Power in Marketing:

A Broadly Dimensional Approach

© John Desmond

First published, October, 2025

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design, “Feeding Frenzy” © Jean Hall

Chapter Two: The Consuming Subject

Introduction

My initial idea was that this would be a short punchy chapter summarizing some of the main perspectives, a task which, as is plainly evident, has failed miserably. I apologize for the unevenness and scrappiness of what follows but must perforce leave things as they are for fear of making things even more complicated. The inspiration came from the observation that although ‘the subject’ is mentioned over and over again in texts, hardly anyone bothers to describe what their conception of the subject is, never mind to consider this in relation to power. Of course Foucault wrote a paper on The Subject and Power and I also remember, but can’t recall where I read it, the comment by Jacques Alain-Miller that the subject does not refer to that part of us that goes swimming, or who plays athletics, but is rather the one who takes exams. Given it is obvious that psychoanalysts are not swimming coaches, that they would not be particularly concerned with their analysands’ prowess in swimming should come as no surprise, although the meaning the analysand attributes to swimming might be of some interest to them. Subjectivity then is about the Cartesian cogito that is the subject of, and subject to, the particular language and cultural context we are born into. This can be rather perplexing, as, if the subject comprises the symbolic self, then on the face of it this ought to rule out consideration of the effects of power on the pre-discursive self, of the emotions and the body, which is after all that part of us that is able to go swimming.

How do theorists construct the subject? From the perspective of consumption homo economicus, the rational actor contrived by neoclassical economists seems a good place to start. At the very least, we know where we are with this fictional entity who is perfectly rational, has perfect access to information and so on. Homo economicus has another advantage in being a readily understandable and communicable concept that accommodates common everyday understandings of power. But then homo economicus is a fiction and alternative conceptions of the subject are available. What is troubling and which makes this topic interesting, is that setting homo economicus aside, there is no agreement between theorists as to the constitution of the subject, indeed, far from it! The behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman offers a more complex version by arguing that human decision-making involves two systems, where system one, which accounts for the majority of our decisions operates without conscious thought. Freudian psychoanalysts locate the subject in the ego which is partly unconscious and mediates between demands by the id for immediate gratification, and those of the superego, for restraint. Not content with this, Lacan, the ‘French Freud’ develops a negative ontology where the subject is located in the Symbolic at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Real. Desire is of equal importance for Lacan and Deleuze, except that for the former, desire is constituted by lack, whilst for the latter it is positive, never mind that the latter entirely dismisses the basis of psychoanalysis. Rene Girard also dismisses psychoanalysis, placing mimesis at the centre of his account of the desiring subject. And then of course there are the post-structuralists.

From the above it is striking that on the one hand we have the mainstream anodyne, readily describable, scarcely credible homo economicus, and on the other hand a range of disparate, divergent theories, each with its own arcane nomenclature together with its hangers on, disciples and apostates. The contrast between the grey uniformity of the former and the fragmented, kaleidoscopic opposition could not be more stark. Given the variety of perspectives on offer one might be tempted to give up on the subject, or on the other hand dive in and embrace the difference. The aim of this short chapter which is to be illustrative, rather than comprehensive, is to offer a snapshot of some of these differing accounts of the subject, to illustrate how, depending on how subjectivity is theorised, one can come up with a quite different understanding of power. The somewhat tongue in cheek “cod latin” titles used below are, ‘homo economicus’; ‘homo psychologicus”; “homo psychoanalyticus”; ‘homo mimeticus” and ‘homo deconstructivus”.

Will these theories be like pieces of a broken mirror that when reconstituted will provide a fuller picture? Or as seems equally if not more likely, will the result be piecemeal?

Homo Economicus

Adam Smith is often mentioned as the towering figure that stands behind the free market with his famous quote that, ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but their self-interest’. However, human sociality and culture, which are also important to Smith’s explanation are entirely missing in the formulation of homo economicus developed by neoclassical economists. In the neoclassical understanding the isolated individual ideal actor in the marketplace is presumed to be motivated purely by self-interest and to act rationally to maximise his utility function by optimising his assortment of goods, using perfect information to judge alternative offerings from a variety of sellers against pre-specified preferences, calculating their respective contribution to the satisfaction provided, and choosing the option that provides the optimum satisfaction. This also assumes the existence of perfect competition between sellers. This is further described in chapter four.

Although originally conceived of as a model of ideal economic behaviour against which to compare real-life situations, the concept of homo economicus hardened such that it came to be assumed that the consumers actually do act rationally, know their preferences and maximise their satisfaction. Assumptions relating to homo economicus were incorporated into models that purported to show that a decentralized economy motivated by self-interest and guided by price signals can operate successfully if left free from outside regulation.¹ It has thus been argued that this fiction came to be viewed by some as the only way to understand economic and organizational behaviour.

This idea of humanity that flattens the variety of life and experience to one dimension might be understandable at times of shortage and famine, when people are truly individualised and focused entirely on one thing, as they are forced to scrabble about for crusts to feed themselves. However, even if we accept that there is a way of differentiating needs from wants, which several theorists object to, even if our basic physiological needs are met, it is hard to conceive of economic life as purely economic, involving isolated individuals who lack all forms of sociality who are indifferent as to whether they are dealing with a human being or a machine.

Writing over fifty years ago Amartya Sen (1977) described homo economicus as a rational fool and it seems that since then, he has been quite sick, or to put it another way, a lot of real people in advanced Western societies appear to be sick. Sen argues that this model of the economic agent guided by self-interest is not only absurdly simplified but false, describing how over the years efforts have been made to introduce more realism into the picture, for example by introducing a more complex utility function or social preferences that interest homo economicus in the interests of others.

Many years later Kahneman (2011) synthesised the findings of the joint research programme with Tversky, developing dual process theory to argue that the human mind comprises two systems; System 1, which consists of fast, effortless, heuristic processes that operate non-consciously, which outstrips the cognitively expensive, slow, conscious, rationally deliberative processing engaged in by System 2. Kahneman (2011) argues that the dominance of System 1 processing leads to systematic biases that undermine rational evaluation and leave individuals exposed and vulnerable to manipulation. Although the research programmes that led to the development of the literature on heuristics and biases and Prospect Theory were conducted in the early 1970s, these ideas enjoyed a renaissance following publications by Thaler and Sunstein (2008), Ariely (2009) and Kahneman, (2011). Tversky and Kahneman (1974) had found that, when allotted a number chosen at random from a roulette wheel and then asked to say how many countries are members of the United Nations, subjects anchored on that number, using it as a base for their estimate. This was subsequently elaborated in the replication by Ariely et al. (2003) with ordinary consumer products, asking subjects to write down the last two digits of their social security number and then decide whether they would pay that amount in dollars for a product such as wine. The authors confirmed the earlier findings, describing the process as arbitrary coherence; arbitrary in that estimates were significantly related to the random number even although subjects clearly knew that the number had been generated by chance; coherent, because they valued the highly rated wine more than the lower-rated wine. They explained that anchoring facilitates the “imprinting” of valuation judgments for later retrieval.²

Homo Civicus and Homo Politicus

This counterpart to homo economicus was developed by the American theorist Robert Dahl, as the basis for his justification for polyarchy. Given that chapter six deals more extensively with Dahl’s argument, some concepts are sketched here. Polyarchy, which was more widespread when Dahl wrote about it, now reflects the state of some western democracies today where two or more parties compete for the favour of voters during elections. As with his economic cousin, Dahl’s individual is spurred into action by self-interest. Departing from Aristotle, Dahl argued that homo civicus is not by nature a political animal, because most citizens are so caught up with day-to-day concerns that they are only aroused to participate in politics when government action or inaction impacts on their personal goals. Dahl argues that in the face of this general indifference the individual who take an abiding interest in such matters as an active homo politicus is thus the exception rather than the rule.

Dahl could hardly be accused of being a starry-eyed advocate of polyarchy, which he argued is second-best to the ideal system. He believed that social class plays a major role affecting participation in polyarchal systems such that the lower one’s social class, the less likely one is to participate in elections and the more authoritarian one’s predisposition. Being generally apathetic, lower socioeconomic groups tend to accept rules and procedures that they do not support. Krouse comments acerbically, “Thus, to put the matter bluntly, consensus is best preserved by holding mass political activity to a minimum”. Such comments seem apt nowadays when the wishes of those who once dreamt of authority are quickly becoming realised and where mass political activity is leading to the terrorisation and silencing of mainstream politicians.³

For Krouse (1982), polyarchy, ‘is neither pure majority rule nor unified minority rule. It is an open, competitive, and pluralistic system of "minorities rule.”⁴ He also makes some telling criticisms of Dahl’s early work, noting for example, that, given the authoritarian bent of much of the populace, ’we must somehow protect the polyarch from the demos’⁵. From this one can perhaps understand why Dahl was untroubled by low turnouts in elections amongst the uneducated lower classes who are prone to be influenced by authoritarian sentiments. Dahl also argued in his early work that because most individuals are apathetic, attempts to increase political participation through education are unrealistic. He was criticised for justifying an elite theory of democracy, by effectively arguing that direct democracy should be placed in the hands of an oligarchy - the result being a ‘thinly veiled apology for elite domination and mass apathy”.⁶ That said, Dahl changed his views in later life to argue for direct democracy.

Krouse notes Dahl’s difference from Aristotle in that he believed that homo civicus is not necessarily a political animal, although this is not so much down to nature as to socioeconomic circumstance. As Krouse sees it, polyarchy ensures that government is responsible for the policy preferences of its individuals and so the Aristotelian participation in the common life as a civilizing process of moral and rational education, “is simply read off the theoretical map”.⁷

Dahl’s argument changed from the nineteen-sixties onwards due to his concern at increasing distantiation of the citizen from the twin giants comprising what he called the “corporate leviathan” and the “democratic leviathan”. Given that he held equality between citizens as the most important consideration, he was especially concerned by the massification of interests in the ‘corporate leviathan’ and its huge influence on the public realm, arguing that business should be made accountable to those whose interests they interfere with. He considered two ways in which this might happen, rejecting polyarchy in favour of economic and political controls and through the introduction of workplace democracy.

It is not too difficult to apply Dahl’s conception of the majority of subjects as dwelling largely in the bubble of their day-to-day concerns, to the majority of consumers as largely motivated by self-interest, spending little time or effort in thinking beyond their immediate situation and resenting the actions of “do-gooders” whose revelations about the damage their lifestyle is causing threatens their enjoyment. In their role as consumers individuals are prone to the influence of emotional appeals by activists to take action on behalf of oppressed workers who make the garments they wear, the animals they eat, species endangered by their way of life and damage to the wider environment. They are also prone to misinformation campaigns that encourage them to stay dormant and continue to enjoy.

Given the above there are interesting parallels between Robert Dahl and Kurt Lewin, who was also concerned about the state of democracy in his adopted country. Lewin is best known for his work on democratic leadership and similar to Dahl, he argued for more democratic participation in a number of contexts, including business. However, Lewin went beyond Dahl by recognising that democracy is not a form of engagement with others that comes naturally, but rather individuals must be schooled in its practice if it is to take root in institutions.

Homo Psychologicus

Given that some time ago the discipline of psychology began to model its theoretical development on the hard sciences, the result has been the production of hundreds of micro-theories that each provides a limited range of explanation. In the following I have drawn together a number of these theories which I have loosely stitched together in order to weave something of a narrative. However what kind of narrative can it be if each presents a different conception of the subject? Discussion takes off from a brief excursion to behavioural economics which offered a direct rejoinder to the conception of homo economicus, then moves briskly on to behaviourism where homo economicus might be presumed to be at root eminently governable. This leads to a discussion of the extent to which human nature is fixed, or plastic, by conforming to the demands of authority, or to the influence of their fellows, or even to ensuring the preservation of their own harmonious sense of self. Related questions concern the existence of an authoritarian personality and the psychology of conspiracy theory which is emerging as an important topic.

Behavioural Economics

It is now over seventy years since the first publication of the results of the ground-breaking experiments by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) into decision-making under uncertainty which led them to question some of the key assumptions underpinning homo economicus. From these considerations they developed Prospect Theory to argue that in real life, humans do not process information in a rational and comprehensive manner but instead resort to heuristics, or rules of thumb. They discovered that even experts do not understand the meaning of randomness and are poor at assessing probabilities; that we do not use logic but draw on stereotypes to judged probabilities; and that we do not process all relevant information when making a decision but restrict our search to what is ready at hand.

This introduced the idea opposed to homo economicus, that humans do not reason in the comprehensive manner assumed by rational choice theory and that even experts are poor statisticians who resort to heuristics, or broad rules of thumb when making decisions. Many years later Kahneman (2011) synthesised the findings of his prior research programme developing dual process theory to argue that the human mind comprises two systems; System 1, which consists of fast, effortless, heuristic processes that operate non-consciously, which outstrips the cognitively expensive, slow, conscious, rationally deliberative processing engaged in by System 2. He argued that the dominance of System 1 processing leads to systematic biases that undermine rational evaluation and leave individuals exposed and vulnerable to manipulation.

Since the turn of the millennium there has been an awakened interest in consumer choice. Research into choice in economic settings has found that we do not optimize our preferences,⁸ which we construct rather than form in advance⁹ and which are initially malleable and arbitrary only becoming fixed after we have made an initial decision.¹⁰ The context of choice matters too, for instance in many situations, we are prone to choose the middle option.¹¹ When choosing, amongst the various biases we are prone to, projection bias operates by overestimating what we think we need from our current situation, for instance, by ordering more food from the menu than we find we can subsequently manage to eat.¹²

Such findings coupled with the knowledge that the processes involved operate non-consciously in less than the blink of an eye, have led to calls for a more realistic understanding based on real humans as opposed to econs,¹³ or superhumans¹⁴. Given that marketers are well versed in how to influence our preferences and choice processes in ways that can be harmful for the individual and for society at large¹⁵, this led to calls for the State to use positive power, expressed as various forms of paternalism such as, “libertarian paternalism”,¹⁶ “asymmetric paternalism,”¹⁷, “light paternalism”,¹⁸ or “means paternalism”¹⁹. The common feature of those approaches is the postulate that non-rational individuals should be helped to satisfy their preferences. Sunstein (2014) for instance justifies means paternalism as follows,

More particularly, I have urged that accumulating evidence suggests, more concretely than ever before, that in identifiable cases, people’s mistaken choices can produce serious harm, even when there is no risk to others. The result is a series of behavioral market failures that provide a plausible basis for some kind of official remedy. Behaviorally informed responses need not, and generally should not, attempt to revisit people’s ends. They are focused on correcting mistakes that people make in choosing the means to satisfy their own ends. (Sunstein, 2014, 163-164). This literature, including the contributions of Kahneman and Thaler is discussed more extensively in chapter three.

Behaviourism

Michel Foucault argued that the Chicago School theorist Gary Becker radically changed the conception of homo economicus from being a partner in exchange, to the entrepreneur of himself, of which more later. Foucault also noted how the definition of rationality was loosened so as to include, “any conduct which is sensitive to modifications in the variables of the environment and which responds to this in a non-random way”.²⁰ Foucault concludes that if the subject of economics is concerned with systematic responses to environmental stimuli, then this is nothing less than behaviourism. The study of human behaviour long precedes the development of behavioural psychology and is most closely associated with Watson’s classical conditioning and with operant conditioning developed by B.F. Skinner. In a callous experiment on a baby called “Little Albert” that would not be ethically permissible today, Watson²¹ demonstrated the efficacy of stimulating fear in the subject, a finding he subsequently promulgated while working for the J Walter Thompson Agency. Watson’s theory. His approach matched the assumptions of advertisers at the time by offering a “progressive vision of social control… that assumed the malleability of man’.²² In line with his argument that only three emotions count, comprising fear, anger and love, Watson’s basic message to advertisers in relation to the consumer was, “tell him something that will tie him up with fear, something that will stir up a mild rage, that will call out an affectionate or love response’.²³

Based on studies of rats and rabbits, B.F, Skinner developed operant conditioning, to argue that behaviour can be controlled by positive or negative reinforcement and extinguished by punishment. This explanation places more emphasis on the manipulation of environmental cues and has had far-reaching consequences and can observed across the retail landscape today.²⁴

Conformity to Authority?

A core tenet of social psychology is that what the individual thinks and does is largely dependent on others, which has been the subject of study over the years in famous Muzafer Sherif and Solomon Asch. A particular feature of human malleability drew the attention of the behavioural psychologist Stanley Milgram following the revelation of the horrors of the Second World War. The experiments conducted into the influence of authority under his leadership continue to shock anyone who believes they are incapable of wrongdoing or evil. While many have been drawn to the simple notion that authority figures can induce us to engage in the most heinous treatment of others, Milgram (1964) drew the lesson from these experiments that humans are social creatures who have a propensity to accept the definitions of, and limits to, action prescribed by those in authority, whom they regard as being legitimate. That is, although the subject performs the action, he or she allows authority to define the meaning of the action. The implications of this are chillingly obvious. To submit others to extreme violence can be perfectly ‘normal’ such that those in authority who wish to commission such deeds have no especial need to find those of a perverse character to do their bidding.

Adorno et al. (1950) were interested to understand the acceptance of Nazi ideology by the mass of the German population in the 1930s which they argued happened because authoritarian tendencies solidified into the rigid form of an authoritarian personality. In line with this argument Zmigrod (2025) argues, in accord with the current fashion for neuroscience, that there are neural correlates in the brain with rigid ideological thinking such that the amygdala is larger in individuals who tend towards more authoritarianism.

On the other hand followers of George Kelly developed a more differentiated argument. Kelly (1955), who was the originator of Personal Construct Theory, focused on the systems of thought we use to construe our environment. He noticed that while many people are relatively flexible in their thinking and will change their views in light of convincing arguments, others are more inflexible and at the extreme can be either rigid or loose. As clinicians his successors were interested to explore the extremes, finding that those prone to obsession construe the world in a monolithic manner that brooks no room for differentiation such that their key constructs were highly related, forming just one cluster where construct A is tied to B and to C and so on. This was the case in cases of paranoia where the system was monolithic and inflexible such that subjects retained this rigid model even when knowledge or even personal experience contradicted it, engaging in, “exaggerated dogmatism” (Lorenzini et al., (1989). At the opposite end of the spectrum the construct systems of those prone to psychosis were found to be extremely loose with little relation between one construct and another, leading to the individual experiencing difficulty in finding any form of grip or purchase on which to form an opinion. By comparison with the extremes, the construct systems of normal subjects consisted of several articulated clusters (Makhlouf-Norris et al., 1970). In relation to authoritarianism, the closed and rigid system of the obsessive can be expected to be resistant and indeed hostile to reasoned argument from others that threatens the status of just one of their constructs, as to change this threatens to bring down the brittle edifice of the self. For instance, someone I know personally I will call Jim tells me that he has heard that Ireland is ‘overrun’ with immigrants, who are indolent, sponging on the State, or engaging in criminal activity, or both, and so on. He simply doesn’t want to know when I present my side of the story based on actually being in Ireland (he has never been), that immigrant labour is needed, that the ‘indigenous’ Kinahan family from North Dublin controls one of the biggest European criminal mafia gangs, and that the immigrants I have met are hard-working and law-abiding.

What of the influence of the peers-group? While Milgram focused on obedience to authority, in a classic experiment which has been replicated several times, Solomon Asch and his confederates discovered that a person will go to extraordinary lengths, to the extent that they dispute the evidence of their own eyes, by agreeing with the obviously mistaken judgements made by others.²⁵ Revisiting the Milgram studies, Reicher and Haslam (2011) provided a different explanation based on the importance of the inter-individual context. Their re-examination found that the exposure of individuals to the voices of others had an influence on the outcome of the experiment, such that there was total obedience if the subject only heard the voice of the experimenter, whereas, if there was the slightest protest from the learner, compliance dropped to 65%, and as the victim got closer, dropped further to 30%. While one might note that 30% in this context is still a worryingly high number, the Reicher and Haslam also noted the “powerful irony”, that while Milgram’s studies sought to show that people obey orders, an “unequivocal” finding from the experiments was that when requests were framed as orders they simply did not comply! This led Reicher and Haslam to surmise that something else was going on and to construct an alternative explanation based on social identity theory, which suggests that questions of obedience will depend on perceptions of a shared identity. From this they pointed to the need to enquire into the effects of context on social identities and the impact these identities have on moral obligations towards different parties and vice versa²⁶.

