“As if by the nod of some invisible conductor”
In December 2010, still in the thick of U.S.-driven global recession, the
New York Review of Books published a review of books dedicated to a consideration of economic recovery. One of these texts is British financial reporter Anatole Kaletsky’s
Capitalism 4.0, which reviewer Jeff Madrick characterizes as espousing a “hopeful economic agenda” in which Kaletsky “relies heavily on his faith in the ingenuity of capitalism as an adaptive mechanism” (1). Madrick goes on to quote Kaletsky on this point: “‘Hoping that “something will turn up” may sound like deluded wishful thinking,’ [Kaletsky] writes, ‘but it is really just an extension into politics and macroeconomics of Adam Smith’s arguments about the self-organizing dynamics of the capitalist economy’” (1). I intentionally break from scholarly convention to cite Kaletsky indirectly in order to underscore the reach of such ideas through concatenated mass-media repetition and also in order to point out how, in spite of the fact that Madrick begins his review with a cynical recognition of the “rarely recognized” structural weaknesses of the U.S. economy and a resultant skepticism about its possibilities of recovery, his article is nevertheless titled, “How Can the Economy Recover?” The title itself echoes Kaletsky’s posture of faith in the persistence of the economic fact and its capacity for self-healing; it is not a question of whether, but how. Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the model of somatic homeostasis it represents—the organic and autonomic tendency toward well-being—turns up as a conceptual source of hope for the longevity of the capitalist fact. Why do we think our culture will continue to be capitalist? Because we believe in the persistence of the self-same, and that self-same is intrinsically—epistemically—founded in the homeostatic logic of capitalism. The epistemic feat of the “invention of man” was to make human homeostasis capitalist.
Six months later, also ruminating on the economic crash of 2008, and giving a blog preview of his own coauthored book on the subject, Greek political economist Yanis Varoufakis departed from the opposite premise that no economic school is to be regarded as having the silver bullet remedy: “The simple point is that, as economists (of almost all persuasions), we have been barking up the wrong tree.” In the face of the “most spectacular privatisation of money in the 1990s and beyond,” Varoufakis writes, “our petty squabbles between ‘monetarists’ and the so-called ‘Keynesians,’ between those favouring inflation targets and those against the fans of zero inflation; between advocates of microeconomic reform in the labour markets and others paying more attention to the credibility of central banks” were all “pointless.” Instead, Varoufakis makes the ludicrous—but, seemingly, not disingenuous—proposal that the economy should follow the example of the U.S. National Football League, where “socialist planning lives in sin with unbridled competition.” In justifying his model, Varoufakis draws from British literary critic Terry Eagleton (2007) in another embedded representation of homeostatic principle disseminated through mass-media circuitry:
In his little book,
The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton faced a similarly daunting task [analogous to the drafting of what Varoufakis calls the New Global Plan]: to capture, in brief, the … meaning of life. His answer was: A band like the Cuban Buena Vista Social Club; that’s the meaning of life! Eagleton’s point was that such a band illustrates the dialectic at its best. A “community” with a clear, unifying tune toward which each “individual” contributes by … improvising. Its members do not mechanistically play from some given score, written by a despotic musical mind (however brilliant that mind might be), but, rather, integrate their own private freedom into a collective pursuit which enhances the experience of each of its members. Their improvisation confirms their private freedom not by having each not whimsically selected by autonomous players but, rather, when all the various pieces of improvisation fall into place,
as if by the nod of some invisible conductor.(emphasis added)
Varoufakis’s rejection of economics as an established disciplinary source of knowledge nevertheless circles directly back to free-market epistemicity as a source of knowledge that is not only naturalized as supremely legitimate but is also cast as being at the crux of the human condition itself. The search for the new global plan is tantamount to the search for the meaning of life, and both searches reach their conceptual apotheosis in the reiteration of the figure of free-market homeostasis—in which “private freedom” results from collective integration within an organic whole whose “various pieces of improvisation fall into place” in a process of self-organization that is not top-down and autocratic, but rather markedly democratic of spirit and, as such, spontaneous and unregulated, yet communicated through a harmonious collective sensibility “as if by the nod of some invisible conductor,” a reference that implicitly evokes what was explicit in Kaletsky, namely, Adam Smith’s invisible hand.
In the same way that the Christ narrative dominates Western ideals of social comportment, the capitalist homeostatic principle has come to dominate Western ideals of social structure and to condition the possibilities of knowledge and imagination that those structures support. It is not simply a model of commerce and exchange in the economic dimension, but in the intellectual and moral dimensions as well. Things work best, we believe, when structured as a collective free flow that obeys only the natural laws of organic integrity that work toward the equity, harmony, and happiness of homeostatic well-being. This homeostatic principle of how things work serves at once as the foundation for thought and its highest proof; it is a point of creative departure as well as a legitimizing force with the power of self-institutionalization.
In a set of posthumously published and instantly classic lectures (
The Birth of Biopolitics, 2007), French philosopher Michel Foucault meditates on this very question of the epistemicity of free-market capitalism, which he calls
homo œconomicus—now a more refined epithet for his earlier “invention of man”—as the power to define the knowable:
Since the eighteenth century, has homo œconomicus involved setting up an essentially and unconditionally irreducible element against any possible government? Does the definition of homo œconomicus involved marking out the zone that is definitively inaccessible to any government action? Is homo œconomicus an atom of freedom in the face of all the conditions, undertakings, legislation, and prohibitions a possible government, or was he not already a certain type of subject who precisely enabled an art of government to be determined according to the principle of economy, both in the sense of political economy and in the sense of the restriction, self-limitation, and frugality of government? Obviously, the way in which I have formulated this question gives the answer straightaway, but this is what I would like to talk about, that is to say, homo œconomicus as the partner, the vis-à-vis, and the basic element of the new governmental reason formulated in the eighteenth century.
Homo œconomicus is someone who can say to the juridical sovereign, to the sovereign possessor of rights and founder of positive law on the basis of the natural right of individuals: You must not. But he does not say: You must not, because I have rights and you must not touch them. This is what the man of right, homo juridicus, says to the sovereign: I have rights, I have entrusted some of them to you, the others you must not touch, or: I have entrusted you with my rights for a particular end. Homo œconomicus does not say this. He also tells the sovereign: You must not. But what must he not? You must not because you cannot. And you cannot in the sense that “you are powerless.” And why are you powerless, why can’t you? You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.
