Progressives Need a Narrative that Resonates

Let’s face it - January was an unimaginably rough start to the New Year for progressives.  First, the painful and surprising loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat to a crass, pickup truck driving teabagger, who tried to sell his daughters on national TV, and who promised the country to derail health insurance reform.  Then, the announcement of the big, unfathomably huge, gargantuan Wall Street bonuses totaling almost the exact amount that taxpayers had forked over in the bailout, ultimately culminating in a 100 million dollar payday for Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankenfein, and the need for anti-nausea drugs for the rest of the country.  With the administration’s most important social policy change unlikely to result in anything meaningful, and the financial crisis turning into a coup for banks, burning rage for the people, and a public relations nightmare for the beleaguered administration the week before the State of the Union speech, things didn’t seem like they could get any worse.  And then - whammo – seemingly out of nowhere, the Supreme Court rules that corporations can make unlimited campaign contributions, expediting the retreat of democracy to an insidious and uniquely American form of corporate fascism.  On the year anniversary of the election of the first black president, and just after our national reflection on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., there’s every reason for progressives to ask, “why, oh why?” 

 

Some answer that it was a failure of the democrats to support Martha Coakley that led to the humiliating loss of the key seat.  Others blame her for an untimely holiday vacation.  Others say she was simply a bad candidate, and mean that she didn’t come across well enough on television.  Some argue that we should have let the banks fail.  Others that they had a gun to their head and a bomb strapped to their back, and we had no choice but to hand over the dough.  Still others feel that allowing corporations carte blanche contributions won’t change much at all – either the people will still prevail, or it’s merely the breakdown of an illusion anyway. 

 

But while all of these points speak at some level to the issues at hand, they also all fail to address the big picture:  the progressive narrative of interdependence, a “level playing field” and social welfare is failing to strike a chord, while the conservative narrative of freedom, individuality and the invisible hand sounds in tune with what many in the country believe on a gut level.  I would argue that the impact of changing media technology on these classic American narratives is the strongest and most difficult force to reckon, blowing back very rational progressive solutions to problems that will determine the future success of this country.

In Beyond Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr.’s most maligned and most prophetic speech, he comments, “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”  But, in spite of this call for transformation, here we find ourselves:  “a thing-oriented society” succumbing to “giant triplets.”

 

How have we become a thing-oriented society?  And why has this process seemed to speed up over recent years?  Our public discourse tends to ignore the things we all accept as givens.  Perhaps, one of the givens is how the incorporation of technology from computers to mobile phones and from HDTV to iPads into our everyday life is changing us.  When we look under the surface, two things become striking:  our lives now incorporate objects affectively and our economy is now driven by the exploitation of attention.   Both of these changes point toward a major problem of resonance for progressive ideals.  We now associate objects with feelings in a way that has changed.  Brands act as a sort of fiber, connecting us to things – allowing us to feel a particular way about a thing, not just think about a thing in one way or another.  Brands live and die based on the connections they create between human and object.  Brands breathe because of the life we give them by our act of watching commercials and advertisements, by our incorporation of screens into all aspects of our daily lives.  We can easily see how our use of screens and the success of branding have increased exponentially since Martin Luther King Jr.’s time.

 

What could be called an “attention economy” and a “sociality with objects” naturally leads to a disintegration of the historic relationship between labor and capital - attention itself becomes a commodity.  We work by watching and the need for us to labor for pay to increase productivity dissolves then vanishes.  Our (stolen) labor, our eyes, our acts of watching, become the fuel of the new economy.  While corporate profits grow, we reduce the need for our work.  It’s hard for us to notice that corporations have taken on the new role of exploiting our attention for profit instead of our work, because we have developed affective bonds with them via the (almost) human feelings we have about them as brands. 

 

The neoliberal “get off your ass and get a job” narrative taps right into this transformation, which on the one hand is an attachment to objects, but on the other hand is a detachment from each other in favor of these object relations.  All we consider American:  Horatio Alger, success based on hard work, “the land of opportunity”, the beating heart of the free market, taps into the rise of a new individual, one who is not interconnected with other individuals.  Neoliberal ideas seem in tune with both the false assumptions about a static economy that most Americans are making because they are ignoring radical technological change, and also ironically with the type of social relationships the new economy fosters.  This is a powerful mix of past and present, and of myth and ideal.  It’s the kind of mix that resonates.

 

On the other hand, the progressive narrative, Obama’s narrative, the “let’s work together to make the world a better place” narrative, simply sounds out of tune in this mediasphere, and it is.  This progressive narrative struggles to explain the changes we are undergoing in the context of the American mythology, which it seems to threaten.  This progressive narrative doesn’t seek to tell the story of a permanently changed globe, in which we can no longer expect to have work that pays consistently, in which we have to choose between a society with no middle class and a large lower class, or a society with a strong democracy that protects its people from these global changes, cushioning the inevitable fall. 

 

The neoliberal narrative is the narrative of the corporation, it is a narrative that serves corporate interests, and a narrative based on the illusion of a world that never changes, and a narrative that thrives based on an ignorance of the meaning of technological change.  Part and parcel with this illusory thinking is the potential for a form of fascism to take hold in America – one that resists a change to old myths, and roots itself directly in that mythology, resonating deeply in American hearts and minds.  

 

Without developing a strong new narrative – one that states clearly that jobs will not “come back” because we work all the time, and that as a result of this breakdown between the relationship between our individual work and our country’s productivity, we can expect 100 million dollar paydays for those who exploit this breakdown by making money from money and not from work, while the majority struggles to work harder, compete more aggressively, and still come up shorter than previous generations.  Until the heart of the progressive movement becomes the telling this new story, it doesn’t seem likely that our ideas for social and economic policy will find any air.

 

Many of the ideas in this article are derived from the work of the following scholars:  Jonathan Beller, Celia Lury and Karin Knorr Cetina.

 

Recommended reading:

The Cinematic Mode of Production by Jonathan Beller

Brands:  The Logos of the Global Economy by Celia Lury

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Media Manifestos by Régis Debray

The Future of Success by Robert Reich

The Jobless Future by Stanley Aronowitz and William Difazio