Capitalism & Schizophrenia
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean, (1968) The System of Objects. Verso, London (2005)
Baudrillard, Jean (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. SAGE Publications, Theory Culture & Society, Nottingham Trent University.
Baudrillard, Jean., (Eds) Poster, Mark. (2001) Selected Writings. Second Edition. Stanford University Press. Stanford, California.
Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscripts on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), pp. 3-7.
Fisher, M., (2009) Capitalist Realism, Is There no Alternative? Zero Books.
Jameson, Frederic (1989) Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. (1977). Écrits: a selection. New York: Norton.
Peretti, J. (1996) Capitalism and Schizophrenia- Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution. Negations http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/issues/96w/96w_peretti.html
This article seeks to highlight the ease of certain anti-capitalist discourse becoming integrated within capitalism itself. This is exemplified specifically with Jonah Peretti, co-founder and now CEO of BuzzFeed. By following his essay ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ [1996], we can find not only a fine source of critique against the hegemony of advertisement, but a historical piece to show how the discourse and critique itself functions better when appropriated for capital.
Before we begin disseminating and following the work of Peretti, we should first clarify some concepts: what do we mean by consumer capitalism and consumer societies? What role does advertising play within the fabric of post-industrial (First World) societies?
By capitalism, what we mean is the economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state or any other actor [Oxford Dictionary]. By consumer societies, what we refer to is Jean Baudrillard’s conception and semiological analysis of the term, regarding the conspicuous consumption of objects and their ever-prevalent role in the age of human affluence [Baudrillard, 1998: 25].
Advertisement, being the promotional ‘messages’ about objects and commodities, functions ultimately as a discourse about objects [Baudrillard, 1968,]. Baudrillard asserts that: ‘Advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe. It is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to production or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in the system of objects, not merely because it relates to consumption but also because it itself becomes an object to be consumed.’ We can now ask: how does advertising become consumed?
ADVERTISEMENT AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
Here we see Peretti’s analysis. He sought to ‘demonstrate the psychological link between one-dimensionality and advertising’, through a comparison of Frederic Jameson’s work and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which both conceptualises schizophrenia in relation to capitalism. Peretti’s underlying point is that the propagation and consumption of images (through advertisement), which is always linked with an object or service to be bought, is symmetrical to the make-up and break up of a subject’s identity [Peretti, 1996]. Buying into images and its close tie to commodities reproduces our sense of self and leads to our identification within consumer capitalism. Though Deleuze and Guattari see schizophrenia as the proper limit of capitalism - something that capitalism always tends to, but never reaches - Jameson proposes the antithetical. ‘For him, postmodern schizophrenic culture "replicates," "reproduces," and "reinforces" the logic of capitalism’ [Peretti, 1996]. By reinforcing the logic of capital, or venturing into the limit of capital, we see the centrality of the human subject within advertisement and obviously capitalism in general. Peretti’s essay extensively contextualises Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage and schizophrenia in order to make better sense of the concept used by Jameson and Deleuze and Guattari.
THE MIRROR STAGE, SOCIETY AND ADVERTISEMENT
One of the central themes in Peretti’s essay is Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. The mirror stage is simply a means of identification, ‘it describes the process by which the schizoid, polyperverse infant first gains a sense of having a unified identity’ [Peretti, 1996]. This opposes any Cartesian conception of the self because it takes the self as something to be made, instead of pre-determined and inherent [Lacan, 1977]. According to Lacan, we are not inherently unified as individuals. During infancy, we ‘experience’ the world and ourselves as a state of totality, of non-differentiation between oneself and the objects and space around it. In this ‘Real’, we do not experience ourselves as a bound person, adhering to a coherent narrative of events. We instead experience phenomena in a disorganised format. But this changes during the mirror stage, when the infant sees itself in the mirror, usually accompanied by a guardian. This process acts as an intermediate phase between the Real and the Symbolic order (language) as the child is pushed towards a complete separation. The child now sees itself as a unified individual.
