adbusters and the "existential divide"

I wasn't quite a charter subscriber to Adbusters, but fairly close to it. Maybe issue 10 or so, if memory serves. I cancelled about a year ago. While it has a certain connection to some of my perennial interests (see the name of my personal blog), I just started to feel increasingly out of touch with, what was it, the tone, the tonal politics, and the plain old politics of the magazine.

Here's part of a post salvaged from my old site, just about when I wrote Adbusters to cancel out:

I've always been unsettled - in the wrong way - by the approach to politics embraced by Adbusters and the like. Seems to me to be an infinitely foreseeable adaptation of left politics to the self-help, self-fulfillment culture that marks the current tidal mark of the American experiment. Marie Antoinette-ism... What the magazine prescribes for its readership is something other than politics, I think. At base, it's a strange sort of "lifestyle" magazine. It is full of stuff like this, from the current issue...

Here in rural Telemark, Norway, my husband and I have an ancient, 100-acre farm without a road, without electricity, without running water, without a computer or mobile telephone or washing machine or CD player or remote-control carrot-dicer... without corporate products, including Barbie dolls or Nike sneakers. We have a fjord-horse to do most of the heavy farm work (and so on...)

And a subscription to Adbusters, it would seem...

Anyway, they sell the magazine at the snazzy co-op where I buy my food, and the other day I bought a copy to see if anything has changed, either about the magazine or about me or both.

Nope.

Right from the first pages - which feature a "visual essay" by Kalle Lasn, the founder and editor - I found some material that I can only classify as disturbing, symptomatic, symptomatically disturbing. Here are a few snips:

a passionate struggle for freedom is deeply embedded in the history of the western world. it still inspires us today. and it still inspires oppressed people everywhere. freedom is our great meta-meme, the crowning jewel of our civilization... but lately in our own back yard, freedom has taken a perverse, hyper-individualistic turn.

The start is not promising - that's basically a version of the "From the dawn of time, man has loved art/literature/freedom/money/sex" that I prohibit my students from using as an opening move in their essays for my classes... And the thing is, it's not just a style issue. The universal sweep of the intro (in my students' papers) tends to give on to overly-broad, unspecific, and often erroneous arguments. Here, Lasn's probably a bit too vague to be "erroneous," though the "inspires oppressed people everywhere" jive is a bit scary. In the end, though, it's the "perverse, hyper-individualistic" part that's going to cause the most problems. I'll continue:

we now drink more, do more drugs, live more promiscuously, spend more money, use up more resources, create more waste, and deliberately flaunt our wealth, power, and sexuality more than any other culture on earth.

when a modest, pious man living in a poor village a world away looks at us, what does he see?

OK. So much to say here. The first issue is obvious. "live more promiscuously?" Are you serious? Before we get to the sexual panic, we might think that Lasn is worried about our drinking and drugging because they are bad reactions to a bad situation - we are self-medicating because we are trapped in desiccating system or whatever. But the anxiety about "promiscuity" shed as a different light, retroactively, on what's come before. Pleasure-seeking itself - even pleasure-seeking that it not easily or ambiguously folded under the rubric of exploitation - is his target.

The point is confused. There just is not the connection between the two strands of his argument confuse both. There is no easy connection between drinking, sex, and the like and the despoliation of the earth, the wasting of resources. If the latter is what he is really after, then he should have chosen different examples. But that's not what he's really after. The pleasure itself is the issue.

I am far more worried about what the "modest, pious man... a world away" eats, where and how much he works, the chances for his children to thrive, and the possibility of his being shredded into bits by cluster-bombs than what the west looks like to him. Lasn's call directs us inward instead of outward in our attention - the pious guy becomes a mirror that we use to establish an ultimately aesthetic rather than political or economic vision of ourselves. This is the problem.