The findings of Reicher and Haslam resonate with Browning’s (1998), sobering account of the real-life decisions made by “ordinary men” when asked to murder hundreds of civilians. Browning describes how Major Trapp, the officer in command of Reserve Battalion 101 announced before the assembled company of five hundred men, that those who did not wish to participate in the Battalion’s first action to murder defenceless civilians would be excused from participation in if they stepped forward at parade. In contrast to the Milgram experiment, Trapp gave his men a choice which was taken up by just eleven of the five hundred.²⁷ Browning describes the context, where Trapp was seen as something of a humanitarian against the noticeable sadism practiced by other officers as, “he had not only offered a choice, he had set a tone”, stating, “We have the task to shoot Jews, but not to beat or torture them.’²⁸ Those later interrogated who took part in the killing said that they did so because they did not want to appear weak, or cowardly, or to lost face in front of their comrades and indeed asserted that they had no choice. The tiny minority on the other hand who took a stand were later treated by their former comrades as social pariahs.²⁹

Social identity is relevant to just one of the six factors in Cialdini’s (2001) model of social influence. Firstly he took authority from the Milgram study; secondly, observation can be important, as being in a position to observe the behaviour of others, as in the situation of the Reserve Battalion, could conceivably have acted as a counter to Trapp’s authority, if the number of men stepping forward had snowballed. Some of those who did step forward may have been motivated by a sense of ethical commitment, fuelled by their need act consistently with their beliefs. The principle of scarcity, which increases the value of an opportunity because it is rare, may perhaps have played a role for some. The extent to which Trapp was liked by his men is another factor that may have led them to support him. Finally, the principle of reciprocity may have led some to support his call if they owed him a favour.

Fear of Death

Where does the antipathy towards others of a different religion, cultural practices or skin colour emanate from? Against the claim that this is somehow natural is evidence that much of the time relations between groups can be pacific, productive and mutually beneficial. An interesting explanation is provided by Terror Management Theory³⁰ which is a psychological science that escaped from psychoanalysis. Its point of departure was Ernest Becker (1973) who in The Denial of Death, argued that the development of religion and culture are means for humans to construct a sense of real or symbolic immortality in the face of our fundamental fear of confronting our mortality. The psychological security of achieving immortality through belief in an immortal soul, by having children, or perhaps through producing music or literature that will outlive us is matched by our need to be thought well of and to have a meaningful life of which we are the author. The theory argues that when we are consciously made aware of our death we take action, by trying to keep safe, for instance by wearing sun-screen on a hot day. More insidious effects are produced when fear of death is awakened unconsciously, for then we are drawn away from engagements with others, and towards our co-religionists and those with whom we share a common culture. Being unconsciously reminded of one’s death thus means that we cling more tightly to our world-view and more rejecting of others.

Conspiracy Theory

Given its prevalence today and the significance of the above in perhaps explaining some of its facets, it is important briefly to introduce the literature on conspiracy theory. The definition of a conspiracy theory in the OED refers to, “a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event’. For example the proportion of the US population believing that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone to assassinate President Kennedy rose from 61% in 2013 to 65% in 2023, and disturbingly for the US government, it was itself named most often as a co-conspirator.³¹ Researchers found that 14% of Americans do not believe there is sufficient evidence for any kind of global warming, whilst of those who do, 54% disagree that human activity is the primary reason but did not ask them if there was any kind of conspiracy involved.³² By comparison, the astonishing QAnon conspiracy theory, which continues to be subscribed to by around 20% of adults in the USA fulfils the criteria of being political in motivation and of involving the activities of an oppressive shadowy elite.³³

A number of studies have sought to understand the tendency for individuals to subscribe to conspiracy theories. While some argued that education has an influence³⁴ the meta-study by Bowes et al. (2023) found limited evidence that conspiratorial thinking is stronger in community samples than in college samples. So what is going on? The authors identified three meta-correlates of conspiratorial thinking which combine personal characteristics with motivations, comprising; the perception of threat and danger, reliance on intuition and antagonism. Perception of threat and danger is associated amongst other things, with powerlessness, perceived threat and paranoia; reliance on intuition involves closed thinking, receptivity to bullshit, and proneness to delusions relevant to psychoticism; finally antagonism and the need to feel superior, are related to collective narcissism, cynicism and disinhibition.

Disentangling situational from personality factors one might surmise that those most prone to conspiratorial thinking may have experienced a perceived loss of security and status resulting perhaps from jobs that have fled overseas or are under threat, jobs that once provided a sense of security, identity and self-worth to individuals, who live in an environment that is physically and socially degraded. Added to the reduction in status, for those in traditional blue-collar jobs such as mining to be told that they should “learn to code” might at the least be considered condescending.³⁵ Covid is likely another factor due partly to the unresolved question as to the origin of the virus, anxiety over vaccinations, fuelled by some highly placed in government, with lockdowns affording plenty of time for individuals to engage with conspiracy theories aired in social media. A third factors is the weaponisation of anxiety by Russian trolls and by activists on the far right. Self-appointed “alt-right” activists such as Richard Spencer declared themselves victims of a corrupt state that works in the interests of a shadowy elite, employing racist rhetoric to insist that the “white” majority of European Christian heritage are being replaced by Muslims and blacks and that democracy is outmoded. Added to this is “toxic masculinity’ promoted by proponents of the “Manosphere” on social media which stokes feelings of inadequacy and resentment in young men and since legitimized by the Trump White House through the brief return of notorious Tate brothers who stood accused of rape and sex trafficking ,³⁶ and astonishingly, inviting the Irish mixed martial arts fighter and rapist Conor McGregor to the White House on St. Patrick’s Day, when traditionally the Irish Taoiseach presents the President with shamrock.³⁷ Claims of “alternative facts” made early on in Trump’s first Presidency supplemented by serial lies told by him and members of his second administration coupled with a cycle of announcements, cancellations, re-announcements of policies designed to “flood the zone” have deliberately fuelled anxieties leading to the sense of being punch-drunk. Finally, this was all helped along by a programme of information warfare promoted by Russian interests and other malign actors.³⁸

In terms of personality, Bowes et al. (2023) argue from the position that individuals have fundamental needs for predictability, social acceptance and to build competence and that different outcomes can arise from the extent to which these are satisfied especially during childhood. From these stable personality traits develop that shape the way individuals pursue their goals in life (Dweck, 2017). Thus individuals who are reared in an unstable and unsafe home environment may subsequently become acutely attuned to signals of potential danger, which at the extreme can develop into paranoia. Such feelings may be reinforced by sharing experiences or circulating stories that reinforce the idea that other people are dangerous. Anxiety is cited as another factor that may influence a person to embrace conspiracy theories, as they provide a sense of certainty, although they are also shaky in that they are unproven, such that over time they can increase the discomfort they were trying to mitigate. Status is also important as it reflects the narcissistic concern to elevate the self and to denigrate others.

Balance theorists shared with psychoanalysts the importance of harmony in relation to our self-concept and our relationships with others. We perceive our own selves as centres of goodness and rightful thinking and like balance in our social relationships, seeking out others who affirm us by holding similar beliefs. We dislike discordance, especially threats to cherished beliefs that are central to our sense of self. We make attributions to preserve a coherent and consistent representation of ourselves , tending to ascribe our own mishaps and failures to the situation rather than to our own failings, while applying the opposite interpretation to the failings of others.

[Once they do engage with these – now they have acted – must bring their actions and beliefs together to preserve an harmonious conception of the self. Festinger – must be notes]

Homo Sociologicus

Sociology is a vast subject that spans the full range of behaviour from the analysis of society to the micro rules that structure everyday life. That the question of the subject is more complex and fraught in sociological discourse compared to sister disciplines of economics and psychology is because many sociologists are critical of the status quo. At one level this finds expression as a rejection of what is perceived to be the narrow instrumental rationality that has gripped sister disciplines of economics and psychology that have progressively re-modelled their subject to conform to the image of the hard sciences.³⁹ Additionally, that sociologists, to paraphrase Yeats, have been trained to ‘cast a cold eye’ on the social relations and formations they analyse should not raise many eyebrows given the critical analytical spectacles provided them by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.⁴⁰ While all sociological endeavour is critical in seeking to analyse and question how society is organised and how it functions, a knowledge of the works of Marx and post-Marxist scholars is a pre-requisite for Critical sociologists such as Steven Lukes, who are concerned to understand questions pertaining to power and domination.

Marx

Marx’s theorisation of the power of the capitalist class over the proletariat is clearly relevant to the study of power as a springboard for discussions of class conflict and ideology. However, Marx did not just provide an analysis but also a prescription in light of which it is scarcely surprising that from the 1990s to this day, Critical sociologists and social theorists have been seen as a thorn in the side of the political and economic establishment which has repaid the compliment by running down and even closing academic schools. Some of those who were evicted subsequently established critical outposts in disciplines such as management studies and the liberal arts which have themselves come under increasing scrutiny and threats of sanction.⁴¹

For the Critical sociologist while a working knowledge of Marx and of the post-Marxists is a pre-requisite, it is also a minefield. For instance, Judith Williamson a well-respected academic, recalled her shock to discover the weaponisation of theory,

as if understanding theories was an end in itself, and the more difficult this end, the more superior those who claim to have reached it. And the more people gras one theory, the more urgent it becomes to manufacture a different model, fast, so that you are still ahead of the great race to be ahead – which so uncannily resembles competitive capitalism.⁴²

There is an element of scholasticism at work as authors selectively cite snippets from the voluminous works of the Great Man, whether these are drawn from the early period (which thanks to the vicissitudes of history were published in translation later than his late works), or written with or without Engels, leading in turn to disagreements that are passionate and can be overtly hostile. The main question that perplexes them is why the proletariat remain so quiescent, or to paraphrase Steven Lukes, how the willing consent of the masses to power is secured.

Marx’s theorisation of the subject presented a conundrum for his successors, once stating that the subject is nothing more than an ensemble of social relations, while at other points he distinguished humans from other animals on the basis of our unique and enduring “species being”. In relation to the former argument some refer to Marx’s commentary on the sixth Thesis on Feuerbach, written in 1845 that, “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations”. In this reading human subjectivity has changed in relation to the prevailing social structure, from slavery to feudalism and capitalism. Struhl (2016), deploys this conception against the contention by Hobbes and Smith that humans are naturally self-interested, to argue that it would be pointless to try to institute a society based on equality and cooperation if human nature were invariably motivated by self-interest and power, as such a society would be undermined by human nature itself. He argues that one does not have to be a Marxist to show that social institutions change historically and that human behaviour has changed in historical epochs, in which case the idea of an invariable human ‘nature’ might be thought meaningless.

What then of Marx’s arguments about a unique ‘species being’? ⁴³ In Byron’s (2016) view Marx believed that there is a specific human nature which can be out of kilter with the organisation of life in a particular era. Marx asserted that by comparison to the mechanical mindless activity of bees, human production requires pre-planning and conscious deliberation associated with abstract thought, as in the architect, who “raises the structure in his mind before he builds it in reality”. In his view the ability for abstract consciousness provides grounds for self-realization through self-recognition based on what one freely produces and which, together with the approbation of others, enables one to fashion and reflect on one’s life as a worthwhile object. It is worth noting that Marx’s formulation of the subject here is virtually identical to that of Lacan, for whom one becomes a truly human subject only once one has passed over the threshold of the Symbolic. Byron argues that this enduring aspect of subjectivity is apparent in the creation of use value, as a “natural necessity” that is uniquely human in all forms of society, as an essential component of human nature but that this is negated by social relations in capitalism.⁴⁴ Moreover he contests the historicist argument that human essence comprises the totality of social relations, to argue that if so, there would be no basis for alienation, as there would be nothing to be alienated from. By losing our ‘species being’ we are alienated from other humans, which means that if we were again able to produce in this way, then we would regain harmony with our essential nature. To sum up, human nature is enduring and what differs is how this is expressed, whether under communism or capitalism where the alienated individual who has lost part of their uniquely human essence is reduced to an animal like function as a seeker of pleasure.⁴⁵

Mystification

Marx once argued the potential for humanity to reach a true state of consciousness such that experience would be adequate to its object such that the social relations of communism would consist of spontaneous human intersubjectivity involving ,‘concrete sensuous self-creation”.⁴⁶ This way of thinking seems to lie behind Jeff Murray’s description of Anna from Mountain Home Arkansas whom he describes as a voracious consumer of fashion magazines and brands in her quest for a sophisticated persona.⁴⁷ Murray criticizes the media circulation of simulated brand identities as a source of false promises and describes Anna’s fascination with these magazines as a superficial understanding of a simulated entity that is based purely on “free floating signifiers” that focus on how an individual looks or what they own.⁴⁸ At root here is an unquestioned assumption from which it seems clear that Murray believes that one can distinguish an authentic true identity from one that is false. In the commodity culture we lose a vital element of our humanity, for instance by acting to stifle our creative endeavour or being consumed by dreams of wealth and status as in the “American Dream” .

The idea of a devalued and suborned human nature appears also in The Culture Industry, first published in 1944 by Horkheimer and Adorno (2004). They describe the rise of mass culture as an extension of the Ford assembly line into the cultural realm through the creation of popular culture by mass media. In an arresting example they describe the scene in a film that depicts a movie-star in the role of a lowly typist with a hidden talent, who is noticed by chance one day by a big producer, then suddenly she is a star! This narrative conveys the “rags to riches” element of what came later to be described as the “American Dream”, fuelling the desire of the millions of typists who watch the film. In such instances “ideology conceals itself in the calculation of probabilities. Not everyone will be so lucky” (Horkeimer & Adorno, 2004: 25).⁴⁹ Walter Benjamin who never made it to the USA was fascinated by powerful disorienting effect on visitors of the dazzling Chrystal Palace constructed for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and the newly built Parisian arcades, as phantasmagoria, deceptive images purposefully designed to entrance the visitor and displacing them from recognizing their real interests. These are metonyms, standing for the entire edifice of capitalism which constructs such fantasy spaces to lure the consumer into immersion in this fantasy world and to displace attention from the realities of exploitation, expropriation and class struggle (Tiedemann, in Benjamin, 1999: 938).⁵⁰

From the above, critics have long associated marketing ,and particularly advertising, as mystifying social, political and economic reality. Not too long ago contributors to a panel of critical marketing academics cited examples of the mystifying role of advertising, cited as examples the Reasons To Believe campaign which implied that by drinking Coke™ will magically enable the consumer to overcome and transcend realities of war, disease and suffering (Dholakia, 2016). Contributors to the session also discussed the torquing of language such that social inequality is re-branded as “opportunity” and overseas development spending which is always skewed to serve the interests of the donor as, “caring and compassionate”. Much of the time mystification lies in what is omitted, where the mise-en-scene obscures what the audience is not shown or told. For instance, the portrayal of nature in films almost overwhelmingly frames this as a resource to be exploited and not as the fragile home we share in common with other living creatures.⁵¹

Social Character

While the above instances capture something of the ways in which a person can be mystified, Marx’s account of alienation points to a more fundamental loss of the capacity for critical awareness as the key to human subjectivity. This constitutive lack by which the uniquely human essence is reduced to that of a seeker of pleasure seems well fitted to the characters described by Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, who joined Marx to Freud to argue that human subjectivity is profoundly changed in capitalist social relations. Fromm (1976, 60) applied Freud’s (1914) ideas on narcissism to the anxiety-ridden ‘marketing character’, an individual who internalizes the commodity form by identifying himself as a brand to be displayed against competing brands in the marketplace. In One Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse, (1964) argued that the consumer society stifles the critical role of the egodissent of the masses such that, ‘a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization’. Against liberal claims of freedom in the marketplace, Marcuse argued that in the consumer society the concept of liberty has been reduced to pseudo ‘freedom of choice’ through consumption, where individuals identify themselves as consumers purely in relation to commodities. He distinguished true needs essential for survival from false needs created by the advertising industry which captivate individuals and maintain them in a state of dependency. For Marcuse, modern life is so bland and comfortable that the critical faculty of the ego has largely disappeared, resulting in the total domination of the drives by the superego which is driven by the demands of the industrial system. Stuart Ewen (1976) added meat to the bones of Marcuse’s argument, producing a more digestible account of the development of advertising and marketing in the course of the first quarter of the twentieth century, describing how the “captains of industry” became “captains of consciousness, accentuating the roles played by the prominent behaviourist J.B. Watson, in developing the “fear appeal” and of Floyd Henry Allport, whose idea of the vacillating “social self” was used by advertisers as the basis for the construction of “anxiety appeals”.

The Later Marx: The “Subject-less” Subject?

The French philosopher Louis Althusser (1971) took the The German Ideology written by Marx in 1845, as the point of an epistemological break with Marx’s early humanistic explanation. Althusser argued that in this piece, rather than focusing on the alienation of the individual, Marx constructed a materialist argument that settles on conflict and contradiction within the economic structure of capitalism. Here Marx portrays ideas as weapons in a field of struggle and ideology as an illusion that naturalizes an unjust form of power. Marx uses the camera obscura as a metaphor to describe ideology as an inverted form of reality where liberal ideas such as legal equality, a fair wage and the national interest are counterposed to the reality for the worker of exploitation, domination and class struggle, such that exploitation appears as equality, domination as freedom and class conflict is either masked or denied (Eagleton, 1996: 8). This work is the source of oft-quoted snippets that, “the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”,⁵² and “(t)he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”.⁵³ Consciousness-raising is judged insufficient to change the system and it is only by changing these material conditions that consciousness can be changed.

Whilst ideology as described above is specifically related to exploitation of the worker, consumers have been bombarded for years with messages that operate according to a similar inverted logic. For instance, menthol cigarettes, which are no less deadly than others, were marketed as cool and fresh through association with images of waterfalls and springtime, whilst the Silk Cut brand associated the lethal product with images of silky smoothness. Brands of deodorant are marketed as “natural” when they are clearly artificial and cover up one’s real natural scent.⁵⁴

Marx (1971) further developed his ideas on ideology “Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy” published in 1859, in relation to the economic base and the superstructure. This conceives of society on the analogy of a building where the economic base, consisting of the forces and relations of production, supports the superstructure which consists of two floors, the first of which comprises the political and legal State, while the second houses ideological institutions such as churches and schools. This argument, which has since been labelled “crude”, or “vulgar” Marxism, is that the economic base ought to determine one’s interests and therefore one’s ideological position. In this account while one’s class position shapes one’s interests, given the power of capitalism, proletarians may misrecognize their real interests and identify with those of the ruling class.

That ideology is a function of the structure of reality, construes society as a set of places which produce different experiences. Thus, if one is a venture capitalist then one will see the world differently to an artisan. Here the subject position, “capitalist/artisan” is the point of truth by which ideology ought to be calibrated and read. That one’s material position influences one’s view of the world may seems obvious. For instance, commenting on the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London when many died because they were told to stay put by the fire brigade, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, pronounced in a media interview that it would have been “common sense” for residents to ignore the advice of the fire brigade and so escape the fire.⁵⁵ Critics pointed out that Rees-Mogg, who subsequently apologized, who lived in a house in Mayfair, possibly the wealthiest part of London, had simply no idea of the conditions of life in a poor multistorey building.

However, the idea that social class determines one’s ideological world-view has been widely criticized as crude or “vulgar” Marxism or sociologism, whereby, “(a) system of places is presumed and then subjects are somehow parachuted into them’ (Hirst, 1996: 114). This line of thinking has been criticized because it pins ideology to a person’s class position. Nicos Poulantzas caricatured this crude perspective which treats bourgeois and proletarians as if they are cars, signalling their views in advance by carrying ideological number-plates on their backs as simplistic; for example, the dominant ideology in a society does not simply reflect the conditions of the ruling class but often contains elements of the ways of life of other class fractions.⁵⁶ From this it is argued that one cannot simply read a person’s ideology from their economic position as the realm of culture is relatively autonomous from the base. A further perceived weakness of “vulgar” marxism is that it presumes workers are cultural dopes who are manipulated by wily capitalists to act against their own vital interests.

