seemingly infinite scale.
In this horrific imaginary circumstance in which “only Britain soldiers on,” the status of illegality has been applied to the net sum of the remaining world population, while the British government maintains a perfect passivity toward their suffering. A recorded announcement played in public transportation urges British citizens not to view refugees as “my dentist,” “my housecleaner,” “my waiter,” “my cousin”; “THEY are illegal,” the public service message insists, breaking the bonds of first-person affective relationships in which all human beings are recognized as self-same and replacing affectivity with legality as the arbiter of the proper code of conduct with these distant third-person Others. Meanwhile, within the sphere of the British ruling elite, limousines of government functionaries divide the turbulent waters of the streets like sharks, lawn parties—albeit of tattered aspect—leisurely occupy entire stretches of green river bank in sharp contrast to the dense use of space in the containment of refugees, and a marble mausoleumlike edifice serves to amass and enshrine the world’s cultural artifacts (the imposing “Ark of the Arts”).
A security scanner submits the film’s hero Theo (Clive Owen) to self-definition by what he carries in his pockets, echoing the moment in which the Joker is likewise defined by the material belongings he carries on his person in the
Dark Knight. Theo has a lighter, a package of cigarettes, a whiskey flask, and a foil-backed plastic sheet of pills—all of which make him the prototypical subject of ill-being. Indeed, Theo is self-professedly “hopeless” (Alfonso Cuarón describes his character as a “veteran of hopelessness … like a zombie” [“Theo and Julian,” DVD special features]). When we see how a digital advertisement for the suicide drug Quietus serves as his alarm clock and when his morning coffee shoots out of his hand in a visceral reaction of fright to the explosion of the coffee shop he has just exited—and where, moreover, he has just watched a news report of the death by stabbing of the teenage “Baby” Diego (Juan Gabriel Yacuzzi), the world’s youngest person—we begin to appreciate how Theo is given over to addictive self-medication. Like
WALL·E, where ultimate dehumanization—lifelessness in the sense of no longer embodying the human condition—is represented by the inability to part one’s attention from the screen that floats in front of the obscenely obese and perpetually reclined bodies,
Children of Men gives an analogous portrait of life within the mainstream system in the form of Theo’s office, where cubicles are defined not by physical walls but by the virtual walls of attention given over exclusively to the screen before each worker. Emotionally attuned only to the media output, and not to one another (the exchange between Theo and his boss is completely flat in contrast to the mediatic melodrama surrounding the youngest person’s death), humans have clearly become alienated on a massive scale from the ability to form flesh-and-blood community. The adolescent son of Theo’s cousin Nigel (Danny Huston), high-ranking government official and director of the Ark of the Arts, embodies this condition of lifelessness: clearly in the flush of youth—complete with a burgeoning whitehead pimple prominent on his cheek—Alex (Ed Westwick) is nevertheless riveted in absolute concentration to a video game that he plays by moving a set of wires hooked onto his fingertips, as though physiologically incapable of parting his mind or body from this virtual engagement. When Nigel successfully dislodges Alex from his video play by screaming his son’s name at the top of his lungs from across the dining room table, it is only with the effect that Alex moves his hand—but not his eyes—to pick up and ingest the pills that his father is frantically commanding him to take. Are the pills keeping him alive or preventing him from living? Much like the futuristic dystopia of “peace” predicated on the collective injection of the sense-deadening drug Prozium in the film
Equilibrium (2002), the dystopia of
Children of Men seems to be succinctly and maximally summarized in the figure of Alex, whose apparent age places him, the spectator can surmise, in the general vicinity of the youngest people living. This youth is not the promise of the future, but the promise of death. And the behavior that represents this future-as-death is the absolute submission of self to medicated consumption.
