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The news media spectacle of the Credit crisis, portrays our socially produced institutions of Banking Conglomerates and Federal Banks appearing as ‘god like personalities controlling our lives without reason or accountability’. Richard Seymour traces a corresponding spectacularising and alienating representation of Capitalisms inherent cyclical logic of wealth obliteration.


The ‘credit crunch’ miniseries has been characterized by one shocking plot twist after another. Each complication in the plot has arisen ex nihilo, with no history, roots or context to speak of. The template for such coverage is provided by the genre of virological outbreak: the malady strikes at random, demanding new industry wide culls, as the pathogen mutates and finds unanticipated vectors. The heady drama of stock market fluctuations, meanwhile, is driven by a single mysterious character known as ‘the investor’. He is confident today, shaken tomorrow, fleeing with his savings (and yours) the next day. All that is offered by way of motivation for such behaviour is the presumed ‘animal spirits’ that disrupt the calculus of said investor.


The reification of socially produced institutions is such that, in the news media spectacle, we experience them as god-like personalities controlling our lives without reason or accountability. One of the great challenges that socialist activists have experienced in trying to rouse resistance to the loss of jobs and livelihoods is that the very idea of ‘resisting the recession’ can seem incoherent in light of its spectacular autonomy.


There is also a process of forgetting built into the dramaturgy. The obliteration of wealth is a routine feature of capitalism, whether in the form of planned obsolescence or regular systemic contractions. Homes are abandoned and their contents left in the skip, goods left unsold and therefore unused, factories and office space abandoned, organic capital left to rust: all of it so much material for the furnace of ‘creative destruction’.


Admittedly, the scale of the current crisis has few precedents. For example, in a single day in September 2008, the New York Stock Exchange lost $1 trillion. To put this in perspective, that was equivalent to a week’s work by the entire population of the planet. And the ferocity of the wipe-out has continued unabated. By March 2009, it was estimated that approximately 45% of the world’s wealth had been destroyed. The crisis has consumed not merely jobs and incomes, but entire industries. Mass foreclosures have produced a new social category in the United States: the ‘economic homeless’, those who are suddenly forced to live with family, or in refuges, because of unemployment. Food lines have sprung up across America, where starving supplicants can expect to wait for hours to get fed. In the richest state in the world, 32 million people depend on food stamps.


Even so, the logic of news production is to fragment and particularise, to denude events of context. The fact that the lineaments of today’s economic meltdown have been prefigured many times over is no concern of the anchor, nor must it be allowed to disrupt his expression of grim orgasm as he narrates the latest shocking events.


Yet, if the function of the news media is to so bracket public memory that every crisis is experienced as a novelty, an exogenous shock to an otherwise stable profit system, then the cultural logic of disaster capitalism is that there is only one appropriate response to catastrophe: aestheticize it. We are used to a genus of cinematic production in which cataclysm is an adventure, an opportunity to shed fickle attachments to stuff and experience authenticity, as well as a social lubricant and a chance to make up with estranged relations. However, to reduce this tendency to the subcategory of disaster films would be to miss the point. Such eschatological tendencies pervade the culture industry.


Think of the range of supposedly ‘anti-consumerist’ films sold to us in alluring DVD format by Dreamworks, 21st Century Fox, and Pixar, among others. David Fincher’s pop-Heideggerian film, Fight Club, ostensibly challenges corporate culture. It does so by validating a rugged masculinism, in which the nameless antihero abandons the comforts of life, blows up his flat with all his belongings, and goes to live with his alter ego, Tyler Durden, in an abandoned house. He sets up fight clubs, and the homoerotic violence instils in him a sense of authenticity and a rage against emasculating corporate culture.


Tyler Durden explains: “We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.” The clubs become the basis of an underground insurgency that, rather than seeking to socialise wealth, sets out to destroy it, to create chaos. Again, Durden explains the motive of the rebels: “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”


The film reaches a euphoric climax with the implosion of the banking system – represented on-screen by two towers exploding in flames and collapsing, as the heroes spectate. In Fight Club, the critique of consumerism comes from the right. The longing for an adventure, for a catastrophe like the Great War, recalls the enthusiasm with which European rightists met that war. The idea that a life and death struggle, or an economic depression, would restore lost integrity is ironically one of the most commonplace tropes of bourgeois culture. You only have to recall the forlorn hope placed in a renewed civic nationalism in America after 9/11, and the relief expressed by commentators as diverse as David Brooks and George Packer, that an era of decadence was at last at an end.


Also generally included in the film buff’s top ten anti-consumerist films is the hylozoistic fantasy that is Sam Mendes’ American Beauty. Instead of the barbarian virtues of the European right, this film expresses the individualist ethics of hippy capitalism. Lester, an alienated middle class American male, knowingly relates his fate from the vantage point of the afterlife: his long death of the soul, and the rediscovery life through the loss of his job. Partially, this rejuvenation takes the form of a reclaimed masculinity, long confiscated by his corporate masters and his shrewish wife. Lester re-lives his youth, and comes to realise that couches and other household goods are “just stuff”.


Despite such trite wisdom, the film expresses, or appropriates, a terrible yearning. But the spiritual solution is supplied by Ricky, the drug-dealing entrepreneur trapped in a violent, patriarchal family, who dates Lester’s daughter, Jane. In a memorable scene, Ricky shows Jane some footage of a floating plastic bag. His choked up commentary relates a sudden sensation that the bag was playing with him, and that there was “this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever.” This intangible force is the ‘beauty’ of the film, which Lester is only able to fully experience when he has been liberated from his life and body and is floating through the sky. There is no implied critique of work or accumulation, as such. Indeed, part of Lester’s liberation consists of his working as a fast food attendant, one of the most exhausting and stressful jobs in America. One is simply exhorted to change one’s relationship to job insecurity, low wage work, being fired, and ultimately losing one’s life. Don’t worry about stuff: use the force.


These, and thousands of lesser productions, are consumed for a supposed ‘anti-consumerist’ message. But a more fitting term for such films would be anti-materialist. The aesthetic appreciation of the destruction of our stuff seems to be as essential to cultural production as waste production, planned obsolescence and the cyclical obliteration of use values is embedded in capitalism. Concomitantly, the idea that people might have a collective interest in, and strategies for, defending their stuff and fighting for more, is not within the culture industry’s repertoire of conventions. In fact, for all the justified mockery of the evangelicals and their evident delight in spelling out the ineluctable and grotesque end that awaits most of humanity, it is a cultural commonplace that there is nothing we can do in the face of catastrophe other than aestheticize it. Indeed, just as in Christian eschatology, we prove ourselves equal to the catastrophe and thus worthy of redemption in the cleansed aftermath precisely by exulting in it.

Special issue: representing the crisis, right-front
Tags: consumerism, economic crisis, Richard Seymour

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