The Attention Industry: From Marketing and Advertising to Mass Media

By Marcus Kahn

When CocaCola flashes a vibrant video clip of a family clinking bottles, what are they doing? How about a car commercial with a movie star that talks more about the feeling of driving the car than its reliability? Or the targeted advertisements on the sidebar on your Facebook page? Are these corporations trying to inform you by presenting logically structured information? The obvious answer is “Of course not. They’re selling you something.” The more sinister, but equally accurate wording argues that the advertiser is trying to manipulate your decision-making paradigm by strategically feeding you sensory data.

The attention industry is tolerated by most Americans, largely because we don’t have a choice. We were all raised on commercials, and it’s gotten to the point where we forget we have a right to cognitive autonomy. If you talk to your parents, they are sure to have a trove of old jingles from companies that no longer exist, and a few especially catchy ones from companies that still do. The mental process that associates a jingle with a feeling is the same one that keeps the Pledge of Allegiance in your head after all these years, and fills your belly with warmth when you hear the Star Spangled Banner. Advertising seems different than propaganda because it’s coming from so many sources, rather than one clear institutional distributor, but the mechanisms are the same. Strategically expose a viewer or reader to certain information in order to guide the formation of their beliefs and actions. And the implications of this practice extend far beyond your T.V. screen.

Manufacturing Consent

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky explicate the development and aims of the public relations (advertising) industry and link it to the increasing sophistication of political propaganda distribution in the 20th century.

Advertisers create uninformed consumers who make irrational decisions, contravening one of the fundamental principles of market economics (that economic decisions are driven by informed consumers behaving rationally). For instance, if CocaCola was trying to inform a rational consumer, they would talk about the health implications of their product and the features that distinguish their product from that of their competitors. Instead they surround their product with image and rhetoric, generating an abstraction that can be widely disseminated. If Lincoln Motors was trying to appeal to your logical side, they’d feature an ‘expert’ or a series of statistics that prove a Lincoln sedan is a superior investment. But they don’t. Instead Matthew McConaughey says sexy things in sexy ways, and people are seduced into their purchase.

In the same vein, mainstream media outlets create an uninformed electorate who makes irrational decisions. Take Fox News. On the establishment left it is commonly understood that Fox News uses sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant to alter their viewership’s perception of current events and policy. It is also understood to a lesser degree that these viewers support administrations and consequently policies that don’t support their best interests. Tax reform comes to mind as the most obvious example. The liberal intellectual class also perceives the establishment right as serving the interests of large multinational corporations, traditionally identifying oil companies and military contractors, but more recently the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Fox fights tooth and nail to divert attention away from these issues to focus on such pressing matters as the almost hysterical defense of perceived American culture and values.

But there is little self-reflection on the part of the liberal intellectual class as to the sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant used to divert their attention away from pressing issues. These issues, if addressed in policy and action, would threaten the primacy of the corporations who consume and hoard disproportionate amounts of resources and also guide policy and decision making.

The evidence is on the front page of mainstream newspapers every day. Or rather it isn’t. Climate change doesn’t get nearly the coverage it deserves. A recent article in the L.A. Times even cited an academic who argued for the reversibility of the trend, though overwhelming scholarship suggests its disastrous inevitability. Many large corporations would have to undergo expensive overhauls or be abandoned altogether in order to contend with the restrictions of radical climate policy, and the minimal and slanted coverage even in a supposedly left-leaning periodical like the Los Angeles Times is reflective of an attempt to divert public attention away from a pressing issue.

Wealth inequality as a structural flaw inherent to capitalism is never supported in print, and presidential candidates who advocate for a radical departure from the doctrinal status quo are given minimal coverage and dismissed as idealistic, ineffective, or worse. On the other hand, corporate executives who have accumulated obscene amounts of capital are often painted as societal leaders and their opinions are given weight and legitimacy, though their interests differ radically from the vast majority of the publication’s readership. A recent article in the Washington Post, titled “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich” questioned the effectiveness of establishing a wealth tax on the grounds that it would be hard to value assets and that it would encounter constitutional opposition. Despite the more fundamental questions surrounding the construction of the U.S. constitution and the landed interests it was meant to promote, there is a more obvious problem with this analysis. If it’s so easy to value my assets and tax me, why aren’t their preexisting mechanisms in place to value and tax the wealthiest members of our society?

The media’s coverage of American aggression abroad is a topic that Chomsky has covered extensively in numerous books and lectures. Much like wealth inequality and climate change, American aggression is portrayed with remarkable similarity across the limited political spectrum of the mainstream media. To take a particularly egregious example, during and after the American attack on Vietnam, the mainstream media portrayed the ‘mission’ as a tactical blunder undertaken with the best intentions, a sincere but poorly executed attempt to spread democracy. However the public and internal records paint a dire picture, where the ‘war’ itself amounted to genocide and was preceeded by nearly a decade of U.S. backed terrorism and repression. American policy consistently ignored the peace sought on both sides of the developing conflict, prioritizing an ultimate ‘victory’ which involved Vietnam’s complete submission to the political and economic dictates of the United States.

American war crimes and international violations are studiously ignored across the board, whether they take place in POW camps during World War II, in bombings over the skies of Indochina, coups and military operations sponsored by the U.S. in Central America, and the list goes on. Covert operations and military aid to oppressive autocratic regimes that were often propped up by the U.S. in the first place are given little to no space or critical evaluation. And the very reasonable American public opinions on such trivial matters as military spending and military interventionism is ignored. The mainstream media’s coverage of foreign affairs generates the sort of patriotic fervor and conditioned fear that blinds Americans to the human and financial costs of warfare and aggression abroad. In the current climate as in years past, fear of Russian and Chinese state and economic power is often the subject of intense journalistic focus, greasing the wheels for the ceaseless operation of the military-industrial complex as it is justified in print and on the air over and over again.