Marx later introduced the concept of fetishism in the first volume of Capital, published in 1867 (Marx, 1976). The relative looseness of this concept, which he borrowed from religion, has since been subjected to various interpretations. Marx reiterates the point he made in relation to ideology, that there is a structural dislocation between appearance and reality but employs a different argument to justify this. The ability of a ruling clique to manipulate reality does not feature and instead his argument is structural, based on the circuit of production, exchange and consumption. This ties in with his discussion of value and the difference between use value and exchange value. Once a commodity moves out of production and towards the market it is framed in relation to its price relative to other commodities and so our attention as consumers is directed towards this frame. The real value of the commodity, say a T-shirt, reflects the labour power it contains, but the focus on its market price displaces the consumer’s attention. Consequently, “a definite social relation between men…assumes the fantastic form of a relationship between things”.⁵⁷ The duplicity built into the structure of capitalism is that the consumer misrecognizes the source of value by mistakenly believing that value is intrinsic to the commodity, thus ignoring the labour-power that actually created its value. The price of the T-shirt thus conceals the social relations involved in its production such as the wages paid to the workers and their conditions of employment including whether workers are indentured and locked into dangerous factories or are underage.

One aspect of fetishism is the myth that the market is like a great god that stands over humanity which is naturally equipped to engage in market relations. Marx had argued that the way in which liberals worship the market is similar to how primitive tribes worshipped their gods. Liberals and their neoliberal successors have sought to justify the market as a natural force that stands above and outside of the human world and that humans are equipped with “domain-specific modules” to engage in market relations (Cosmides & Tooby, 1989). Ignoring the fact that the market is a human construction, the naturalization of monetary exchange and its elevation to divine status leads to the perverse situation whereby, rather than the market serving the needs of humanity, the relation is reversed, resulting in the situation of “material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Eagleton, 1994: 27). Thus, the market, on which all of our fortunes rests appears to have a life of its own, whilst workers are estranged from the fruits of their production, the value of which rides on the market.

Structuralist Developments of Marx

The influence of Marx’s turn to a more structural explanation is manifest in contributions from Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu. Roland Barthes developed a structural semiotic analysis which he applied to quotidian objects previously thought to be beyond linguistic analysis. In a popular weekly newspaper series subsequently published in book form, Barthes discussed the mythical status of wrestling, French wine, British tea, soap-powder and magazine covers amongst other topics, demonstrating that the apparently naturally given meaning was in actual fact highly conventional and supportive of the status quo in France. Pierre Bourdieu developed a structuralist conception to argue that social and cultural contexts comprise semi-autonomous fields for the accumulation of capital distinct from the economy which are objective and which specify social interaction. Thus in the educational field he describes the naturalization of middle-class values applied to the classroom context, such that middle-class children are presumed to be naturally gifted whilst their working-class counterparts are considered as naturally lacking in the requisite vocabulary, range of expression self-confidence and motivation.⁵⁸ In relation to the perception of art and the consumption of food, expressions of taste by the middle classes are similarly presumed as being naturally sensitive and refined. Misrecognition occurs in each context as subjects do not consciously ‘cognise’ or acknowledge the objective generative structure of the field in question, leaving the symbolic violence involved in naturalizing and individualising the effects of this structural activity to pass un-noticed.

By comparison to Barthes and Bourdieu, Althusser’s (1971) explanation clings more closely to Marx, although he reformulated key elements of his theory of ideology, by rejecting claims that this involves mystification or false consciousness and instead that signifying practices have a material basis, and fundamentally, that ideology only exists by means of the constituting category of the subject who freely constructs his or her identity within it. He likens ideology to the pedestrian walking down the street when behind them a policeman calls out, “Hey you!” Ideology fulfils its role and the subject is constituted when the individual responds by turning round in recognition that it is they who are being summoned by the call, although Althusser also allows for the possibility that the individual may not hear the summons or ignored it, perhaps deliberately or because they believed that it was addressed to someone else.

Discussing the materiality of ideology Althusser quotes Pascal who “scandalously” reversed the taken for granted progression from ideas to behaviour, ‘kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’.⁵⁹ The subject makes an appearance here because under the influence of Jacques Lacan, Althusser argued that ideology only exists because of the constituting category of the “subject”. The sting in the tail is that through interpellation we ‘freely’ construct ourselves by drawing upon the pre-existing ideologies that recruit us as their authors.⁶⁰ The social totality is a structure that forms us into subjects in such a way that we fail to recognize it at work, as it provides spaces within which we appear to freely identify.

Althusser (1971) argued that the dominant ideology of capitalism does not so much occur in the work context but is relayed through Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) such as the family, religion, communication media, politics and especially the education system. Some of the ISAs mentioned by Althusser, such as trades unions, law and politicians, seem a lot less relevant nowadays and additionally, given his interest in education, it is noteworthy that he had nothing to say about the role of advertising in “educating” the subject, which seems a rather odd omission, as even now, I can remember ads and jingles that must have embedded themselves into my unconscious during my formative years. In light of which it is fortuitous that, influenced by Althusser, Judith Williamson (1978) decided to produce a manual for those who wanted to understand how advertising operates as an ideological apparatus that interpellates or hails the subject to participate in an exchange of meaning. Williamson’s account is useful too by illustrating the rather difficult propositions expressed by Althusser that even although our positions are structurally determined, we are constituted and live our social relations as if we are subjects, as if we constituted ourselves.⁶¹

Williamson takes up Althusser’s formulation of ideology as a form of misrecogniton: “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”⁶² From the above, although we may fervently believe that we freely create our own identity, the twist is that while we are indeed active in searching for the wholeness we lack, we are interpellated or “hailed” by advertisers to “freely” take up the slots for us to identity with that they have created for us in advance, inserting ourselves into the circuit by completing the meaning that is dangled before us. To begin with every product of a given class is functionally similar to every other and so lacks meaning and individuality. For a product to gain a meaning requires that a stable system of meaning referring say to inventors, founders, nature, science or celebrity, is plundered for signifiers that can be associated with the product so as to differentiate them from rivals. The process is similar to totemism, where differences in natural objects such as animals (“bear” tribe vs. “lion” tribe) are used to mark differences between human groups, the difference being that objects such as Coca Cola and Apple are not natural.

Williamson draws on Lacan to argue that ideology invites imaginary identification.⁶³ Advertising is a signifying system within the Symbolic that represents one’s place in the Imaginary, offering the lure of unification with the ideal-ego. Such re-unification of the self by fusing with the ideal-ego is of course impossible once the bar or threshold of the Symbolic has been crossed and one becomes a subject. However, the lure dangled by the advertising image that offers the prospect of imaginary closure acts as a potent means to channel the desire of the subject. By dangling before us the image of an Other, but inviting us to become the Same, the advertisement thus disguises its symbolic nature by offering imaginary unity.⁶⁴ We live ‘as if’ we freely constitute ourselves choosing from amongst the plethora of commodity identities on offer, which have been designed for us in advance. There is nothing false or illusory about this as the ‘as if’ is the reality of our experience; ‘As subjects we live as we are subjects and as such ideology really does have a determinate effect’.

In this account advertising calls or interpellates the subject to participate in an exchange of meaning whereby they invest in an image in return for the promise of an (illusory) sense of wholeness. The subject is not deceived by someone else putting over false ideas but is rather active in ‘freely’ creating themselves in structures which have already been created for them. That said, Williamson argues the advertising system does involve false differences. One is the process by which artificial symbolic differences are attached to products that are functionally similar and naturalised such that for instance, “Coke = Togetherness” while “Pepsi = Energy”. Secondly, the process involves some people, advertisers, who create artificial differences between products which are then sold back to consumers who use them to differentiate themselves from others, while masking those people who made the products.⁶⁵ Thus advertising by referring solely to the realm of consumption obscures and avoids the real issues that relate to the context of work.

Althusser’s re-formulation of ideology was subjected to critique, particularly in the wake of the events in France in 1968, on grounds that it is overly formal and ignores ideological struggle.⁶⁶ Stuart Hall (1985) also developed a neutral understanding of ideologies as systems of representation people use to figure out how the social world works, what their place is in it and what they ought to do. Agreeing with Althusser’s argument against false-consciousness (and the “true” consciousness that is presumed as its opposite) Hall cautioned against so-called “common-sense”, arguing that to believe in one’s authenticity is the worst form of ideological trap as this effectively denies that one is, like everyone else, immersed in ideology of one form or another. Thus, those millions of individuals who take the narrative portrayed in The Matrix as gospel, believing that they have taken the “red pill” which they believe reveals the true state of reality, have not fallen, ‘into Nature but into naturalistic illusion’, tumbling down one rabbit-hole or another, and ending up the most deluded of all.

Hall argued that Althusser focused too much on ideology as a property of the State and as the cement that holds society together, rather than focusing on ideological struggle. He found Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony more compelling because it acknowledges the complexity of relations existing between private and public institutions and by raising questions as to how ideology works in civil society which is largely outside of the purview of the State. Thus, while it is all very well to assume an identity of interests in a dictatorship, the relations between the democratic nation state, the media and civil society are more complex than those envisioned by the Ideological State Apparatuses. Given that the media is not instructed by the State, Hall wondered how it could be that so many journalists can spontaneously reproduce ideas contained within the same ideological categories, seeming “to be inscribed by an ideology that writes them’, as the element of ideology that most requires explanation. His argument that one should pay close to signifying practices and overlapping discursive chains which can contest one another but draw on a shared repertoire of concepts, which they disarticulate and rearticulate (104).

Hall differed from Althusser by arguing that ideology is not simply a matter of reproducing class relations but rather sets limits on the extent to which the dominant society can reproduce itself. The powerless have the possibility to re-signify the meaning of pejorative terms used to keep them in their place. As an example, he describes the re-signification of “black” by Jamaicans in the 1960s and 1970s, for centuries a signifier of dispossession and disparagement, as positive, articulated with “soul”, solidarity and struggle. Hall describes this resignification as no less than the constitution of a new black subject, “the concrete individuals had always been there, but as subjects-in-struggle for a new epoch they appeared for the first time”; by invading the heartland of the negative connotation the black movement has attempted to snatch the fire of the term itself (Hall, 1985. 112/113).

During his time at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (CCCS) Hall was influential in developing the field of cultural studies which in the UK had been initiated by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. The difference between culture and ideology is,

The dominant culture represents itself as the culture. It tries to define and contain all other cultures within its inclusive range. Its views of the world, unless challenged, will stand as the most natural, all-embracing, universal culture. Other cultural configurations will not only be subordinate to this dominant order: they will enter into struggle with it, seek to modify, negotiate, resist or even overthrow its reign—its hegemony. The struggle between classes over material and social life thus always assumes the forms of a continuous struggle over the distribution of ‘cultural power’. We might want, here, to make a distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘ideology’. Dominant and subordinate classes will each have distinct cultures. But when one culture gains ascendancy over the other, and when the subordinate culture experiences itself in terms prescribed by the dominant culture, then the dominant culture has also become the basis of a dominant ideology.” (Clarke et al. 1979: 12)

The above conception of culture as variegated led members to conduct research into the sub-cultural context of consumption in relation to which Hebdige (1979, 1988) is particularly relevant for his argument of the influence of style as a key factor in differentiating between youth subcultures. Consumer researchers Schouten and McAlexander (1993) later introduced the concept of subculture into their field as a means to describe the shared commitment to the brand expressed by members of Harley Davidson Owners’ Groups (HOGs). While their overall approach was broadly similar to that adopted by the CCCS, Holt (1998) pointed out the key difference, that while Hebdige discussed how mods and rockers emerged from a common working-class culture, using a range of commodities and locations as symbolic markers of their respective identities, the focus of Schouten & McAlexander was largely voluntarist and individualistic, downplaying collective influences such as ethnicity, gender or social-class.⁶⁷

There are similarities between the positions of Hall and Steven Lukes, for whom Gramsci is also a stated influence, whose arguments for a third dimension of power are discussed in chapter seven. Lukes aims for the middle ground between agency and structural determinism such that agents are constrained to operate within structurally determined limits but enjoy a certain amount of autonomy, not least because in a given situation they could have acted differently. While Lukes argues that the willing compliance of those who are dominated is gained because they are mystified, he distances himself from arguments based on false consciousness, which, “carries a weight of unwelcome baggage”, to argue that rather than relating this to hidden truths, mystification is better conceived of as the power to mislead (Lukes, 2021: 154).

Fetishism

Larrain (1995) pointed out that fetishism may not involve falsehood or manipulation because the moment of market exchange is no more or less real than the production and distribution which are ‘lost’ because they are not taken into account by the consumer. It is not that the market is any more “real” than these other moments, it is just that it is the particular moment of the circuit of production which is encountered daily and is therefore taken for granted. Here fetishism operates metonymically by substituting the market, which is one part of the circuit of production, for the whole circuit. Fetishism is in this explanation not so much false as an inadequate explanation of a process. Fetishism is discussed further in chapter three in relation to the literature in marketing and consumer research.

Value

Value is central to the theory outlined by Marx in Capital and the Grundrisse, where he expands on Adam Smith’s re-formulation of the concept. Yet until recently, this discussion was largely hidden, firstly because it was seen as wanting in light of the marginalist economics of our time and secondly, because it was overshadowed by discussions of ideology and fetishism. Marx’s labour theory of is now making a comeback as fundamental questions relating to value assume centre-stage today relating to the pervasive financialization of the economy and the growing certainty that much human labour will be replaced by machines.

Marx’s theory of value must first be placed in context. Taking a long view, there has been a movement away from value being attached to physical, tangible things towards the virtual and ephemeral. The sixteenth-century mercantilists argued that possession and control of the circulation of precious metals was most valuable. Two hundred years later the physiocrats argued to the contrary, that land is most valuable, as it provides the soil for agriculture and mining which together sustain and nourish human wellbeing. Adam Smith represents a profound change in the concept of value by focusing on the value added by labour which transforms resources into commodities in production. In his view productive labour creates the surplus value that feeds, clothes and houses those working in the unproductive sectors of government, services and households. In this understanding, while workers’ income and profit from enterprise are productive, the extraction of rent by landlords and of surpluses gained through monopoly practices and the actions of banks are not.

A difficulty with Smith’s conception of value is that he provides no objective measure. Marx’s major contribution lay in his differentiation of the actual labour expended in production from labour power, which is the capacity to work. Labour power requires that the worker is fed, clothed, educated and otherwise sustained to enable them to engage in a day’s work. A worker may need to work four hours a day to restore his or her labour power. However, the dynamism of capitalism represented by its insatiable drive towards continuous growth, leads to the extraction of eight or more hours of work, creating huge amounts of surplus value over and above the reproduction of labour power. This surplus supports unproductive sectors such as services and banking or is otherwise pocketed by capitalists. Marx describes the constant flux and upheaval caused by capitalists’ quest for new markets and increased productivity. This leads to mechanisation which, by displacing labour, has the effect of reducing profits.

From the mid-eighteenth century the ideas of Smith and Marx were displaced by the marginal revolution. The marginalists moved away from a theory of value towards just one concept, scarcity. Utilitarianism was developed by Jeremy Bentham and from this economists promoted the idea that the value of a commodity lies in its utility for the buyer. Productive labour was redefined along these lines to describe labour which produces subjective utility. In this new understanding services are considered productive, so long as they are sold and labour is paid a wage. Economists focused on scarcity, developing the concept of marginal utility, which to explore the effect of a small change in price on quantity demanded. Relating utility to scarcity helped explain the conundrum of why water, which is essential to life is cheap, whilst diamonds which are useless for survival, are expensive. The value of a commodity thus came to be related to its price. Mazzucato (2018) argues that difficulties arise when valuable activities are not priced, because they fail to show up in measures of value and for the opposite reason, when products and services are priced, but do not confer value. In relation to the former, government and households produce value that is not priced and indeed it is common for government to be described as a drain on resources. Rent extraction on the other hand describes the activities of unscrupulous traders who hoard grain in times of famine to boost its price, or middlemen who over-charge customers and suppliers for their services.

Financialization

Stuart Ewen (1976) writes of the powerful allure of credit for early consumers who were promised that they could realize their dreams right now, only to be subjected to the disciplinary power of constant indebtedness. Dholakia (2012) provides an overview of the growth of finance capital in the USA from the instalment plans of the early 1900s to the maxed-out credit cards today. Strange to say but true, until the 1970s, the financial sector was not included in estimates of GDP. As illustrated in chapter five, it was considered unproductive as a distributor of funds rather than as a creator of value. Karl Marx located finance in the circulation sector as a catalyst that transforms money capital into production capital. In his scheme, because all value is created by productive labour, financiers do not create value but take a portion of the surplus value created by producers. Although marginal economists disagreed with Marx on just about everything else, they broadly shared the idea that financial services are unproductive. However, following extensive lobbying by the industry, deregulation in the early 1970s ensured that where they once counted for nothing, the activities of banks came to be included in national accounts, such that today finance, insurance and real-estate (FIRE) represent 20% of Gross Domestic Product in the USA. Mazzucato (2018) argues that the financialization of modern capitalism is dysfunctional. As a consequence of de-regulation, trade in financial instruments is today greater than the trade in products. She argues that finance capitalists act as rent seekers, using their position as intermediaries to extract a significant share of revenue without playing an active role in production and job creation. Rent is extracted in the difference between the fees of asset managers and the actual risks they face, in the activities of private equity funds that load their acquisitions with debt, and through the proliferation of hedge funds and credit default swaps.

Innovation

Mazzucato’s second argument is that innovation, which is so often praised for adding value actually extracts it. Innovation is mistakenly attributed to organizations or even to lone entrepreneurs, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, when government and public institutions have assumed the real risk by funding basic research. For example Gilread who launched two related products, Sovaldi and Harmoni to treat hepatitis-C. Sovaldi was priced at $84,000 for a three-month treatment; Harmoni at $94,500. The basic research was publicly funded and private investors contributed $300 million to the development of these drugs. In the first six months of 2015 combined sales were $9.4 billion standing at $45 billion within three years of launch.⁶⁸ Mazzucato argues that a similar story can be told about the activities of the big five technology companies, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook. Amazon and Google.

Mazzacuto critiques Public Choice Theory developed by the Chicago School which views government should be kept small as it is inherently corrupt and prone to capture by vested interests. She argues that government was unfairly blamed for the 2007-8 financial crisis caused by high private debt and reckless behaviour by private sector financial institutions such as Bear-Stearns, Lehman Brothers and the Royal Bank of Scotland, which had to be bailed out by taxpayers, who then had austerity foisted on them. She argues that the austerity programme was itself a grave error, perpetrated by the ideology that government debt is uniformly bad, ignoring that government spending on infrastructure creates value by aiding the economy to produce more goods and services. Arguments from Public Choice Theory thus diminish the important role played by government in innovation in infrastructure, education and basic research in science.

The Machine⁶⁹

Marx was fond of using the cardiovascular system as a metaphor, portraying the capitalist as a vampire and arguing the imperative for capital is to circulate. Consider that two firms are each capitalized at £100 million and each has a return of 10%, the difference being that one turns over its capital every six months, while the other turns it over once every year. The return of the latter would be 10% whilst that of the former would be 21%. If it turned over its capital four times, the return would be 46.4%. This highlights two issues. The first involves breaking down the barriers to increasing turnover by providing smoother access to raw materials, increasing efficiency of production and speed of delivery of the product to customers. The second issue relates to the fact that the advantage gained by the firm with the increased turnover will be short-lived, as others will quickly catch up. However, the increase in the efficiency of production will have a lasting effect by reducing the proportion of living labour that goes into each product. Marx argues that logically, if less labour time is needed to make a given amount of product, this is equivalent to producing more finished products in a given amount of time. Increases in efficiency thus reduce the proportion of living labour in the product. Marx argued that because profits are made solely by living labour, profits will consequently fall in the long-run. He clearly got this wrong, as capitalists responded to the threat of stagnation by engaging in market development, diversification and creating high value-added service sectors.