For lack of a better word, the argument seems painfully Christian to me. And like Christianity itself, it is characterized by a collection of a few good ideas (and some very bad ones), but a collection structured by a completely perverse hierarchy of values. It pays lip service to actual pressing issues and effects, but urges us, in the end, toward a new wardrobe, a new look, new lifestyle choices, a new and reinvigorating asceticism.

Rather than clean water for those who lack it, the most likely and immediate effect of this sort of rhetoric is to turn us from bottled to tap, and finally for once to truly taste and savor the tap water. To thank Christ or Kalle for re-enchanting our lives, purging the limpidity, and rendering the personal forcefully political.

we kill ourselves slowly, by eating too much or too little, becoming fat, or anorexic, or diabetic. physically and psychologically we whither away in our culture of collective self-absorption and material sloth. and our boundless, insatiable greed now threatens to drag the entire planet down with us.

meanwhile, in our eyes, the islamist suicide bomber has come to epitomize "the terrorist", a modern savage, a psychopathic degenerate utterly disconnected from any redeeming social or moral values. yet, in fact, this "other" is a man whose life revolves around the mosque, daily prayer, restrained dress, modest fasting, a tight-knit family and community. When pushed to the limit, a committed muslim may decide to sacrifice his own life, his own body for what he sees as a greater social and spiritual good. which one of us in the west will do this now.

this is the existential divide.

In between the previous passage and this one, there is an utterly baffling clipping from a newspaper (I guess) piece decrying the "decline in Australian male culture" and the rise of "metrosexuality." In light of the last passage, what Lasn thinks he's doing with this snippet is beyond me. Fight Club, anyone? Seriously?

I'm not really sure I need to do the close reading of this comparison between fat "us" and "moral" them, in light of what I've said above. But do you see the way a sociopolitical system and distinction gets blurred into moral evaluation? The pressing divide, in other words, isn't existential (whatever he wants that to mean) so much as material and political. And where it's an "existential" issue, or a religious one, I'm afraid you can count me out.

Whatever my politics are, they most distinctly do not involve nostalgia for a church or mosque centered existence, for smothering family relations, or, um, restrained dress. (See how it keeps sneaking in here, the What Not to Wear fixation...) And further, I really don't begrudge people - the rich or the poor - their pleasures, even those of the most material varieties. Pleasure, even or especially the pleasure of consumption, is not the problem - it's the unequal distribution of resources that afford pleasure, or before that, sustenance, comfort. I am not sure, in other words, that the fine people in their lonely farm in Telemark, for all their pride and excitement, are really doing anything to benefit anyone other than themselves. Which is fine, but it is important not to delude ourselves that we are acting effectively when we really aren't.

Adbusters is probably, in many ways, an important influence on certain aspects of how I think about culture and politics today. And while I'm not quite a "no enemies on the left" sort of guy, I would in general rather spend my time working on something other than the unsympathetic critique of radical journals. Our culture kills them off easily enough without my help. But this magazine, which is in many ways so promising, seems locked into a strain of political perversity that renders it either something between useless and dangerous. Unhelpful at least. Frightening at the most.

What do you think?

Comments

[jane]

You're a good one, CR. Just thought I'd say so. I'm sad Baudrillard is dead, unrelatedly.

D'you think AdBusters' obsession with self-scourging — I mean, aside from partaking of the regressivist back-to-the-land fantasy — is just a version of philanthropy for those who can't afford to be actual philanthropists? As if acts of personal renunciation can serve to produce systemic change? Doesn't this simply reveal — with exactitude — the fallacy that was always present in the proposition that "the personal is political"?

[Matt]

Girlfriend brought home a copy from the local mega health-store just the other day, on a nostalgic whim, and in semi-awe because it was the most expensive magazine in the place, she said. I was curious too whether it had changed over the years, but just glanced at that "existential divide" shit, and had about the same reaction. Lifestyle activism for the gentri-yogi, guilty-conscience class, bleh.

Perhaps it could open a mental door or two for my students, she said. Southern Baptist highschool kids read this, you think, I wondered?

