Schizophrenic Advertising... and Why it Works.

^^Which Barbie? becomes an Identity-affiliating push-poll^^

The On-line Self as a Second Order Production... to help one construct a Cohesive Narrative out of the Chaotic Order of Signifier data presentation and tie subject's affiliated flaneurian identity/ role models and derived aphorisms together with products and create a consumerist System of Objects while in parallel, forming an on-line "identity" from disparate pieces of the subjective experiences, of celebrities and other role models, obtained via adverts/ film/ video/ audio of other culture industry products.

From the above video:

This is a quiz titled, "Which Barbie doll are you", sponsored by Barbie on BuzzFeed. You may think of the central question of this video as "What kind of culture or society is this quiz a symptom of." Pretty much everyone has heard of BuzzFeed, but what many might not know is that BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, when he was younger, was somewhat of an anti-capitalist and an aspiring theorist who wrote an essay called "Capitalism and Schizophrenia," drawing on the kinds of philosophers that this channel talks about. And it is precisely in this essay that we can find an answer to our question.
One of the central themes in this essay is Lacan and his theory of the mirror stage. According to Lacan, we aren't inherently unified as individuals. In infancy, we do not experience ourselves as a bound person living through a coherent narrative of events. Instead, we experience things in a disorganized way, without unity. A loud noise over there, a bright color over there, a pang of hunger there, a pain here. In general, a sequence of unconnected "presents" in time.

However in normal development, this changes, during the mirror stage. This happens when the child sees itself in the mirror, typically along with encouragement from a guardian, who points out the child's reflection saying, "See? That's you!" The mirror stage is when the child for the first time comes to see itself as a coherent and unified individual, identifying itself with the reflection in the mirror. This is how the Subject is formed.  It's a radical departure from older accounts of the Subject. In modern philosophy, philosophers like Descartes and Kant saw the Subject, the Individual, as having an inherent unity, a unity that is independent of circumstances. For Lacan, on the other hand, this unity needs to be developed over time through socialization. The experience of oneself, as an individual, must be in a sense "manufactured" and is thus dependent on the circumstances one grows up and lives in.

One of the biggest influences on Lacan's psychoanalysis is structuralism in linguistics, which were extremely popular in France in his time, as my subscribers should know. Because of this, Lacan sees the individual as being made up of Signifiers. Such Signifiers could be anything from the nationality one identifies with, one's religion, one subculture, one's ethical code, life experiences in the normal course of development. All these signifiers connect to one another in a unified way, producing a person's experience of being an Individual.

However, it is possible for this unity to dissolve, for the Signifiers to become disconnected. And in such cases, a person is no longer capable to experience oneself as a coherent Subject. According to Lacan, this is what happens in Schizophrenia, and this is why Lacan defines Schizophrenia as being a breakdown in the signifying chain. The signifiers no longer connect to produce a coherent narrative. Instead, they become disorganized the way that they were in infancy.

The reason that I'm talking about this is because this notion of Schizophrenia was later used by theorists to talk about Culture and Society. One of the most famous examples is the Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. According to Fredric Jameson, under Modernity, people were able to see themselves as being part of a greater whole, as being a part of a narrative. Perhaps they saw themselves as part of history, or as part of some religious tradition, or even just a part of their community. This ability for people to place themselves into a narrative gave the meaning, the sense of playing some meaningful role in life, and the ability to tell a coherent story about oneself.

However under Post-Modernity, mainly starting in the second half of the 20th Century, all such narratives that previously gave people meaning began to disappear, and this is why Fredric Jameson identifies Postmodern culture with Schizophrenia. See, what happens to the individual in Lacan's account of Schizophrenia has happened on the Societal and Cultural level. According to Jameson, the Signifiers that were previously unified to give Societies, cultures, and communities meaning, have disconnected and people are no longer capable of seeing themselves as part of a greater and coherent narrative.

In other words, we have lost the power to historicize. What we have instead, is a bunch of disconnected experiences and events that we can't make sense of. We have more information than ever before, but with the lack of a narrative to identify with, we only become more lost in the midst of this information we keep being bombarded with. Images with advertisements, with brands, with videos, with movies, and tweets, and we have no ability to take all of these disconnected experiences and make sense of them in a meaningful way. On TV as well as many parts of the Internet, entertainment news, events, scientific claims, and art all become mashed together in a single stream of content. Instead of a coherent narrative, we have a whole bunch of disconnected Signifiers. And despite all of the societal improvements that have been made, wenstill feel exhausted in the face of all this incoherence. This is the way in which Jameson applies Lacan's notion of Schizophrenia to Society and Culture as a whole. Presumably a Jamesonian solution would be to try to overcome this cultural condition and discover new narratives to identify with.

Now, as Jonah Peretti points out, the conception of the mirror stage has been used extensively by media critics to explain the force images have in the regime of Consumer Capitalism. The mirroring that Lacan describes happens when a woman looks at idealized images in a fashion magazine, when a teenager stares at a poster of a rock star, or when the man on the street gazes up at the Marlboro Man on the Billboard. The Subjective Unity that Lacan talks about is nothing natural, it is a social construct that must be maintained, and many of us spend our entire life's trying to maintain it.

One of the things that many advertisements do is promise to give us this Unity that our Identity depends on. whereas in the past, the signifiers that make up one's Identity were found in religious iconography, historical figures, or art pieces like paintings and sculptures, today, to an increasing extent, the Signifiers come from Mass Media, especially entertainment and advertising. But this doesn't just change the kind of identities we form, it also changes how fast we form them, and how fast we get rid of them.