Colin Mason (2016) asks what might happen if a machine was invented that lasts forever? This once seemed outlandish, however, as Mason points out, software is precisely such a machine as it costs relatively little and does not degrade over time. Today’s machines are infused with software. In the Grundrisse, Marx argues that a machine that lasts forever adds an amount of labour value to the product that is close to zero, thus reducing the value of the product, which essentially consists of the costs of energy and raw materials. These may well be relatively significant; think here of the Cloud which relies on massive data centres comprising huge buildings housing rows of computers that consume vast amounts of energy. Overall, the value of the product will fall towards zero.

The plummeting value of technology has led FAAMG⁷⁰ to respond through an admixture of, monopoly pricing, massive growth through mergers and acquisitions and mining of “data exhaust” comprising the ‘behavioural data’ made up of the billions of keystrokes and utterances of individuals and their interactive behaviours, which is analysed to optimise the algorithms that keep consumers consuming and sold to the highest bidder (Zuboff, 2019). A key question is what is to become of the millions of workers who will be displaced from jobs because of automation? One influential report suggests that 47% of all jobs are subject to automation, which will come in two waves.⁷¹ The areas to be impacted include non-routine manual and cognitive tasks. The former will involve replacement of those working in transport and logistics and in the administrative support and labour involved in production. Regarding the latter, machine learning will replace a range of tasks that require equal application of impartial principles across all cases, ranging from the preparing legal documents and accounts to marking examination papers and diagnosing disease. Even tasks that involve subtle judgement such as offering financial advice are open to computerisation. If this is startling, nanotechnology presents humanity with unprecedented opportunities and challenges.

In the late 1950s Richard Feynman proposed the incredible prospect of an economy consisting entirely of machines the size of a dust particle that are constructed to operate at the nano-scale. A nanometer is one billionth of a metre- a human hair is 80,000 nanometers. One nanometer is the width of three atoms. So far it is estimated that two thousand nano products have been developed that are used in products such as waterproof clothing and molecular filters that remove the pollution from exhausts. The promise of nano-technology is that in fifty or so years replicators will have been developed that can make absolutely anything by combining atoms into molecules. The most sophisticated molecular robot was constructed in 2019 made up of 150 atoms, which works in the same way as a robot in an assembly line to produce new types of molecules depending on how it is programmed. It is envisaged that such machines will be powered by light and chemical fuels. Proponents argue that nano-factories will emit no waste and will allow humans to fabricate anything they want from air, water and soil. Given that the nano-world is characterised by abundance this raises fundamental questions about marginal economics which is founded on scarcity Add to this developments in quantum computing which is developing at a pace previously thought unimaginable and developments in Artificial Intelligence which herald, depending on one’s outlook, the realisation of previously unimaginable utopian and dystopian visions. Mason asks, if nothing is scarce, does anything have value? What happens to manufacturers? What will work consist of? How will incomes be made – will there even be a need for income and work? If not, how will humans define themselves in the absence of employment? What of the role of government in collecting and distributing tax revenues?

Discussion

It is noteworthy that since the 2008 financial crash and in the context of the fourth industrial revolution authors have turned more towards Marx’s later structural theory which discusses the tendency of capitalism towards crisis and the effects of replacing labour with machines. Indeed Klaus Schwab, chair of the World Economic Forum (Schwab, 2016) declared that the transformation brought about by developments in automation, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and the formation of cryptocurrencies which are growing apace will have unprecedented effects on the entire economic system in years to come. The change is not linear but exponential. In the “Founder’s Letter”, Sergey Brin (2017) President of Google’s parent company Alphabet described how The Pentium II computer that was used at the time Google began operations performed roughly 100 million floating point operations per second, while Tensor Processing Units used for neural networks and machine learning were then capable of producing 180 trillion operations per second.⁷² And by now that figure has been superseded as a trip to Nvidia’s website should demonstrate. Given the massive concentration of power in the hands of Big Tech, this unprecedented acceleration in technology has led to a step-change, which its developers argue will save humanity from itself, whilst observers on the fringes are becoming increasingly worried and indeed alarmed of the prospect of its deployment by a fast rising global oligarchy, as a shield to protect their position and as a weapon. In the headlong mimetic scramble for advantage scarcely any thought has been given to the real-life effects of developing these technologies or to the moral context of their use. Some warn that Artificial Intelligence will accord unheard of power to would-be demagogues, revolutionaries and terrorists. When combined with drone technology this offers the very real possibility for every action by every individual on the planet to be monitored in real time. The truly frightening thing is that no-one, including those individuals in organizations at the forefront of developing these technologies has considered their implications.⁷³

Social Theorists of Late modernity and postmodernity

While Marx continues to inspire theorists from the Left, Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens conceived of capitalism as one aspect of late modernity. Through vivid metaphors they express concerns about individualism, rootlessness, the crumbling of social institutions once thought eternal, of powerlessness and dislocation in the face of globalization, subjection to the increasingly abstract systems that social life depends on for its functioning and the pressing weight of responsibility laid on the shoulders of the individual, who is expected to be an entrepreneur of the self. Giddens argues that in the ‘runaway world’ of late modernity, the individual is uprooted and disembedded from the bulwarks of family, community and religion. For Bauman liquid modernity perfectly describes the plight of the postmodern individual who must stumble through quicksand. Community, once a solid term to signify a group sutured by thick bonds of kinship and tradition is now invoked as a description of ephemeral and threadbare forms of human connection such as the “brand communities” comprising Mac users and Saab drivers described by Muniz and O’Guinn (2001). Despite the optimism of some who publish in the Journal of Consumer Research, neither Giddens nor Bauman is convinced that consumerism has, or will, fill the gap left by the dissolution of key institutions what Althusser referred to as key “State Apparatuses” that once provided grounds for the interpellation of ideology.

Giddens highlights institutional trust in the abstract systems that westerners take for granted as their entitlement, of water that is safe to drink, a well-functioning sewage system, lighting and heating at the flick of a switch, a year-round plentiful supply of a variety of foods, readily available transport and communication technologies and a social security blanket. However, despite that all of these services remained intact during the massive disruption that occurred through the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic and despite the successful invention of vaccines and of mass vaccination programmes it has become clear that a substantial proportion of the population are now distrustful of government and indeed of all institutions.

Beck argues that the modern individual is deeply implicated in the late modern risk society as the steward of their personal capital who is expected to reflexively anticipate and manage risks to their fitness, health and wealth. Modern science, industry and technology that drove increased life expectancy and rapid material progress throughout the twentieth century are increasingly recognized as posing existential threats to human existence, of global warming, nuclear war, the supplanting of human by artificial intelligence and the unknown threats posed by biological and nano technologies.

One must be careful not to generalise, to recognise that something more complex is going on. For instance should we regard vociferous campaigns against lockdown restrictions and vaccine mandates at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the actions of the incoming second Trump administration to appoint known sceptics on climate and health, and to put into question billions of dollars in funding for scientific research, as evidence of an erosion in institutional trust? Behavioural and polling data from the USA and the UK suggest that whilst trust in scientists declined from 2019 to 2024, the vast majority not only complied with lockdown vaccination guidelines but endorsed them.⁷⁴ The dip in trust in scientists from 86% pre-pandemic to 76% in 2024 was largely explained by the increase in the sizeable minority who evince no trust in science, which rose from 13% to 23%.⁷⁵ However scientists themselves are all too aware of the real present risks presented by current research programmes into technologies that are imperfectly understood and which potentially pose a threat to humanity.⁷⁶

Beck argues along similar lines to Norbert Elias, that individualization is a profoundly social structure that has undermined the traditional basis for social coexistence’ “it means the paradox of an ‘individualizing structure’ as a non-linear, open-ended, highly ambivalent, ongoing process. It relates to a decline of narratives of given sociability” (Beck & Beck, 2001: xxii). The individual today lacks stable anchor-points for identity that were once provided by religion, nationality, gender and social class.

Given increased specialization of knowledge the individual today is often ignorant, even of the origin and nutritional value of the food they eat, never mind of the thicket of regulations that surround its production and sale put in place to protect them. However, in a society that prides itself on freedom of choice these same individuals are also presumed to have the relevant knowledge to judge what is and what is not good for their general wellbeing. In between the food production system and the consumer are the experts who make a good living by constantly (and seemingly fruitlessly) advising the consumer to avoid entire aisles in supermarkets devoted to chocolates, crisps and alcohol and ‘UPFs’⁷⁷, the ‘wellness industry’ that feeds off consumer guilt and shame, the pharma companies and medics who profit greatly from the invention of new weight-loss drugs, and last but not least, the media, that advertises all the bad stuff (‘you’ve only got one life’) whilst simultaneously preaching about the “problem’ of obesity laying out ’solutions’ in its editorials. In the UK, levels of trust in Government regulators are reported to be relatively high despite that many witnessed in living memory outbreaks of Food and Mouth disease and BSE, a novel disease in cattle first detected in 1986, which later transferred to humans in the form of a novel variant of CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease). This brought a massive scandal of dangerous food industry practices to public attention.⁷⁸ The basis of institutional trust in things as basic as a guaranteed food supply could be undermined very quickly. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted major vulnerabilities in the ability of the UK food chain which is largely based on Just-In-Time principles to cope with future shocks.⁷⁹

Given increasing specialisation, Giddens, Bauman and Beck have recognised the increasing role of experts in mediating knowledge and the problems this creates for overall levels of trust, which have markedly declined in recent years. Giddens discusses the institutionally reflexive nature of science which is governed by the principle of doubt such that no matter how cherished and well-established a scientific finding may be, it is always open to dispute and revision in light of new findings. A problem arises when issues that ought to be resolved within the scientific community are widely publicised by the mass media, as occurred in the case of the erroneous claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. This is compounded by the everyday misunderstanding that science is exact, as in the ‘Follow the Science’ rhetoric unwisely circulated by the Johnson Government in the UK during the Covid epidemic.⁸⁰ The reflexivity of science is thus existentially troubling to ordinary individuals who must live in a world where whatever passes for ‘truth’ must always be placed in doubt.

The problem with relying on experts is that they often get it wrong, which far from increasing confidence, can lead to cynicism. This can be for innocent reasons, given that even experts are subject to the same heuristic processes and biases that the rest of us mortals are subject to.⁸¹ Additionally, before the rapid growth in social media, experts promoting a scare story or perhaps touting the prospect of a new drug as a ploy to gain ‘impact’ or funding, or disagreements between experts on a matter of substance would regularly feature on mass media outlets. Add to this the toxic role of PR – from lead to tobacco to denial of global warming corporations have infiltrated to the highest levels of science and the academy to recruit to their aim.

Norms

A related line of research is into the extent to which norms regulate behaviour in terms of what “ought” to be done in a particular context. Norms are not simply rules, which are merely ideals, if they lack enforcement (Horne, 2001: 4). As is obvious to anyone who plays the “suitcase game”, “innocently” shuffling their suitcase ahead of them in a queue to avoid losing their place to a rival, people pay very close attention to what others are doing. Consumer researchers have explored whether queues can be thought of as social systems and what happens when normative expectations are violated, as when individuals butt into a queue. Schau and Gilly (1998) employed an ethnomethodological approach to explore the normative behaviours and sanctions at fast food drive-thrus by deliberately contravening expectations, for instance, by delaying their transit through the section and going through on roller-skates.

The focus on norms and queues invites consideration of the extent to which new norms have emerged in recent years to train consumers to pack their own supermarket shopping and to check in and transport their own bags to the conveyor belt at the airport. Sometimes these are sold on the basis of self-interested convenience, yet it is legitimately asked how convenient is it when one has to do the labour for oneself? A well-known trope that goes back many years is that as a rule people in Britain are masters at self-organising queues, which they will form at the drop of a hat, whether at the airport, supermarket or bus-stop.

While queuing is what can be called a “thick”, or general-purpose rule that can be applied to a host of situations. Daston (2022), argues that thick rules are being progressively replaced by a host of thin rules that operate in specific circumstances. Not only are we expected to queue at the supermarket checkout, we are also expected to bring our own bag, place it correctly, scan the items ourselves prior to placing them in the bag before paying and so on – reputedly because it is more convenient to do so – which begs the question as to why engaging in all this labour actually is convenient? Nowadays we are expected not only to book our flights, print our own boarding cards, check in our luggage, ensure it is the correct weight, print the luggage slip and transfer it to the carousel, and later queue like cattle in the rain under the watchful eye of some tyrant employed by the budget airline, and all for our supposed convenience. The same series of “thin” rules applies to other modes of consumption such as buying petrol etc. In this day and age one might expect that airport security staff would follow rigidly specified rules, Kirschenbaum et al (2012) observed that personnel developed a number of informal processes over and above the formal rules that enabled them to cope with the exigencies presented by real-time contextual factors.

Rasumsen and Posner (2000), provide an interesting “Chicago-style” discussion of the extent to which government ought to engage with norms, which they describe as providing , “private, decentralized, and competitive alternative to governmental control of social behaviour”⁸². While noting that norms operate more effectively against theft than does legal sanction, they argue that the law is necessary, given that many people are impervious to feelings of guilt or shame. In discussing government responses to bad norms they mention ‘dueling’ as an example, (although they admit this is a bad one as no-one in the USA approves of it). They suggest that government could step in to diminish the efficacy of dueling by diminishing the benefits of compliance and by creating effective legal remedies for deliberate injuries and thus reducing the benefit of a revenge norm motivated by personal honour. While some might argue that the government should keep out of the way ‘and allow the private regime of norm regulation to go ahead’, the authors conclude that its most appropriate role is to supplement and regulate norm sanctions.⁸³

Homo psychoanalyticus

The psychoanalytic conception of the subject is complex for the theorist of power as it questions the extent to which the individual is master of their own house, positing that the mental operations of homo economicus, the supposedly rational self, are largely unconscious and caught between the conflicting demands of society and biological drives. Psychoanalysis has achieved at best a peripheral status in consumer research, enjoying limited attention in the 1940s and 1950s which waned in the 1960s in favour of a cognitive approach, followed by a decades-long interregnum, then something of revival of interest after the Millenium in the wake of developments in behavioural economics, since when nothing much has happened.⁸⁴ The basic reasons why this is the case were more or less summed up seventy years ago,

While unconscious desires can be important, they are almost impossible to recover empirically outside of months of psychoanalysis, and when uncovered they can be ugly and not lend themselves to effective selling appeals.”(Engel, Kollat & Blackwell, 1968: 29).

Sigmund Freud was well aware of such criticisms, writing just before his death in relation to his ‘discovery’ that, “I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe my facts and thought my theories unsavoury”.⁸⁵ Freud’s admittedly speculative movement away from neuroanatomy to found psychoanalysis involved his blending of insights from ancient myth with findings from contemporary science, moderated by clinical experiences developed over a lifetime, as a continual work of progress. His experience of dealing with analysands returning from the First World War led him to refocus his explanation away from an initial focus on the self-preservative and sexual drives constituting Eros, to consider Thanatos, the death drive. Further complexity was then added when acolytes of Freud such as Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, Herbert Marcuse, Luce Irigary, Helen Cixious and Judith Butler to name a few, not content with the veracity of the master’s “facts”, had the temerity to devise their own concepts and explanations, some even forming their own schools.

In relation to power, Freud’s greatest contribution was to enable one to look under the bonnet of fictions such as homo economicus, the supposedly rational self, to reveal a glimmer of the complex nature of human subjectivity. While his tripartite division of the psyche into the id, ego and superego is so well-known that it has become a cliché, it provides a template to explore complex relations between emotional drives, identity formation, symbolic functioning, and societal constraint. His observation that most of these operations are unconscious adds a challenge to the analyst, while affording opportunities to marketers. Freud’s understanding of what today is called “neuro-divergence” was expressed through his observation that one should not assume that all human psychology is stamped from the same mould but that different characters form as a consequence of early childhood experiences.⁸⁶ Finally, Freud posited that identification is the primary emotional tie that unites the individual to others and to the group.

A conflicted subject.

In Freud’s hydraulic model, human physical and psychical growth develop through the constant exchange of energy. The hydraulic analogy he took from von Helmholz is appropriate to describe this process as the individual is conceived of as growing and developing physically and psychically through the constant exchange of energy flows. The name Freud gave to this energetic principle of the life force is Eros. The id serves as a storehouse or cauldron of energy that is invested into objects in the world by the ego in the hope that this will be returned with interest. For example, hunger arising in the body arouses energy which seeks sustenance which is replaced by the food that is received, producing an added supplement. Freud focused on the difficulty that the society of his day demanded the repression of sexual and violent manifestations of erotic desire, leading to the internalization of conflict which manifested as psychic distress. In his later years he introduced what he admitted was the speculative hypothesis of Thanatos, the death instinct. While in his early work Freud had linked human cruelty and aggressivity to the self-preservative drives of the ego these were now attributed to Thanatos.⁸⁷

Unconscious Processes

It is noteworthy that consumer research has never taken Freud’s theory of the unconscious seriously.⁸⁸ Freud posited that unconscious processes operate dynamically by repressing a troubling memory through condensation, or combining two ideas into one, through displacement onto an innocuous image, or through conversion into a physical symptom. Consumer researchers were instead at one time captivated by the use of subliminal stimuli in advertising, an interest provoked by a passing remark made by Vance Packard in one paragraph of The Hidden Persuaders, (despite that most of Packard’s argument was about the employment of supraliminal stimuli ⁸⁹). Ernest Dichter, the principal advocate of psychoanalysis in the 1950s, accentuated the influence of supraliminal cues on judgement, such as the shape and feel of a bar of soap, the colour of coffee, the font in which a message is written, or the role of clothing as a defence against contamination.⁹⁰ Subsequent research by social psychologists proved the operation of mental processes such as the ‘halo’ effect, where individuals perceived as “warm” are considered competent, while those who are physically attractive are thought to be kind and trustworthy.⁹¹ However, such was the antipathy by consumer researchers to any idea of the unconscious, never mind the Freudian unconscious, that it was not until after the turn of the Millenium that the Journal of Consumer Research saw fit to publish an article that once more made the case that much, if not most social judgement and intention occurs without conscious awareness.⁹² Since then JCR has published research on the effects of supra-liminal cues on behaviour, for instance to assess the effect of the size of a waiter on the food one orders of dieters and non-dieters,⁹³ or the extent to which individuals identify with attributes of brand personalities.⁹⁴

The implication for the understanding of power from non-conscious decision making is that virtually every minute of every day the individual is influenced by supra-liminal stimuli which they see but do not notice. The operation of the Freudian or Lacanian unconscious is darker and more convoluted than this, dealing with the formation of desires. Just one paper, by Holbrook and Hirschman (1982) came close to accepting this. The authors argued the need to go beyond the cognitive focus on manifest content to explore consumption fantasies involving, “material that often masks embarrassing or socially sensitive perceptions” that provokes anxiety or is repressed. However, they distanced their orientation from the Freudian perspective by arguing that this material is preconscious not unconscious⁹⁵. Questions pertaining to Freud’s concept of the unconscious are perhaps better suited to exploration within the purview of the arts which allows more leeway to a range of explanation.

Sex and Gender

Like Freud Ernest Dichter was also concerned by questions of sex and gender, but in the much narrower sense of their use to marketing. In relation to the former he argued that,‘the trouble with advertising is that it hasn’t enough sex and the little bit that is has is the wrong kind’.⁹⁶ He disparaged the taboo-ridden, superficial, stereotyped portrayals of sexuality in American advertising, arguing for presentations that were less clichéd and more genuine. Dichter also contended that the marketing of gender roles should be more clearly differentiated. He was closely involved in studying reception of the launch of the Barbie doll by Mattel, arguing that her key appeal lay in her approximation to the American Dream, such that she possessed unlimited freedom to achieve all of her dreams.⁹⁷

Identification

For Freud the self is constituted by identifications which are the most primitive imaginary emotional connections one can make and so are resistant to change by rational argument. Freud controversially offered the myth of the totem meal in his Group Psychology⁹⁸, to argue that identification springs from the desire to assume the power of the other by eating them. However, identification can be ambivalent between love of and hatred for the other. For instance, when the child resolves the Oedipus Complex by identifying with his father, this may be to recapture a lost love object or to defend himself against the father’s aggression.⁹⁹

Freud had earlier associated melancholia as a case of identification whereby the subject cannot let go of the object and so internalizes it. Identification thus occurs in relation to the loss of our love-objects by bringing their image inside such that the other is present whenever we imitate their moods, mannerisms, thoughts and desires. For Diana Fuss (1995) the Greek metaphora, or transport, immediately implicates the transferential act of identification in the rhetorical process of figuration.

