The Power of the Dominant Social and Economic Imaginary

By Peter Doran 

One of the most powerful ideologies used to obscure patterns of global and national accumulation and systemic inequality is the ideology of “growth”. Late-stage neoliberal forms of carbon-driven capitalism are further empowered by attempts at the enclosure and colonization of the human imagination and emotion by forces of consumerism, advertising, celebrity culture and the manufacture of our consent engineered through the use of neuro-algorithms and a plethora of therapeutic industries. 

Consumerism is more than a set of material practices at the end of a capitalist value chain: the infrastructures of consumerism - including Hollywood, large swathes of the traditional media and social media platforms and gaming industries - are factories of dreams and pacification. Consumerism is the bearer of a modern and colonial ontology, a way of being- in-the-world for modern subjects and objects, a legacy of a troubled and troubling relationship with modernity and its ways of understanding time. As such, our debates about transforming economics are also debates about contested meaning itself. 

De/Tachment 

In the stunning American movie, Detachment (2011), substitute teacher, Henry Barthes drifts from school to school, classroom to classroom. During one month-long assignment in a failing public school, Barthes finds a connection to the students and teachers who are all, in their own ways, experiencing deep loss of connection, and are negotiating a world so bereft of love and attention that they have become invisible at work and at home. In a pivotal moment in the film, Barthes delivers a no-holes-barred monologue to his students: 

How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you? Doublethink. To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they’re false. (Detachment, 2011)

In a real sense, the nature of modern mass mediatised consumerist ideology, accelerated by the onslaught of social media - ‘capitalist realism’[1] - poses a direct threat to wellbeing at the most subtle levels of human experience: attention and intention. The nexus between attention and power plays out on many levels, with the most disempowered being the least capable of commanding attention and the loudest voices being those fuelled by capital. The granting and claiming of attention can unconsciously reinforce already-problematic power dynamics, such as gender dynamics. 

A fertile ground is being prepared for a popular alignment with corporate-sponsored denial of the depths of the world’s socio-ecological predicament, an undermining of innate human capabilities for critical and transformative responses. In the words of the Chan scholar, Peter Hershock[2], through the consumption of mass media and its associated commodities, human attention is being exported out of our immediate situation: 

"This compromises relational depth and quality, effectively eroding presently obtaining patterns of mutual support and contribution, and triggers further and still more extensive commodity consumption. As this recursive process intensified beyond the point at which all major subsistence needs have been commodified, consciousness itself is effectively colonised. The relational capabilities of both persons and communities atrophy, situational diversity is converted into circumstantial variety, and the very resources needed to meaningfully respond to and resolve our suffering or troubles are systematically depleted." (Hershock 2006:26) 

As Žižek[3] has described, capitalism relies on a structural disavowal based on an overvaluing of individual belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is ambivalent, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange - settling for an ironic distance. This corporate-sponsored rupture, summed up in Saul Alinsky’s observation that ‘most people are eagerly groping for some medium, some means by which they can bridge the gap between their morals and their practices’, goes to the heart of the debate on wellbeing, redefining prosperity and understanding consumerism. For the choices that confront us are not merely about our relationship with the world and others. The choices must also embrace a much older conversation about our relations with the self: on our subjectivity. 

The capitalist complex of micro-practices - most visible in the outworkings of the operation of mass media, advertising and the culture of consumerism - represent the culmination of a deeply ambivalent tradition in Western thought that has resulted in a profound ‘breach of faith toward everything that is’. For Apffel Marglin, Bush and Zajonc (2002)[4] it is this breach, first articulated by René Descartes, that not only enables unprecedented levels of human control and manipulation of the social and natural worlds but also lies today behind a deep alienation and meaninglessness. Since the 16th century, ‘control’ has been a key strategic value informing the explosion of technological development associated with the rise of Euro- modernity and its influence over other parts of the world. Hershock notes that what we refer to generically as ‘technology’ is actually a particular family or lineage of technologies that have arisen and been sustained through a complex of political, social, economic and cultural forces, focused on the value of exerting control over our circumstances to enhance felt independence. This strategic value has delivered military and ecological destruction on a scale hitherto never attained, having co-evolved with and serviced the rise of the modern nation state (Scott 1988)[5]. Hershock notes that although we remain related to others and to our environment, the prevalence of sovereign claims to control fosters a dichotomous perspective on that relationship - a splitting into the objective and subjective - that facilitates treating our relations with others as either actually or potentially instrumental: 

