Know it while you have it: The Ontological Condition of a Cancelled Advertisement

ABSTRACT

It is well known that advertising and branding co-opts counter culture to sell commodities, but in this article we uncover the ontological conditions for such an appropriation. We investigate a particular example of contemporary advertising, the Levis commercial “Legacy – Now is our Time“ (2011), which was subsequently pulled because of the British riots of that year, as a historical situated and saturated moment. This article employs Benjamin's notion of the phantasmagoria to uncover the messianic possibilities of a future hidden in the cynicism of the image, and Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ to suggest the particular temporal structure of this future as a repetition of an absolute past. Such an example of advertising and branding is situated within the overall theory of subjectification of late capitalism, where the dominate concept of capital is human capital (biopolitics), and in which capital is directly parasitical on creativity and life.

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Notes

1 Levi's Legacy®.

2 Razorfish Case Study on Levi's Go Forth Campaign.

3 “Levi's Go Forth with Legacy”.

4 “Levi's Latest ‘Go Forth' Ad”, Forbes.

5 Benjamin, The Arcades Project.

6 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism.

7 Zwick and Cayla, Inside Marketing.

8 For the Sagan quote, see Carl Sagan Crumbly But Good.

9 Holt, How Brands Become Icons, p. 6.

10 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

11 It is worth mentioning that the British campaign had a corresponding formula in the USA. Instead of using Bukowski, Walt Whitman was preferred as he poetically summoned youth to insurrection (see, Levi's – OPioneers! (Go Forth) Commercial). Interestingly, the campaign sought to valorize the experience of the declining American blue-collar labour movement and lead with the slogan “We are all workers” (see, “Adeevee – Levi's: We Are All Workers”) and did so contemporaneously to the Occupy Wall Street movement's slogan “We are the 99%”. The coincidence was also present in their slogan “Everybody's work is equally important” (see, Macleod, “Levis Ready to Work”). It is noteworthy that, as part of the campaign, a series of short documentaries depicting the hardship of post-industrial Braddock were produced (see, Levi's We Are All Workers – Ep. 1) Of course, the irony of Levis contrived identification with the inhabitants of a depressed post-industrial town is apparent when it is remembered that Levis outsource their production.

12 “All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Marx and Engels, The Communist manifesto, p. 223.

13 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 216–38.

14 See Schultz, Investment in Human Capital; Becker, Human Capital; Mincer, Schooling, Experience, and Earnings.

15 This was the justification of the introduction of tuition fees in the UK and their tripling in England in 2010. See, “The Browne Report”.

16 Tronti, Operai E Capitale.

17 This opposition between nature and history is a false one. What is real are practices (and this includes the sciences). Natural objects are the result of practices. There is no hidden reality that transcends them and remains the same outside of history.

18 For a sustained critique of the Marxist appropriation of Marx and the centrality of praxis in his thought, see Henry, Marx (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Only the first volume has been translated as Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).

19 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 261.

20 Ibid., p. 260.

21 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”, pp. 335–76. Freud does mention in passing advertising in this piece, though only in relation to pillars in the street announcing spiritual mediums. Ibid., p. 365.

22 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 4.

23 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’”, pp. 358–9.

24 The phrase “pure past” is Deleuze's and belongs to his critic of Freud in Difference and Repetition. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 96–116. Our temporal ontology of the image, which is to be contrasted with its hermeneutic reading, is also indebted to Deleuze's Bergsonism (from which his critic of Freud begins). See Deleuze, Bergsonism, and Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, pp. 103–30. For Bergson's own account of the past, see Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 133–77. We also found Alia Al-Saji's article particular useful in explaining this ontology of time: Alia Al-Saji, “The Memory of Another Past”. Finally, as McGettigan points out, Benjamin's own conception of historical time was inspired by his reading of Bergson. See McGettigan, “As Flowers Turn Towards the Sun”.

25 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, p. 81.