A case in point is the dream of the failed supper party recounted to Freud by the woman he called la belle bouchère¹⁰⁰.

I want to give a supper, but having nothing at hand except some smoked salmon, I think of going marketing, but I remember that it is Sunday afternoon, when all the shops are closed,I next try to telephone to some caterers, but the telephone is out of order. Thus I must resign my wish to have a supper.¹⁰¹

She told Freud that her husband with whom she is very much in love had spoken of his intention to diet and on no account to accept invitations to dinner parties. She also mentions her fantasy of eating a bread roll with caviar each morning but has grudged the expense. Her husband had offered to buy her caviar but she refused on the grounds that she could tease him about it. She mentions that the day before she had visited a friend of whom she is jealous because her husband speaks highly of her. Fortunately, her husband prefers buxom women and this friend is very thin, although she now discloses her intention to put on weight. During the visit the friend asked her when she might be invited over again.

Freud provides two explanations for the dream in which identification plays a key role. Given that Diana Fuss (1995) mentions four other explanations, it seems clear that there is no simple independent way of judging the matter. Leaving aside the precise form in which it took, the one might thus generalize that the dream involved processes of identification.

Lacan developed Freud’s account of ego-formation to argue that the individual mis-identifies with an image that affirms a sense of oneness, wholeness, mastery and self-containment that belies the yawning béance, or lack that is at the centre of their being, whilst for Ernest Becker, the harmonious self is formed as a protective skin to shield the individual from the existential terror of the reality of their mortality.¹⁰² That the self is a necessary fabrication made up of identifications fundamentally challenges the idea of a real or authentic ‘me’ that lies beneath the set of identifications. Freud argued that identification also forms the basis of group psychology. The US Republican Party is an artificial group where members are bound to one another and with whoever is the leader, whilst the MAGA movement is a spontaneous grouping that specifically focuses on the personage of its leader. Freud wrote,

He need only possess the typical qualities of the individuals concerned in a particularly clearly marked and pure form, and need only give an impression of greater force and of more freedom of libido; and in that case the need for a strong chief will often meet him half-way and invest him with a predominance to which he would otherwise perhaps have had no claim. The other members of the group, whose ego ideal would not, apart from this, have become embodied in his person without some correction, are then carried away with the rest by 'suggestion', that is to say, by means of identification. ¹⁰³

Freud cites Gustave Le Bon approvingly that, ‘a group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association… and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function”. ¹⁰⁴ The formation of the group mind that is resistant to rational argument rests on identification as the most basic emotional tie by which the subject assumes the identity of the model.

Social Character

In Freud’s conception, power does not just press in from the outside against an obdurate subject but plays a formative role in its construction such that the prevailing social organization foregrounds those personality traits that are congruent and suppresses those that are antithetical to its overall aims.¹⁰⁵ Different personality traits come to the fore depending on the child’s response to social expectations, depending on the extent to which they negotiate and surmount developmental hurdles, from weaning to toilet training, and Oedipal identification. Interest in such characters has risen and fallen over the years and indeed in social theory the very notion of character has now been largely superseded by the more mobile concept of discourse.¹⁰⁶ Despite this, while discussion of the anal, hoarding character has largely waned,¹⁰⁷ the figure of the narcissist has largely retained its currency, appearing in critical works every decade or so as the character best suited to the capitalist social order.¹⁰⁸

The principal agency invoked in relation to the formation of social character is the superego, which Freud at one point likened to a garrison that society installed into the psyche. Norbert Elias (1939) relied on the strengthening of the superego in his great work on the civilizing process to explain the development of manners in modern Europe, which he ascribed to the development of Court Societies and a monopoly of violence in the hands of the sovereign. He argued that processes of psychologization and rationalisation worked in tandem to reduce overt displays of violence through repression and internalization of conflict into the individual psyche, leading to the formation of a pressure cooker self, where repressed violence manifested itself in neuroses and in other forms of psychological distress.

In contrast, Erich Fromm linked the marketing character to the development of exchange value in capitalism, describing this character as an individual who perceives themselves as a commodity for sale on the personality market, who projects an image that is amenable, upbeat and authentic, which belies the internal experience of meaninglessness and ennui it seeks to remedy through consumption.¹⁰⁹ Fromm’s observation might be seen as prescient in foreshadowing the rise to prominence of the individual personal brand.¹¹⁰ The explanation developed by Herbert Marcuse who also sought to fuse Marx with Freud , resonates with Marx’s early argument that capitalist social relations reduce humans to the status of animals, by contending that the vital critical dimension of the ego is now blunted by an increasingly forceful superego that works in the interest of consumer capitalism.

Although the arguments from Dean MacCannell (2002), and Todd McGowan (2003), are based on Lacan, there are resonances with the above in their arguments that traditional prohibitions associated with the superego (“thou shalt not”) are transformed in capitalism to a morality that replaces values of moderation and self-restraint with one based on social Darwinist principles and the pursuit of jouissance.

While the arguments described above may make it seem that individuals took to capitalism like ducks to water, Ernest Dichter a dedicated advocate of consumer capitalism in the 1950s demurred, to argue that this transformation did not occur overnight and that even by the late 1950s, many Americans continued to feel that materialism is immoral and prosperity, ‘almost a sin’.¹¹¹ Indeed Dichter took it as his aim to counter these longstanding beliefs by describing the desire for physical goods as natural, signifying freedom, security, creativity and social recognition for the individual, even that goods have a ‘soul’.¹¹² Above all else Dichter railed against tradition, associating material consumption with progress¹¹³ and as a duty on the grounds that if consumption is related solely to immediate needs, the economy will collapse.¹¹⁴ The association of consumption with freedom had been made years earlier by Edward Bernays, who orchestrated and publicised the (in)famous pseudo-event he captioned ‘Torches of Freedom’, by persuading his secretaries and some other young women to join the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City and ostentatiously smoke cigarettes.¹¹⁵

What of social character today? Paul Verhaeghe (2012) notes that in many countries sexual displays and identities that were proscribed in the 1950s are now legitimate and from the huge change in the media landscape since the 1990s, are free to post whatever content they wish to anonymously on social media. Despite this he quotes Zygmunt Bauman that, “never have we been so free, never have we felt so powerless.’¹¹⁶ What is going on? Verhaeghe describes the dominant characteristics of today’s society as driven by a norm of efficiency and a goal of material profit, where greed as the virtue. The one who prospers in this context has an inflated opinion of themselves, is good at manipulating others and at dissimulation and has a lack of empathy, corresponding in short to traits describing ‘normal’ narcissism and psychopathy. He identifies three broad groups. There are those raised in a “Make it or Break it” context, for whom the dominant concern is their own success; in contrast, ‘Pacifier Kids’ who are shielded from the realities of life, are taught that life is predictable, pleasure is normal and pain is avoidable, so that if anything goes wrong, it is someone else’s fault; the final group comprises those diagnosed with some type of disorder.

One might add to this a pervading sense of suspicion. Criminals now widely avail of developments in Artificial Intelligence to construct sophisticated simulations to fool individuals into believing that they are actually giving money to colleagues, friends, relatives, or even themselves! Additionally, when front-stage individuals are constantly on-show and so must rigidly self-police their behaviour for fear that every gesture or nuance might be ineradicably be recorded by someone and taken as a social offence that could result in them being cancelled, whilst back-stage, as if wearing Gyges’ ring and so invisible to scrutiny to engage in their wildest and most depraved fantasies.

Lacan

In contrast to Freud, in the “French Freud” Lacan’s negative ontology, lack is constitutive of the subject which can be filled neither by imaginary identifications nor by symbolic desire. Self-recognition in the mirror forms a conceptual space, “that is me!”, thus opening the door for entry into the Symbolic, when according to Lacan the child is constituted as a fully human subject by accepting her castration before the Law where she must come to accept her subjection within the structure of language. For the human infant power is insinuated in the symbolic system of language that cuts into and organizes the body it renders intelligible. The subject is shaped in advance by the Symbolic order consisting of the categories of culture that simultaneously render her body intelligible. In relation to this, Althusser comments that the Symbolic order, “lurks there prior to birth, seizing on him from his very first cry to assign him to his place and role and thus his forced destination’ (1996: 55).

That there is not much discussion nowadays about the Imaginary is possibly because this topic preoccupied Lacan in his first seminars and has since been displaced by his later focus on the Symbolic and latterly, the Real. The Imaginary order taken on its own is highly relevant to the understanding of power, in the Lacanian understanding, in Althusser’s (1971) theory of ideology and as developed by Rene Girard, as the engine that drives the subject of mimetic desire. Imaginary identification forms the basis for bodily unity and self-continuity involving processes of self-identification that inform the image of a subject that presumes itself to be self-contained and self-directed and strives to live in harmony with itself. The Imaginary self is not monistic, as Lacan deploys the ‘master-slave’ tale from Hegel to describe this as a dual relation between a powerful mirror image that the individual identifies with which contrasts to internal feelings of loss and fragmentation, resulting in an oscillating see-saw relation of rivalry and hatred. The self develops as self-righteous and self-justifying, developing a variety of mechanisms for conserving itself and shifting blame onto others. Rivalry thrives in the absence of symbolic distance, as seems evident in the current algorithm-driven social media landscape. Through imagery, power reaches below the level of the subject to engage with the Imaginary interplay between self and other. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein describes in vivid detail how she was almost sucked into the stadium of desire constructed by social media towards a malign focus on the other Naomi (Wolf), her doppelganger, (anti)model, rival, and for a time, the object of her obsession.¹¹⁷ Klein points out that when confronted by very real dangers, a person can become entirely consumed by imaginary identifications with mirrored synthetic selves and manufactured realities, as at bottom there lurks what we cannot bear to see, in our own past, in our present and in the future racing towards us.¹¹⁸

The Symbolic imposes a cultural grid framing inchoate experience, rendering it intelligible, for instance, by enabling us to assign names to our ailments, to name our body-parts and to communicate with others. The emergent subject is hemmed in by the imposition of the cultural order which specifies in advance our assignment to a gender role, a class position and a position within the family. In this sense as Althusser notes, we are ‘always already’ subjects. In the most obvious sense power is implicated in culture through the way in which a given society is organised, in relation to exchange the preponderance given to sharing, hierarchy, gift exchange or the market. Power resides in the differentiation of tasks and the allocation of roles and responsibilities and importantly in the arbiters of these functions. It is there too in the unspoken, implicit, taken for granted rules that seem to govern day to day life.

The individual becomes a subject by identifying with the paternal metaphor, the nom du père, taking the name of the father (nom) and by accepting his prohibition (non) against attempts to challenge his authority by continuing to act as the phallus of the mother.¹¹⁹ At this point desire to be the sole object of the (m)other’s desire and desire for the mother is repressed into the unconscious. This allows for the installation into the psyche of the ego-ideal, related to the superego on condition that the child let’s go of their Imaginary quest to be the phallus for the (m)other and acquiesces to the symbolic prohibition of the Name of the Father. Importantly, the ego-ideal provides respite from Imaginary rivalry by providing a third space for self-reflection. However, as Butler notes, this is always produced at a cost, ‘and whatever resists the normative demand by which subjects are instituted remains unconscious”.¹²⁰ Neurotic symptoms arise in response to the instalment of the paternal metaphor, whilst psychosis results from its violent repudiation and perversion from its disavowal. The hysteric who is distressed by repressed symptoms presents the other with the riddle of the Sphinx, by instituting the other whether as priest, faith-healer, medic or psychiatrist, as the one supposed to know the secret of her malady and discomfort. Her fundamental aim is to complete the other.¹²¹ The obsessive on the other hand couldn’t care less about the other, the epitome of the ‘self-made man’ who believes he doesn’t owe anyone anything.¹²²

In the above description, the ‘neurotypical’ individual describes the desire of the male, neurotic, consumer. The picture becomes a good deal more complex when one takes into account that the fundamental fantasy of the individual might be structured as “female” in relation to sexuation, as psychotic, by rejecting the insistent advances of the Other, or as perverse, by disavowing the Other. Lacanian analysts further distinguish between paranoia and schizophrenia. For the psychotic character the Other keeps insisting but there is no traction as they are not rooted in the Other, so dominant forms of identification are Imaginary (rivalry) or Real (Phantasmic). Rik Loose (2002) argues that the flat over-repressed neurotic seeks drug experiences to boost their jouissance, whereas the individual with a psychotic character who is fizzing with jouissance seeks out opiates to alleviate thrumming tension. Schizophrenics are a small but nonetheless significant group and in the general population studies suggest that the number of those who hear voices is between 5% and 28% of the population in the USA.¹²³

The variety of responses to the installation of the paternal signifier from the Other can be understood as challenges to the cultural insistence that one assumes a coherent subjectivity in line with a pre-ordained identity. Here the psyche overflows the rational subject as the site of Imaginary identifications, unconscious phantasies and jouissance. For Judith Butler such resistance to normalization offers a critique to Foucault as, ‘The psyche is what resists the regularization that Foucault ascribes to normalizing discourses’.¹²⁴ Repression of the phallic signifier founds the unconscious. A bar is created that separates unconscious signification from conscious thought. The conscious moi, of homo economicus is an imaginary construction believing itself to be self-contained and self-directed whilst it is simultaneously subject to and spoken by the unconscious. Psychoanalysis asks, when the subject speaks, who is actually speaking? Once the subject has accepted the paternal metaphor their repressed desire forms the unconscious where it operates according to metaphor by condensing memories and by displacing them onto innocuous material through metonymy. The unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the Other. Given the importance of speech in psychoanalysis Lacan argued that there is a non-correspondence between what the “I of the analysand says, which is the enunciation, and the enoncé, or written equivalent, or as it is sometimes known, between the saying and the said.¹²⁵ Lacan initially contrasted the “full speech” of the unconscious subject with the self-justifying “empty speech” of the analysand, later switching to discuss this in relation to desire. There is a split between the “I” of the enunciation of the one who speaks and the grammatical “I” of the subject in the statement. The words that she uses carry a meaning that exceeds the one she hoped to convey when he opened her mouth, so it is through the act of enunciation that unconscious processes are manifested. The subject that is revealed is not the same as the subject that is speaking. In other words, an unconscious production is one in which you do not recognise yourself in what you have actually said. This is an experience well-known to anyone who has undertaken analysis, where the signifier represents the subject for another signifier.

The desire of the neurotic subject is repressed while continuing to exert pressure through the action of unconscious processes and revealing itself through slips. Desire is not simply what is expressed by the subject for an object but is situated with respect to the discourse of the Other, from the prevailing symbolic order. Given the indeterminacy of language which is based on difference, the prevailing symbolic order offers master signifiers as ideological anchor points for identification. In contemporary consumer capitalism one’s lack of being is converted to a lack of having. Years ago the “good life” was associated with the latest goods, such as a car, or ice-cream maker, although they were buying into an ideology of progress and efficiency, as well as a product. The preoccupation with goods has since ceded some ground to signifiers associated with “wellness” and a “full life”, which are linked to experiences. One trekking company newsletter I received relatively recently celebrated one loyal couple who had travelled under their auspices on a hundred “adventures” to far-flung places, many of which were sold as ‘trips of a lifetime’.

Object a

Lacan once commented that the concept of object a, the object cause of desire, was his primary contribution to psychoanalysis. There is a considerable elasticity in this concept given that Lacan developed his thinking on it over his lifetime. Object a is not actually an object but arises from the experience of lack of being in the Real, and lack of Imaginary fullness with the (m)Other. Object a retains elements of Freud’s theorisation of character formation in relation to oral, scopic, sado-mcovidostic and anal fixations. In Freud’s theorisation these are reversible such that scopophilia involves voyeurism of looking or being looked at; orality as eating the other or being eaten by them, and anality as retentiveness or wastefulness. It is a remainder that reminds us of our prior fullness of being, a lack peculiar to each individual that draws our fascination, whether a wistful smile, a playful childishness, or perhaps a look, that we find irresistible. Bruce Fink (2011), argues that object a can explain why, when relationships end, one partner can find it so difficult to let go, because they continue to pin object a onto their former partner.

For Zizek object a is the basis of the sublime object of ideology that structures our desire. There is no question of imposition of an ideology here because object a is an intrinsic feature of subjectivity and so desire is experienced as the subject’s own. The sublime object is an everyday object that has the aura of the Thing. Lacan’s friend the surrealist Salvador Dali understood very well, as do brands such as Hermes and Selfridges, that in a commercial setting the shop window is the perfect lure to inflame the desire of the one situated on the other side of the transparent barrier.¹²⁶ The shop window illustrates perhaps better than advertising, how object a is not the thing itself, but rather forms the structure by which desire is itself created as the sublime object that gives phantasmatic support to ideological structures. For Marx the reproduction of subjectivity is linked to the reproduction of capitalism which recreates itself through us. The commodity fetish has magical properties, not just in relation to branding but also in relation to how as an object, it recreates the formal relations of exchange. For Zizek the central question is to locate where our desire is coming from so that we can seek to liberate ourselves from the pre-ordained phantasmatic frames of capitalist incentive structures we experience as being our own desires. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, we can respond by saying “I prefer not to’. Additionally, although marketers and advertisers are skilled at exploiting our desire, they can only hope to recreate this structure which has its origin in a primary loss of plenitude.

Finally in relation to object a, Althusser’s (1971) formulation of ideology has been critiqued as being over-socialized, by passing over the kernel of the non-symbolizable and unassimilable remainder of the Real that like a bit of gristle, sticks in the symbolic gullet that cannot digest it. Butler cites Dolar’s argument in this vein that Althusser does not fully take into account the ‘remainder’, ‘the non-phenomenal ‘kernel of interiority’ that remains following subjectivation.¹²⁷

Four discourses¹²⁸

Lacan’s later development of the four discourses has a direct bearing on questions of power. These outline four formal subject positions, comprising, the master, the university, the hysterical split subject and object-a. The discourse of the master circles around a master signifier that retroactively gives meaning to the knowledge and truth processes around it. The master signifier is empty, there is no need for legitimacy as it is underpinned by the symbolic authority of the Big Other, say of the monarch or the president. I listen not to truth or reason or politics but am simply embody power as my true will. Some argue that the symbolic authority of the master has slipped, citing examples of bosses who want to be seen as part of the team, parents who want to be their children’s best friend, and Prime Ministers who say that they are merely “following the science”. Here the master actually refuses to fill the role of Master, thus stimulating calls for a ‘real’ master to arise, which in Lacan’s view threatens the return of repressed obscene power. Rise of the far right today in the face of permacrisis - a return of the repressed obscene power.

The university discourse does not just refer to the academy but to the panoply of experts who purport that there is a science of objective truth with which the master can be filled with verifiable knowledge.

The one in the position of the hysteric asks the master ‘tell me who I am”. During an increasingly rambunctious talk that Lacan gave to students at Vincennes in 1969, he asked them what was it that those in ’68 were rebelling against? Lacan then placed his student in the position of the hysteric, describing them as helots (slaves or collaborators with the regime) who framed their aspiration to revolution in relation to the discourse of the Master, “what you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one.”¹²⁹

Finally, there is the position of the analyst who has no stake in the game, who refuses to follow the script provided them by the analysand, to affirm – but rather changes the stakes so that eventually the subject can assume his own truth or the figure of empty authority.

Lacan later developed a fifth discourse he named the capitalist discourse, which he suggested, transforms the way in which the subject traditionally takes shape, and gives rise to new symptoms, as well as consumerist requests for help. What is characteristic of the consumerist request for help is that it ignores unconscious truth. The capitalist discourse, “exists in a curious copulation with science”. ¹³⁰ Science ensures the production of knowledge (S2) through which S1 becomes ever more innovative, such that old answers must be answered by new ones. The solutions proffered by S1 are not fixed but endlessly new and better. As noted by Vanhuele (2016) the only thing missing is the consumer who frames their lack in terms of the gap in the market that is delineated by S2, and who believe in S1.