No longer intimately continuous with all things - that is related internally - gaps open up in what I can attend to or hold in careful awareness. By ignoring what intimately connects who ‘I am’ with what ‘I am not’, I render myself liable to being blindsided - subject to accidental or fateful events of the sort that cause the experience of trouble or suffering. (Hershock 2006:90) 

For Hershock, the realisation of convenience and control comes at a huge human and public cost in terms of an erosion of relational quality, resulting in a mounting incapacity for appreciation and contribution. He observes in the market valorisation of convenience and choice both general narrowing of our horizons of personal responsibility and, over time, a severe compromise of relational capability and attunement. For Hershock, degraded environments are inseparable from degraded consciousness, in a dual pattern of degradation that at once devalues what is experienced and lowers experiential quality. In one of his most radical claims, Hershock goes so far as to suggest that the colonisation of consciousness is in many ways a more critical threat to our possibilities for realising truly liberating environments than is the depletion of soil, the fouling of our rivers, lakes, seas and skies. 

Theatre as Resistance 

In an essay calling upon artists to pursue the truths of the times we live in through honest, socio-politically responsive work, Scottish playwright David Greig[6] argues that one of the key roles of theatre is to resist ‘the management of the imagination by power’. He paints a picture of the influence of the dominant economic ideology on our core cultural mythology: 

The institutions of global capital manage the imagination in the first instance through media institutions. Hollywood cinema, the television and newspapers of the great media empires like Fox, CNN. These forms create the narrative superstructure around which our imagination grows. In this way we learn to think along certain paths, to believe certain truths, all of which tend to further the aims of capital and the continuance of economic growth. Once the superstructure is in place, our own individual creativity will tend to grow around it and assume its shape so that the stories we tell ourselves, the photographs we take, and so forth, are put in the service of the same narratives and assumptions. (Greig, 2007) 

For Greig, however, very few imaginations are totally colonized, just as very few are totally liberated. In most minds there is a back and forth - a dialogue and questioning between challenge and assumption. By intervening in the realm of the imaginary, however, power continually shapes our understanding of reality. 

Consumption - or consumerism - is one of the key sites for the deployment of contemporary presuppositions concerning the self. Expertise has forged alignments between broad socio-political objectives, the goals of producers and the self-regulating propensities of individuals. A complex economic terrain has taken shape, in which the success of an economy is seen as dependent on the ability of politicians, planners and manufacturers and marketers to differentiate needs, to produce products aligned to them and to ensure the purchasing capacity to enable acts of consumption to occur. While political authorities can only act indirectly upon the innumerable private acts of consumption, it is the expertise of market research, of promotion and communication, underpinned by the knowledge and techniques of subjectivity, that provides the relays through which the aspirations of ministers, business and the dreams of consumers achieve mutual translatability. Mark Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism encompasses much more than the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising - and its associated infrastructure - operates. It is what he describes as a pervasive atmosphere , conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action. 

In the process, the dominant economic ideology of our times engages in what Fisher names as an ‘amoral affective engineering’: 

Morality has been replaced by feeling. In the “empire of the self” everyone feels the same without ever escaping a condition of solipsism. (Fisher 2009:24) 

Noting the prevalence of mental health challenges - notably those among university students with whom he had worked - Fisher calls for a conversion of these problems into effective sites of antagonism and campaigning, describing affective disorders as ‘captured discontent’. 

Similarly, Tim Jackson (2010) has challenged the dominant ‘social logic of consumerism’ which has linked prevailing understandings of prosperity with the accumulation of material wealth. He notes a consensus in the academic literature on the existence of a ‘social recession’ in modern Western society, with rising rates of anxiety and clinical depression, increased alcoholism and binge drinking, and a decline in morale at work. 