The consistency among corporately-owned news outlets that claim vast political differences cannot be overemphasized. Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model provide a convincing framework for explaining this phenomenon. The network of associations that define media ownership and stewardship of these corporate outlets sheds further light on the complex interplay of power that exists at the top of the corporate world.

Media Ownership and Stewardship

Explicit ownership of a news outlet no longer has sole explanatory power in analyzing how a media outlet behaves. Arthur O. Sulzberger may have some say in what is published in the New York Times, but there is a dense network of corporate relationships that bolsters the institution and guides its decision making. Each mainstream media outlet is not only owned by an individual, family or parent corporation, but also advised by a group of representatives from some of the largest corporations in the American lexicon.

The Sulzberger family has owned the New York Times since 1896, which should send up some red flags. But The New York Times Company Board of Directors also has members associated with McDonald’s, Verizon, Nike, Facebook, Expedia, Etsy, Sony, Pandora, as well as a visiting professor of Rhetoric and the Art of Public Persuasion at the University of Oxford.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon owns the Washington Post. You’ll find board members associated with General Motors, Xerox, Johnson and Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway, a $70bn investment-fund, a large insurance company, and SurveyMonkey.com, which I imagine is capable of gathering massive amounts of data on public opinion.

The Los Angeles Times is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the president of SoftBank investment fund, which nets $32bn in sales every year and is a virtual god in the world of tech investment. I couldn’t find a board of directors for the Los Angeles Times online.

I won’t bother looking into Fox. Everyone knows how that will turn out.

The mechanisms used to manipulate public opinion have gotten infinitely more sophisticated since William Randolph Hearst’s time, though control of the mainstream media today is similarly plutocratic. In the age of big data, the aim and ability to manipulate public opinion should come across as a terrifying feature of the American public discourse. Take Facebook, for example. It is clear how much power even a foreign government can have on American public opinion, regardless of whether or not Trump actively contributed to the Russian misinformation effort. I shudder to think about the powerful effect corporations and other powerful institutions will have on the outcome of this election using the mainstream media.

Conclusion

In the same way that advertisers manufacture the desire for their product by feeding you sensory data, corporately owned news outlets manufacture consent for harmful government policies by publishing information strategically. What’s scarier than the monopolistic bent of marketing-heavy corporations is the transformation of corporate-political propaganda into a hard science. Poll after poll, study after study, has helped to refine the art of public persuasion. This might not seem relevant during a contentious presidential election. Just mute the TV during commercials, right? But the science under development in the public relations industry has always shared close ties with corporate power, and by connection media and politics.

There doesn’t need to be a grand conspiracy. There doesn’t have to be a dark room full of whispered commands. But there is an identifiable pattern of power and influence that permeates the mainstream media; a pattern that can be reframed as a centuries-long marketing campaign to suit the interests of a global class of plutocrats.

Corporations donate to election campaigns for the same reason they place representatives on the boards of major media outlets. They want control over policy and control over public opinion. And though there are a lot of different organizations competing for this privileged access to media and governmental influence, their interests are often aligned. They cooperate across the limited political spectrum of American media to temper rising racial and class awareness.

Though it is subtle, you can identify it with the right questions. Why does the mainstream media only cover a social movement like the Civil Rights Movement and the resistance to the Vietnam War, or more recently the Black Lives Matter or #MeToo movements when they become too powerful to ignore? Why isn’t economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, racial inequality, or climate change the front page story every day, when they’re clearly the most dire threats to the vast majority of people in the short and long-term? Advocating strongly for these issues goes against the best interests and likely the nature of a small yet powerful class of business super-elites. They cooperate to varying degrees on key issues producing a remarkable degree of consistency across the spectrum, from the New York Times to Fox News.

Identity Theft and the Body's Disappearance

(Art by Steve Cutts)

By Robert Bohm

"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

- Allen Ginsberg from his poem " Howl "

Identity theft, at least the most familiar type, is possible because today the individual exists not merely as flesh and blood, but as flesh and blood spliced with bank account numbers, user names, passwords, credit card chips, etc. These added parts aren't secondary to the individual's overall identity, they're central to it. Sometimes they're all there is of it, as in many banking and purchasing transactions. In such instances, the data we've supplied to the relevant institutions doesn't merely represent us, it is us. Our bodies alone can't complete transactions without the account numbers, user names, passwords, credit card numbers, and ID cards which have become our identity's essence. Without them, in many ways, we don't exist.

In a worst case scenario, if someone gets hold of this private data, they can become us by possessing the data that is us. Following this, who or what we are is no longer a question. We don't exist, except in the form of a stolen dataset now under someone else's control.

In such a case, an unknown proxy has eliminated us and become who we once were.

Although problematic, the above form of identity theft is relatively minor. A worse form is one we all know about, yet chronically underestimate because we think of ourselves as too canny to be conned. Nonetheless, this other form of identity theft frames and limits everything we do. In the process, it fleeces us of the fullness of our identities and subjects our lives to a type of remote control. This remote control consists of the combined influence on us, from childhood onward, of society's major institutions and dominant activities, which seed us with a variety of parameters for how to acceptably navigate society and and its particular challenges.

This process is usually called "socialization." However, it's better seen as a sorting procedure in which society sifts us through a citizenship sieve in order to eliminate supposed defects, thereby guaranteeing that, despite each of us possessing unique characteristics, we share an underlying uniformity. Ultimately, this process is a kind of identity eugenics which strives to purify the population by eliminating or weakening troublesome qualities - e.g., an overly questioning attitude, chronic boundary-testing, a confrontational stance toward authority, a fierce protectiveness toward whatever space the body inhabits, etc. Such traits are frowned upon because they're seen by the status quo as a likely threat to society's stability.