The background detail of the film gives historiographical clues about how to formulate an interpretive periodization of this human apocalypse. One such moment is the commentary with which a pop radio disc jockey prefaces The Kills’ “Wait” as a “blast from the past all the way back from 2003, that beautiful time when people refused to accept that the future was just around the corner.” We know the film takes place in 2027, and that the last human birth was eighteen years prior, which we can calculate as 2008. So the choice of 2003 as a pivotal year, and one in which there was, as suggested by the radio personality’s implicit cultural criticism, already a force of willful blindness about the death and destruction that lay ahead, seems pointed when one considers how strongly the year 2003 resonates with the other historiographical references made by the film. These references are most notably concentrated in an intense cluster that defines Theo’s aging hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine) and his catatonic wife Janice (Philippa Urquhart). This couple and their camouflaged house in the woods serve as a physical and emotional refuge for Theo and as the film’s greatest symbol of all that stands in opposition to the extreme malaise that has overcome the human world. When Theo first enters their house seeking respite from those ills, the camera makes a slow pan over what we come to realize is a shrine of sorts to the couple’s markedly leftist political commitment. Newspaper clippings, protest posters, professional awards, and photographs all combine to show what Jasper, as a political cartoonist, and Janice, as a photojournalist, have stood for in the public sphere. Their activism, as viewed in their chronologically ordered keepsakes and clippings, moves from opposition to the Iraq War to concern over declining births and, finally, to the defense of “foogies,” the slang for illegal refugees in the era of full-blown infertility. This panoramic detail—later echoed by similar clippings pasted on the walls of the makeshift interrogation room maintained by the rebel group headed up by Theo’s ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore)—constitutes the single most sustained politico-historical commentary posed by the film. To it we may add Jasper’s later recounting of how Theo and Julian met at an antiglobalization rally in what would have been the turn of the twenty-first century—perhaps a reference to the so-called J18 protests that took place around the world, one of them in London, on June 18, 1999. Our chronology becomes antiglobalization protests (1999), Iraq War (2003), infertility (2008), subsequent police repression of refugees. We see through the newspaper clippings that Janice became a leader in the public outcry against mistreatment of refugees, only to be tortured herself by the M15, the British security service. Confined to a wheelchair during the film’s present moment, impassive and motionless, Janice embodies the living-dead condition that afflicts the world: her moral paralysis registers the unbridled logic of homicide and its violent quashing of hope. Janice’s body has been stilled by the violence that is just as much a part of the pandemic as infertility itself. Without new life, there can be no hope. Infertility, then, is the ultimate symptom and symbol of homicidal neoliberalism. (It is conceptually fitting, then, that Janice should meet her end with Quietus, administered though it may be by the loving hand of Jasper to prevent her from having to endure any further violence.)
The panoramic exposition of Jasper and Janice’s lives is arranged in chronological order not only so we will understand them as characters, but, even more important, so that we will understand the world history that has led to their present moment, and most important, so that we will understand that world history as a sequence of events—as an evolution or, more precisely, as a devolving state, a disintegration. That is to say, this panoramic shot of newspaper headlines and keepsakes does not simply satisfy the need, in elegant shorthand, to provide the spectator with background information; it also suggests that world events have developed as though reaching a crescendo. Jasper tells Theo a joke about an Englishman at a dinner party who doesn’t know the cause of infertility, but dines with gusto on stork; the lead-in to the punch line gives us background information that is analogous to the use of the panoramic shot. What has occasioned infertility?, the joke begins. There is apparently an established litany of possible causes: “genetic experiments, gamma rays, pollution, same old same old,” recites Jasper. All these possibilities resonate with the culture of risk capitalism, of the harnessing of technology and science to further the interests of capital over humanity, of capital over the earth. The fact that infertility is never assigned a cause allows it to come into view as a cultural illness, as a moral illness (functioning in exactly the same as the loss of sight in Fernando Meirelles’s
Blindness). Neoliberal globalization comes to an apex in the bid to control oil resources—
Children of Men presents the Iraq War as the last recognizable historical reference before the world succumbs to infertility. (Director Kathryn Bigelow’s perspective on the Iraq War in “The Hurt Locker” [2008] also adds warmaking to our growing list of addictions, as her
New York Times reviewer Manohla Dargis attests in urging us to consider how the film “takes an analytical if visceral look at how the experience of war can change a man, how it eats into his brain so badly he ends up hooked on it.”) The identification of 2003 as “that beautiful time when people refused to accept that the future was just around the corner” takes on a distinctly political resonance when we juxtapose 2003 as a transitional year with the timeline established in Janice’s tabletop scrapbook: the Iraq War comes into view as the beginning of the end of the world. From the series of details presented to us about world events, we may infer a logic of causality between these social phenomena: the same neoliberal circumstances that inspired antiglobalization rallies also occasioned the Iraq War, before finally culminating in global infertility, the film grimly suggests.