Berardi notes that the technical definition of depression is the deactivation of desire after a panicked acceleration and calls on us to see depression not as a mere pathology but also as a form of knowledge. He adds that when dealing with depression the challenge is not to bring the depressed back to normality, to reintegrate behaviour into the universal standards of normal social language. Rather, the goal is to change the focus of the sufferer’s depressive attention, to re-focalize, to deterritorialize the mind and the expressive flow. The goal in therapy is to offer the possibility of seeing new landscapes, to overcome the obsessive and repetitive refrain. At the level of society Berardi anticipates a reconsideration of the notion of wealth and its association with purchasing power, so that a new emphasis might be placed on enjoyment. For it is in the disciplinary culture of modernity that has equated pleasure and possessing that many of our problems have their origin: 

…and economic thinking created scarcity and privatized social need in order to make possible the process of capitalist accumulation. (Berardi 2009: 214- 215)[7]

We have known for some time that modernity and its exemplary mode of material transmission in the form of capitalism and neoliberalism have only progressed by imposing collateral damage on society and nature. Indeed, for Carlisle, Henderson and Hanlon (2009) wellbeing is the collateral damage. They agree that the science of wellbeing - and its critique - are reconnected by, and subsumed within, an environmental critique of modern consumer society. 

Our ‘social recession’ manifests in a number of symptoms that flow from a disintegration of social ties or what Zygmunt Bauman (2002)[8] described as social liquidity, including consumer society, wherein all things, goods and people are treated as consumer objects. Liquid society is the result of a long process that has accelerated from the early 1980s along with neoliberal forms of capitalism: it is a mobile, transient, precarious society in which the disintegration of social ties reaches levels that have been hitherto unknown. Bonaiuti (2012:41)[9] has linked this disintegration to: 

i) The spread of individualistic behaviours and to positional competition; 

ii) A contribution to the loss of wellbeing in contemporary societies; and 

iii) A loss of resilience of social organisation when faced with external stress (both economic and ecological); and 

iv) A clue to comprehending why contemporary societies seem to show little reaction when confronted with the multidimensional crises we are now facing. 

Many of us are now familiar with the argument that advanced societies are hitting up against the planetary boundaries (Rockström et al, 2009)[10] and ‘social limits’ (Raworth 2012)[11] associated with myopic behaviour and hyper individualism. But what if the ‘social recession’ is not only undermining psychological wellbeing but also undermining our ability to respond to the associated ecological crises. As Bauman (2005) has observed, ‘Imagining the possibility of another way of living together is not a strong point of our world of privatised utopias’. 

As individual and organisational members of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance - set within a network of networks, movement of movements, dedicated to re-imagining and designing economies in the image of our wellbeing - it is clear that our primary challenge to the dominant narrative must be cast in a new language and style. 

If the main threat to the dominant economic narrative could be found in logic alone, the battle of ideas over a new economy would have been won and lost years ago. 

The creative challenge is two-fold: 

• To render visible the power and interest that sits behind the dominant narratives told and retold across policy, educational, and media platforms; and 

• To enable spaces and platforms for emergent alternatives to flourish in the pluriverse: a world that can celebrate many worldviews. 

1. Mark Fisher, 2009, Capitalist Realism. London: Zero Books.

2. Peter Hershock, 2006, Buddhism in the Public Sphere. London:Routledge.

3. Slavoj Zizek, cited in Fisher, 2009, p.13.

4. Frederique Apfel Marglin, Mirabai Bush and Arthur Zajonc, 2002, ‘Healing the Breach of Faith with Everything’, Conference Paper. See: https://www.arthurzajonc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Healingthe-BreachofFaithTowardEverythingThatIs.doc.pdf

5. Scott, James C, 1999, Seeing Like A State, Yale: Yale University Press.

6.  Joyce McMillan on David Greig for Scotsman Festival Mag., August 2007 

7. Franco ‘Biffo’ Berardi, 2009, The Soul At Work, Boston: MIT Press.

8. Zygmunt, Bauman, Society Under Siege. London:Polity, 2002.

9. M. Bonaiuti, M. ‘Degrowth: Tools for a Complex Analysis of the Multidimensional Crisis’, Capitalism Nature Socialism(2012), 23:1, March, pp.30-50.

10. Rockström, J., W. Steffen, K. Noone, Å. Persson, F. S. Chapin, III, E. Lambin, T. M. Lenton, M. Scheffer, C. Folke, H. Schellnhuber, B. Nykvist, C. A. De Wit, T. Hughes, S. van der Leeuw, H. Rodhe, S. Sörlin, P. K. Snyder, R. Costanza, U. Svedin, M. Falkenmark, L. Karlberg, R. W. Corell, V. J. Fabry, J. Hansen, B. Walker, D. Liverman, K. Richardson, P. Crutzen, and J. Foley. 2009. Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society (2009), 14(2): 32. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

11.  K. Raworth, "A Safe and Just Space for Humanity," Oxfam Discussion Paper, February 2012.