Spiritualized market subjectivity and new resistances: Russell Brand’s concept of revolution

Abstract

Russell Brand’s sustained presence in the British media, his strong international social media following and increasing engagement with high-profile political figures in the U.K. situates him squarely in the public sphere as both active participant and critic. Despite the numerous criticisms and some support of his call for revolution, there has been a marked neglect of engagement with his concept of revolution. Through an analysis of the assemblage of the enunciation of Brand’s revolution in his 2013 interview with Jeremy Paxman and his book Revolution (2014) this article addresses this oversight, putting forward a Brand-specific concept of revolution. I argue further that this concept of revolution produces a spiritualized market subject. While this subject does remain part of the capitalist axiomatic, the brief release or deterritorialization that takes place with this type of spiritual revolution can change subjective dispositions. Thus, it is possible for the remediated subject to alter power distribution from within the capitalist system.

Acknowledgements

To Frank. I would like to thank Heather Delfs, Ashleigh Prosser, Jacqueline Boaks and Andrea McRae who either read and commented on this article or helped me develop my ideas prior to the CSAA Minor Culture conference in 2015. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for helping shape this article.

Notes

1. Jeremy Paxman is a British journalist who is well-known for his probing political interviews (see: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0668096/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm).

2. It should be noted that Paxman’s own views on the subject are unclear. Paxman considered himself a socialist and a Communist in his youth, but appears to have become more conservative with age: ‘I do understand we have to have a government, and I do firmly believe in democracy. So it’s not true to say I’m not a political person. I am a political person. But I’m not a party political person. I don’t believe there is a monopoly of wisdom in any one party. I suppose as one gets older – I would have described it at the age of 21 as the process of selling out, but another way of looking at it is to say, actually, the world is not a very simple place, and that as you get older simple-minded solutions seem less attractive’ (Aitkenhead 2009).

3. A shopping centre built in Essex during Brand’s youth. He refers to Lakeside in Revolution (2014) as ‘the giant shopping centre, mall to Americans, and maul is right, because these citadels of global brands are not tender lovers, it is not a consensual caress, it’s a maul’ (7).

4. Lustig is referring to an incident that occurred on BBC Radio 2 in 2008. Russell Brand along with TV host Jonathan Ross prank called actor Andrew Sachs leaving lewd messages on his answering machine about Brand’s sexual exploits with Sachs’ granddaughter, Georgina Baillie.

5. British slang for ‘idiot’.

6. Kapoor borrows this idea from Žižek and defines it as ‘a sort of humanized capitalism that manages to hold together both enormous wealth accumulation and significant global inequality by attending to the worst manifestations of such inequality through charity’ (Kapoor 2013, 3).