Against this backdrop of homicidal capitalist hopelessness, Theo emerges as a chosen one to restore hope. His very name—“God,” from the ancient Greek—resonates with other details as we approach his moral conversion from death to life. Along with the effects of destructive consumerism that Theo empties from his pockets in the Ark of the Arts, he also bears a set of keys. This last attribute proves to be a homonym for his messianic mission: Theo is asked by Julian to escort a “foogie” named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) to the border, a trip that draws Theo out of his death-trap existence and thrusts him onto the path of an archetypal journey of individual purification and renewal with like implications for the species collective. When Julian is murdered on the road to the rendezvous point, Theo expresses his devastation by crumpling into tears rather than lifting his flask all the way to his lips—an emotional awakening is his first step toward countering his own culturally and commercially imposed ill-being. When he and the others arrive at their first safe house, the man who greets them remarks with surprise at that fact that the dogs, “who don’t like anyone,” nevertheless wag their tails without barking at Theo. It is here that we see Theo drink and smoke for the last time. The draft script includes a line cut from the final movie version in which the caretaker of the dogs rejects a swig from Theo’s flask on the grounds that “alcohol is a tool of the government to numb the people,” a claim that resonates conceptually with the structure of consumption embodied by Theo as zombie-addict. As Theo is led to the barn where he will behold the pregnant Kee in a state of epiphany, he stamps out his last cigarette. (Much later on in the film, an elderly man requests a cigarette from Theo, and we realize in hindsight that from this point forward he has no longer smoked.)
Summoned by Kee, Theo finds her in the barn surrounded by cows, and what follows is the film’s most important stretch of dialogue:
KEE: You know what they do to these cows, they cut off their tits, they do. Zzzt, gone, bye. Only leave four. Four tits fits the machine. It’s wacko. Why not make machines that suck eight titties, eh?
THEO: Is that what you want to talk about, cows and titties?
KEE: Julian told me about your baby. Said his name was Dylan. You taught him to swim when he was two. He called you papa. She said anything goes spooky, I should talk to you. Said you’d help me. Said you’d get me to the boat.
THEO: What boat?
KEE: The Tomorrow.
THEO: The Tomorrow? I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m sure your friends can take care of you.
KEE: But Julian said only trust you. She said you’d help me.
THEO: I don’t know why she said that. Listen, I don’t quite know what’s going on.
KEE: You can’t leave!
THEO: Kee, I’m in a lot of trouble myself. I’m sorry.
KEE: Wait! (Kee starts to unbutton her shirt.)
THEO: What are you doing?! Don’t do that. (Kee takes off her shirt, covering her breasts with one hand and her underwear with the other—the “War, he sung, is toil and trouble” aria from Handel’s opera Alexander’s Feast starts again. Theo stares at pregnant Kee surrounded by cows.)
KEE: I’m scared. Please help me.
THEO: Jesus Christ.
On seeing Theo, Kee launches abruptly into a discussion of the cows and how they are milked. Disarmed by her offbeat overture, Theo is uncomprehending, but the meaning of Kee’s comments lies in her implicit self-comparison to the mutilated cows—surrounded, as she is, by them as she speaks—and in her referencing of neoliberal capitalist practices as the starting point of her negotiations with Theo. Capitalism has no compassion, no empathy, doesn’t care about the cows. Just as Quietus is the ultimate symbol of capitalist consumption, the four-nipple machine is the ultimate symbol of capitalist production. The four-nipple machine epitomizes risk culture: to turn a quicker profit, the cow is half-sacrificed with no thought to long-term effects. Capitalism functions against nature, against feelings, against health. When Kee has finished with her impromptu analysis of capitalism (which resonates with Sheriff Tom Ed Bell’s discussion, between uneasy and mournful, of how cows are now slaughtered with air guns in the Coen Brothers’
No Country for Old Men), she launches into an interpellation of Theo as a father. This seems at first like a non sequitur, but the movement Kee has made is from the threat that assails her and the life she carries—the future of humanity itself—to the force that can protect her from that threat: Theo as father. It is this part of Theo that has languished in half-dead internal paralysis—an emotional analogue of Janice’s outward state—and it is this part of him that is capable of overcoming the four-tit machine of death. As he beholds Kee’s bare pregnant belly in a sustained gaze of wonderment—accompanied by Handel’s aria motif—Theo says, “Jesus Christ,” here not only a banal expression of amazement but also a symbolic naming of the life in Kee’s belly. The scene’s biblical symbology suddenly becomes fully clear: Theo—God—beholds the savior of humanity in a stable. Theo’s status as chosen one is reiterated by Kee, who reveals that she has inherited Julian’s absolute trust in him.