(282–83, emphasis added)
This losing battle of the sovereign to
homo œconomicus is succinctly recounted in the review—to circle back to Kaletsky’s reviewer—of Jeff Madrick’s
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (2011) by U.S. economists Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Madrick explains how the increasing deregulation of finance gave rise to cycle after cycle of deepening greed, extreme risk taking, and dubious legality in banking from the 1970s to the present, creating “so many [villains] that by the end of the book,” Krugman and Wells aver, “we were, frankly, suffering from a bit of outrage fatigue” (2). In their review of Madrick’s book, Krugman and Wells say they “get a lot of the what, but not much of the why”—“why have villains triumphed so repeatedly?” (2), they ask. “If the problem was lack of oversight, that leads to another question: Why did the regulators abdicate—and keep abdicating despite repeated financial disasters?” “There’s another book to be written here,” Krugman and Wells aver, “one that gets at the forces that made the reign of financial villains possible” (2). Yet, throughout their review, Krugman and Wells make reference to a deepening ideological naturalization of the free-market ideal, beginning with how Ronald Reagan, on the strength of Milton Friedman’s radical free-market paradigm, “made unchecked greed and runaway individualism not only acceptable, but lauded, in the American psyche” based on the conviction that “financial markets could do no wrong” (1). Krugman and Wells even give their own term for this, in a pithy definition of the conceptual backbone of the neoliberalism that Reagan and Friedman spawned: “greedism,” the “creed … that unchecked self-interest furthers the common good” (1). If free-market capitalism was born in synchronicity with liberal democracy as its political avatar, then neoliberalism has constituted the radical expression of free-market capitalism by forcing its political counterpart to obey its epistemic principle of self-regulated horizontality to the letter of the law.
In Krugman and Wells’s economical turn of phrase—the creed that unchecked self-interest furthers the common good—we have a concise summary of the fundamental epistemic operation of neoliberalism: the fusion of the model of neocolonial growth (unchecked self-interest) with that of free-market homeostasis (the common good). This is why, as a culture, we cannot set limits on profit: because to do so is tantamount, we believe (we know, in the epistemic sense of free-market hegemony), to short-circuiting our own well-being—in a word, to committing suicide. And so the argument rages about the definition of well-being and ill-being, with free-market apologists claiming that to limit profit is terminal ill-being, with free-market antagonists like Varoufakis warning that humanity is on course to “[end] up like a dim, self-defeating virus,” both sides engaging organic metaphors of well-being or malaise to stake their claims, each claiming the epistemic privilege of invisible somatic self-orchestration that only works to reaffirm the originary free-market model.
Biopower: Affective, Epistemic
Homo œconomicus … tells the sovereign: You must not. But what must he not? You must not because you cannot. And you cannot in the sense that “you are powerless.” And why are you powerless, why can’t you? You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.
(Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283)
In the face-off between models of power that this passage enacts, it is the sovereign—the ruler that presumes to govern by exception when the homeostatic principle of immanent democracy has categorically precluded such power—who is now visited with the powerlessness of not knowing and not being able to know. The sovereign is categorically barred from the knowledge of homo œconomicus (because the sovereign is the rational head that has been disavowed—disowned—by the feeling soma of homo œconomicus); only the perfectly democratic constituency of that feeling soma may know, in the intransitive rendering of that normally transitive verb Foucault employs to denote an epistemic access to the limits and possibilities of knowledge.
But beyond their function of tracing a logic of epistemic inclusion and exclusion, Foucault’s words also hold a more general import, to which this entire study is dedicated: simply, that free-market capitalism—homo œconomicus—has its own epistemic modality, its own ways of knowing. (I like to imagine that it was this rumbling of the tectonic cultural plates—“the deepest strata of Western culture” [xxiv]—that Foucault claimed to feel as he finished The Order of Things in the mid-1960s, a historic moment when global decolonization would spell the end of epistemic reason, the beginning of free-market triumph, and the ascendance of epistemic affect. “It is the same ground that is stirring once more under our feet” [xxiv], he wrote, though he himself left that rumbling ultimately undiagnosed and unnamed.) If Foucault’s free-market homo œconomicus claims an epistemic monopoly that translates into absolute power, then it is of the essence to comprehend the terms of that monopoly over the structure, sign, and play of knowledge.
From the time that Thomas Jefferson formulated political autonomy as the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (1776), thereby declaring a state of sovereignty for the body politic from the colonial crown, that last phrase—“the pursuit of happiness”—defined the resultant headless body as a feeling one. If reason and its tropes of order and control performed by a thinking head to the effect of subjugating the body constituted the epistemic imaginary of colonial power, then affect and its central trope of well-being—for which happiness, along with love, is the ultimate metonym—now emerged to constitute the epistemic imaginary of democratic power. The feeling soma’s claim to happy well-being is synonymous with its claim to sovereignty: it is the ability of the feeling soma to generate and participate in, simultaneously, its own self-arising and self-justifying mechanism of power that makes it its own sovereign master. In this model of affective sovereignty, the homeostatic criteria of that system of order—and knowledge of that system—are not only organically immanent to that feeling subject but also, as Foucault astutely observes, exclusively accessible to that feeling subject. The rational apparatus may perceive and even appreciate well-being, but its physiological experience, and therefore its authorship and ownership, are proper to the nonrational homeostatic affective pathways of the soma.
Current research in psychology holds that, as a medium of knowledge, affect functions through a mode of communication that is organically monosemic and involuntary. In other words, as a sign—a signifier denoting a given signified—affective information is neither arbitrary nor polyvalent, but rather constitutes a signification that is organic and of a meaning both singular and unequivocal.
As previously mentioned, Charles Darwin’s
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) argued for the universality of the expression of human emotion. This hypothesis languished in oblivion for almost a hundred years; Darwin’s twentieth-century editor Paul Ekman believes that his universalism was politically unacceptable to scholars who viewed their own commitment to cultural relativism as an ethical imperative for countering fascist politics and atrocities.
1 Ekman himself professes to have set out to prove Darwin wrong with an experiment comparing Western and non-Western cultural identification of emotional expressions, which yielded data that unexpectedly corroborated Darwin’s belief that humans are programmed to experience and display the same emotional sets (1980). Of interest for the question of epistemic affect is Darwin’s claim, sustained by Ekman, that as humans we are not only programmed as a species to express emotion, but that we are programmed to react to each other’s expressions. In analogy to how Noam Chomsky contends that infants are universally and innately equipped to generate linguistic grammar, even in isolation from fully developed language, Ekman proposes the affective equivalent, arguing that humans are born with the ability to communicate universally in what Darwin called “the language of the emotions” (360). This means that the interpretation of the face of the other—which Darwin and Ekman believe is simply the outward manifestation of an inner physiological state—is a hard-wired and involuntary act.
2Perspectives informed by the cultural relativism that has dominated the Western academy—especially the humanities—with particular intensity in the wake of decolonization and the resistance of imperialist politics in any guise will object to this universalist characterization of emotion on the grounds that it is essentialist, foreclosing the possibility of contestation and autonomy in the form of emotional variation across cultures or of the sovereign performance of emotional states as distinct from the construal of their performance as involuntary experience. In defense of the universalist point of view, Ekman answers that, while there are many second-order corporeal communicative signals that are learned (rather than innate) and arbitrary (rather than organic), there is nevertheless a basic set of human emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—that are common to the species and, when felt, are expressed involuntarily on the face in what may be considered the true and organic sign of an internal physiological state. Even when these emotions are imitated for the sake of performance, Ekman argues—as he himself has done for the sake of cataloguing thousands of emotions—the effect is to generate the physiological experience of the emotional state being imitated; in this sense, there is no difference between performance and experience as a catalyst for emotion and its expression. Just as emotional experience produces a matching emotional expression, emotional expression also matches—and produces—emotional experience.