Peretti points to how the conception of the mirror stage explains the ‘forces images have in the regime of consumer capitalism’ [Peretti, 1996]. It explains as to why the proliferation of images results in the consumption of objects and services: we constantly go through this mirror stage when confronted by advertisement. The fixed imagos in the adverts present to us the ‘Ideal-I’’s that we want to resonate with, when ‘a woman looks at idealized images in a fashion magazine, when a teenager stares at a poster of a rock star, or when the man on the street gazes up at the Marlboro man on the billboard. Such examples are omnipresent in this media saturated society.’ [Peretti, 1996]. These images, however, must have content to create the possibility for a mirror stage identification. It is this identification with a model, an athlete, or actor that encourages the purchase of the product being pitched. Therefore, in order for an advertisement to be successful, it must provoke an ego formation that makes the ‘the product integral to the viewer’s identity.’ [Peretti, 1996]. This weak ego formation only needs to exist long enough to purchase the product. These capitalist media images ‘are perhaps even less complex than the infantile imago of the child's own reflection’ and in turn, produce quick ego formations which ‘wears out fast, inspiring the consumer to shop around for another one.’ [Peretti, 1996]. Advertisements link identities with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism [Peretti, 1996]. The subject is induced to keep up with the constant change in new images. This acceleration encourages weak egos, which dissolve as quickly as it forms. The essentially ‘schizo’ person buys a new wardrobe to complement their new identity, yet this is forsaken as contradictory and new media images propose a different identity for the individual's psyche. ‘The person becomes schizo again, prepared for another round of Lacanian identification and catalogue shopping… put differently, capitalism needs schizophrenia, but it also needs egos.’ [Peretti, 1996].
This leads to Peretti’s assertion that ‘the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities.’ The subjective unity that Lacan iterates is not natural, that it is something socially constructed and artificial, the Oedipal drama exists only due to socialisation. Adverts give us a promise. It is a promise of a unity, a promise of completion of the drama and ourselves. Furthermore, it also reflects the cultural logic and ideology of the consumer society: the naïve anthropology of the natural propensity to happiness [Baudrillard, 1990: 49]. Happiness, written in ‘letters of fire’ behind all adverts, from bath salts to Canary Island holiday packages, is the absolute reference of the consumer society and is strictly equivalent to salvation [Baudrillard, 1990: 49]. These promises are inherently linked with a service or object that the adverts seek to sell, to be consumed – both the object and the advert.
The imperative of happiness, propounded as the implicit logic of consumer societies, is seen as a symptom within the culture of late capitalism. Mark Fisher proposes that this manifests in the blip atmosphere of the youth- or, for those that are born into that generation where ‘time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.’ [Fisher, 2009: 25]. It materialises as a condition he coins as ‘depressive hedonia’. What does he mean by this? It is the inability to ‘to do anything else except pursue pleasure.’ The thought that the lack of enjoyment one experiences might be beyond the pleasure principle is unfathomable - the act of reading itself is boring, anything with difficulty or doesn’t immediately release dopamine, that cannot be broken down into bite-sized quanta, is boring. Boredom resides from the removal from the ‘communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube, and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand.’ [Fisher, 2009: 24]. For those with this general ‘depressive hedonia’, it is similar to the schizophrenic in the sense that both are reduced to the experience of pure material signifiers, living through each present in time with the aim of instant gratification. Where experience happens to you, rather than you having the experience.
For Jameson, postmodern culture is identified with schizophrenia. What happens to the individual in Lacan’s account for schizophrenia, has happened on the societal level. We have lost the power to historicize ourselves. We can’t make sense of the events we have, to place it in a cohesive structure. Similar to Baudrillard’s theory on media, we have more information than ever before, yet it inversely correlates to the amount of meaning that it produces. ‘Meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be re-injected.’[Baudillard, 1983]. The signifiers are displaced and lose their significance. As an example, think of Twitter feeds or Instagram whereby the endless feed and scrolling of miscellaneous topics are placed on the same plane and dimension. News events, adverts, friend’s birthdays, opinions, scientific findings and cultural phenomena are all jumbled one after another. As such, all these signifiers are no longer hierarchical, but it no longer produces any significant meaning or value. It is also in a way both schizophrenic in its arbitrariness of signifiers, and a cultural symptom of Jameson’s societal breakdown of signifiers within consumer/postmodern societies.
DELEUZE, GUATTARI AND CAPITALISM
Deleuze and Guattari also apply this conceptualisation of schizophrenia to society. However, unlike Jameson, it is not identified with late capitalism, but with the limit of capitalism. Schizophrenia is that which capitalism tends towards but never actually reaches. Capitalism, just like schizophrenia, breaks down signifiers, it destabilises them. They call this process ‘deterritorialization’. A process in which capitalism rips things out of the territories that they previously rigidly occupied, breaks apart things that were previously combined For example, capitalism breaks up traditions and commodifies it, the condition that Fisher marked out of capitalist realism (consumer society) is its ability of subsuming history, turning its objects into artifacts and giving it a monetary value. But:
Deleuze and Guattari do not characterise the capitalist machine as monolithic or unitary, it does not have an ‘I’, an ego, or a unified identity. it works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic and linguistic barriers that limit exchange. [Peretti, 1996].