Such indoctrination is much subtler yet, in many ways, more pervasive than outright propaganda. Its theater of operations is everywhere, taking place on many fronts. Public and private education, advertising, mass culture, government institutions, the prevailing ideas of how to correct socioeconomic wrongs (this is a "good" form of protest, this a "bad" one), the methods by which various slangs are robbed of their transgressive nature through absorption into the mainstream, the social production of substitute behaviors for nonconformity and rebellion - each of these phenomena and others play a role in generating the so-called "acceptable citizen," a trimmed down (i.e., possesses reduced potential) version of her or his original personality.

Make no doubt about it, this trimming of the personality is a form of identity theft. It is, in fact, the ultimate form. Take as an example the African slave in the U.S.: abducted from her or his homeland, forbidden from learning to read or write, denied legal standing in the courts, given no say over whether offspring would be sold to another owner or remain with them. The slave was robbed of her/his most essential identity, their status as a human being.

In his book, The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B. Du Bois described this theft in terms of how slavery reduces the slave to a person with "no true self-consciousness" - that is, with no stable knowledge of self, no clear sense of who she or he is in terms of culture, preceding generations, rituals for bringing to fruition one's potential to create her or his own fate. As Du Bois correctly argued, this left the slave, and afterwards the freed Black, with a "longing to attain self-conscious manhood," to know who she or he was, to see oneself through one's own eyes and not through the eyes of one's denigrators - e.g., white supremacists, confederate diehards, "good" people who nonetheless regarded Blacks as "lesser," etc. Du Bois understood that from such people's perspectives, Blacks possessed only one identity: the identity of being owned, of possessing no value other than what its owner could extract from them. Without an owner to extract this value, the slave was either identity-less or possessed an identity so slimmed and emaciated as to be a nothing.

The point here isn't that today socialization enslaves the population in the same way as U.S. slavery once enslaved Blacks, but rather that identity theft is, psychologically and culturally speaking, a key aspect of disempowering people and has been for centuries. Today, because of mass culture and new technologies, the methods of accomplishing it are far more sophisticated than during other eras.

How disempowerment/identity theft occurs in contemporary society is inseparable from capitalism's current state of development. We long ago passed the moment (after the introduction of assembly line production in the early 20th century) when modern advertising started its trek toward becoming one of the most powerful socialization forces in the U.S. As such, it convinces consumers not only to purchase individual products but, even more importantly, sells us on the idea that buying in general and all the time, no matter what we purchase, is proof of one's value as a person.

To accomplish this end, modern advertising was molded by its creators into a type of PSYOP designed for destabilizing individuals' adherence to old saws like "a penny saved is a penny earned" and "without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor." Once this happened, the United States' days of puritan buying restraint were over. However, modern advertising was never solely about undermining personal fiscal restraint. It was also about manipulating feelings of personal failure - e.g., dissatisfaction with lifestyle and income, a sense of being trapped, fear of being physically unappealing, etc. - and turning them not into motives for self-scrutiny or social critiques, but into a spur for commodity obsession. This wasn't simply about owning the product or products, but an obsessive hope that buying one or more commodities would trigger relief from momentary or long-term anxiety and frustration related to one's life-woes: job, marriage, lack of money, illness, etc.

Helen Woodward, a leading advertising copywriter of the early decades of the 20th century, described how this was done in her book, Through Many Windows , published in 1926. One example she used focused on women as consumers:

The restless desire for a change in fashions is a healthy outlet. It is normal to want something different, something new, even if many women spend too much time and too much money that way. Change is the most beneficent medicine in the world to most people. And to those who cannot change their whole lives or occupations, even a new line in a dress is often a relief. The woman who is tired of her husband or her home or a job feels some lifting of the weight of life from seeing a straight line change into a bouffant, or a gray pass into a beige. Most people do not have the courage or understanding to make deeper changes.

Woodward's statement reveals not only the advertising industry's PSYOP characteristic of manipulating people's frustrations in order to lure them into making purchases, but also the industry's view of the people to whom it speaks through its ads. As indicated by Woodward's words, this view is one of condescension, of viewing most consumers as unable to bring about real socioeconomic change because they lack the abilities - "the courage or understanding" - necessary to do so. Consequently, their main purpose in life, it is implied, is to exist as a consumer mass constantly gorging on capitalism's products in order to keep the system running smoothly. In doing this, Woodward writes, buyers find in the act of making purchases "a healthy outlet" for troubled emotions spawned in other parts of their lives.

Such advertising philosophies in the early 20th century opened a door for the industry, one that would never again be closed. Through that door (or window), one could glimpse the future: a world with an ever greater supply of commodities to sell and an advertising industry ready to make sure people bought them. To guarantee this, advertisers set about creating additional techniques for reshaping public consciousness into one persuaded that owning as many of those commodities as possible was an existential exercise of defining who an individual was.

In his book The Consumer Society , philosopher Jean Baudrillard deals with precisely this process. He writes that such a society is driven by:

the contradiction between a virtually unlimited productivity and the need to dispose of the product. It becomes vital for the system at this stage to control not only the mechanism of production, but also consumer demand.

"To control ... consumer demand." This is the key phrase here. Capitalist forces not only wanted to own and control the means of production in factories, it also wanted to control consumers in such a way that they had no choice but to buy, then buy more. In other words, capitalism was in quest of a strategy engineered to make us synch our minds to a capitalism operating in overdrive ("virtually unlimited" production).

The way this occurs, Baudrillard argues, is by capitalism transforming (through advertising) the process of buying an individual product from merely being a response to a "this looks good" or "that would be useful around the house" attitude to something more in line with what psychologists call "ego integration." It refers to that part of human development in which an individual's various personality characteristics (viewpoints, goals, physical desires, etc.) are organized into a balanced whole. At that point, what advertising basically did for capitalism was develop a reconfigured ego integration process in which the personality is reorganized to view its stability as dependent on its life as a consumer.