Let us return to Foucault in order to recall his characterization of modernity as a political epoch that exerts far more control over the body of the subject than ever before. In contrast to the “ancient right to
take life or
let live,” Foucault argues in his earliest formulation of biopower, modern politics wields the “power to
foster life or
disallow it to the point of death” (
The History of Sexuality 138). That is to say, modern political systems have an unprecedented ability to interfere with the quality of life, to regulate not only birth and death, but, more important, all that lies in between. This is precisely the power of
homo œconomicus: to maximize control over the most intimate bodily livelihood. In this model of subjectivity cognition operates at a visceral level that bypasses both the second-order process of reason and the polysemy of verbal language; the language of affect—to render Darwin’s original formulation in epistemic dimensions—is direct and unappealable. Whether in the service of a politics of fear or love, or of a consumption of health or toxicity, this is biopower at its most potent. It is no wonder that anticonsumer culture activists like Sut Jhally warn that we are “advertising at the edge of apocalypse.”
“Estás aquí para ser feliz” (“You are here to be happy”)
Since 2006, Coca-Cola—a company that boasts the total consumption of 1.7 billion servings per day—has developed the global branding campaign of the “Coke side of life,” which its central concept of “happiness in a bottle” clearly defines as the side of affect, with the imperative to “Open Happiness” (in Spanish, “Destapa la felicidad”). In developing the campaign, Coca-Cola researchers “learned that what loyal Coke drinkers love most about the brand was the physical and emotional uplift they got when drinking the product” (Macarthur). Constructing the representation of a global affective subject on these terms, the Coca-Cola website hosts an interactive feature called the “Smile-izer” in which users are invited to record their laughter and to search by name for other users’ recordings. The image of a studio microphone hovers against a backdrop made to look like the brown liquid of Coca-Cola, with bubbles floating to the top of the screen conveying the idea of Coca-Cola as the medium of happiness. Coca-Cola figures its consumers as the expression of their positive emotion—whether in aural disembodiment as a representation, precisely, of the feeling body or in the throes of somatic response to consumption—defining subjectivity on both an individual and collective scale as tantamount to happiness and, most critically, laying claim to the very physiological experience of happiness.
Indeed, an advertisement from the “happiness in a bottle” campaign deepens this claim to the physiology of happiness. In “The Library” (developed in 2009 by Weiden+Kennedy, Amsterdam) a teenage boy and girl seated across a table experience a wordless communion that is silent not so much because they must observe the institutional norms of learning as because they find another more powerful mechanism of communicating and sharing the experience of life that does not require words or the rational edifice they support. The boy draws a bottle of Coca-Cola on his forearm; the girl draws a glass with ice cubes on hers. The Coca-Cola on the boy’s forearm comes to life as a substance that flows from his arm and into her glass. They are joined in a physiological encounter in which the product becomes indistinguishable from the body of the consumer; they merge into a homeostatic loop in which the product-cum-lifeforce circulates as though it were blood. The two seem to fall in love—an idea reinforced by the title of the theme song, “Strange Love” by the Swedish jazz duo Koop, for which the advertisement won a CLIO award—yet even this concept falls short of conveying the intense intimacy that this somatic-affective communion creates. Happiness, love, community—here in the intimacy of a couple—and the physiological substance of vitality itself are all collapsed into the bottle of Coke. Coca-Cola positions itself as the purveyor of homeostatic well-being, the motor that drives life itself.
This communion has taken place not only without breaking the rules of the library but without engaging the library’s attention or entering into its sphere of consciousness. This kind of communication passes completely unperceived by the surveilling logic of reason. The library is powerless because it does not know; it does not know because it cannot know. How can a library think beyond institutionality, borders, words, rules? The control of institutions built on a model of rational control—discrete, compartmentalized, panoptic—gives way to a new model of order that is based on organic interconnectedness, shared knowledge rooted in a common affective experience, and self-regulated.
Another Coca-Cola advertisement goes even further in its claim to well-being and, as such, life itself—understanding life, according to Foucault’s definition of its modern variant, as all that lies between birth and death. “Encuentro” (“Encounter”; also developed in 2009, by McCann Erickson, Madrid—a firm, incidentally, that is one of Don Draper’s fiercest competitors) stages the meeting in Madrid between the 102-year-old Mallorcan Josep Mascaró and hours-old newborn Aitana Martínez, likely making them the oldest and youngest actors in the world as well as encompassing the full spectrum of human life and experience. Throughout the running time of the ad, a message from Josep to Aitana sounds in voice-over as he shares with her the wisdom of his years: that times of adversity and “crisis” aren’t what really matter; what matters is what makes us happy. The visuals paired with the audio track chronicle the story of Josep’s trip and Aitana’s delivery: Aitana’s mother in a taxi going to deliver her baby, Josep’s trip by car to the airport; Aitana’s mother’s preparation for delivery, Josep’s first ever airplane ride from Mallorca to Madrid; Aitana’s mother’s labor and delivery, Josep’s arrival at the hospital and entry into Aitana’s room; the expectant tenderness of Aitana’s mother as she watches Josep approach Aitana in her bassinet, Josep’s expression of great-grandfatherly care and wonderment as he beholds this new little life and touches her tiny fingers with his. The commercial closes with Josep amid a gathering of loved ones, wherein, finally, the brand makes its appearance as a small sea of Coke bottles rise above smiles in a toast that punctuates Josep’s last axiomatic words: “Estás aquí para ser feliz” (“You are here to be happy”).
Coca-Cola moves beyond artificial representation and toward narrative forged from the reality of bare life, penetrating the most private points of human existence. Though in excellent health, Josep’s delicate physique nevertheless evokes compassion for his proximity to death—his face and hands are a mass of softly knotted wrinkles; his walk has the halting and jerky rhythm that comes with age. The camera likewise shows Aitana at her most vulnerable, in the very instant of her birth, raised up from between her mother’s legs and placed on her mother’s chest as the medical staff rub her vigorously to bring color to her body and to induce a first cry. As an extended part of the advertisement, Coca-Cola arranged with the hospital to allow webcams to be installed with family consent above the cribs of babies so that websurfers might view them in real time and post their own messages of optimism to the website.
“Encuentro” crosses all established boundaries of intimacy, of the division between public and private, between the virtual and brick-and-mortar world, joining even those who don’t know one another in a togetherness predicated on a universal sentiment of humanity. This common humanity should be understood in the qualitative terms of principally emotional experience—that is, what it means to inhabit the human condition—but also in the quantitative terms of population. The bringing together of Josep and Aitana is a gesture symbolically representative of a single and vast human race; their pairing works as a cross-section of the present moment, each occupying the extremes of extant human life, but their pairing also connotes the unending cycle of life, therefore standing in for humanity in all its diachrony, in timeless perpetuity. The two become connected as though one by pathways of common experience and sentiment and of emotional communication that knows no borders, but rather travels in a free flow just as easily between perfect strangers as between family and lifelong friends. In “Encuentro” Coca-Cola constructs humanity as a single organic network powered by the vital flow of emotion; it delivers as its message—in a bottle—the emotional knowledge of the human condition.