In the discourse of the hysteric, the discontent of the subject is addressed to the master, or the one who is supposed to know who is made equally responsible for addressing their distress by helping bring their unconscious knowledge to the surface. Vanhuele invokes the dream of La Belle Bouchere (The beautiful butcher’s wife) first described by Freud to illustrate the process of dream analysis. The woman loved caviar but forbade her husband from buying it for her, whilst she knew that her friend loved smoked salmon, but in the dream, was unable to buy it. In the analysis of the dream smoked salmon and caviar play an illustrative role in relation to desire by exemplifying fears in relation to food and the hidden rivalries that haunt relationships. The last thing imaginable is that all would have been well if the butcher’s wife actually had been able to purchase smoked salmon and had in stock! In contrast, capitalist discourse would have mistaken her problematic desire as a frustrated demand that could be satisfied. The solution offered by capitalism to the butcher’s wife would simply be to go out and buy smoked salmon or caviar. By offering pat, simple solutions capitalist discourse occludes discussion of deeper issues pertaining to love and unfulfilled desire. It completely sidelines the role of the unconscious knowledge that produces distress, When everything is always about gratifying demand an entire dimension is lost, as fundamental questions are left unaddressed. Once purchased the product quickly loses its aura. It never lives up to its initial promise that was in any event doomed from the start, as the result of the conflation of specific demands with mobile desire.

Bryant (2008, 13) from Žižek, that under the regime of capitalism, the subject's principal question is not “what do I desire” but “what should I desire,” which is “not a question about objects, but a question of those conditions under which the subject might be desired by the Other.” This takes up the position of the hysteric for whom desire is essentially mediated by the desire of the Other. Within capitalist discourse this implies that merchandise will not so much be preferred for its intrinsic qualities, but in terms of how it is evaluated by the other. Indeed, this is often how marketing proceeds, by associating products as highly desired by successful celebrities and influencers they signal the viewer’s discontent and so direct their desire to consume.

Homo Mimeticus

Homo mimeticus poses a challenge to the conception of homo economicus as self-directed, by arguing that human subjectivity is inter-dividual and that mimetic desire forms the basis of all human striving. René Girard’s conception of mimesis is closely related to concepts such as sympathy and imitation. In terms of neural processes sympathy, which is the capacity to “enter into the feelings of others” noted by Adam Smith, is a pre-requisite for mimetic desire, has been found to rest on a substrate of mirror neurons.¹³¹ Additionally, research confirms the importance of over-imitation to cultural learning in humans who have been found to repeat redundant steps in a problem-solving sequence demonstrated by a model, which monkeys quickly dispense with to develop leaner, faster, solutions.¹³²

Girard argued more broadly that we humans do not just desire objects but like other animals, we desire the desire of those others whom we take as our models. Moreover, while strict hierarchies restrain and contain outbreaks of mimetic violence that occur in animal societies, when two hands reached for the same object, the containment of such violence posed a major threat to the survival of early human collectives. In his view, lacking symbolic controls, mimetic rivalry played havoc in archaic human communities, reaching epidemic proportions that spilled over into violence and threatened the existence of the entire social order. Respite was gained only following the seizure and collective sacrifice of a scapegoat, who was subsequently sacralised, forming the basis for the establishment of more stable forms for the prohibition and containment of mimetic rivalry involving formal religion, social hierarchy, the law and media for exchange.¹³³

Girard thus poses important questions for the assumptions behind homo economicus, that posit a simple relation between an individual and the object of their desire. For Girard, desire is triangular, involving a subject, the individual they take as their model, and the object which the model possesses which the subject desires. There are similarities with the realm of the Imaginary described by Lacan, in that the object is not desirable in itself, but is charged only because the model desires it, who appears complete and successful by comparison with the subject. The object comes into view as the ‘X’ that marks the crucial difference that separates the powerful model from the lacking subject. This need not be a physical object but could be an idea or even a person. In the case of a ‘love triangle’, as the story progresses, the supposed object (person) of desire can fade into the background, as the rivalry between the suitors takes centre stage. Indeed the ‘object’ can quickly lose appeal for the subject from the moment the model’s desire alights onto another object. As is further discussed below, Girard’s concept of external mediation has resonances with the Lacanian Symbolic.

Given that the market society actively invites social comparison and mimetic rivalry a pertinent question is why do we not see massive outbreaks of mimetically inspired violence today? Orléan (1989), sought to reconcile Girard’s mimetic theory with neoclassical economics by distinguishing routine goods from status goods. With respect to the former, consumers have relatively fixed preferences and given that they know the worth of the goods on offer, they see no need to imitate what others do. The situation is quite different with scarce goods such as luxuries, or property, where prices bubbles build quickly so that it can be rational to imitate the desires of others. Examples of such madness down the centuries attest to the disastrous consequences of such perverse spirals, from the feverish tulip mania that enveloped Europe in the seventeenth-century, to the South Sea Bubble, that occurred a century later, and more recently, the housing “sub-prime” crisis which precipitated the 2008 financial crash. Indeed one of the key questions confronting policy-makers in a capitalistic market system is how to avoid ‘boom and bust” cycles.

While Orlean’s paper is interesting, it arguably focuses too much on goods and insufficiently on mimetic desire, which knows no clear boundaries. Mimesis fundamentally involves a function of dependence on another’s desire. The subject does not know what he wants, never mind what he prefers, and is dependent on the model for both. Girard differentiates two environments for mimesis comprising internal mediation and external mediation. In the situation of internal mediation, the subject takes as their model someone who is in their immediate social circle. Let us say that Jim has fixated on Jane who is a member of his social circle as his model. During a brief conversation at a social event Jane casually mentions her plan to go on a trek around Mont Blanc. Later Jim, who previously had not considered himself particularly athletic or adventurousness and had never considered this before, feels gripped by the idea to do something equally adventurous and books a trekking holiday. Over the years Jim and Jane meet off and on and when they do, Jim casually recounts tales of his latest adventure such as his recent trip to the Himalaya. Jane notices Jim’s cool and rather smug behaviour when in her company. When they meet a year later at a mutual friend’s party, Jim discovers that Jane has since been on treks to remote parts of Chile and Mongolia and as she describes her experiences is particularly irked by her smile, which he finds condescending. Jim upsets his hosts and surprises even himself by constantly interrupting and disparaging everything Jane says, to which she responds in turn, resulting in a furious row.

Considering the above example from a Girardian perspective an important point is that Jim and Jane are peers so there is no social or symbolic distance between them. At the initial meeting Jim unconsciously finds himself lacking with respect to Jane and identifies this crucial difference in her quest for adventure. This provides the motive for him to desire what she desires. To begin with the object is all that seems to matter, but as Jim becomes more proficient, the object of desire (adventurousness) fades into the background, and Jim and Jane become what Girard calls ‘monstrous doubles’ who are drawn into a cyclothymic spiral of rivalry, each swinging from surges of gleeful superiority at their latest success, or at the other’s failure, to crashing despair when the other triumphs. Naomi Klein’s highly nuanced account describes in arresting detail her fluctuating feelings of superiority, annoyance and spiralling rivalry with her doppelganger Naomi Wolf, and the considerable difficulties she experienced in trying to surmount this. Girard might have argued that such destructive mirroring was accentuated not just because bad behaviour is encouraged and monetised by algorithms but crucially, because of the lack of any of the symbolic barriers that prevail in face-to-face encounters between subject and model in the virtual context.¹³⁴

Jim does not really know what he wants, over and above the sense of adventure that he lacks and Jane seems to possess. He looks to Jane’s desire to inform him as to what he should desire, so that he can be like that. In the above example it does not follow that Jim is simply imitating another person who is “adventurous” whom he is trying to outdo. Jim could be engaged in ‘negative imitation’, by adopting a behavioural stance that is the opposite of the model, who perhaps lives a frugal, sedentary life. While in this situation Jim would not be formally imitating the model of his desire, the important thing is that his desire is still dependent on, and indeed might be rigidly fixated, on the model’s desire.

The situation of Jim and Jane described above is one of internal mediation, where each is a peer within the same social circle, such that no social or symbolic distance separates them. In contrast, in contexts of external mediation individuals are separated by symbolic distance. Girard for instance discusses how Sancho Panza who is from a different class to Don Quixote lacks any desire for the objects his master desires.¹³⁵ He thus views symbolic distinctions based on caste or on class hierarchy as brakes on the spread of mimetic desire, where individuals are raised to value and desire different objects, as in the situation of amor fati described by Bourdieu. In the situation of external mediation, the subject does not take the other as the model for their desire because of the symbolic distance that separates them. In addition to authority ranking, reciprocal gift exchange provides symbolic distance by laying down a clear formula for conduct, so that when I give you something, I demonstrate my superiority and prestige, forcing you to reciprocate, in order to reinstate balance. While some elevate the selfless beauty of the freely given gift as one of the most noble of human acts, Girard points to the potential violence that underlies the gift, at one point offering the mundane example of the aspiring mafioso who hangs about a café, building his circle of obligation from the ground up by offering “free” coffee to those who subsequently become his marks. Dumouchel (2001) points out that violence is deeply implicated in the circle of gift exchange as it will ensue if the debt incurred through the obligation to reciprocate is not honoured, such that members of the gift community are likewise beholden to use violence to defend against outside attack. In such situations obligations that in the daily course of events protect individuals from violence can actually stoke conflict, leading to a tit-for-tat spiral of recrimination when employed as means to take revenge on outsiders who do the community harm.

Dumouchel argues that money exchange offers a more secure form of external mediation by creating an even more distant relation between subject and model, as it breaks the circle of the gift and so frees buyer and seller from ties of reciprocity. While the thick bonds of community are shorn, on the other hand, the abandonment of reciprocal obligations can prevent mimetic violence from spreading to others. On the downside, unlike gift communities which strive for balance, the growth imperative demanded by the capitalist market facilitates and indeed thrives off mimetic desire. Consequently, capitalist societies consist of a, “bubbling stew of violent competitive energies” restrained by the symbolic distance put in place by the market itself, by law, and ultimately by the monopoly of violence enforced by the state.

Since its inception modern marketing has employed images of desirable celebrities as models to create brand appeal. However, except in exceptional circumstances¹³⁶ nothing used to come of this in relation to mimetic violence, as celebrities exist in another universe that is materially distant and symbolically sacralised and so unreachable to most. The situation is different today as a vast web of “influencers” has spread on social media, where it is possible that the influencer is known to those who imitate their desire. A UK Parliamentary report mentioned that, “(m)any of the influencers we have spoken to say they face significant online abuse and trolling”. While one contributor mentioned that, “it comes with the territory”, another declared that, “abuse can be “relentless” and result in mental health issues for influencers”, with one contributor expressing concern that there will be more cases of suicide and depression among them. One witness, Dr Crystal Abidin told the committee that the most significant problem facing influencers in her research areas of China, Japan and Korea is suicide as a result of online bullying.¹³⁷

Girard’s theory illustrates the extent to which we live inside each other’s heads, sharing the same desires, fears and anxieties. It also illustrates the endless, silent behind-the-scenes nature of comparison of oneself to others, comparisons that cut every way in which one can identify oneself to others. It explains the fundamental desire to be somebody, to be the best, no matter how bizarre or life-threatening that may be, whether the best fighter, ultra-marathon runner, gang member, long-distance swimmer, mountain-climber, or copycat suicide, such that in any event you will have the best funeral!

Instances of monstrous doubling are more visible today in the era of social media, in which context it is noteworthy that Facebook received its first capital input from billionaire disrupter Peter Thiel, who skewed Girard to his own pecuniary advantage by seeing the massive potential of fostering rather than damping down mimesis. Thiel put it that, “competitors tend to become obsessed with their rivals at the expense of their substantive goals, and because of that… the intensity of competition doesn't tell you anything about underlying value. People will compete fiercely for things that don't matter, and once they're fighting they'll fight harder and harder.¹³⁸ Arnaud Auger has called Girard the godfather of the “like” button.¹³⁹ While this had not been invented in 2004, when Thiel made his investment into Facebook, the seeming anonymity of the platform provides cover for individuals to openly express opinions they would never previously have dared to in the company of others. Geoff Shullenberg percipiently argued that “objects” such as likes, up-votes, reblogs, re-tweets and comments are all visible signals of the other’s desire. The more mediated through the other’s desire (by being liked and so on), the more prominent a post becomes on one’s feed and hence the more desirable, such that desire begets desire,

…social media platforms perpetually enjoin users, through various means, to enter the iterative chain of mimesis: to signal their desires to other users, eliciting further desires in the process. The algorithms driving social media, as it turns out, are programmed on mimetic principles.¹⁴⁰

That one’s social capital rests on ‘likes’ to one’s last post, leading to rapid oscillations in users from pride and celebration to shame and despair, is it any wonder that social media use is linked to anxiety? In such contexts the individual is driven by a desire they are possibly unaware of and caught in an imaginary web of relations with others they see no prospect of escaping from with consequences that can be all too real.¹⁴¹

From the above, homo mimeticus is fundamentally different to homo economicus in that his preferences are not fixed, but depend crucially on the preferences of others.¹⁴² Because mimetic desire is inter-dividual, featuring relations between individuals, it is expressed differently in different inter-dividual contexts. Spiralling rivalry is best observed in relatively closed social contexts. Low-budget television producers were attracted by the spectacle of rivalry between families from the UK “traveller” community.¹⁴³ The man, who still occupies the traditional role as provider for his family, signifies his status in relation to other men in terms of how “big” the wedding is in terms of its extravagance and cost, while each successive bride signifies her status by wearing a dress that is wider and heavier than those of her predecessors. Such tight-knit communities are very much the exception today and generally it seems that the market has acted as a distancing mechanism that offers a proliferation of celebrity models and a seemingly endless variety of objects on which desire can alight. However, the situation is fluid and seems to be changing rapidly in the social media landscape.

Girard’s insight into the inter-individual nature of desire invites discussion as to whether the pathologisation of the individual in current medical practice is adequate to the task, or whether it contributes to the problem. If mimesis is endemic then is it advisable to group those diagnosed with addictions or eating disorder together in rehabilitation units where silent and potentially lethal games of inter-individual rivalry can be played out unseen by those in charge?

Dumouchel (2014) criticizes the individualism prevalent in capitalist societies by offering an inter-individual account of scarcity. The liberal and neoliberal economic argument for scarcity is as the necessary foundation for the economy as the engine that spurs innovation and growth. Such a presumption informed the actions of the Argentinian government headed by Javier Gerardo Milei, beloved of anarcho-capitalists and of Donald Trump, whose policies halved the rate of inflation in just one year, while the proportion of those at or below the poverty line rose to over fifty percent of the population.¹⁴⁴ For Dumouchel (ibid.), scarcity is not a natural given, nor is it a socially constructed term, but rather, socially instituted. This is because the very idea of scarcity would be foreign to inhabitants of a society organised around principles of gift exchange, which obligates reciprocity and solidarity such that, “no member of a group is in danger of dying unless all are”. While people may starve, this would be taken not be taken as a sign of scarcity, but rather as a moral failure of individuals to meet created by reciprocal obligation was broken with the introduction of money exchange which substituted a distant and detached relation for ties that once bound the individual to the community. As ties of solidary obligation loosened, so scarcity, linked to lack of resources came to be seen as the problem.

Pankaj Mishra antedates Girard’s ideas on mimetic rivalry to the antagonism between Voltaire and Rousseau involving the former’s claim, in relation to the rising class of bourgeoisie, that amour propre and the pursuit of self-interest are essential to the operation of society, whilst Rousseau warned that such a society, based not on real needs but on the desire to surpass others will end in deceit and violence.¹⁴⁵ Focussing at the level of the nation state Mishra argues that ressentiment bred from a lack of recognition and respect from the West have been key factors motivating the actions of colonised elites and in other countries beyond the European Pale. He describes “an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness” experienced by those from the Indian sub-continent towards the “mother country” where many had been educated (and patronised), involving an ambivalent, bifurcated identity…of ‘cringe and hate’ towards their overlords who treated them with contempt as backward and effeminate. Such treatment in his view fuelled programmes of ruthless national self-assertion by fascists, anarchists and revolutionaries who were enflamed by their reading amongst others, of Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Mazzini, D’Annunzio and Sorel, to construct grand visions of the nation as a coherent community of patriotic citizens furnished with a splendidly unique and exceptional history, achievable by testosterone fuelled ideal of self-overcoming heroism involving blood and sacrifice of self and of others to realise this vision of progress.¹⁴⁶

Mishra contends that nowadays, ressentiment is felt most keenly in societies that claim to be meritocratic and egalitarian that invite individuals to engage in invidious comparison. As upward mobility is restricted to just a few, for members of excluded minorities or those of the majority whose standard of living and future prospects have declined, stories that feed narratives of lost national, ethnic or religious greatness, or admixtures of all three, act as powerful binding agents to inflame and incite. On the one hand there are insurgencies by minorities denied social recognition and legitimation, such as the Tamils, Nagas, Kashmiri’s and Palestinians, while on the other, illiberal democracies in India, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the USA and sustain large minorities of the disaffected in France, Germany and the UK.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s review of two Russian studies of the Cold War period lends support to Mishra’s argument. These authors argue that during this period Russia was less interested in victory and more concerned with winning the respect of their mightier Western foe, as despite its nuclear, arsenal the Soviet Union was weaker than the USA economically and generally militarily. Resentment led to the Soviet Union modelling its strategy on that pursued by its rival; for instance, the authors argue that although its arguments were couched in the language of anti-imperialism, the main reason behind the Soviet Union seeking client states in the Middle-East and Third World had little to do with the spread of communist, ideology and much more to do with matching the USA and the emergent China. In an unlikely twist, the process of détente entered into by Nixon and Brezhnev in the early 1970’s offered the prospect of moving beyond the mimetic tussle of “winning” or “losing” the Cold War.

While the Nixon-Breshnev engagement offered a sliver of hope, the process of détente foundered following the Helsinki Accords of 1975, when US President Jimmy Carter and others leveraged the Accords to attack the Soviet Union for human rights violations. Fitzpatrick argues that the Soviets, who were “extremely sensitive to anything that smacked of condescension, were “embarrassed by this turn of events…such a teacher-student relationship was fundamentally incompatible with the Soviet sense of self-importance’.¹⁴⁷ Fitzpatrick recounts that when Ronald Reagan became President in the 1980s, he was surprised to learn that the Soviets were just as scared of the Americans as the Americans were of them. Mikhail Gorbachev is described as a true radical by envisaging, ‘an idealistic joint process with the West for a nuclear-free Europe and a common European home…who did the unthinkable and walked away from Eastern Europe”.¹⁴⁸ In the view of one of the authors this was when ‘Moscow briefly stood as a city on the hill, showing the way to a brave new world’. Fitzpatrick reads Gorbachev’s attempt as the most successful, “of a long line of Soviet attempts to be recognized as America’s equal”, such that the Soviet Union could work in tandem to lead the world to a better future. That this did not work out is laid largely at the door of the Americans who still wanted to call the shots. It seems that what rankled especially for Russians was George H.W. Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union address in 1992, that America won the Cold War, “a message that was hard to swallow”.¹⁴⁹ The authors mention that Boris Yeltsin reiterated Gorbachev’s call that the USA and now the Russian Federation be ‘special allies in the building of a new world order”, an aspiration the US never took as plausible which Fitzpatrick describes as fantasy; ‘the US had to be stronger”. Then came Putin who took office as President in 2000 for whom resentment was as ingrained to his personality as the lettering on a stick of rock, seeing Russia as a great power that had been wilfully reduced by his predecessors. Fitzpatrick includes a snippet from Putin’s speech aimed at the USA, on the second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022,

Where does this insolent manner of speaking from the position of your own exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness come from? Wherefrom does that condescending, arrogant attitude towards the interests and absolutely legitimate demands?¹⁵⁰

Fitzpatrick notes that while Radchenko refers to the above as “raving” and which she herself admits “certainly sounds a bit unhinged”, it echoes the sentiments expressed by Putin’s predecessors “from Stalin to Yeltsin”.