Advertisers pulled this off because the commodity, in an age of commodity profusion, isn't simply a commodity but is also an indicator or sign referring to a particular set of values or behavior, i.e. a particular type of person. It is this which is purchased: the meaning, or constellation of meanings, which the commodity indicates.

In this way, the commodity, once bought, becomes a signal to others that "I, the owner, am this type of person." Buy an Old Hickory J143 baseball bat and those in the know grasp that you're headed for the pros. Sling on some Pandora bling and all the guys' eyes are on you as you hip-swing into the Groove Lounge. Even the NY Times is hip to what's up. If you want to be a true Antifa activist, the newspaper informed its readers on Nov. 29, 2017, this is the attire you must wear:

Black work or military boots, pants, balaclavas or ski masks, gloves and jackets, North Face brand or otherwise. Gas masks, goggles and shields may be added as accessories, but the basics have stayed the same since the look's inception.

After you dress up, it's not even necessary to attend a protest and fight fascists to be full-blown Antifa. You're a walking billboard (or signification) proclaiming your values everywhere. Dress the part and you are the part.

Let's return to Baudrillard, though. In The System of Objects , another of his books, he writes about how the issue of signification, and the method by which individuals purchase particular commodities in order to refine their identity for public consumption, becomes the universal mass experience:

To become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign. That is to say: it must become external, in a sense, to a relationship that it now merely signifies ... Only in this context can it be 'personalized', can it become part of a series, and so on; only thus can it be consumed, never in its materiality, but in its difference.

This "difference" is what the product signifies. That is, the product isn't just a product anymore. It isn't only its function. It has transitioned into an indicator of a unique personality trait, or of being a member of a certain lifestyle grouping or social class, or of subscribing to a particular political persuasion, Republican, anarchist, whatever. In this way, choosing the commodities to purchase is essential to one's self-construction, one's effort to make sure the world knows exactly who they are.

The individual produced by this citizen-forming process is a reduced one, the weight of her/his full personality pared down by cutting off the unnecessary weight of potentials and inclinations perceived as "not a good fit" for a citizen at this stage of capitalism. Such a citizen, however, isn't an automaton. She or he makes choices, indulges her or his unique appetites, even periodically rebels against bureaucratic inefficiency or a social inequity perceived to be particularly stupid or unfair. Yet after a few days or few months of this activity, this momentary rebel fades back into the woodwork, satisfied by their sincere but token challenge to the mainstream. The woodwork into which they fade is, of course, their home or another favorite location (a lover's apartment, a bar, a ski resort cabin, a pool hall, etc.).

From this point on, or at least for the foreseeable future, such a person isn't inclined to look at the world with a sharp political eye, except possibly within the confines of their private life. In this way, they turn whatever criticism of the mainstream they may have into a petty gripe endowed with no intention of joining with others in order to fight for any specific change(s) regarding that political, socioeconomic or cultural phenomenon against which the complaint has been lodged. Instead, all the complainer wants is congratulations from her or his listener(s) about how passionate, on-target, and right the complaint was.

This is the sieve process, identity eugenics, in action. Far more subtle and elastic than previous methods of social control, it narrows what we believe to be our options and successfully maneuvers us into a world where advertising shapes us more than schools do. In this mode, it teaches us that life's choices aren't so much about justice or morality, but more about what choosing between commodities is like: which is more useful to me in my private life, which one better defines me as a person, which one makes me look cooler, chicer, brainier, hunkier, more activist to those I know.

It is in this context that a young, new, "acceptable" citizen enters society as a walking irony. Raised to be a cog in a machine in a time of capitalistic excess, the individual arrives on the scene as a player of no consequence in a game in which she or he has been deluded that they're the game's star. But far from being a star, this person, weakened beyond repair by the surrender of too much potential, is so without ability that she or he has no impact whatsoever on the game. Consequently, this individual is, for all practical purposes, an absence. The ultimate invisible person, a nothing in the midst of players who don't take note of this absence at all. And why should they? The full-of-potential individual who eventually morphed into this absence is long gone, remembered by no one, except as a fading image of what once was.

This process of reducing a potentially creative person into a virtual non-presence is a form of ideological anorexia. Once afflicted, an individual refuses nourishment until they're nothing but skin and bones. However, the "weight" they've lost doesn't consist of actual pounds. Instead, it involves a loss of the psychological heftiness and mental bulk necessary to be a full human being.

One can't lose more weight than that.

Human life as we once knew it is gone, replaced by the ritual of endless purchasing. This is existence in what used to be called "the belly of the beast." Our role in life has become to nourish capitalism by being at its disposal, by giving of ourselves. Such giving frequently entails self-mutilation: the debt, credit card and otherwise, that bludgeons to death the dreams of many individuals and families.

This quasi-religious self-sacrifice replicates in another form: the Dark Ages practice employed by fanatical monks and other flagellants who lashed themselves with whips made from copper wires, thereby ripping their flesh and bleeding until they descended into a state of religious hysteria. The more we give of ourselves in this way, the thinner and more weightless we become. Meanwhile, the god whom Allen Ginsberg called Moloch grows more obese day after day, its belly is filled with:

Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!...

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

What capitalism wants from us, of course, isn't merely self-sacrifice, it's surrender. Hunger for life is viewed negatively by the status quo because it nourishes the self, making it stronger and more alert and, therefore, better prepared to assert itself. The fact that such an empowered self is more there (possesses more of a presence) than its undersized counterpart makes the healthier self unacceptable to the powers that be. This is because there-ness is no longer an option in our national life. Only non-there-ness is. If you're not a political anorexic, you're on the wrong side.

