“What the Oedipal family-machine produces is just enough: obedient ascetic subjects programmed to accept the mediation of capital between their productive life-activity and their own enjoyment of it, who will work for an internalized prohibitive authority and defer gratification until the day they die, the day after retiring.” -Holland, Eugene W. (2002-01-04). Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (p. 55). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
Here we run into the kind of conflicts and contradictions that can occur in the general flux of desiring and social production in the context of D & G’s points about debt. What I’m mainly thinking about here is the paradox of thrift which notes that, on one hand, thrift and saving is encouraged as the way to get ahead or be blessed by the religion of Capitalism. At the same time, living in a debt based economy as we do, if everyone were thrifty and saved until they got too old to actually enjoy it, our economy would implode. The odious aspect of it is that once the individual (in support of our expansion based economy (goes into debt to the point of no longer being able to dig themselves out, they find themselves subject to the Calvinistic finger wag of some kind of moral failure on their part, that referred to as the pathetic fallacy in sociological circles. In other words, our system gives praise (and can only give praise (to the ascetic lifestyle because so few people engage in it as to not present the very real threat it actually presents if practiced universally –a threat Capitalism is perfectly aware is there.
This can be seen in the workings of Alan Greenspan who, being an inflation hawk, always recommended raising the interest rate when the economy got too hot then, upon seeing the effect of this on his country-club buddies, turned to the import of expanding credit.
We can see a similar dynamic in Capitalism’s claim to an intimate and exclusive relationship to freedom in terms of the automaton. On the production side of the equation, the automaton would be perfectly suitable. The problem is that, on the consumption side of the equation, automatons don’t need much: nourishment, shelter, sleep, little more. They are the perfect ascetics. And we can see it all over the semiotics of advertising as well as media in general. On one hand, it offers these paths to freedom which we can buy our way into; while on the other hand, it is always describing to us the perimeters we must stay within in order to have that freedom. Lately, according to most beer commercials, it’s been the hipsters. And to see the most extreme aspect of this dynamic, all you need to look at is an infomercial that happens to have an audience. It’s surreal: an audience cheering at the product the host is selling. We see something similar on game shows.
And we see as much in the world presented in the shows that corporate owned media presents us with (Seinfeld for instance: a world in which no one has to ask what they can afford, but what product to buy. We see a similar dynamic in Modern Family as well –that is as much as I like the show.
Basically what we’re looking at through media is the creation of consumer bots. The scary thing is that most of us (at least the intellectually curious who inhabit these boards (know better. The problem is that we can’t be sure our politicians do. We can’t help but feel that most policy is based on what they see on media.
As D&G point out: Capitalism should, in theory, deterritorialize, yet, always seems work back to reterritorializations.