Reactions to “Encuentro” register the receipt of this message along an analytical axis of markedly emotional criteria. A Spanish advertising blog site commends the spot’s power to communicate feeling: “Muchos directores de cine les gustaría hacer llegar parte del sentimiento que hace llegar Coca-Cola. Felicidades” (“Many film directors would like to convey even part of the emotion that Coca-Cola conveys. Congratulations”; “Anuncio Coca-Cola”). U.S. advertising blog sites echo this perception: one such intervention titles itself—even in its URL—“Coke ad from Spain has grown men falling to their knees crying” (Wasserman); another begins with a descriptive account of personal feeling in reaction to the commercial, and, on this basis, segues into broadly prescriptive advice on emotional behavior: “[Josep’s advice] seems so genuinely heartfelt and honestly-meant that I let myself go and went for the emotional ride of it. And you should too. Sometimes, it just feels good to feel good” (“Coca-Cola: Encounter”). These bloggers affirm the wisdom that emotional narrative is received in kind: viscerally, nonrationally, and mimetically. We uncritically accept as a truth the emotional maxim of the ad along with its implicit imperative: we are here to be happy (we will buy Coke).
Zombies and Human Consumption
If the most powerful companies in the world seek to bind our happiness, from life to death, to the consumption of their products, then I argue that the most devastating—and terrifying—critique of that consumerism is to be found in the now culturally iconic zombie. The zombie itself has certainly become a fetishized commodity, starring in a full-fledged film genre that is typically traced to George A. Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead (1968), gracing crowdsourced T-shirt designs like those sold by Threadless.com, topping bathroom reading piles with books like
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (2003), or serving as the enemy in some hundred video games that have sold millions upon millions of copies worldwide. With this proliferation of mass-produced imagery, pulp literature, and screen presence, the zombie seems to have become the reigning monster of popular global culture. Even Cuba boasts an officially sanctioned zombie thriller,
Juan de los muertos (2011), which, in its English translation “Juan of the Dead,” rhymes playfully with both the second film in Romero’s classic zombie trilogy,
Dawn of the Dead (1978), and its successful British comedic parody,
Shaun of the Dead (2004).
Why does the zombie resonate so strongly within our cultural imaginary? The growing corpus of zombie criticism suggests many themes—contagion, migration, surveillance, warring populations, religion, suburbia, and militarism, among others. But I argue that what we find so compelling—and disturbing—about the zombie is how profoundly it speaks to the power of consumption.
Although the zombie has its roots in Haitian voudou and the idea that through magic a dead body is awakened to do the bidding of another, the zombie’s contemporary iteration does away with this power dynamic of third-party intercession. Since Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, in which a horde of the undead attack a handful of the living sheltered in a Pennsylvania farmhouse, zombies have been treated as a found object, with no history or backstory for how they came to be; they simply—always already, in an Althusserian kind of way—exist.
Zombie mechanics are simple to the point of monotony. Their singular drive is to consume live human flesh, which is the only substance that will retard their decomposition. Penetration of the living by zombie teeth induces death, which, in turn, is followed by reawakening as a zombie. Zombies have no character, no individuation, no higher faculties; they rely on sensory detection of life and move inexorably toward their prey. Only mortal wounds to the head can kill zombies. The fact that these prototypical dynamics have been so spare and static for fifty years, yet have steadily occupied the cultural imaginary—and with a prominence that has only been on the rise—should alert us to the likelihood that something about the zombie is tapping deep into our contemporary psyche.
What are zombies if not the ultimate consumers? Annie Leonard’s claim about the primacy of consumer identity is useful to revisit in this context: “We have become a nation of consumers. Our primary identity has become that of consumer, not mothers, teachers, farmers, but consumers. The primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated is by how much we … consume.” Leonard is speaking specifically about the United States, but her claim could be extended to the whole of global consumer culture, whose borderlessness is mirrored by the postidentity nature of zombies, whose tattered garments and style frozen at the moment of death give hints of former social roles that have ceased to matter. The sole telos of zombies is to consume. As though interpreting to the letter of the law the corporate world’s putative objective of turning everything under the sun into consumable material,
3 the zombie as a manifestation of this cultural logic subscribes to a mantra of privatization, commodification, and consumption that is so perfect as to turn it on humans themselves, darkly figuring the ultimate consequences of our faith in consumerism as our own subjugation—our own falling prey—to its law.
The AMC original cable series The Walking Dead (2010–present), which boasts a steadily increasing viewership in the millions, adds a further twist to this deadly immanence. The show takes place in the postapocalypse of a zombie outbreak that has devastated life as we know it, leaving the nearest city, Atlanta, and its surrounding area in ruins, with the occasional sign of survivors and more generally populated by zombies wandering, alone or in groups, always in search of live flesh. In the final episode of its first season, a lone scientist (Noah Emmerich), bunkered down in the massive complex of Atlanta’s Center for Disease Control, reluctantly gives shelter to the small group of survivors whose story the series had thus far traced. The group relaxes into the miracle of refuge only to learn that the scientist has become so fatally disillusioned with the dismal prospects for humanity that he has irreversibly programmed the destruction of the CDC complex. In the final moments before its monumental explosion, the scientist whispers something into the hero’s ear (Andrew Lincoln) that the audience does not hear, which we can only interpret as a kind of orally delivered suicide note. It is not until the final episode of the second season that the content of this message is revealed: all of humanity, the scientist has discovered, is infected with the zombie plague. In other words, regardless of how a living human dies—by zombie wound or no—an undead fate awaits. The immanence of zombie “life” is so complete as to reach into the erstwhile terrain of the metaphysical, categorically colonizing death itself, proscribing any and all classically transcendental aspect of the afterlife.
This grim formulation of a universal zombie fate recalls anew—in what has come to figure as a kind of warning bell leitmotiv of this entire study—Foucault’s definition of biopower as control not simply over whether a subject is executed or spared, but over the quality of life in all its duration. Here that control is extended to death itself. Our cultural law of consumption, if we accede to reading zombies as its representation, is therein imagined as exerting a sway of immanence of such far-reaching proportions as to dictate the terms of life
and death.
A mesmerizing scene from the penultimate first-season episode of
The Walking Dead, in which the CDC scientist plays back the fMRI imaging of his own wife’s process of zombification, shows a complete blackout of brain activity during death followed by the illumination of the most primitive areas of the brain stem that govern—what? The survival instinct? Basic sensory perception? The impulse and desire to consume? Are the undead truly dead, or are they in fact alive, in a new definition of “life” governed purely and exclusively by appetite? Read in this way,
The Walking Dead shows how the feeling soma will be its own ruin. Paring down the figure of nonrational self-governance that epistemologically underwrites capitalist democracy to its barest bones—literally—this representation posits the feeling soma as occasioning the demise of its own organic systemicity. While the size of the feeling soma as zombie postnation waxes infinite, its morality and self-determination wane to the point of disappearance; the feeling soma is stripped of all powers of cognition except the recognition of its own appetite for destruction, a turn of phrase that recalls the eponymous landmark Guns N’ Roses album that set to music what a contemporaneous rock documentary called the “decline of Western civilization.”