In the following scene, the future of Kee’s baby is debated by the Fishes. Julian’s visually spectacular assassination by her own rebel group has already persuasively demonstrated the extent to which the political left has succumbed as much to corruption and violence as the political right that it opposes—in what tenuous sphere of coherent politics remains. This scene, in which the treacherous new Fishes leader Luke (Chiwetel Ejiofor) argues that the Fishes should appropriate Kee’s baby for political leverage, confirms that politics proper has crumbled beyond salvation. Hope will not be found therein and can only lie elsewhere. In response to Luke’s plan to use Kee’s unborn baby as a political pawn, Theo argues before the full assembly of Fishes that what Kee needs is, above all, a doctor. As Theo speaks, a tiny kitten tries in a determined singularity of attention to claw its way up his pant leg. The attentions of the helpless kitten seeking protection from Theo signal him once again as a chosen one against the backdrop of broken politics. Theo will in fact become the very doctor for which he advocates, not only further abandoning vice but this time turning it into virtue by using and purifying the remaining alcohol in his flask to clean his hands as well as the newborn baby he delivers into the sick world standing on the verge of social death.
That this baby is an antidote to apocalypse is evident in the heart-stopping scene in which full-scale urban warfare between the police forces and the rebel uprising in the Bexhill refugee camp comes to a sudden and complete stop within the circumference of those who realize they are in the presence of a baby. The sound of the baby’s wails leads instantly to the command to cease fire; the sight of the newborn baby brings awestruck soldiers to their knees against the audio overlay of the aria—once more—that symbolizes the power of love and life over hate and death. Theo is mortally wounded in the battle by the leader of the Fishes, who would use Kee’s baby to galvanize antigovernment sentiment (and the same leader who has killed Julian because of her own commitment to humanity over politics), which only affirms politics—whether for or against a repressive government—as the enemy of humanity. In his role as a chosen one, Theo is neither fighter nor political activist. To underscore this pacifism, his character wears flip-flops through war zones; when Julian tells the story of their romance, Theo disavows its political aspect, saying he went to the rallies just to get her in bed, a sentiment he reiterates just moments before she is shot. For all his vice and hopelessness—the part of him that has succumbed to the zombifying effects of neoliberal risk culture—Theo is a father, a healer, a lover. Theo is the film’s true revolutionary: he is the guardian of bare life. Theo is the fusion of Ernesto and el Chivo before him, a doctor and a father, like Bruce Wayne’s father in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005), represented by the visual synecdoche of the stethoscope as the instrument capable of healing the sick body politic.
Children of Men ends on a note that brings the possibility of utopian redemption onscreen. This sequence begins with Theo’s death, which is framed as a sacrifice for the sake of inspiring faith in Kee: Theo’s last gesture is to rock his arms in imitation of what she must do to reassure her little girl Dylan (named after his own lost son, who represented his and Julian’s hope, a “magical child,” in Jasper’s words, and thus represents the renewed possibility of the miraculous). Theo ends his life not as a cynic given over to ill-being, but as a father working selflessly toward the well-being of his adoptive family, rocking his arms and telling Kee that everything will be all right—for her, for Dylan, for all of humanity. As we watch in shock as our hero—our father-doctor, our messiah—slumps in death, the film takes us forward in time beyond the suspension of revolution-to-come and into the realization of our hope: in the final frames of the film the
Tomorrow emerges from the fog—the clouded vision of humanity—to come into view. (The
Tomorrow, incidentally, bears a striking resemblance to the Greenpeace boat
Esperanza—hope—active since 2002.) Kee and her baby—our twenty-first-century Mary and Jesus—and, by extension, all humanity, are saved. Kee has, in fact, earlier joked that hers was an immaculate conception, only to confess that she does not know which of the “wankers” was the father, casting herself as more of a Mary Magdalene than a Mary yet nevertheless carrying a miraculously conceived and messianic child and opening the door for Theo to act as its symbolic father.