Wherever we look, we see it. Invisibility, or at least as much of it as possible, is the individual's goal. It's the new real. Fashion reveals this as well as anything. It does so by disseminating an ideal of beauty that fetishizes the body's anorexic wilting away. Not the body's presence but its fade to disappearance is the source of its allure. The ultimate fashion model hovers fragilely on the brink of absence in order not to distract from the only thing which counts in capitalism: the commodity to be sold - e.g., the boutique bomber jacket, the shirt, the pantsuit, the earrings, the shawl, the stilettos, the iPhone, the Ferrari, and, possibly most of all, the political passivity intrinsic to spending your life acquiring things in order to prove to others and ourselves that we've discovered in these things something more useful than Socrates' goal of knowing thyself or Emma Goldman's warning , "The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought."

What is true on the fashion runway is also true in politics. Just as the best model is one thin enough to fade into non-presence, so our democracy, supposedly ruled "by and for the people," has thinned down so much that "the people" can't even be seen (except as stage props), let alone get their hands on democracy except in token ways. No matter how often we the people are praised rhetorically by politicians, we aren't allowed as a group to get in the way of the capitalist system's freedom to do whatever it wants in order to sustain commodity worship and guarantee capital's right to permanent rule. If the military-industrial complex needs another war in order to pump out more profits, then so be it. We have no say in the matter. The identity theft built into society's structure makes sure of this. It's stripped us of our "weight" - our creativity, our willingness to take political risks, our capacity to choose action over posturing. After this forced weight loss, what's left of us is a mess. Too philosophically and psychologically anemic to successfully challenge our leaders' decisions, we, for all practical purposes, disappear.

As a reward for our passivity, we're permitted a certain range of freedom - as long as "a certain range" is defined as "varieties of buying" and doesn't include behavior that might result in the population's attainment of greater political power.

So, it continues, the only good citizen is the absent citizen. Which is to say, a citizen who has dieted him or herself into a state of political anorexia - i.e., that level of mental weightlessness necessary for guaranteeing a person's permanent self-exclusion from the machinery of power.

***

Our flesh no longer exists in the way it once did. A new evolutionary stage has arrived.

In this new stage, the flesh isn't merely what it seems to be: flesh, pure and simple. Instead, it's a hybrid. It's what exists after the mind oversees its passage through the sieve of mass culture.

After this passage, what the flesh is now are the poses it adopts from studying movies, rappers, punk rockers, fashionistas of all kinds, reality TV stars, football hunks, whomever. It's also what it wears, skinny jeans or loose-fitting chinos, short skirt or spandex, Hawaiian shirt or muscle tank top, pierced bellybutton, dope hiking boots, burgundy eyeliner. Here we come, marching, strolling, demon-eyed, innocent as Johnny Appleseed. Everybody's snapping pics with their phones, selfies and shots of others (friends, strangers, the maimed, the hilarious, the so-called idiotic). The flesh's pictures are everywhere. In movie ads, cosmetic ads, suppository ads, Viagra ads. This is the wave of the already-here but still-coming future. The actual flesh's replacement by televised, printed, digitalized and Photoshopped images of it produces the ultimate self-bifurcation.

Increasingly cut off from any unmediated life of its own, the flesh now exists mostly as a natural resource for those (including ourselves) who need it for a project; to photograph it, dress it up, pose it in a certain way, put it on a diet, commodify/objectify it in any style ranging from traditional commodification to the latest avant-garde objectification.

All these stylings/makeovers, although advertised as a form of liberation for the flesh (a "freeing" of your flesh so you can be what you want to be), are in fact not that. Instead, they are part of the process of distancing ourselves from the flesh by always doing something to it rather than simply being it.

When we are it, we feel what the flesh feels, the pain, the joy, the satisfaction, the terror, the disgust, the hints of hope, a sense of irreparable loss, whatever.

When we objectify it, it is a mannequin, emotionless, a thing that uses up a certain amount of space. As such we can do what we want with it: decorate it, pull it apart, vent our frustrations on it, starve it, practice surgical cuts on it, put it to whatever use we like. It isn't a person. It is separate from our personhood and we own it.

In fact we own all the world's flesh.

We live, after all, in the American Empire, and the Empire owns everything. As the Empire's citizens, we own everything it owns. Except for one thing: ourselves.

***

The flesh is both here and not here. Increasingly, it is more an object that we do things to - e.g., bulk it up, change its hair color, mass-kill it from a hotel window on the 32nd floor, view in a porno flick - than a presence in its own right (i.e., self-contained, a force to be reckoned with). In this sense, it is a growing absence, each day losing more of its self-determination and becoming more a thing lost than something that exists fully, on its own, in the here and now. Given this, the proper attitude to have toward the flesh is one of nostalgia.

Of course, the flesh hasn't really disappeared. What has disappeared is what it once was, a meat-and-bones reality, a site of pleasure and injury. Now, however, it's not so valuable in itself as it is in its in its role as a starting-off point for endless makeovers.

These makeover options are arrayed before the consumer everywhere: online, in big box stores, in niche markets and so on. Today, it is in these places, not at birth, that the flesh starts its trek toward maturation. It does this by offering itself up as a sacrifice to be used as they see fit by the fashion industry, the gym industry, the addiction-cure industry, the diet industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the education industry, etc. Each body in the nation reaches its fullest potential only when it becomes a testing site to be used by these industries as they explore more and better ways to establish themselves as indispensable to capitalism's endless reproduction.

In the end, the flesh, the target of all this competition for its attention, has less of a life on its own than it does as the object of advertisers' opinions about what can be done to improve it or to reconstruct it. Only to the extent that the flesh can transcend or reconstitute itself can it be said to be truly alive.