4 As represented in the
Walking Dead, the cultural motif of the zombie apocalypse suggests that there is no escape from the power of consumerism as a decline of civilization: the threat that holds us so captive, perhaps, as an audience, is this commentary on our own propensity toward consumption, on the ways in which we have been “hooked” and “hijacked”—as Moss and Kessler have argued, respectively, in the case of processed food—into physiological addiction to our patterns of consumption and emotionally wedded to our identity as consumers. As a cultural figure, the zombie touches precisely that nerve, provocatively asking if consumption can, in fact, consume us to the point of consuming ourselves, in pursuit of our primordial satisfaction, for all eternity.
On Wanting: Toward Epistemic Anagnorisis
I am hoping that my reader will appreciate the zombie apocalypse as the obverse of happiness in a bottle—as two sides of the proverbial single coin. And I wish to reiterate that it is not the objective of this study to take sides, but rather, and simply, to show them both, together, as functions of the same epistemic discourse of affect, as representations of the feeling soma.
Whenever notions of the organic, of the nonrational, of the emotional, of the fluidly self-governing are deployed in cultural production, where they are naturalized as part of the human condition, it is my hope and objective to have presented herein a model of analytic denaturalization such that these concepts may be weighed and considered as constructs participating in a larger epistemological discourse that is interpellating us—greeting us and ushering us into—a terrain already marked by the conceptual preeminence of the feeling soma in the service of capitalist democracy. That is, simply put, that we will learn to read and interpret the discursive supports of capitalist democracy and to disinter them from the foundations of our cultural psyche in order to interrogate the role they are playing in both our affirmations and our critiques of our cultural present, in our denunciations of injustice and formulations of a better future.
This vision of an epistemological common—of epistemic affect, at our current historical juncture, as I have been arguing in this study—could help us to see the commonalities between otherwise unthinkably diverse cultural interventions. Take, for example, Wendy Brown’s suggestion that we reinvent ourselves as a political collective—a “we” instead of an “I”—and that we take as our telos the negotiation of pain, which she argues is foundationally constitutive of our contemporary political subjectivity (in other words, what I have been calling a denunciation of ill-being), and invest that subject with a “language of reflexive ‘wanting’” in order to achieve a “partial dissolution of sovereignty into desire,” understanding the subject, now, as “an effect of an (ongoing) genealogy of desire” that works toward a kind of subjectivity—and, therefore, power—that is neither “sovereign nor conclusive” (“Wounded Attachments” 407).
Can we see in Brown’s politically positive—in the sense of being emancipatory and constructive—project of “wanting” the echoes of a whole corpus of theoretical thought that has privileged the open-ended and nonconclusive, the flowing and the feeling, as somehow more powerful than the fixed, the reified, the insensible? The individual and the vertical (for Brown, encapsulated in the Nietzschean “I,” her de facto analogue for the Cartesian subject) decried in favor of the collective and the horizontal? (I recall a like-minded presentation at the 2011 MLA Presidential Forum by Judith/Jack Halberstam in which s/he visually cited the Muppets—with a photo of the whole crew—as having taught the current generation the power of the collective, the revolutionary power of togetherness to “learn to unlearn.”)
I see in Brown’s hopeful formulation of “wanting” as much of an echo of the feeling soma as I do in Josep Mascaró’s upbeat affirmation that we were born to drink Coke, or, in the negative image of the same conceptual photograph, in zombies’ implacable appetite for destruction, where homeostatic well-being has gone horribly and terminally wrong. In saying this, I do not stand in judgment; I simply seek to point out that a singular epistemic figure of nonrational homeostatic well-being is informing this broad range of cultural production—from scholarly political critique to profit-boosting advertising spots to popular television shows. Understanding it as the epistemic counterpart of homo œconomicus, the feeling soma is intrinsically neither good nor bad. That is, epistemic affect does not have a positive or negative ontology. Its moral coding as such comes from its analysis as an instrument of power; a favorable analysis will deem it positive, whereas an unfavorable analysis will deem it negative. As always, the political position from which we perform the analysis of affective discourse will determine the moral code to which we cleave therein. If we accept McDonald’s smiles, we are “lovin’ it”; if we reject those smiles as what Hardt and Negri call “affective labor” or a false mask obscuring other forms of exploitative behavior, then we are “not lovin’ it”—a contestatory slogan that peppers the Internet.
The central conceit of the present study is to hold up a mirror: is there a self-discovery to be had by looking therein? Is there a passage of awareness to be traversed from epistemological blindness to insight? If so, will that cultural insight work to reveal the structure, sign, and play of our economic and political game? The communication—production and reception—of affective information travels as a type of cognition that is somatic rather than rational, tending toward the preclusion of critical thought. Are we losing our minds in coming to our senses? Or may we yet find “reason” and its power of self-expression and agency in the epistemological territory of affect?
Toward the Superstructure of Capitalist (In)Equality
In the course of this project, I have often been asked about exceptions to affective epistemicity. What lies outside this logic? I would answer that vertical rationality continues to lie outside, but its public face is much diminished. Growth, profit, and privilege are the powerful conceptual and practical vestiges of imperialism that have survived the shift of paradigm and episteme in the transition to free-market democracy. They are the principles of conquest, royal wealth, and divine right recast in democratic free-market clothes. The logic of verticality makes appearances where we expect them and even where we don’t. In the former category, the steady eclipse of national economies by corporations, continual allegation of human rights violations and environmental devastation by corporations, the increasing collusion between, and even de facto fusion of, governments and corporations, annual profit earnings in the billions by the most powerful corporations are all naturalized aspects of persistent verticality legitimized by a logic of a rationalized right to amass capital ad infinitum and wield the power it affords. Consider the so-called American Dream, a national myth that promises an equal chance for everyone in the United States has an equal opportunity to become successful, rich, and happy without limits. The rhetorical sleight of hand of equal opportunity is that democracy and fair distribution of resources exists only in the hypothetical; in reality, only a lucky few achieve this prosperity. Pablo Larraín’s 2010 film
No places a cynical parroting of the American Dream in the mouth of a Pinochet campaign manager in the lead-up to the 1989 plebiscite: the correct strategy for capturing the country’s vote, he argues, is to hold out the promise that under Pinochet anyone can achieve wealth—“ojo,” he says, “cualquiera; no todos” (“mind you,” … “anyone; not everyone”). Scriptwriter Pedro Peirano brilliantly and succinctly represents the hidden verticality within the concept of equal opportunity, which, thus laid bare, helps to explain why the U.S.-led neoliberal world would be willing to tolerate the worst kind of socioeconomic asymmetries on the gamble that they can catapult themselves into the superrich 1 percent, as the Occupy movements have dubbed the cadre of billionaires and corporations who, respectively, control nearly half of U.S. private wealth and constitute half the world’s largest economies.
Theorists and activists like David Harvey (2005) and Naomi Klein (2007) have endeavored to show how material inequalities within capitalism are structural rather than aberrant—no small task, given that capitalism views itself as inherently democratic.
