taCity

Kylie Jenner’s infamous Pepsi ad, that was pulled after a public outcry that it trivialised the Black Live Matter protests in 2017

Advertising shits in your head. It permeates every aspect of our waking (and perhaps soon, non-waking) lives, manipulating our innermost desires, and shaping our perception of what we need to be live a life of fulfilment and happiness. As good upstanding consumers, we are bombarded with carefully crafted messages designed to provoke an insatiable hunger for products and services, and couple that with planned obsolescence in the capitalist mode of production, we are forced to buy things more often.

But advertising in and of itself is necessary. For good ideas that make for a better, just, more sustainable world to spread, communication is needed; and when that becomes something that is broadcast, it becomes a form of advertising. The practice itself is not completely synonymous with capitalism.

But the advertising industry is. It operates as a cog in the smooth appropriative and co-optive capitalist machine, skilfully engineering our latent desire for corporate profit maximization. But what is desire in this sense? Deleuze and Guattari, in their seminal work “Anti-Oedipus,” write of desire as a productive force that flows, constantly seeking new channels and intensities; they use the term ‘desire-production’. Within the cooptive constraints of capitalism, human desire is harnessed, channelled, and controlled: making it conducive to the replication of capitalism itself. We need the latest product, we need to see the newest film, wear the right fashion, look the right way; advertising enacts what capitalism needs for us to buy. Advertisers create artificial lack and amplify our sense of inadequacy to present their products as the missing pieces to a fulfilled life. I could direct you to a number of deeply theoretical and wonderful texts to exemplify this, but for me, this sketch by Mitchell & Webb from nearly two decades ago articulates it better than anyone I’ve seen thus far….

Post-capitalist desire?

How can we then reclaim desire for a post-capitalist society? I have argued elsewhere that Mark Fisher’s work is important in generating an aesthetics of post-capitalist desire, but more generally and perhaps more socio-politically, we must explore ways to reclaim desire from the clutches of rampant consumerist institutional advertising. Linked to their understanding of desire, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “body without organs” represents a state of ‘pure’ desire that is unmediated and unregulated, free from the constraints of capitalist (or in their critique of psychoanalysis, psychological) and appropriation and exploitation.

Perhaps the first step towards reclaiming desire is recognizing and dismantling the artificial needs instilled by capitalist versions of advertising. Discerning genuine necessities from artificially induced desires can be tricky, but there plenty of techniques out there to help individuals resist the allure of consumerist culture. Deleuze and Guattari argue that we can “deterritorialize” our desire away from its commodified form to other things and other forms of satisfying that need. Deterritorialization encourages a shift in focus from external products that we never realised we wanted, to internal experiences that are fundamental to our wellbeing. Desiring fulfilment that is not found solely through material possessions, but instead via emotional connections, creativity, and genuine experiences (something which I certainly get via psychogeography, but that argument, as they say, is for another day).

But perhaps more importantly for a post-capitalist society, the emphasis on what we should be ‘directed’ to desire by advertising is a shift towards communal well-being rather than individualistic pursuits. It is no secret that strong social connections can alleviate the loneliness and emptiness that the individualistic ideologies of capitalism can pretty upon (which is very much a focus of my most recent book).

And of course, within the context of climate catastrophe, capitalism’s obsession with endless growth is incompatible with the finite resources of our planet. A post-capitalist society must prioritize sustainability, degrowth and regenerative sensibilities if we are to to break free from the cycle of perpetual desire-driven capitalist production.

The advertising industry’s manipulation of desire within a capitalist system has far-reaching consequences for individuals and society as a whole, but by understanding the mechanisms that control and exploit desire, we can envision a post-capitalist world where genuine emancipatory fulfillment takes precedence over material accumulation. The first and I believe most pressing step in dismantling a capitalist system is to ‘defrag’ and reconfigure its most potent weapon of expansion, it’s control of our desires.