[Kenneth Rufo]

I don't know if the argument would appeal to you any more CR, but my partner has a book coming out with University of Minnesota in a month or two that spends a lot of time engaging Adbusters as being too focused on its own brand identity as the negation of other brands, and is for too situationist trendy for the times. She looks at some other similar movements, too, like appropriation art and copyright theft, before ultimately arguing that creation of a new commons through something like an intensification of copyright - like Creative Commons - is a more productive mode of resistance to brands and copyright. Anyway, it may not tickle your fancy, but it's a good read, if I do say so myself, and the Amazon link is here.

[jane]

Kenneth: though I can't quite place the grammar of your post, I suspect it's saying that AdBusters's strategy is "situationist trendy." If I have that wrong, you can disregard the rest of this post.

It's funny, when Matt first asked me if I'd like to contribute an entry to this site, my impulse was simply to list the use of the world "spectacle" and try to attend to the ways it failed to attend to the basics of spectacle theory while pretending to invoke it. I was troubled by how (potentially trendy) misuse of the term increasingly calcifies an almost entire misunderstanding of the idea.

I eventually abandoned the project because it would have been too scolding, and I am an LS fan. But I will take that up just for a brief second to say that AdBusters and like strategies are themselves a thorough (and kinda dumb) misreading of those ideas — a misreading you merely repeat by adducing one to the other. Put most simply, Debord simply doesn't believe that "media" are the problem, or that the spectacle resides in media, or in the realm of appearances at all.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images, he writes, as explicitly as possible. The failure of AdBusters and like strategies is exactly that they are led always away from the catastrophe, toward a contained set of its expressions, and so fight a cultural (in the narrow sense) rather than a historical struggle.

One should be leery of throwing out the baby of political economy with the bathwater of media interventions.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Nice, Jane, and you had my meaning exactly.

Though, and I'm being serious here, I would have thought the baby to be media interventions and the bathwater to be political economy.

[CR]

You're a good one, CR. Just thought I'd say so.

Thanks, Jane. I hope you know that I think you're a pretty good one too... Please do post again here soon!

Doesn't this simply reveal — with exactitude — the fallacy that was always present in the proposition that "the personal is political"?

Absolutely.

Kenneth,

The book sounds good... I'll definitely take a look.

[jane]

Kevin: I take your point that political economy has more the feel of a medium in which we're all sunk, potentially misrecognized each time we locate it in a singular object. You'll trust I was using the tired analogy to distinguish the critical from the ancillary, only.

In general, "bathwater" is the analogy I always use in explaining ideology to [poets], as in, "It always involves an operation analogous to lying in a bath heated to 98.6 degrees, and insisting that the water has no temperature."

[Nate]

Great post CR. I think you hit the nail squarely on the head. Question: did Adbusters always suck, or did it take a turn? I quit subscribing after Lasn made a comment about how awful women only spaces at some college were, sexist etc. That crystallized my growing discontent into not renewing, but back then I was still of a type to get off on the self-renunciation in Adbusters, one which makes their occasional invocations of the SI both hollow and ironic. I vaguely remember buying an issue a few years ago because of a music compilation that came with it, but I can't remember at all what was in that issue of the mag, perhaps I didn't bother to read it. The comp was pretty good.

Jane, Adbusters no more discredits "the personal is political" than they discredit the SI. To say otherwise is itself fallacious.

Ken, your partner's book looks great, which raises issues of limits of subvertising even without Adbusters puritanism. I know the Chainworkers in Italy try/tried to combine culture jamming with more traditional activist and union tactics. I don't know how much success they've had, and I know a number of exclusively culture jamming activities have spun off it. Elsewhere in the cultural networks of Italian far lest scenes, earlier I think, folk around the Luther Blissett project tried to combine media stunt aspects with open source and creative commons activity. I'm not sure if any of that's ongoing anymore either, but it was really interesting and exciting while it was on.

[CR]

Thanks, Nate...

Question: did Adbusters always suck, or did it take a turn?