This last fact - about aliveness - represents the culmination of a process. This process pertains to the visualization and digitalization of everything and the consequent disappearance of everything behind a wall of signification.

A televised or computerized image, discussion, commentary, conjecture, etc., becomes the thing it meditates on, depicts or interprets. This happens by virtue of the fact that the thing itself (the real flesh behind the televised or computerized image, discussion, commentary, conjecture, etc.) has disappeared into the discussion or into the image of it presented on the computer or TV screen.

In the same way, an anorexic model (her/his flesh and blood presence) disappears into the fashions she or he displays for the public.

In each instance the thing (the flesh) now no longer exists except in other people's meditations on it; it has become those other people's meditations. The ultimate anorexic, it (the thing) has lost so much weight it's no longer physically there except as an idea in someone else's mind or in a series of binary codings inside computers.

This is the final victory of absence over there-ness, of the anorexic ideal over the idea of being fully human (i.e., "bulging with existence," "fat with life"). The self has been successfully starved to the point of such a radical thinness that it can no longer stand up to a blade of grass, let alone make itself felt by the powers that be.

This originally appeared at realprogressiveusa.com

Invisible Chains: Consumerism, Debt, and Consciousness

By Colin Jenkins

Critical analyses regarding the effects of "consumerism" have been a staple of Leftist theory for the past century. The Situationist International, appearing in the 1950s as an extension of Lukacs' unique brand of social analysis from the 20s, famously ridiculed the "western lifestyle" as a "fake reality which masks the capitalist degradation of human life."[1] The Situationists viewed the "spectacle" as the process for which people's desires are shaped and molded towards consumerist tendencies through mass media, marketing and advertising, and advanced techniques like "recuperation." This counter-cultural examination quickly became synonymous with a Left that had already come to terms with the "economic injustice" which characterized "the predatory phase of human development."[2] In opposition to this "rigged game," a determined and conscious working class countered with radical unionism and activism, direct action, stacks of polemics, studies on socio-economics, and avant-garde artistic techniques that fell under the banner of "culture jamming." "Detournement" turned the act of recuperation upside down by attempting to radicalize and politicize the corporate slogans and logos that flooded the "spectacle," leading to modern alternative media outlets such as Adbusters, the unsung catalysts of Occupy Wall Street and Rolling Jubilee, and street artists like Banksy, who combines detournement techniques with urban graffiti to send powerful counter-cultural messages via concrete canvass.

Naturally, any opposition to consumerism, especially from within those societies historically classified as "western" or "industrialized," is counter-hegemonic and proto-revolutionary. After all, the cultures derived from them have come to be dominated by ideals rooted in capitalism and market economies, naturally leading to intense daily routines that consist of celebrity worship at the altar of reality television and a multi-billion dollar "gossip industry." And when considering the dominant culture is one of superficiality, where our identities are based on what we own, wear and drive - in other words, consumerism - any stance in opposition to this is naturally "against the grain." The current counter-culture is one that not only recognizes the inherent dangers of a society where meaningful human concerns like impoverishment, homelessness, ever-increasing militarism, racism and misogyny take a backseat to Reality Housewives, American Idol and Jersey Shore; but also one that dares to make conscious lifestyle decisions which run contrary to this domination, while also working to break the collective trance that derives from such. Despite the obvious legitimacies found in this stance, and assuming we haven't conceded to nothingness, it's important to consider (1) how this opposition affects the Left's ability to function as a real alternative to the embedded socio-political hegemony, and (2) how it affects the Left's relationship with a working class that has embraced much of this culture as its own. The inherent risks of elitist-like diatribes against what have essentially become "cultural norms" beg for a re-evaluation which must recognize the need to accommodate both scathing cultural critiques and working-class political means. And while this seemingly half-assed approach to addressing such reactionary psychology may be debatable, the dangerous effects and continued escalation of consumerism clearly represent a powerful barrier to reaching any semblance of a collective working class consciousness. Its roots are not always as clear.

In 1901, following the conquest of Madagascar, French General Joseph Simon Gallieni immediately introduced a franc-based currency in order to impose an "educational tax" on the native population. This move had three implied purposes: "To teach the natives the value of work;" to create an immediate and effective monetary form of debt; and to instill consumerist tendencies within the population. While the first "function" followed the typical blueprint of colonialism by creating cheap forms of "human resources" to exploit, the latter two incorporated tangible debts to "legitimize" servitude (a tactic that would soon take hold in the "modern international financial system") and a culture of consumerism as the psychological means to establish and maintain what Antonio Gramsci once referred to as "cultural hegemony." As David Graeber explains, "The colonial (French) government was quite explicit about the need to make sure that (indigenous) peasants had at least some money of their own left over, and to ensure that they became accustomed to the minor luxuries - parasols, lipstick, cookies - available at the shops."[3] Understanding the connection between alienation, debt and consumerism - and how each may be used as a form of control - goes beyond the "inferiority complex" that Fanon once attributed to colonized populations which are "physically and symbolically destroyed, and in their place the colonizer produces a people who deserve only to be ruled."[4] Essentially, these are tools that transcend international and inherently racist relations between the "core" and "periphery" - making class analyses absolutely vital in regards to the "forced dependency" created by the architects of the dominant culture, not only from the perspective of an indigenous population, but also from that of the domestic working classes. "It was crucial that they (the colonized) develop new tastes, habits and expectations; that they lay the foundation of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to France."[5]

Establishing a "cultural hegemony" runs analogous to principles that drive the market business model, which relies solely on individual "desires" to sell products. Since most of these desires do not constitute basic needs in the Maslovian sense, advertising and marketing must convince consumers that they need big screen televisions, new clothes, technological gadgets, and so forth. With such a task at hand, the business community had to look no further than the colonizers' experience in establishing control over its subject population. In a 1955 edition of The Journal of Retailing, Economist and Marketing Consultant, Victor Lebow, urged business "leaders" and marketers to cultivate and exploit this consumerist mentality with full force:

(Our economy) demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.... We require not only "forced draft" consumption, but "expensive" consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.[6]

To them, the ultimate challenge was not merely establishing a monetary system which allows for widespread consumer spending (fiat-based, supply-side economics) - a task that is handled in conjunction by the "financial wizards" of the hegemonic class - but rather creating the psychological desire to drive such spending. Essentially, as Lebow implied, this may only be accomplished by deflating the "meaning" out of life and replacing it with artificial "spiritual and ego satisfactions" that are achieved through false consciousness and "forced draft consumption." In a scene from the movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden famously rails against the effects of this conditioned psychology on the working classes:

I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit that we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose of place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives.

While Durden's underground sermon accurately characterized the nihilistic decadence of America's Generation X - a generation born at the pinnacle of this consumerist assault - he was merely echoing the theoretical basis of "commodity fetishism" espoused by Marx nearly a century and a half prior:

(With the spread of markets) there will come a time when everything that people consider as inalienable will become an object of exchange, of traffic, and can be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged, given, but never sold, acquired but never bought - virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience - when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality. It has left remaining no other nexus between man and man other than naked self-interest and callous cash payment. [7]

As predicted, this commodity-consumer paradigm has dominated life for much of the past century. Just as workers are commodified and alienated by their role within the labor-capital relationship, they are doubly commodified and exploited in the consumer-capital relationship. Marx recognized this; western imperialists recognized this; and the corporate business community recognizes this. Hence, the appearance of an extensive "propaganda model" that is carried out in the form of a multi-billion-dollar marketing and advertising industry - which is controlled to a large extent by "a relatively concentrated network of major corporations, conglomerates and investment firms."[8] And while there are certainly examples of acute organization within this corporate community (i.e. The Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce, etc…), the maintenance of its hegemony ultimately falls on a loosely connected arrangement of entities that share one powerful commonality: the search for profit. It is this very dynamism that makes it such a formidable foe for the Left in its attempt to deploy class-conscious politics.

Long before the onset of industrialization, capitalism, and even market economies, there were many examples of cultures partaking in the act of accumulation for reasons other than need. Therefore, it seems such "gathering" is likely inherent in our DNA. So what's the problem? Well, first of all, it's important to differentiate between a superficial condemnation that borders on envy, and an analytical assessment that attempts to identify and deconstruct mindless, narcissistic and reactionary societal tendencies. By doing so, it brings much needed legitimacy to the latter purpose, while avoiding further alienation from folks who find natural enjoyment in the acquisition of things. In other words, it's not the act of "wanting" that's inherently bad, it's the totality of a "consumerist" society that intensifies the process of degradation and dehumanization which has already been established within the realms of capital, labor and property relations. And while the battle against exploitation via labor and property is complex, multi-layered and formidable, especially when considering its collective nature and the multitude of external factors involved, the battle against anti-consciousness perpetuated by consumerism can be won on an individual basis, from within. Ultimately, it is this compounding "superstructure" which houses many aspects of superfluous want, where the transition from a civil society to a "surface society" has been made complete; and ironically, where the reversal of such may begin. Therefore, juxtaposing "superficial condemnation" and "analytical analysis" is absolutely vital when breaking down this inherently destructive process. Secondly, it is important to identify such characteristics of a "surface society," with the most dangerous of those coming in the form of personal identity, whether internally through the self or externally through the perception of others. Historically, this process of "self-worth through accumulation" and its reciprocal effect on public perception has blurred the lines between consummation for personal enjoyment and "conspicuous consumerism" as a means of establishing human value. Thorstein Veblen's observations of more than a century ago, though somewhat obvious, still ring true:

Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit."[9]

As if the illegitimacy and consequences of personal fortune and unequal distribution are not enough, the cultural norms that are created through consumption and public display serve to compound and further entrench such inequity on a social scale. As such, the "cultural hegemony" becomes a self-sustaining phenomenon that persists without the need for direct manipulation. "This principle has had the force of a conventional law," explains Veblen. "It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to conform, and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as an aberrant form, sure to be eliminated sooner or later in the further course of development."

A civil society is one that recognizes the collective nature which exists within a community and realizes the inherent connection between a common good and the individual "pursuit of happiness." The essence of civility was captured by Peter Kropotkin in his historical work, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution:

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. It was chiefly evolved during periods of peace and prosperity; but when even the greatest calamities befell men --when whole countries were laid waste by wars, and whole populations were decimated by misery, or groaned under the yoke of tyranny --the same tendency continued to live in the villages and among the poorer classes in the towns; it still kept them together, and in the long run it reacted even upon those ruling, fighting, and devastating minorities which dismissed it as sentimental nonsense. And whenever mankind had to work out a new social organization, adapted to a new phase of development, its constructive genius always drew the elements and the inspiration for the new departure from that same ever-living tendency.[10]

A "surface society" is one that ignores this commonality and replaces it with narcissistic tendencies that are centered within a false sense of identity - one that constantly pursues wealth or, at the very least, the appearance of such. In Prosperity without Growth, Tim Jackson writes, "The profit motive stimulates a continual search for newer, better or cheaper products and services. Our own relentless search for novelty and social status locks us into an iron cage of consumerism. Affluence itself has betrayed us."[11] This society, in sharp contrast to its civil counterpart, has been intensified by the maturation and successive mutations of capitalism, a system that has far outlived the spotty improvements it once offered to its ancestral systems of feudalism and mercantalism.