7
Universal Morality, Perfect Democratization, Equitable Distribution of Resources
Health becomes the operative metaphorical measure of the status of the collective. Just as well-being—the product of an optimal homeostasis—indicates a healthy collective, ill-being—the breakdown in homeostatic function—indicates its potentially terminal imperilment. “If society fell apart, would you?” asks the Discovery Channel’s reality show The Colony. This tag line signals the show’s premise of social apocalypse, with the canonical handful of strangers from diverse walks of life “participat[ing] in an experiment that will test humanity’s ability to survive.” The show’s doomsday scenarios and living conditions—biological disaster, pandemic, no power from the grid, no running water, no communication from the outside world—demonstrate a common concern with Wright and Children of Men over the fate of the human collective. In The Colony and Children of Men—also in Blindness, where the world struggles to cope with a pandemic loss of sight—the emergence of a small microcosmic community formed across social divisions of class, race, gender, and ideology constitutes the promise of human salvation. These works posit the rejection of the social hierarchy based on such divisive and segregating compartmentalizations as the first essential step toward redemption and social healing: a perfect democratization.
In contemplating the dissolution of the “technological superorganism,” Wright muses that avoiding this chaos will require “morality.” The implication that morality may be wanting in the current implicitly neoliberal landscape echoes the calls for capitalist reform by the likes of former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who at the G-20 Summit of 2009 declared the days of the so-called Washington Consensus—profit for profit’s sake—to be over and urged the world to adopt a common set of “values” that do not cross “moral boundaries” (“Britain’s Brown Urges Moral Values at G-20”). Brown urged the collective correction of what he called the “unsupervised globalization of our financial markets,” including—to Brown’s mind—the regulation of the “shadow” banking system and their hedge funds, credit rating agencies, tax havens, and corporate bonuses (“Old Washington Consensus Is Over: Gordon Brown”). But while the call to morality is meant to regulate and curb these neoliberal practices, which generate untold profit for a financial elite, Brown’s discourse of morality—like Wright’s warning that morality will be required to prevent the collapse of the superorganism or the moral awakening of the small reterritorialized communities in
Children of Men,
The Colony, and
Blindness—does not contradict the classic discourse of capitalism itself. On the contrary, if we think back to the equivalency established across Adam Smith’s works (
Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations) between morality and resources, both being guided by the invisible hand through the body politic in harmonious flow, we appreciate the notion that morality—as though an affective homologue of capital—is the blood of homeostatic capitalist dynamics.
Morality, democracy, the distribution of resources, and the human species are inveterate topics of inquiry and representation. What I suggest is that we consider the persistence with which they are arranged into a constellation of topoi that yields a certain vision of humanity consonant with the capitalist imaginary. This vision is neatly represented by the single image on the otherwise spare cover of the 250th-anniversary edition of Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments: an origami heart shaped out of a one-dollar bill. The owner of this one-dollar bill heart is the species collective itself. If thus referenced in passing by Smith some 250 years ago, in the origins of modern-day capitalism, the notion of the species—and particularly of the species engaged in capitalist activity—has now exploded as a trope into the mainstream discourse of globalization. Moral humanity—love being its synecdoche and sexual reproduction its telos—is democratically interwoven in a shared and infinitely capacious body governed by its homeostatic tendency toward well-being. In place of politics articulated through the rationale of reasoned argumentation, this figure of the homeostatic species collective indicates a positive political position, with the language of health becoming the symbol of affirmative politics and the status quo; a negative political position is indicated by ill-being, connoting by homeostatic principle the urgent, life-or-death need to return to organic balance by reversing or otherwise reforming political course. In the formulation of inquiry across disciplines, the collective has begun to move toward epistemological hegemony both as the basis for the conception of what is knowable and for the scale optimal for the greatest, most sophisticated, and most accurate production of human knowledge. This knowledge may be rational in its substance and use, but it is produced unthinkingly through the shared heart that delivers a flow of capital to all its species constituents across the feeling soma.