Dunno. This is certainly something a bit of research would clear up, though I'm not sure where one might get a hold of a full run of the mag. (My uni library doesn't have it....)

But my best guess - and it's a personally inflected guess - is that the world changed a bit, whatever happened to the magazine. During the 1990s, political struggle seemed so much more slippery, what with the rising tide lifts all boats scenario to argue with, that perhaps I was a bit more open to idiosyncratic responses than I am now, when things are perhaps a bit more out in the clear. Does this make sense? I'm both more pessimisitic and optimistic now in just such a way that answers like Adbusters's seem totally off the mark.

And / or I was just a kid and didn't know any better.

Actually examining the old numbers of the mag would be the best route. I'm going to put it on the middle distance list of things to do.

[Craig]

Perhaps there is something about youth that makes Adbusters or Ayn Rand palatable... A radical naivety, perhaps? (One also thinks of the extraordinarily simple politics of "punk" music and the obligation, it seems, that every "punk" band make an "anti-war" video.)

[Steve Brown]

There's a magazine in France called "Decroissance" which sounds pretty much the same. It's not about getting rid of croissants or pan au chocolats (sorry, poor jokelet) - but argues for a greener world devoid of what counts as economic growth. It too has a radical gloss but ultimately boils down to, "You can save the world by wearing a hair shirt".

[Nominalist]

""""that's basically a version of the "From the dawn of time, man has loved art/literature/freedom/money/sex" that I prohibit my students from using as an opening move in their essays for my classes... And the thing is, it's not just a style issue. The universal sweep of the intro (in my students' papers) tends to give on to overly-broad, unspecific, and often erroneous arguments.....""

It's not just a style issue: c'est vraiment. Yet tell that to the members of the MLA mafia, who have, under the influence of "poststructuralism" or whatever, opposed argumentation, empiricism and data-driven research for years. Marxist economic materialism is essentially empirical, based on observation, fact, historical record (see the German Ideology rather than Capital)--even the "rentiers" idea could be (and ought to be) confirmed via inspection of economic data, land holdings etc--it is the non-empirical, speculative aspects of Marxism (ie the lingering Hegelianism) that are the "problematics" as y'all say--such as class struggle, and the surplus value theory, the obscured discussion on commodity,.

[RC]

Adbusters is an argument, proposed reductio ad absurdem. Its function is to drum up fear, anxiety and despair. Its efficacy is totally undermined by its tactics.

In the "exitential divide" there is an art piece of a woman with clouds behind her, smoking a cigarrette, looking all "existential". I keep wondering what brand cigarrette.

Maybe I don't get adbusters? You tell me.

You read the mag, you see a Nike ad that has been altered to show Nike in a negative light. You then agree with adbusters "advertising" and blame Nike for the problems of the world. Hating Nike, you then preach to people who wear Nike in hopes of enlightening them, which as can be expected, pisses them off. You then begin to hate people that wear Nike, since they are obtuse dicks who choose their own foot comfort over your newly found pure and 'committed' convictions. You then look around your space and find it filled with everything adbusters tells you to hate. The result is you hate yourself, since you can't "go live on 100 acres in sweden" in a burlap sack, or whatever. So now you hate yourself because your a filthy label whore.

Wait, your right. It does sound like Fight Club.

Perhaps the movie is a lesson showing the pitfalls of going down this road of self loathing schitzophrenia, because in the end, the only answer is to put a cathartic bullit in your head. People who read adbusters are "going through a very strange time in their life".

Peace.

[Kevin]

All people have a need to feel important. Their ideologies are those that they think will be the easiest way to accomplish this goal. The guilty-class in our nation feel important by ridiculing others by saying, "I care what this pious man thinks about me and you don't." In reality they care only about themselves as much as the pious man who lives his life the way he does because it makes him feel important.

[CR]

Don't disagree with much that you've said, Kevin, but who is this "pious man" of whom you speak? Jesus? It must be Jesus that you're talking about.

I think you did great. My compliments.