The development of a "surface society" is as much intentional as it is incidental. On one hand, it represents a regression to what Kant once referred to as "man's self-imposed infancy." On the other hand, it represents a product of invention - the intended result of a social and economic system that is manipulated and shaped through intensely concentrated power structures and profit-seeking motives. The latter brings us back to the French subjugation of Madagascar, where a noted "strategy" used to gain control of the indigenous population was to mold them into consumers who become "accustomed to the minor luxuries available at the shops." Thus, by doing so, they are not only assimilated into the "western mindset," but also dependent on the perceived need for otherwise worthless commodities. Post-industrialized societies are marked by similar dynamics, some of which are natural byproducts of the corporatized market system, and others which are products of design through hierarchical decision-making and political and monetary policy. Ultimately, if the interests of the "ruling-class" (the super minority) not only differs from that of the "working-class" (the super majority), but actually runs adversarial to such, then the need to "manipulate a culturally diverse society so that the ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm," like Gramsci once suggested, is logical on face value.

As we embark well into the 21st century, debt has officially replaced "labor surplus value" as the fundamental tool used by "the rich to extract wealth from the rest of us."[12] However, below its tangible use for "extracting" and funneling wealth to the top lies a crucial weapon in the battle for consciousness and working-class servitude. One of the most notable instances of "assimilation through policy" is reflected within America's love affair with home ownership, which has been intensely subsidized by the federal government for the past century. Interestingly enough, the push for home ownership was rooted in two essential motives: to quell the radical working-class uprisings of the early 1900s, and to serve as a subtle avenue for transferring public funds to private finance. Federal support of home ownership "began as an extension of anti-communist efforts in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; as on organization of realtors put it at the time, "socialism and communism do not take root in the ranks of those who have their feet firmly embedded in the soil of America through homeownership."[13] The working-class angst that had begun to surface, both internationally with the events in Tsarist Russia and nationally with the groundswell of union activity and workers' strikes, presented the need to ramp up capitalist intervention in domestic policy. What followed were the federally-backed "Own Your Own Home" campaign, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (better known as "Fannie Mae."). The consensus among the "owning-class" was that indebted homeowners do not go on strike. The subsidization of private home ownership through tax incentives (where the federal government actually pays homeowners a portion of their expenses at the end of the year) allowed for the manipulation of working-class interests, and were eventually fortified by modern advents of the same, such as consumer debt (rampant through the 1980s and 90s) and student loan debt (dominant from the 1990s to present). It is no surprise that this "control by debt" mantra has intensified during an historical macroeconomic transition from tangible production economies to highly abstract "financial" economies. In contrast to the potentially negative perception of debt, the introduction of seemingly positive forms of class connections have been deployed in the form of "privatized" retirement plans, company "profit sharing," 401Ks and "deferred compensation" plans - all of which urge workers to give portions of their earnings to Wall St. in the promise of long-term returns. Yet another artificial creation of vested (in the form of a direct monetary medium), though contradictory, interest in the owning-class' well-being. The result: A working-class that cheers on the Dow, Nasdaq and S & P 500 under the false impression of inclusion and mutual interest, all the while being fleeced.

Naturally, as "financialization" has sprung up as the dominant paradigm, so has the near-complete fusion of what C. Wright Mills once referred to as "The Power Elite." Graeber writes:

Financialization is not just the manipulation of money. Ultimately, it's the ability to manipulate state power to extract a portion of other people's incomes. Wall Street and Washington, in other words, have become one. Financialization, securitization and militarization are all different aspects of the same process. And the endless multiplication, in cities across America, of gleaming bank offices- 
 spotless stores selling nothing while armed security guards stand by-is just the most immediate and visceral symbol for what we, as a nation, have become.[14]

So, where does consumerism fit into this bleak reality? It's rather simple. Without a constant effort to ensure people remain "accustomed to the minor luxuries - parasols, lipstick, cookies- available at the shops," the potential reach of debt is limited. Of course, basic necessities like housing, health care, food, clothing, and even water can and have been commodified in this fashion - but this isn't enough. Without creating and maintaining an insatiable "need" for luxuries, immense avenues of profit (on one side) and debt (on the other side) are essentially shut down. Furthermore, beyond the basic pursuit of monetary gain (profit) and wealth extraction (debt) lies the foundation of the status quo: the struggle for consciousness. A working class that remains ignorant to its role in this struggle; that remains indignant towards members of its own class through artificial divisions (race, gender, nationality) or false consciousness (by foolishly blaming the poor, homeless, welfare recipients, etc..); that buys into the Weltanschauung established by the "owning-class," is one that stands idle in the face of its own collective disenfranchisement. It allows "the norms of gender, class, and culturally circumscribed behavior, the requirements of work, the pressures of seeking status through consumption, and, in the absence of viable social alternatives, the need to find almost all enjoyment from private commodities" to dictate human life.[15] In this sense, consumerism is the enemy of solidarity; and solidarity is the catalyst of social awareness. Because if and when genuine class consciousness takes flight, society runs the risk of offering a meaningful human existence - an inevitable death to the status quo and the collective realization that "you're not your fuckin khakis."

Notes

[1] Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle.

[2] Albert Einstein. Why Socialism? Monthly Review: May 1949. (Paraphrasing Thorstein Veblen)

[3] David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011)

[4] Franz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967)

[5] Graeber, Debt.

[6] Karl Marx. The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847.

[7] Victor Lebow. Journal of Retailing, Spring of 1955.

[8] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988)

[9] Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 68-101

[10] Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. 1902

[11] Is rampant consumerism ruining our lives? The Guardian, March 17, 2011.

[12] "Can Debt Spark a Revolution?" David Graeber. The Nation, September 5, 2012.

[13] Vincent Cannato, A Home of One's Own, National Affairs, Spring 2010.

[14] The Nation.

[15] Michael Albert. Parecon: Life After Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 205.