5 French economist Thomas Piketty’s
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014 [2013]) has, in effect, lent the power of quantitative analysis to their position with its simple formula r > g (return on capital is greater than growth) that both explains and calculates this structural inequality of wealth within capitalism. Economist and public intellectual Paul Krugman cogently summarizes Piketty’s formulation as a “break[ing of] ranks” with the predominant tendency to analyze economic inequality as a function of unequal income and, in its place, a “startling” return to an older, even Marxist, tradition of analyzing economic inequality as a function of unequal possession of capital (“Why We’re in a New Gilded Age”).
Krugman avers that Piketty “throws down the intellectual gauntlet … with his book’s very title” and “its obvious allusion to Marx,” marveling, “Are economists still allowed to talk like that?” I ask the same question, replacing “economists” with “humanists,” cognizant that the scope of the present study effectively throws down the same intellectual gauntlet, including—by uncanny coincidence?—an unapologetic return to Marx that has tacitly informed my thinking throughout, and that I will here explicitly acknowledge:
In
The German Ideology (circa 1845–1846), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels propose that it is by means of ideology that the dominant class achieves the perpetuation of economic inequality: ideology—the aggregate of “ruling ideas” (64)—creates a false consciousness throughout the social order that works to attenuate and override the cognitive dissonance of this circumstance of material economic inequality. The shape of this relationship of false consciousness is one of inversion—“in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a
camera obscura” (47)—that is, ideology obscures material inequalities by fabricating an opposite truth.
6Piketty’s
Capital in the Twenty-First Century provides a mathematical formula for capitalist inequality, and warns that, absent governmental intervention to limit the return on capital (which regulatory intervention headless capitalism will always resist as a tyrannical deprivation of freedom), the inequalities generated by capitalism will ultimately undermine democracy itself.
7 Where
Capital in the Twenty-First Century defines material economic conditions of capitalism as we know and live it,
Coming to Our Senses seeks to define its ideology. I have endeavored herein to lay bare the epistemological paradigm of the feeling soma—the infinitely capacious brotherly-sisterly “we” that positively emotes its way to an egalitarian good life of comforts and fairness (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)—which works to naturalize a system that structurally produces a contrary reality of staggering inequality by neutralizing, at the deepest cognitive level, any resistance. My proposition may feel supremely uncomfortable when taken to its ultimate implications: we are epistemologically grounded by the feeling soma as much in our moments of most fervent dissidence as in our moments of most fervent acquiescence, for the feeling soma has foundationally informed our very structures of knowledge and models of political action. It is in this sense that Foucault’s notion of epistemicity insists on the diffuse character of power, expanding the one-to-one relationship of causal responsibility between “ruling ideas” and “ruling class” (Marx and Engels 64) to society at large. Affective epistemicity is our diffuse ideology; biopower a name for the control it exerts over us. Consider the willingness of the American public to accept staggering neoimperialist inequalities only in the discursive packaging of egalitarian inclusivity and positive sentiment and the backlash against anything that runs counter to it. Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney may have lost the 2012 election well in advance when he was captured on secret video tracing a patent hierarchy between the haves and the have-nots and openly disparaging the latter; it was, in contrast, the campaign predicated on positive and universal affect by incumbent Barack Obama, no less supportive of the free-market economy, that carried the day. The public expects a face of loving global oneness, even when this “face” is patently little more than a mask. When massive negative press greeted news of Facebook’s covert manipulation of users’ news feeds to study the phenomenon of emotional contagion, an experiment conducted in collaboration with Cornell researchers—and, for a brief moment, it was suggested, before being just as quickly retracted, the Pentagon—
8 savvy CEO Sheryl Sandberg apologized in the language of emotion: “We never meant to upset you” (Krishna).
Free-market capitalism is not just about economics and moneymaking; it engenders a way of thinking—a way of “thinking” as a way of feeling—a way of organizing what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible” in the world. But where Rancière sees politics, the call by the “we” to be afforded more power and resources by the police order of the aesthetic regime, in short, the call for greater democracy, as a dissident call from below, I would argue that what the present thesis of epistemic affectivity suggests is that the democracy-seeking “we” is itself coeval with the very police order of the aesthetic regime and that, as a project, the “distribution of the sensible” is a captured category. This is because Rancière’s democracy-seeking political “we” is, itself, indistinct from the police order that controls the aesthetic regime. There is no outside to the “we” and therefore no possibility of dissidence that cannot be reabsorbed within, or, conversely, that can stand apart from, the signifying machine of free-market democracy.
In other words, if capitalism were only the vector-oriented and rationalizing profit machine as it is often cast in Manichaean terms (like
Avatar’s RDA and its CEO Parker Selfridge), then it might possibly be stoppable, as was formal empire before it. But capitalism also, and even more primordially, styles itself as revolution, not the status quo. And that revolutionary force is one that works on a model of happy democratic all-inclusiveness—hence capitalism’s oft-cited ability to absorb, encompass, assimilate everything, even its harshest criticism or resistance. As an affective model, it expands toward plenitude, well-being, immanence; there is nothing that lies without. It is this epistemological structure that keeps capitalism on the cutting—revolutionary—edge of itself because, from this epistemological vantage point, it is never static or repressive, but rather always dynamic and embracing: a body moving ever toward optimal health.
And yet the denunciation of ill-being—as a failure of the democratic-capitalist project, as a betrayal of its promise of health, prosperity, and happiness—in voices that claim pain, suffering, and rage, are growing just as loud. Although I have used a vocabulary of emotion and health to describe these poles, the reality of ill-being is, ultimately, one heavily marked by violence. “Silent spring”: the ecological violence denounced by Rachel Carson (1962) as the death of nature by human chemicals; as she warned the U.S. Senate in 1963, “Our heedless and destructive acts enter into the vast cycles of the earth and in time return to bring hazard to ourselves” (Griswold). “Slow violence”: Rob Nixon’s (2011) like-minded vision of planetary devastation as time-elapsed on a massive scale across regions and populations: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all [because it] is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2), and its primary victimization of the “unseen” poor, “those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence” (3). “Disposable people”: the some twenty-seven million people, by Kevin Bales’s 1999 count (8), who are effectively enslaved in the modern world wherein “slaveholders, businesspeople, even governments hide slavery behind smoke screens of words and definitions,” in a phenomenon that is “not a ‘third world’ issue but a global reality” (260). “Horrorism”: Adriana Cavarero’s 2007 term for the contemporary violence that has “sprea[d] and assume[d] unheard-of forms,” a violence for which the concepts of “‘terrorism’ and ‘war’” are no longer sufficiently denotative (2); in its emotional dimension, horror precludes escape; in its political dimension, horror destroys subjectivities as well as bodies. And, finally, simply, “violence”: namely, that of capitalism, which, from a philosophical angle, Slavoj Žižek considers a “systemic” violence that goes unperceived because, “something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics,” it is “inherent to th[e] normal state of things” (2008: 2). Žižek concludes his meditations by urging “abstention” from the “very frame of decision” that structures capitalist-democratic power in order to reveal the “vacuity of today’s democracies”; he recommends withdrawal from participation, from critique, from dialogue, from protest. “Sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do,” Žižek avers (
Violence 217), glossing this notion by citing Alain Badiou’s view that “it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent” (216).