What shape does resistance to power take in Girard’s theory? For Girard, the keystone of resistance is for the victim to suppress the urge for reprisals and to forego the sacrifice or scapegoating of others in order to close off the spiral of mimetic rivalry.¹⁵¹ Many would argue the impossibility turning the other cheek for those confronted with the rawness of their loss and humiliation. Yet Hodge (2011), offers the astonishing example of the Suai community in East Timor who symbolically reenacted scenes from the massacre of their people by the Indonesian paramilitaries without resorting to calls to vengeance, or retaliatory violence.

Homo Deconstruktivus

From their survey of the literature Downey et al (2014) reported their surprise that by 2008, at the time of the global financial crash and the imposition of austerity programmes when capitalism seemed to be on its knees, ideology critique had virtually disappeared from discussion in academic journals. The authors noted that this was paralleled by a concomitant rise in identity politics, and its split from discussions of capitalism and class. Stuart Hall (1985), dated the origins of this rift to Louis Althusser’s (1971) piece on the ISA’s, which fatefully, according to Hall, split discussion of class reproduction from subjectivity, leading to a subsequent “bifurcation” between theorists of a marxist bent who stuck with class reproduction and those who focused instead on questions of subjectivity and identity, a split which, ‘has had the most disastrous consequences for the unevenness of the subsequent development of the problematic of ideology, not to speak of its damaging political effects.” (Hall, 1985: 103). Laying aside discussion of whether or not it is fair to blame Althusser, there seems little doubt that in hindsight, the shift in emphasis by the progressive liberal cultural elite away from questions of class reproduction and the concerns of the working class to identity politics has indeed had a profound effect.

By focusing on the rarified world of the academy, Downey et al. (2014) overlooked a version of the ideology thesis which had spilled out into the real world where it continued to proliferate. Like characters from The Godfather, on whom real mafiosi purportedly model their image, the message of The Matrix (1997) with its vision of a ‘red pill/blue pill’ world resonated with real-world experiences of the disaffected, from young male Incels to members of the white, middle-classes who had lost income, status and privilege, who took on board its view of a world turned upside-down and driven by powerful hidden forces. While these simulations have had far reaching real-world effects, the truism that what happens in reality would be considered too bizarre to pass as a movie script is surely the case today. Imagine in 2008 trying to pass a script where a female candidate for Presidency is accused of heading a Satan-worshipping paedophile ring that has infiltrated government, business and the media and operates from the basement of a New York pizza parlour, kidnapping infants to harvest their organs, against which a billionaire property developer is waging a noble secret war? Simulation and the loss of the real is of course the territory of Jean Baudrillard, whose Simulacra and Simulations appears fleetingly in The Matrix.¹⁵² Given reversibility is a constant theme in Baudrillard’s work, from life to death, presence to absence, negativity to positivity and so this seems prescient given the astounding reversals before us today, from perpetrator to victim, friend to enemy, truth to post-truth and democracy to autocracy.

While discussion of the current ills that beset what passes for social order today is already the topic of several books, the “culture wars” deserve mention if only because prominent post-structuralists are implicated. In a message addressed largely to the American humanities Bruno Latour (2004), hardly a post-structuralist, argued that critical studies of science had been mobilised by powerful vested interests as leverage to foster distrust and to foment division and doubt in public opinion on global warming and other crucial matters of fact. He mentions an American Republican strategist who argued in the face of the virtually overwhelming scientific consensus over global warming, the need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.¹⁵³ Latour worried because his own project sought to identify ideology and lack of certainty in scientific research so as, ‘to emancipate the populace from, prematurely naturalized objectified facts’¹⁵⁴. He now questions whether he was foolish to do so given that there seems now to be a general distrust of all facts that are assumed to be ideologically biased. He distinguishes between two approaches, the first of which corresponds to his early work which sought to reveal the prejudices that serve particular interests that lie behind the facts. A second approach, which he now believes to be crucially important is to defend the real facts that exist behind such interests,

And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives (Latour, 2004: 227).

Latour points to the complicity of Baudrillard, Foucault and by implication Derrida in the above, singling out Baudrillard for suggesting that the Twin Towers collapsed under the “utter nihilism inherent in capitalism’, asking, “What has become of critique when a book that claims no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon can be a bestseller?’¹⁵⁵. Latour is right to argue that such statements feed into a post-truth discourse that signals, ‘an apparent crisis in which truth no longer has any authority to determine people’s beliefs or judgements’ (D’Ancona 2017, 7–8; Higgins 2016, 9). Latour also singles out Bourdieu (again hardly a poststructuralist) for comparison with conspiracy theory,

In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusion of their real motives. Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge-slash-power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation’.¹⁵⁶

While there may be some form of relation in structure, it is important to note that conspiracy theory is motivated by identification not rational disputation; theorists make crass generalizations, employ false equivalences, tell outright lies, state positions rather than develop reasoned arguments and are allergic to considering anything that goes against the grain of their position.¹⁵⁷ By comparison at its best, science is reflexive, motivated by the principal of doubt such that findings and interpretations are subjected to rigorous evaluation and open to disputation and re-interpretation or rejection in light of new evidence. A good example of this is the relatively recent controversy over the lack of replication of results on priming effects in behavioural psychology.¹⁵⁸ Streams of research across the sciences, from geology, to geography, meteorology and oceanography, all add support to the evidence base that predicts the calamitous effect of human-produced greenhouse gases have on global warming and on human life. In the face of this conspiracy theorists simply ignore the evidence and repeat the lie. One wonders what their explanation will be in 2050?

Latour elaborates on his second argument that the current emphasis on debunking matters of fact should be replaced by a positive focus on matters of concern, asking, ‘Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality?” (232)

From the above, it strikes me that there are two conversations between the academy and civil discourse that run along parallel tracks but cross only occasionally. In the conversation between critical academics, Latour’s reasoned argument for a more constructive discussion is conducted amicably, whilst on the other side of the tracks, the most preposterous lies masquerade as truth. Does it really matter a damn in this second sense that Foucault, Derrida, Latour and generally Baudrillard would have been upset by the misappropriation of their arguments? For these or at least a pastiche of them has long since spilled out beyond the confines of the academy into an increasingly uncivil and unruly society. This is not surprising when one figures that just 8% of Americans had college degrees in 1960, rising to over 30% by 2022 and roughly 37% today,¹⁵⁹ of which a sizeable proportion took liberal arts degrees. It is unsurprising that alongside media representations in The Matrix and elsewhere divergent interpretations of these theories has since gained widespread circulation in the mainstream, amplified by social media and weaponised by those who turn them to their advantage.¹⁶⁰ When Latour asks has Discipline and Punish become bedtime reading of those at the US National Security Agency, he has a point!¹⁶¹ By this point in time, one might suggest, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, the cat out of the bag, the fox out of the hole and it is too late to stop the rot.

Lacan was a towering presence, not only in his own mind, influencing the direction taken by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, post-structuralists who, if their obituaries are anything to go by, have become equally, if not more famous than their predecessor. Post-structuralists are, or were, disruptors of social order, whose aim was to break the carapace of harmony and order of structuralist theory, by questioning its basic assumptions. One of the most central of these is that cultural order is maintained through the operation of a regular system of binary oppositions implicit in language that provide social stability and meaning and identity for individuals. Most provocatively Jacques Derrida questioned the very basis of the famous dictum from John, “In the beginning was the Word” to argue from de Saussure, that difference is primary, given that the meaning of a signifier can only be located in the system of differences comprising the language system. By means of the neologism differance, Derrida argued that all meaning is ultimately indeterminate and uncertain in being constantly deferred. This idea owes its provenance to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who had also argued that desire is not simply an individual relation between a subject and the object of desire but rather is a social relation.

Derrida demonstrated the power inscribed in logocentrism which consistently privileges one term of a binary opposition over another; of mental ideas over writing; of phallogocentrism, a discourse that consistently privileges the male over the female; and finally, carnophallogocentrism, which summons attention to what he believed to be the most pernicious boundary erected between humans and those others we corrall under the blanket term “animal”. Those who proclaim identity politics turn Derrida around because his aim was first and foremost concerned with developing an ethics of responsibility as opposed to a baleful rhetoric of blame. The irony is that because of his acute awareness of the antagonism it creates, his entire project was based on deconstructing the very notion of identity.

Derrida was a profoundly moral thinker who sought to show how power operates through language in an unquestioned way to elevate some above others who are objectified. In place of identity he sought out an impossible position beyond labels, describing himself as neither human nor animal but as an “animot”, to argue the importance of attending to the singularity of the one we have before us, whether this is a person, or the cat that shared his space. The artist Patricia Piccinini perhaps best realises Derrida’s vision of the animot through her fleshly hybrid creations. By raising the “question of the animal” Derrida thus added a new dimension to a subject that had up until then been governed by utilitarian and deontological thinking.

Daniel Miller is annoyed by proponents of intersectionality and critical race theory, who claim the superiority of marginalised identities in the name of Foucault. He argues that the “pseudo-Foucault” they construct is the antithesis of the real Foucault, whose task was not to establish a game of victimhood and persecution but rather, to trace the genealogy of power. While acknowledging Foucault’s capacity for subversion, Miller (2020) points out in a splenetic retort that Foucault never argued that women, people of colour or of trans-identifying activists who have suffered historically under the boot of white male chauvinism should be lauded, or indeed that the successors of the privileged should be pilloried. Miller notes that where the real Foucault adopted a neutral stance by analysing how the categorisation and labelling of perverse identities enhanced the power of the emergent profession of psychiatry, the pseudo-Foucault in contrast employs discourse as a strategy of power.

A student of Althusser, rather than subsuming politics, religion, education and so on into a global ideology associated with a state apparatus, Foucault employed the more mobile and decentralised concept of discourse to argue that power is imbricated in medical, psychiatric, penal and neoliberal discourses amongst many others, Like Foucault did not theorise racial or gender identities as given by nature but as constructed by power. For instance in the History of Sexuality (1978) he mentions that the notion of a fixed stable (totalised) identity of the homosexual was first developed by psychiatrists in the early modern period and that such explanations enabled psychiatrists to extend their power over criminologists in the court system and over the bodies of those whom they diagnosed. Contrary to those today who seek to develop an identity politics Foucault was suspicious of any identity which claims that it is authentic and which seeks to fill the totality of the individual.

How does Foucault’s conception of the subject compare with the Lacanian subject? Given that this question was explored by Judith Butler in “Between Freud and Foucault”, the following is partly indebted to that. As mentioned earlier, the Lacanian subject comes into being through identification with the Name-of-the-Father and installation of the ego-ideal which, creates a new tier of self-awareness that enables reflection on the self as an object. By means of this identification the subject is produced at the cost of the repression of forbidden pleasures which henceforth proliferate through the activity of unconscious processes. The Lacanian subject is never fully constituted by the law because of the persistence of this psychic remainder that continues to resist normalization, although it lacks the means to re-articulate the symbolic demand by which the subject is constituted (89, 96-97).

Foucault emphasised the idea of productivity in the formation of the subject that is brought into being and produced by the law. Similar to Lacan he does not conceive of power as an external force that presses down on a pre-given individual but rather through subjectivation, the subject comes into being and is simultaneously subjected to power. Discourses that furnish identities such as “Catholic”, “pupil”, “prisoner”, “patient” or “homosexual”, are totalising in their aim to construct and to fill their subject according to the prescribed model.¹⁶² Foucault reverses the Catholic theologian Thomas Acquinas’ depiction of the soul as a prisoner chained to the body, to argue instead that the body is the prisoner of a “soul” constructed by discourse, whose primarily effects are on the body whose excesses must be reined-in and shaped to conform to the image of the model.

A major difference between Foucault and Lacan is that the latter’s concepts of Imaginary, Real, jouissance and object a are entirely missing. Butler describes Foucault’s conception of the “soul” as a psychic identity that, “constitutes a more profound captivity than that of enclosure within the physical walls of the prison” (Butler, 197: 83-84). She interrogates Foucault’s argument for the docility of the body in Discipline and Punish, whereby the “soul” acts as a normative ideal according to which the body is “produced” and “stamped through power”, trained, shaped and invested according to an “historically specific” imaginary ideal. She mentions that Foucault once stated that it is only through the destruction and disappearance of the body that the “dissociated unity” of the subject comes into being (90). While I can appreciate that the aim of culture is to make the body docile or receptive to its demands, from a psychoanalytic view it also makes the body intelligible. One can also appreciate that a fundamental dimension of experience is lost as the relation to the body is no longer direct or Imaginary but Symbolic, but to my mind it seems to be going a bit too far to say that the body is destroyed.

Foucault’s account differs markedly from Lacan in relation to resistance. Butler questions the Lacanian conception of resistance as that which can undermine symbolic authority but which lacks the ability to re-articulate the symbolic law that constitutes the subject (Butler, 1997: 88-89). While acknowledging that there are “elements in Foucault” of something approaching this explanation, where a bodily remainder persists in the form of an absence or “constitutive loss” that might return as a “non-normalizable wildness” (92), she accepts that Foucault mostly conceptualizes resistance as an effect of power that subverts itself. This occurs because the subject is never fully produced in its totality but on multiple occasions. Butler describes for instance how “exhausting” it is for the “out” homosexual to constantly fend off demands from friends and foes alike that, “you are that and only that” (93). These repeated attempts to produce the totalised subject allow for the possibility of repetitions that fail to realise their aim and instead lead to the creation of a “reverse discourse”. It is from this that the subject gains its ‘inadvertently enabling” power.

In Foucault’s later work there is no resistance that is outside the law, resistance which arises as an effect of the very power it seeks to oppose. Where Lacan attributes power to the symbolic domain and resistance to the imaginary, for Foucault the symbolic realm consists of relations of power and resistance as an effect of power, such that the symbolic produces the possibilities for its own subversion (99). The symbolic realm theorised by Lacan is monolithic by comparison with Foucault’s conception of power as multiform, sinuous and conflictual, where the law can undo itself through resignification and subjectively is continuously rearticulated and remade, where the, “dependency of the subject on reiteration for coherence may constitute the subject’s incoherence”. (99).

Butler notes that in his later interviews Foucault drew attention to the response of the State to singular and injured identities, noting that the more specific the identity the more totalised it became as a result of the demand for specificity and that;

“Because for Foucault the disciplinary apparatus of the State operates through the totalised production of individuals and because the totalization of this individual extends the jurisdiction of the state (i.e. by transforming individuals into subjects of the state, Foucault will call for a remaking of subjectivity beyond the bounds of the juridical law” (100)

For Butler, taken this way, what is known as identity politics is produced by a state that can only recognize and grant rights to subjects that are totalised with respect to a particular identity (100). She refers to Foucault (1982), where he does not formulate resistance as the release of a repressed subjectivity, but for a radical response, involving the refusal to be constituted in this totalizing manner. Butler demurs, asking questioning the extent to which it will be easy to throw off the totalised identities linked to the disciplinary apparatus of the state?

From the above, discourses create the subjectivities they regulate and frame possibilities for resistance, as evidenced by the myriad schemes engaged in by those subjugated by power to evade it. Most relevant in relation to consumption is Foucault’s later work, where amongst others, he discussed the influence of the Chicago School economist Ernest Becker, in forging a neoliberal governmentality centred around a vision of the individual wedded to the logic of homo economicus who identifies as a commodity and as an entrepreneur of themselves. Becker illustrated his point with several examples, arguing for instance that education made good sense financially for people of colour, that parents who prudently invest in their children can rely on them in their own age and that criminal behaviour is responsive to manipulation of the costs and benefits involved. Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism based on Gary Becker’s conception of the subject as an agent who maximises their utility, acting as ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’. While later I discuss the case of “Sammy”, a learning-disabled individual who is presumed to possess the competency of homo economicus, others have since argued that Becker’s formulation of the neoliberal subject is too narrow and that the conception of the entrepreneur should be broadened to account for a multiplicity of relations, including for instance, the non-calculative “leap of faith” entered into by those who earn a precarious living in the creative industries (Christiaens, 2020).¹⁶³

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¹ Arrow, K.J & F.H. Hahn (1971). General competitive analysis, San-Fransico: Holden-Day.

² See also Simonson et al. (2004) and Yoon et al. (2013) for related studies.

³ See for instance, Karni, A. & L. Broadwater, (2025). Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA mean girls, a former used car salesman, a Florida NEPO baby, and a man with rats in his walls broke congress, NY & London: Penguin, Randomhouse.

⁴ Krouse, (1982: 443).

⁵ Krouse, (1982: 448)

⁶ Krouse, (1982: 444).

⁷ Krouse, (1982: 449).

⁸ O’Donoghue & Rabin, (2003)

⁹ Bettman, Luce and Payne, (1998).

¹⁰ Ariely et al. (2003).

¹¹ See Vlaev, (2007) in relation to contextual effects and Rodway et al., (2012) in relation to the middle option.

¹² Lowenstein et al., (2003).

¹³ Sunstein & Thaler, (2008).

¹⁴ O’Donoghue & Rabin, (2003).

¹⁵ While some of his original research has come under scrutiny much of Arielly (2009) provides useful summaries and examples to illustrate how marketers can take advantage of relativity or context framing (ch. 1), anchoring (ch. 2), the actual cost of “zero cost” offerings (ch. 3), our lack of self-control (ch. 5), why we overvalue what we own (ch. 6), or like to keep our options open (ch.7), why we get what we expect (ch. 8), and the general belief that expensive = good (ch. 9).

¹⁶ Thaler & Sunstein, (2003).

¹⁷ Camerer, Issacharoff, Loewenstein, O’Donoghue, & Rabin, (2003).

¹⁸ Loewenstein and Haisley, (2007).

¹⁹ Sunstein, (2014).

²⁰ Foucault, (2008, Seminar of 28th March, 1979, 269).

21 See, Watson, Helen, (2014). Baby used in notorious fear experiment is lost no more. New Scientist, 1st October.

²² Kreshel, (1990, 50).

²³ Ibid., 53.

²⁴ See for example Underhill, P. (2009). Why we buy: the science of shopping, Ny, London: Simon & Schuster.

²⁵ Asch, (1951; 1955; 1956).

²⁶ Reicher & Haslam, (2011), 168.

²⁷ Browning, (1998), 71.

²⁸ Ibid. 87.

²⁹ Ibid., 72.

³⁰ See for example, Pyszczynski, et al. (1999), Jeff Greenberg offers a readable summary in Greenberg, (2020). This mortal coil. Aeon.

³¹ Swift, A. (2013), Majority in US continue to believe JFK killed in a conspiracy. Gallup News. https://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-killed-conspiracy.aspx, Brenan, M. (2023). Decades later, most Americans doubt lone gunman killed JFK. Gallup News, https://news.gallup.com/poll/514310/decades-later-americans-doubt-lone-gunman-killed-jfk.aspx

³² Pasquini, G.; A. Spencer, A. Tyson & G. Funk, (2023). Why some Americans do not see urgency on Climate Change. Pew Research Center, 9th Aug. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/08/09/why-some-americans-do-not-see-urgency-on-climate-change/

³³ See Holoyda, (2022). B.J. (2022). QAnon: A Modern Conspiracy Theory and the Assessment of Its Believers. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, AAPL.210053-21; DOI: https://doi.org/10.29158/JAAPL.210053-21 See also, Huff, I. (2022). QAnon beliefs have increased since 2021 as Americans are less likely to reject conspiracies, PRRI, 24th June. https://www.prri.org/spotlight/qanon-beliefs-have-increased-since-2021-as-americans-are-less-likely-to-reject-conspiracies/

³⁴ See van Prooijen, (2017).

³⁵ Joe Biden in 2019 reputedly told an audience of miners in Derry, New Hampshire; “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!” His comment was reported to have met with silence from the audience. Kelly, A. (2019). Biden tells coal miners to “learn to code”, 31st Dec. Changing America. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/476391-biden-tells-coal-miners-to-learn-to-code/ According to Newsweek he said, "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way," Source. Crowley, James, (2019). Biden Suggests Coal Miners Learn to Code To Be Prepared for 'Jobs of the Future', Newsweek, 31st Dec. https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-new-hampshire-campaign-code-1479913

³⁶ Blistein, J. (2025). Accused rapist, sex trafficker Andrew Tate allowed to leave Romania for US. Rolling Stone, 27th Feb.