We can see the similarities between capitalist deterritorialization and Lacanian schizophrenia. Schizophrenia breaks down that which was previously unified, just like capitalism does. Thus, schizophrenia as a mental condition can be described as ‘deterritorialization of subjectivity’. Why then does Deleuze and Guattari ascribe schizophrenia with the limit of capital and not capital in general? Because capitalism still needs a minimum amount of stability in order to function. It still needs the state’s violent protection of private property rights and capital circulation of markets. If capitalism reached its limit, it would lose its minimum amount of stability and destroy itself. Therefore, capitalism must inhibit its own schizophrenic tendencies, using the state apparatus.
Schizophrenia therefore has revolutionary potential. This is the difference between Deleuze and Jameson, while Jameson identifies schizophrenia with the exhausting condition of late capitalism, and therefore something to be overcome, Deleuze and Guattari identify it as a latent tendency exhibited within capitalism, which in order to reach its revolutionary potential, must be accelerated. It is not to resist capitalism’s deterritorialization, but to go even further with it, accelerate it until it is too much for capitalism to bear. Henceforth the political tendency known as ‘accelerationism’ -to speed up the schizophrenic tendencies of late capitalism in order for the system to collapse- is so influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, if capitalism thrives off its contradictions, as aforementioned, is there really ‘hope’ in such an easily egocentric movement?
Peretti’s last section looks at the schizophrenic as a potentially radical anti-capitalist. He distinguishes between three different figures for promoting the limits of capital: Queer activists, the slacker and the postmodern artist. He chooses these three because of their way of subverting different aspects of capital. Queer political practice subverts the politics of capital. The slacker negates identity formations and takes the media satiation as the end product. The artist provides quotational work that dissociates media images from consumer products. Peretti’s essay lays out these potential figures, but he comes to the conclusion that the most they can do is alternate the accelerating rhythm of late capitalism [Peretti, 1996].
‘ACCELERATIONISM’ AND CAPITAL APPROPRIATION
Herein we have the irony of this detailed exploit of Peretti’s analysis. Peretti wrote his essay as an anti-capitalist. Now as a CEO, he is incorporating the very anti-capitalist heterodox discourse he iterated into capitalism, into Buzzfeed’s advertising model. The company does what is known as native advertising: embedding and weaving the adverts into the page so as to not hinder the content [Vinderslev, 2016]. You would participate in a quiz, yet it would be sponsored by a brand. Once finished, your identity is linked to a particular product. Buzzfeed’s model not only exploits the Lacanian notion of the mirror stage and the schizophrenic, but incorporates it into its own function. Moreover, it accelerates this process. Today, virtual commerce is already mainstream. In being so, the temporal distance between formalising an identity through objects, and purchasing the objects, is minimised. Needless to say, Peretti is identifiable as a sell-out and hypocrite.
Accelerationism (to speed up the schizophrenic and the internal contradictory tendencies of late capitalism in order for the system to collapse), in the case of Peretti, is merely a self- interested shallow ploy. Beyond this, incorporating the discourse and profiteering from it effectively, this initial incorporation of anti-capitalism into capitalism generally is crucial. It is crucial insofar as highlighting, again, the realism of capital. It seems to highlight a condition whereby the effacement of the conditions of capitalism do nothing more than violently reshape it into a more dynamic structure. Its plasticity, its malleability, integrates the theoretical critique all too easily. Thus, the lesson learned can be twofold: that the critique of capital can easily be incorporated into capitalism itself. The second lesson then might be that we should therefore avoid this form of critique.
What do I mean by ‘this form of critique’? I would say this is one antithetical to something more intrinsic to capitalism, to its patriarchal and racial elements and critiques. After all, the bourgeoisie want ‘the world after their own image’ [Marx], and hence the world to be patriarchal, European and white. However, this form is one of effacement: it explains the mechanisms and effectiveness of certain aspects of capitalism: the how. It is the ‘how’ but in a creative sense, combining elements of different theories from multiple disciplines, but specifically (in Peretti’s case) structural linguistics and psychology. Ultimately it is the creativity of understanding ourselves that capitalism seems to be able to digest most effectively. When something is said, when it gains an ontology (a being, or logic of being), then it can become consumed for capital, by capital, and ultimately become capital:
Hence, what to do now?
Written by - Hadi El-kettas