9In the same breath with which Žižek advocates abstention from the democratic-capitalist project—going off the grid—he also makes an assertion that he acknowledges may strike his reader as “crazy and tasteless,” namely, that the violent regimes in our modern history have not been “violent enough.” That is, no form of protest, intervention, dissent, or aggression has managed to achieve liberation from imperialist structures past or present (217). The desire for a utopian escape from a cultural system that captures and engulfs, rendering epistemologically self-same, every form of “doing something,” and the twin desire for an instrument of violence capable of bursting asunder the dark matter of capitalist-democratic empire to accomplish that impossible getaway both attest to Žižek’s discomfort within the strictures of full enclosure on the totalizing plane of capitalist-democratic immanence. But his desires for transcendence and revolutionary violence for the sake of human progress beyond the logic of empire belong, epistemologically, to reason, with its verticalities, its thinking heads—whether imperial or insurgent—its teleologies. Capitalist democracy admits none of these conceptual precepts; they are epistemologically anathema to its fundamentally horizontal universality in which the happy flow of life is the only “telos.” In this regard, Žižek effectively proposes little more than a nostalgic swap of the epistemological master present for the epistemological master immediately past, in the latter of which violence was justified and even celebrated as a means to an end and reason upheld as the basis for mounting a political action believed capable of achieving political transcendence. But affective epistemicity can no longer tolerate deliberate violence, no matter how lofty of cause; hence Žižek’s intuition that his yearning for as much may strike his reader—epistemologically immersed, after all, within affectivity—as “crazy and tasteless.”
If Žižek yearns for violence, for its power of change, at least, if not for its blood, then it bears reflection that violence is always vertical, always underwritten by hierarchy, whether established or aspiring. That is, whether the perpetrators of violence are powerless underdogs acting from below or powerful elites from on high, both seek to intervene within and influence the distribution of power and resultant access to resources along a vertical axis. Violence is conceptually anathema to the affective principle of free-market democracy with its tenets of brotherhood and equal opportunity, which explains why democratic governments cannot openly engage in it without the cloak of rhetoric (i.e., fighting for freedom and democracy) or, more powerfully, of business, outsourcing their most objectionable vertical violence as “security contracting.” Journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of
Blackwater (2007), calls the eponymous company a “neoconservative Praetorian Guard for a borderless war launched in the immediate aftermath of 9/11” (“Blackwater Founder”). Indeed, the commercial paramilitary services of the former private security agency Blackwater were instrumental in the Iraq War and were retained during the politically conservative and liberal presidencies, respectively, of George W. Bush and Barack Obama alike, despite criticism levied by Blackwater founder Erik Prince against the latter: “It’s a shame the [Obama] administration crushed my old business, because as a private organization, we could’ve solved the boots-on-the-ground issue, we could have had contracts from people that want to go [to the Middle East] as contractors; you don’t have the argument of U.S. active duty going back in there [to combat the Islamic State]…. [Blackwater could have] gone in there and done it, and be done, and not have a long, protracted political mess that I predict will ensue” (Suebsaeng). Prince’s statement acknowledges the unacceptability of governmentally sponsored violence and the comparative efficiency and impunity of a company. Indeed, the 2014 trial of four Blackwater operatives for the Iraqi civilian massacre known as “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday” lasted a matter of weeks and convicted only a handful of operatives, leaving the company’s founder untouched (Scahill, “Blackwater Founder”), whereas the investigation of what the
New York Times calls a “decade-long debate over torture,” which produced the 2104 U.S. Senate Torture Report, took five years, compiled over six thousand pages (only some six hundred of which comprise the declassified public version), and implicates an unquantifiable number of responsible parties and governmental institutions, though in and of itself it is not constitutive of any formal indictment.
Whether yearned for as a romanticized part of anticolonial revolutionary times past (which participated epistemologically in the paradigm of colonialist rationality), wielded with relative impunity by capitalist corporations, covertly exercised with the consequence of a “long, protracted political mess” by putative democracies, or, perhaps even more interestingly—and frighteningly—woven into our capitalist-democratic cultural fabric in the form of bullying,
10 violence is nevertheless squarely anathema to and prohibited within capitalist-democratic affectivity. From within the epistemological framework of affectivity, the contradiction of violence is treated as an autonomic failure—the source of illness, disease, unhappiness—the irruption of verticality within the conceptually dominant plane of horizontality that is decried and denounced as something gone wrong that requires remediation. Despite the fact that violence inherently violates the epistemological framework of affectivity, its popular critique—in terms of critiques with “trending” power to go viral—is enunciated from within an affective framework.
In his defense of “violent” inactivity, Žižek’s warns that “doing something” ultimately remits to and reifies dominant structures of power (Violence 217). If protestors invoke the epistemological supports of affectivity to communicate their critiques of violence, whether a violence sponsored by states, institutions, or culture at large, is this protest always already a captured category, tantamount to a subsuming of culture—and would-be counterculture, by capitalist-democratic immanence? Must it be understood as the affirmation and reification of dominant structures of power? But shouldn’t it be understood as the form of protest that is considered most culturally powerful and intelligible? Or is it necessarily both dissidence and reification all at once? Did not Žižek “do something” by speaking to the then budding Occupy Wall Street movement, his voice projected in waves by the human microphone?
Just what are our available avenues for and lexicons of civic political participation? Is the hashtag #todossomosayotzinapa (We Are All Ayotzinapa) a gesture of solidarity with the forty-three rural Mexican students, brutally murdered for unknown reasons by
narcotraficantes in collusion with the police and local politicians, tantamount to a “doing something” that only demonstrates the vacuity of the capitalist-democratic matrix? What about members of the U.S. National Basketball Association team Miami Heat who posed dressed in hoodies with their heads bowed to reference the attire and death of Trayvon Martin, the young and unarmed black man killed in 2012 by a white man exonerated at trial, a photo that LeBron James posted with the hashtag #WeAreTrayvonMartin? The five St. Louis Rams National Football League players who, in a nationally televised game, raised their arms together in the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture in solidarity with Michael Brown, another unarmed black man slain, this time by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014? The 131 Mexican students who made a YouTube video displaying their university identification cards one by one to defend their legitimate right to civic protest against then presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, sparking the “Yo Soy 132” (“I Am [Number] 132”) movement that propagated the students’ dissident stance on a national level, which generated enough public pressure to hold unprecedented nationally televised presidential candidate debates? Or the so-called die-ins of 2007 and 2014 in which protestors lay down silently as though dead, their bodies strewn over large swaths of ground, the former in protest of the Iraq War on the Capitol lawn, the latter in protest of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the black man suffocated to death in a choke hold by a white police officer on Staten Island? The December 2014 wave of die-ins that swept the United States in concert with the movement #blacklivesmatter brought the civil rights “sit-in” of the 1960s to a level of affective biopolitics. Are these not examples of what Žižek, in his Occupy Wall Street speech, calls the “free egalitarian community of believers united by love” (“Slavoj Žižek”)?
