kevincasper.net

i have no idea how i’m gonna keep it together. it’s 12:22 and i’m drinking beer to slow down my brain for sleep. lots of research and nonsense banging around in there.

hooch, you’re on ‘taking care of your ole boy kev’ duties this week. i don’t want to make you do anything uncomfortable, but maybe a hand job or something can be arranged … think on it.

here’s a prospectus i just wrote for my marxism class. who let me into this program?

i wish the formatting from word to wordpress was more smoothly transferred. there’s probably a plugin i could install. another one for the winter break list …

Fancied Need: How Fear Creates New Intrinsic Markets in 21st Century Capitalism

In Stuart Ewen’s book Captains of Consciousness, the author quotes the former president Calvin Coolidge who, in 1926, declared in an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies that “advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade” (33). In 1926, Coolidge was speaking in a historical period that didn’t yet know the extent of the ideological and cultural power that advertising would amass in the next eighty or so years. The 1960s counter-cultural radical Bob Dylan, for example, wasn’t even born in 1926, so Coolidge could have had no idea that Dylan would one day be transformed in the into a 21st century businessman who uses the medium of corporate television advertisements – for high end brands like Cadillac and Victoria Secret – to market his new music. Coolidge could never have imagined the breadth of spiritualness the advertising world would one day encompass.

Ewen’s project, written in the mid-1970s, aims to historicize the role advertising plays in the evolution of the capitalist working class from workers to consumers. As modes of production continued to become more efficient and continued to produce more and more goods quicker and easier, the problem of overproduction increasingly became a concern. In order for businesses to continue to produce sufficient surplus value, they needed to discover new markets that were willing to purchase their goods and services. As Ewen writes, “the growth of goods production offered a context in which industrial discipline might more and more come to define the realm of consumption as well as that of production” (15). The capitalists did not turn their attention to far away lands with fledgling free market economies (as is a popular modus operandi today), but rather to their own wage-labor workers. If they could begin to not only control the workers when they were in the factory, but when they left the factory as well through the ideological apparatus of advertising, there was seemingly no limit to the amount of consumption that could be generated. Ewen suggests, like Coolidge before him, that this transformation of the capitalism from a production system to a production and consumption system owes as much to the manipulation of psychology and spirituality as it does to the manipulation of markets:

Beyond standing at the helm of the industrial machines, businessmen understood the social nature of their hegemony. They looked to move beyond their nineteenth-century characterization as captains of industry toward a position in which they could control the entire social realm. They aspired to be captains of consciousness. (19)

It is at this moment, that the ideas of mass production and the mass consumer market began working harmoniously with one another in a relationship that is still paying dividends today.

In this essay, I will extend Ewen’s thesis and apply his analysis of the expanding markets of 1920s America to the expanding markets of the 21st century. While Ewen’s focus is on the advertising industry’s reifying power as a force that can shape cultural ideology, I will explore how another ideological tool – fear – works in conjunction with advertising (and other forms of media) to create new markets where there previously were none. The fear that I am interested in can be generically described as a vague sort of badness that threatens to soil the purity of the consumer’s bodies, minds and souls. This badness can take many forms, but in this project I will be looking at two very specific commodities that, until relatively recently, were available to anyone who wanted them for a very nominal fee: drinking water and the morning radio program The Howard Stern Show.

These commodities are admittedly disparate; one is second only to air in the hierarchy of substances human beings need in order to not die, and the other is an oft-maligned shock jock who, as legend has it, once offered to give a toilet to the listener with the largest bowel movement. These disparate commodities, however, do share one important feature in relation to this analysis: something has been signified as being bad about each of them. In the case of water, beginning in the early 1990s, a movement began to introduce bottled water to consumers as an alternative to the water that was coming out of their taps. The simple argument was that the tap water was dirty, unhealthy, dangerous, and you shouldn’t drink it. In the case of Stern, the Federal Communication Commission (under pressure of conservative social and religious groups and left leaning identity politicians in academia) began fining Stern for using indecent language on the free radio waves, and began a movement to force him off the air. Again, the simple argument was that he used language that was dirty, unhealthy, and dangerous, and you shouldn’t listen to it. The arguments against each of these commodities stemmed from the same place, i.e. they were both bad for people in their current form. One is physically bad for you, and one is spiritually bad for you. Interestingly, the solutions to both problems are likewise very similar, i.e. the best way to safely avoid the badness in these commodities is to now purchase both commodities at a greatly increased price. Tap water became the multi-billion dollar bottled water industry, and Stern’s terrestrial radio program moved to subscription-based satellite radio: new markets where there previously were none.

In order to make this case, I will lean on several texts from our semester’s reading list including Marx’s Das Capital, the preface to Carl Freedman’s The Incomplete Projects, Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, as well as several others. My external research will, obviously, be situated firmly in Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness as well as several specific journal sources that relate to the bottled water industry and the curious career that is Howard Stern’s. This topic was inspired by a class discussion early in the semester during our talks on Marx’s Capital when the idea of oxygen bars was raised as a new market that sells something previously available for free. While oxygen bars still seem to be (thankfully) a rather niche market, the same can’t be said for bottled water. In addition, my Master’s thesis was concerned with Howard Stern and the effects his work has had on the American ideological landscape of the last twenty-five years, and I saw this project as an opportunity to continue exploring his work from a different angle. The following works cited list, like this essay, is a work in process.

Works Cited
Connell, John. “‘The Taste of Paradise’: Selling Fiji and FIJI Water.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 47 (2006): 342-50.
Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1976. 1-261.
Ferrier, Catherine. “Bottled Water: Understanding a Social Phenomenon.” Ambio 30 (2001): 118-19.
Freedman, Carl. “The Situation of Modernity and the Crisis of Political Thinking at the Present Time.” The Incomplete Projects : Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture. By Carl Freedman. New York: University P of New England, 2002. 1-41.
Gabriel, Jerry. “Water for Sale.” Human Ecology Dec. 2001: 7-9.
Howard, Brian. “Message in a Bottle.” E Magazine Sept.-Oct. 2003: 27-39.
Knopper, Melissa. “Bottled Water Backlash.” E Magazine May-June 2008: 37-39.
Marx, Karl. “Capital, Volume One.” The Marx-Engels Reader. By Karl Marx and Robert C. Tucker. Ed. David P. McLellan. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 1978. 294-438.
Murray, Matthew. “Censorship.” Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio 1 (2004): 306-10.
Niman, Michael. “Bottled Insanity.” The Humanist May-June 2007: 40-41.
Wilk, Richard. “Bottled Water: The pure commodity in the age of branding.” Journal of Consumer Culture 6 (2006): 303-25.

only 20 more pages to go! who wants to get a phd? huh? raise ‘em up high, i need to get an accurate count … anybody?

hello?

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