The Neoliberalist Blob

Or: what people really look like when looked at through the Glasses of Truth

This week’s blog post takes a somewhat Marxist look at the way cultural phenomena in this day and age, as markets, products and productivity, are best understood as lived realities, instead of abstract concepts that stand on their own.[1] Being your own island or your own product within a neoliberalist society seems an illusion, and the case study we employ to illustrate this analysis is John Carpenter’s film They Live. Released in cinemas in 1988, it couldn’t be described as recent, but its content seems more actual than ever. The movie opens with the drifter John Nada (Roddy Piper) arriving in Los Angeles (the media capital of the world?) in search for work. He finds employment at a construction site. One day, in an abandoned church opposite the construction site, he finds a pair of sunglasses in a box. When he puts on these sunglasses, his phenomenal conception of human beings and the world he lives in, shatters, and the noumenal reality becomes openly discernible: people are of a zombie like nature and the urban screens he observes, feed subliminal and hyper charged neoliberalist messages like ‘Conform’, ‘Work 8 Hours’, ‘Obey’, and ‘Consume’, into the urban landscape.

While Hesmondhalgh and Baker note that nowadays a ‘host of new entrants compete over the same territory, threatening to swallow the political economy whole’, They Live posits a regime in which the study of economy or political behavior seems to be excommunicated altogether; the regime’s only aim seems to be a subjugation of every societal element in order to feed the capitalist system.[2] Mayer states that in many societies ‘media production has been structured by a bureaucratic state that manages people and their institutions in order to accumulate capital, organize citizens and workers, and maintain a monopoly over the use of force and violence’.[3] The hyperbolic form of neoliberalism in They Live feeds into that concept and pays tribute to the notion that modern social structures for media production are immersed in histories of colonialism and imperialism by presenting the leaders of the regime as delegates of an alien race that want to usurp the Earth and use it as a colony for resources.[4] What else is the Occident nowadays, one might ask, than a colony for capitalist resources? A colony in which the bulk of creative labor (which Hesmondhalgh and Baker describe as those forms of labor with a distinct element of aesthetic, expressive and informational symbol making) has to dance to the tune of certain aesthetic conventions promulgated by the media mammoths.[5] To what degree does a person, living in such a society, has agency of its own? Culture, according to Deuze, is ‘both manufactured and managed: it is produced and experienced by people, in specific social and organizational contexts, with certain purposes’.[6] But, as we touched lightly upon at the beginning of this blog, the lines between products and lived realities have become increasingly blurred and the spatial and temporal boundaries for media production have been next to erased.[7] We don’t manufacture and then manage, we manufacture and manage and are being manufactured and managed at the same time. So we find it rather naïve when Deuze writes that lived experiences become similar to the aesthetic experiences of works of art and that people move form event to event, consuming and subsequently evaluating each and every event on the spot (but not necessarily reflecting on its impact).[8] Because clear discerning between objects, and to determine where media messages begin and artworks end, seems infeasible. As Mayer writes: ‘In the storm of media messages we encounter, we rarely consider where they came from, who made them, and how’.[9] We use and consume things and we put names on everything, but the exact way these products are made and how, the materials we put into our mouths, the way they were excavated and assembled; we don’t know the specific process of all that. The idea that, in this day and age, a neoliberalist product par excellence such as a pop-idol, brings out an album by the name Born This Way sec, without any irony, seems to be the highpoint of irony (but then again, who knows what Lady Gaga was thinking when she came up with that title?)

Let’s go back to They Live. John Nada takes up arms, together with a small underground revolutionist group, with the aim to destroy the source of the subliminal broadcasting. He is not depicted as a passive reflection of a certain societal structure (instead, most of the inhabitants of Los Angeles are) but as an ‘active autonomous subject resisting the influence of oppressive social forces’.[10] But the most interesting question is whether or not the glasses Nada looks through, really are the glasses of truth, or that they simply offer just another generic neoliberalist spectacle. On a meta level, something very paradoxical is going on here, because Carpenter wraps up his Marxist message in a capitalist vehicle: the science-fiction action movie.[11] What he employs could be considered a stunted form of ‘militainment’: winning consumers’ hearts and minds through popular culture.[12] In conclusion, we might say that in a neoliberalist society, there is no real distinction any more between lived realities, products, media, and human beings; they all blend in together to form an all-usurping blob. Criticism on that blob will be usurped by the dominant hegemony, or can only exist in a form that is condoned by the regime, thereby making it a little impotent a priori.

Proposition: In a neoliberalist society, the lines between lived realities, media, and human beings are erased.

A.vd.B., V.M., J.P.

Bibliography

Mark Deuze (2007), ‘Creative Industries, Convergence Culture and Media Work’, in: Media Work. Cambridge & Malden: polity, pp. 45-83

David Hesmondhalgh & Sarah Baker (2011), ‘Toward a Political Economy of Labor in the Media Industries’, in: Janet Wasko, Gragham Murdock & Helena Sousa (eds.), The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications. Blackwell Publishing, pp. 381-400.

Vicki Mayer (2013), ‘Making Media Production Visible’, in: Vicki Mayer (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Volume II: Media Production. Blackwell Publishing, 2013.

Jay Plaat (2014), ‘Digging deep with toy shovels’, as part of the course Screen Cultures. Dr. Timotheus Vermeulen & dr. Martijn Stevens, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. September-december 2014.

Filmography

They Live. John Carpenter. (1988) United States: Alive Films; Larry Franco Productions; produced by: Larry Franco; distributed by: Universal Pictures; Carolco Pictures.

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[1] Deuze 2007: 45.

[2] Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2011: 381.

[3] Mayer 2013: 3.

[4] Mayer 2013: 3.

[5] Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2011: 382.

[6] Deuze 2007: 45.

[7] Mayer 2013: 5.

[8] Deuze 2007: 46.

[9] Mayer 2013: 1.

[10] Hesmondhalgh & Baker 2011: 386.

[11] Plaat 2014: 5.

[12] Mayer 2013: 7.