But Žižek also warns the OWS protestors against “false friends” (“Slavoj Žižek”). Would this latter category include Facebook, whose monotonous daily thoughtwork consists of teaching a billion users that their only practically and epistemologically available action verb is “to like”? What about Coca-Cola Light (aka Diet Coke), which opportunistically riffs on this limited vocabulary by exhorting the world to “choose love over like,” positing an illusory opposition that masquerades as a discerning and even morally inflected expansion of our action verbs, when, in fact, there is no real choice at all, but rather only an exacerbating concatenation of the two terms that further wends around us the chains of our epistemologically affective captivity? Or the online bank PayPal, self-defined as the “world’s most-loved way to pay and be paid” (“What Is PayPal?”)? PayPal’s first global campaign “Powering the People Economy” strives to “give a contemporary, human and populist voice to a brand that does amazing things for everyday people,” namely, “help[ing] people take control of their money and use it in any way they want, through seamless and delightful experiences” and “making life better in tangible, practical and magical ways that … pu[t] people, not institutions, first” (“PayPal Brand Campaign”), thus unabashedly appropriating the language of political self-determination and blending it with positive affect and even fantasy. In September 2014 PayPal ran a full-page ad in the
New York Times with the tagline “People Rule” (Johnson), a terse summary of the sentiment expressed in a one-minute companion YouTube video spot entitled “PayPal Voices”:
We Are the People, who have built a whole new way to live, dream, and be. We employ ourselves, and vote with our money. Our phone is our wallet…. We can buy and sell and rent and send … lend a twenty to a friend from the coffee bar and share-car. We are unstoppable, with our thumbs. Just One Touch to buy just about anything…. We live on all devices, and are as mobile as nature intended…. We have magical money, not bound by bank or bill…. Consider yourself invited to “The People Economy.”
The visual accompaniment of this narrative presented in caption form is a fast-paced montage of diverse human faces of every shape, color, and style; the audio accompaniment is a composite voice, which suggests itself as that of this multitude enunciating, in perfect synchronicity, the written words the opening and closing quotation marks denote as the directly cited speech of this “we.” A we that is the embodiment of foundational democracy, a we that is boundlessly mobile, autonomous, part of a fluid set of equivalencies in which communication, technology, nature, life, relationships, and money all morph conceptually into one another in analogy to the swiftly changing faces. The final “invitation” to join this immanent we is rhetorically structured as the revelation of an a priori envelopment and belonging.
Does not this same “we” undergird the long list of aforementioned contestations and promotions alike? If we consider PayPal alongside the infamous decade-old hacker group Anonymous, which has, in fact, staged a “digital protest” again PayPal for its perceived unfreedoms, then we can appreciate how similarly these two sometime antagonists frame themselves. The hybrid audio track of “PayPal Voices” is evocative of Anonymous’s signature use of a voice changer that reproduces a single voice in several octaves at once, blending them all together in simultaneity to create an audio disguise that assumes the form of multiplicity. Like PayPal, Anonymous also speaks in the first-person plural; Anonymous’s tagline “We are legion” conceptually resonates with “People Rule,” both asserting power in the fact of extrainstitutional plurality, where an implicit immanent common of the “we” becomes the only cultural institution of which to speak. This we is “more powerful than ever,” claims PayPal in the closing frame of its “Voices” video; “You should have expected us,” echoes Anonymous, albeit in a more menacing tone, in an expression of omnipresent omnipotence in which the antagonistic “you” is subsumed, like the “you” “invited” to join PayPal, within a borderless immanence. Where PayPal represents its plurality with a fast-moving stream of diverse faces, we might conceive of Anonymous’s plurality as fast-moving stream of diverse online posts and activity. But Anonymous also has a visual representation overwhelmingly associated with the iconic Guy Fawkes mask popularized by the 2005 film
V for Vendetta, in which the futuristic freedom fighter V combats a fascist state regime that derives its power from media control, using a Guy Fawkes mask to liken his own subversion to the historical example of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in which Fawkes had planned to incite revolution by blowing up the English Parliament building. The poster for the 2012 documentary film about Anonymous,
We Are Legion, depicts several rows of headless male torsos clad in identical black and white business attire superimposed on a Guy Fawkes mask. Street footage within the film includes interviews of three different unnamed protestors, each also wearing Guy Fawkes masks, whose content reiterates the themes that should by now seem predictable: “We stand for freedom, the power of the people,” says one; “We have members throughout society, in all stratas [sic] of it worldwide. Yet we have no leadership,” says the second. “It’s one voice, it’s not individual voices, that’s why we don’t show our faces, that’s why we don’t give our names, we’re speaking as one collective,” says the last, as, in the background, a line of riot-masked police officers rushes by on foot, batons in hand. A single protestor wearing a Guy Fawkes mask also graces the poster for the 2012 documentary film
Occupy Love, which attests to the consistent presence of both Guy Fawkes masks and Anonymous in the global “Occupy” protests of the early 2010s. At his feet lies a hand-letter sign that reads: “Always know you are loved—the Universe.” The Anonymous Facebook page “Re-LOVE-ution,” which, as its banner image announces, focuses on what it calls “Operation Green Rights,” echoes the discursive movements that should also by now be so familiar, namely, making love and nature the twin ideals and propellers alike of social change.
The objective of this long list of examples, and, indeed, of this entire study, has been to show that the capitalist-democratic power of immanence, of horizontal all-beingness, along with the very real violence that its discourse is so frequently made to cloak, is not without rhyme or reason, but rather turns on the logic of the feeling soma. Perhaps if we begin to “do something” in the epistemological dimension, that is, by interrogating the deployment of emotion in all contexts—happiness, love, pride, health, sorrow, hate, indignation, disease—we may yet begin to loosen the capitalist-democratic ties that bind at their source so that we may imagine and carry out political activity that accomplishes something other than “mask the nothingness of what goes on” (Žižek,
Violence 217).
Regardless of the direction in which our political inclinations lead us to position ourselves with respect to affective discourse—its production as much as its reception—it is of the essence to note its power, a power to engender a mirror response of analogous emotional bent and therefore to perpetuate its own discursive life and a power to shape the ways in which we conceive of the very shape, possibilities, and limits of knowledge. Emotional discourse is no longer to be scorned or dismissed, but to be taken seriously as a cultural force central to the definition of life in the global West. The language of this global community, knit together by the apparatus of a new media technology that both facilitates and drives the discursive rendition of the world as an affective “we,” is not the language of reason but the language of emotion and feeling. Where there is unfreedom, it will rely on affective discourse to accomplish its repression. Where there is contestation, it will also rely on affective discourse to accomplish its subversion. In order to comprehend discourses of power and its contestation alike in a world defined by capitalist democracy, we—the “we” of the title of this book, the we who inhabit that world—must come to our senses: we need to comprehend, in rational terms, emotional language and its epistemic rendition in the figure of the feeling soma.