³⁷ Sharkey, K. (2025). Woman wins civil rape case against Conor McGregor, BBC, 22nd November. Quinn, Q. & Duggan, K. (2025). Donald Trump, Conor McGregor praise each other’s work ethics during St Patrick’s Day meeting at the White House. The Irish Times, 17th March.

³⁸ Kanet, R.E. (2024).Moscow and the World: From Soviet Active Measures to Russian Information Warfare. Aplied Cybersecurity and Internet Governance, 3(1), 34-57.

³⁹ See Krouse, (2021).

⁴⁰ Luscombe, R. (2024). Ron deSantis condemned as sociology removed as core college class. The Guardian, 26th January.

⁴¹ With respect to reaction to what happened at CCCS, see Curtis, P.(2002). Cultural elite express opposition to Birmingham closure. The Guardian, 18th July. See also, The Guardian (2002). Full Text of Letter, 18th July. A similar purge was conducted of Critical Management Studies at the University of Leicester. See ULSB (2025). A site about the purge of Critical Management Studies and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. See also, amongst others, Halford, S. (2021). BSA President writes to Leicester VC on the proposed closure of Critical Management Studies and Political Economy. Everyday Society, 11th May.

⁴² Williamson, (1991), Preface. This is a necessary part of the academic game that Critical academics must engage in if they are to secure their employment and gain promotion. A more unsavoury element is added in the lack of collegiality of a minority who gloat at their own success and at the misfortune of their colleagues. There can be a degree of hypocrisy involved as at during strike action in pursuit of better working conditions and less casualisation, to my knowledge, at least one ‘Critical’ academic crossed a Union picket line to work.

⁴³ See for instance, Wallimann (1981). One might object that Marx is incorrect to view production as a uniquely human activity. Byron counters, that humans produce even when they are free from need (Byron, 2016, 381). Derrida (2008) offers a trenchant criticism of the erection of such boundaries between humans and those other species they call animals. In particular, he seeks to deconstruct the foundation of the Lacanian – and by implication Marxian – subject who is presumed to be unique amongst animals in having capacities for language, simulation and dissimulation.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 385.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 389.

⁴⁶ Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, from Hirst, (1979), In Eagleton, (1996: 118).

⁴⁷ Murray, (2002, 436).

⁴⁸ A point made well by Baudrillard in Consumer Society.

⁴⁹ The idea of the American Dream has changed radically over time and it is noteworthy that one hundred years ago it signified the dream of equality, justice and democracy, which is virtually the opposite of the individualistic concern with wealth and success that it is taken for today. The version of the dream peddled in the film only came about in the 1930s following James Truslow Adams (1931) lamentation about the growing materialism of American society (Churchwell, 2018).

⁵⁰ Benjamin’s ideas are developed by Brown (2003) who coined the concept of retromarketing. See also MacLaran & Brown, (2005) for a discussion of the phantasmagoric aspect of consumer malls in the late modern era.

⁵¹ McDonagh & Brereton, (2010). Thankfully this narrative has since been challenged, particularly since Blue Planet II.

⁵² See under, Marx & Engels, (1974 [1845-1846]): From Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook B. The Illusion of the Epoch.

⁵³ Marx & Engels, (1845-46) in Eagleton, 1994, 24).

⁵⁴ Small Objects of Desire: The Deodorant (BBC2 TV series 1990-1993).

⁵⁵ The Guardian, 5th November 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2019/nov/05/grenfell-fire-victims-lacked-common-sense-jacob-rees-mogg-suggests-video

⁵⁶ Poulantzas, 1973 in Eagleton, (1994, 132).

⁵⁷ Marx, (1976, 83).

⁵⁸ A study of the grading of school essays showed stark differences in grades between children of civil servants, whose essays were rated as “brilliant”, those of the petty-bourgeois as “pedestrian” or “solid”; finally working class children rated as “derivative” and “unoriginal” (Bourdieu, 1984, 43, in Fowler, 2011). Bourdieu explains that the teachers would have been horrified if they had been accused of deliberately classifying essays by the class origins of those who submitted them. James (2015) conducted some interesting research on this in the UK.

⁵⁹ Althusser, (1971) in Eagleton, 1994, 105).

⁶⁰ See Hall (1985, 102).

⁶¹ Hirst, (1979) in Eagleton, (1996, 121).

⁶² Williamson, (1978, 40).

⁶³ Ibid., 63.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 65.

⁶⁵ Williamson, (1978, 47). Italics in original

⁶⁶ See for example, Ranciere,

⁶⁷ The term sub-culture was also criticized for being too narrow as it envisages a subaltern group with a common identity (Kozinets, 2001.)

⁶⁸ Mazzucato, (2019, 108-109).

⁶⁹ The source for this section is largely Grundrisse, Notebook V.

⁷⁰ Facebook , Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

⁷¹ Frey, C.B. & M. Osborne (2013). The future of employment; How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? Oxford University workshop on, ‘Machines and Employment’. See also, Osborne, M. & C.B Frey (2018), Automation and the future of work. Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment. https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/future-of-employment.pdf. Accessed August 2019.

⁷² Brin, Sergey (2017) Founder’s Letter. https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2017/index.html

⁷³ See for example, Kissinger, H.A.; C Mundie and E. Schmidt (2024). Genesis: Artificial intelligence, hope and the human spirit, John Murray Press

⁷⁴ In the UK, pollsters noted that while posts on Twitter seemed to indicate that Britain was in ‘open rebellion’, population polling found that 93% of the population supported the initial lockdown in March 2020 and 83% endorsed later measures imposed in September of that year. One of the main criticisms of the later imposition was that it didn’t go far enough. Source: Curtis, C. (2020). Only the “loud minority’ oppose lockdown restrictions, YouGov. 25th September.

⁷⁵ Tyson, A. & B. Kennedy, (2024). Public trust in science and views on their role in policy making. Pew Research Center, 14th November.

⁷⁶ Many are concerned about the Trump administration’s removal of State oversight of Artificial Intelligence programmes. However, as Adamala, K.P. et al. (2024) point out, there are risks on a number of fronts. They describe how RNA and DNA are made up of ‘right-handed’ nucleotides and proteins from ‘left-handed’ amino acids. Their paper reports that, ‘driven by curiosity some researchers had begun work towards creating reversible lifeforms composed entirely of mirror-image biological molecules’, a development they argue constitutes ‘unprecedented and largely overlooked risks’.

⁷⁷ Spector, T. (2024). Food for life, NY: Vintage, Van Tulleken, C. (2023). Ultra-processed people: why do we all eat stuff that isn’t food and why can’t we stop? Cornerstone Press.

⁷⁸ Government Chemist, (2025). Food security report 2024. UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 14th January. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-food-security-report-2024-published Cattle from Britain began to suffer from BSE in 1986 and by the late 1990s medics became aware of an increasing number of infections and deaths in the UK population. See Will, R.G. et al. (1996). A new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the UK. The Lancet, 347(9006), 921 - 925

⁷⁹ See for instance, Laing, T. (2025). Briefing note. Civil resilience and UK preparedness for food system shocks. UK Research and Innovation. https://www.agrifood4netzero.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Tim-Lang-Civil-Resilience-Briefing.pdf

⁸⁰ See for instance, MacAulay et al. (2023).

⁸¹ See Dror et al., (2011).

⁸² Rasmusen & Posner, (2000:=, 382).

⁸³ Ibid,, 382

⁸⁴ There have been occasional articles, for instance a rare invited article in the Journal of Consumer Research by Dean McCannell (2002) who developed a psychoanalytic explanation of tourism and also the special edition of Marketing Theory edited by Cluley and Desmond (2015).

⁸⁵ Freud note to BBC in advance of broadcast, December 7th, 1938, p. 1. Sigmund Freud: Conflict & Culture From the Individual to Society, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/freud/freud03a.html

⁸⁶ However much is owed to Bowlby who changed the basis of Freud’s explanation from instinctual emotional drives to the attachment relation between mother and child.

⁸⁷ See Freud (1930) Civilization and its discontents.

⁸⁸ See for instance, Williams & Poehlman, 2017).

⁸⁹ By comparison to supraliminal stimuli that we see all around us but may not notice, sub-liminal stimuli pass below the limen of consciousness. A meta-analysis by Trappey (1996) cites more than ten papers on subliminal advertising published in marketing journals.

⁹⁰ See for example Dichter, (1960, 105) with respect to textiles.

⁹¹ Nisbett & Wilson, (1977).

⁹² See Bargh, (2002).

⁹³ McFerran et al., (2010).

⁹⁴ In the study by Fitzsimons et al. (2008) reported that individuals primed with Apple logos behaved more creatively than those primed with an IBM logo.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 136.

⁹⁶ References here are from Parkin, (2010, pp. 140, 141).

⁹⁷ Krummeich & Lahm, (2010, 161).

⁹⁸ Freud, (1922).

⁹⁹ Bronfenbrenner, (1960, 17).

¹⁰⁰ The butcher’s pretty wife.

¹⁰¹ Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, (1913, 123-128).

¹⁰² For me, these psychoanalytically informed explanations provide a more satisfactory account of what Festinger called cognitive dissonance. The fundamental driver is the preservation of harmony and the rejection of threats to one’s world-view.

¹⁰³ Freud, (1922) Part II.

¹⁰⁴ The imaginary and emotional nature of identification has the effect that group members are virtually impervious to rational argument. The MAGA movement is a good example, deflecting mention of the leader’s grotesque narcissism, endemic lying, brutish incivility towards others and sexual violence towards women. The oft-quoted meme, “He could murder somebody and I’d still support him”, if true, illustrates a abandonment of self to the other.

¹⁰⁵ David Riesman wrote that, “any sufficiently large society will throw up a slate of psychological types varied enough to suggest possibilities in many different directions’ (Riesman, Preface to the 1961 edition, 2020: xxxviii).

¹⁰⁶ For example, in their study of fashion discourse, Thompson & Haytko, (1997, 17-18) describe two of their participants Hanna and Brandon as drawing from two different discourses on fashion as story lines to articulate their sense of identity, where Brandon “assumes a moralistic inner-directed stance” by comparison to Hanna, for whom high-fashion is “an idealised dream world”.

¹⁰⁷ Haslam, (2011) argues that the anal character has since, “been recycled into a number of smaller but better ones”, in relation to authoritarianism, conscientiousness, detail focus, disgust sensitivity, hoarding, obsessive–compulsive behaviour.

¹⁰⁸ See for example Lasch, 1979: Brennan, 1993; Twenge et al. (2014) – there are many more!

¹⁰⁹ Fromm, (1976holt). David Riesman separately identified similar changes in social character. The empirical study by Riesman et al. (1961) identified a shift from an “inner-directed’ character guided by an internal gyroscope, to a vacillating chameleon-like and malleable ‘other-directed’ character, who was open to influence of consumerism.

¹¹⁰ See as one example, Avery, J. & R. Greenwald, (2023). A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand. Harvard Business Review, May-June. The authors argue that to market oneself as a brand requires an audit one’s social and cultural capital and the projection of a sense of personal distinctiveness in relation to the competition based on market research, development of a personal narrative and finally, embody your brand. The authors caution that, “In casual conversations, at parties, in job interviews, people are forming opinions about you whether you like it or not, and consciously or subconsciously, you’re advertising yourself.”

¹¹¹ Dichter (1960: ch. 13, 253).

¹¹² Dichter, (1960: ch. 5, esp. 85, 86).

¹¹³ In one example he discusses how to persuade Brazilian women to abandon traditional sanitary practices they felt were ‘good enough’ (Dichter, 1960, 206).

¹¹⁴ Dichter, (1960: ch. 8, 169).

¹¹⁵ See Ewen, (1998) on Bernays and Boorstin, ([1962], 1992) on the idea of pseudo-events. In the political sphere such events which are unfortunately widespread are referred to as astroturf politics.

¹¹⁶ References in this paragraph to Verhaeghe, (2012, 177-180).

¹¹⁷ Klein, (2023).

¹¹⁸ Klein, (2024, 322).

¹¹⁹ The father does not have to be a real, physical presence.

¹²⁰ Butler, (1997, 86).

¹²¹ Fink, (1997, ch.8 (esp. 145-160)

¹²² Fink, 1997, ch.8 (esp. 130, 135-140).

¹²³ De Lede et al., (2013).

¹²⁴ For further complexity see also p. 94, where she discusses possibilities for resignification, then asking from a psychoanalytic perspective, whether resistance to a subjectivating power can be derived from what is “in” or “of” discourse?” (ibid., 94).

¹²⁵ There is a lot going on here where Lacan is at his most enigmatic. For instance, when stating that “language is the murder of the thing”, Lacan is reiterating Kojève’s point that the moment one utters a signifier such as say ‘lion’, one invents it in one’s imagination whilst simultaneously abolishing it as a tangible thing at the same time. Say elephants says Lacan and, there is a whole herd in the room, present in its absence. In this respect, to say that language is the manifestation of the negativity of the subject that imposes itself by negating the ‘real’ means that it works by manifesting what is not. As Kojève wrote, it presents the absence of a reality and thus manifests the disappearing “nothing” that is the subject of desire. The subject speaks in language whilst at the same time abolishing itself there, in just the way that the lion or dog are abolished. To say “I” is to say “I am nothing, or I am dead, or I am pure non-existent negativity”. in other words, the subject of the enunciation disappears by appearing in the subject of the enoncé, which presents the subject in its absence. Source: (Borch-Jacobsen & Brick, (1989: esp. 93)

¹²⁶ Dali dressed the shop window of the Bonwit Teller department store on fifth Avenue, New York in 1936, commenting, By way of demonstration, I accepted an offer to dress one of the windows of Bonwit-Teller’s shop with a surrealist display. I used a manikin whose head was made of red roses and who had fingernails of ermine fur. On a table, a telephone transformed into a lobster; hanging on a chair, my famous “aphrodisiac coat” (Othman, 2022: 42-42). While I could not trace this particular image, similar ones are located at Worsinger Photo, Museum of the

City of New York, see https://collections.mcny.org/Collection/-Surrealist-window-at-Bonwit-Teller---2F34089IVN1.html

¹²⁷ Butler, (1997, 122).

¹²⁸ Lacan, J. (1971). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII 1970-1971. On a discourse that might not be a semblance, Cormac Gallagher (trans.), Lacan in Ireland. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/translations/seminars/

¹²⁹ Lacan, (1969), Television, 3rd December, 107. By this I take it that he is referring to a monstrous image of the obscene master such as that embodied by Goya in Saturn Devouring his Son. For real-life comparisons the ‘usual suspects’ are Stalin and Mao; Putin and Ping might just squeeze in – but Trump is arguably nothing more than a simulacrum of the obscene father. There are frequent complaints today in the “West” that we lack “strong government”, that ‘democracy isn’t working’ and in response there are plenty of candidates who assert that they will make the country ‘great’ again – as if it was ever great in the first place – without providing any plan as to how this will be achieved.

¹³⁰ Lacan, J. Seminar of 1969-1970: L’envers de psychanalyse, 110.

¹³¹ Gallese & Goldman, (1998).

¹³² See for example, McGuigan, et al. (2011).

¹³³ Girard, (1979).

¹³⁴ Klein, N. (2024). Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world, London & NY: Penguin.

¹³⁵ Girard, (1961).

¹³⁶ See for example Jack Jones’ account of how Mark Chapman’s adulation turned to hatred against his model, John Lennon. Jones, J. (1993). Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon, London: Virgin Books.

¹³⁷ Digital, Culture, Media, Sport Committee, (2022). Influencer culture: Lights, camera, inaction. Report, together with formal minutes relating to the report, Twelfth Report of Session 2021-2022: House of Commons, 9th May, pp. 9-10.

¹³⁸ Feloni, Richard, (2014). Peter Thiel explains how an esoteric philosophy book shaped his worldview. Business Insider, 10th November. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-rene-girards-influence-2014-11.

¹³⁹ Shullenberger, G. (2016). Mimesis, violence and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection, Cyborgology, 13th August. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/08/13/mimesis-violence-and-facebook-peter-thiels-french-connection-full-essay/

¹⁴⁰ Shullenberg, G. (2016). Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection (Full Essay), Cyborgology, 13th August.

¹⁴¹ See Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation, London & NY: Penguin.

¹⁴² See for example, Dumouchel (2012) critique of rationality of homo economicus.

¹⁴³ Channel 4, (2011). Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, UK.

¹⁴⁴ Nugent, C. (2024). Argentina’s poverty rate soars above 50% under Javier Millei. Financial Times, 26th September. Initial report from Torcuato Di Tella University. 

¹⁴⁵ Rousseau defined amour propre from amour de soi, in the Second Discourse, on the Origins of Inequality among Men (1755),

¹⁴⁶ Mishra points out in relation to the infamous adage, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, imperialists had earlier abrogated to themselves the God-given power to mould their colonies and the people who lived in them to their own image, which might have required some heads to be chopped off (252). Later sacrifices in the name of progress were made by Hitler, Stalin and Mao (Mishra, 2017, 252).

¹⁴⁷ Fitzpatrick, Sheila, (2025). Not corrupt enough, London Review of Books, 20th March, 15-18. Books reviewed by Sergey Radchenko, To run the world: the Kremlin’s Cold War bid for global power, Cambridge University Press; Vladislav Zubok, The world of the Cold War 1945-1991, Pelican.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., 17.

¹⁴⁹ Ibid., 18.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid., 18. Russian Media Monitor formed by Julia Davis provides a window into the truly unhinged world of Russian broadcaster RT, which since February 2022 has featured astonishing outbursts of hubristic hatred directed against the West from “anchors” Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Solovyov. From a Girardian perspective their frequent calls for nuclear Armageddon no longer focus on the object but entirely on the destruction of the model, imagined as some fantasy of an evil “West”.

¹⁵¹ Girard & Grayson, (2016).

¹⁵² This happens early on when Neo stuffs his illegal software into a hollowed out copy of the book.

¹⁵³ Italics in original.

¹⁵⁴ Latour, (2004), 227.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid.: 228.

¹⁵⁶ Ibid.: 229.

¹⁵⁷ For instance, a dangerous lie peddled amongst others by Elon Musk and American Vice-President JD Vance, is that the UK has jailed thousands of “free speech’ activists compared to Russia, which jailed just four hundred. As revealed by investigators numbers were falsified (there were not thousands involved in the UK but hundreds); the equivalence was false (In the UK one can be jailed for violent threats against those of a different ethnicity or gender; in Russia one can be jailed for promoting homosexuality, speaking against the war in Ukraine, or speaking against the State. Harford, T. (2025). More or less, BBC Radio 4, 19th March. In general terms pertaining to freedom, in 2025 Freedom House, a US based independent body scored the UK 92, against 12 for the Russian Federation and -1 for Russian Occoupied Ukraine. The USA scored 84.

¹⁵⁸ Maxwell, S.E.; M.Y. Lau & G.S. Howard, (2015). Is Psychology Suffering From a Replication Crisis?

What Does “Failure to Replicate” Really Mean? American Psychologist, vol. 70(6): 487-498. See also email from Daniel Kahneman to colleagues. https://www.nature.com/news/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/suppinfoFile/Kahneman%20Letter.pdf

¹⁵⁹ Statista, (2025). Educational attainment distribution in the United States from 1960 to 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/

¹⁶⁰ 38% of the one million associate degrees gained in 2021-2022 took liberal arts and 11% business, while liberal arts did not feature in the two million bachelor’s degrees awarded business accounted for 19% and social science and history 7%. National Center for Education Statistics, (2025). Most common undergraduate fields of study 2021-2022. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=37

¹⁶¹ Latour, (2004: 228).

¹⁶² The process seems obvious when one admits that one is not a “pupil” before one goes to school, nor is one a “prisoner” before one is incarcerated, although one may very well be constituted as a Catholic a few days after birth.

¹⁶³ The notion of leap of faith seems convincing also in the legions of self-branded “personalities” and “influencers” that populate Instagram and Tiktok. One amongst tens of thousands, each is sustained to cling to their precarious situation by succumbing to the tantalising dream that they are special and will be the one who makes it. On the other side of the coin are the casualties; at time of writing the UK Labour Government declared the need to address a crisis where 8% of those of working age, many of them young, were on long term “incapacity” benefit