Once again, Peretti says, "I assert that the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in Late Capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume, and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with Late Capitalism. And further, to promote Consumer Capitalism, the images must have some content to create the possibility for a mirror stage identification. It is this identification with the model, athlete, or actor that encourages the purchase of the product being pitched. In order for an advertisement in GQ to be successful, it must provoke an Ego formation that makes the product integral to the viewers identity. This fragile Ego formation must persist long enough for the GQ reader to purchase the product."

What's amazing is how well this applies to BuzzFeed's advertising model. See, they do what is called "Native Advertising". They don't do ad banners, or pop-up ads, or anything that disrupts the content of the website itself. Instead, the advertising is woven into the content of the website, and the quizzes are an especially good example.

Usually, when someone does a sponsored quiz on BuzzFeed, they don't even experience it as advertising. They are asked personal questions, and then their answers are connected to some kind of branded product. Thus, the Lacanian Ego formation is extremely explicit. Your self-identity is directly connected to the brand you're being exposed to. And ideally, it makes you feel like the ensuing branded product will then affirm the identity you have formed. This is obviously not accidental. BuzzFeed's managing editorial director, Burton said, "targeting specific niches, fandoms, and identities is very important. People love it when you're speaking directly to them."

So the challenge for advertisers under Late Capitalism is to create Identity formations that could be created as quickly as possible, persist long enough for the consumer to buy the product, but also disappear quickly enough for new formations to form for new products. Of course, with our media technology, this formation does not have to last long at all. Most of us can immediately order a product at the click of a button, or consume brands through streaming services. The result is a cultural tempo unparalleled in history. People assume and shed identities like never before, leading them to consume like never before. And the result is exactly what Fredric Jameson was talking about when he applied Lacan's theory of Schizophrenia to culture.

Peretti summarizes the result of this, "This type of acceleration encourages weak Egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily. An essentially Schizo person can have a quick Ego formation and buy a new wardrobe to complement his or her new Identity. This Identity must be quickly forsaken as Styles change and, as contradictory media images barrage the individual psyche. The person becomes Schizo again, prepared for another round of Lacanian identification and catalog shopping. The "Ideal-I"s that the Capitalist Media offer are perhaps even less complex than the infantile Imago of the child's own reflection. Needless to say, such an ego wears out fast, inspiring the consumer to shop around for another one." 

The lay theorist, Mark Fisher, talks about this too, as he saw the effect of this cultural condition on the education of the students he was teaching. "The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix his twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus. Students' incapacity to connect current lack of focus with future failure, their inability to synthesize time into any coherent narrative, is symptomatic of more than mere demotivation."

Jameson observed..."that Lacan's theory of Schizophrenia offered a suggestive 'aesthetic model' for understanding the fragmenting of Subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment industrial complex." With the breakdown of the signifying chain, Jameson summarized, "the Lacanian Schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material Signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time."

"Jameson was writing in the late 1980s, ie- the period in which most of my students were born. What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical anti-mnemonic blip culture - a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices."

Now, the postmodern theorists, Deleuze and Guattari, also apply Lacan's notion of Schizophrenia to Society, but in a very different way than Fredric Jameson does. And here is one example of the distance between Marxist theory and Postmodern theory. Unlike Jameson, they do not identify Schizophrenia with Late Capitalism, nor Capitalism in general, but with the limit of Capitalism. Schizophrenia is that which Capitalism moves towards, but never actually reaches. A bit like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick. Capitalism, just like Schizophrenia, breaks down Signifiers. It destabilizes them. In DeLeuze's language, Capitalism deterritorializes things.

What this means is that Capitalism rips things out of the territories that they previously rigidly occupied. It breaks apart things that were previously combined. I know, this sounds very abstract, so I'll try to give some examples.

Before Capitalism, there were certain things that could not be bought, or sold, or exchanged. For example, Holy items. And these Holy items were bound up with specific religious traditions, and the traditions were connected to specific groups of people, and these people occupied specific territories. Capitalism deterritorializes, by breaking apart all of these elements that were previously tied together. It takes Holy items apart from their tradition and exchanges them for other things. It moves communities of people away from their original homes, and into factories. It breaks up traditions, and commodifies them to be bought and sold. In short, it deterritorializes. That which previously was connected to a specific territory, starts to circulate around the globe.

As Jonah Peretti explains, "Deleuze and Guattari do not characterize the Capitalist machine as monolithic or Unitary. It does not have an "I", an Ego, or a Unified Identity. It works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers that creates territories and limit exchange."

Once again, you might see the similarity between Capitals deterritorialization and Lacan's notion of Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia breaks down that which was previously unified just like Capitalism does. The Schizophrenia as a mental condition could be described as the territorialization of Subjectivity.

But now, why do Deleuze and Guattari identify Schizophrenia not with Capitalism, but with the limit of Capitalism? Well, because despite all of its' deterritorializing tendencies, Capitalism still requires a minimum amount of stability in order to function, the stability of private property rights, of capital circulation, of markets. If Capitalism reached its' limit, it would lose this minimum amount of stability and would destroy itself. Therefore, Capitalism must inhibit its' own Schizophrenic tendencies by using the State apparatus. This is why Schizophrenia is the limit of Capitalism. It is that which Capitalism always moves towards, but can never reach without destroying itself in the process. And because of this, for Deleuze and Guattari, there is a revolutionary potential in Schizophrenia.

And this is where the crucial difference lies between Deleuze and Fredric Jameson. While Jameson identifies Schizophrenia with the exhaustion condition of Late Capitalism, and therefore as something to be overcome, Deleuze identified Schizophrenia as a latent tendency within Capitalism, which in order to reach its revolutionary potential must be accelerated, not overcome. For them, the way to fight against Capitalism is not to resist its deterritorialization, but to go even further with it, accelerate until it becomes too much for Capitalism to bear, and it collapses. This is why the political tendency known as acceleration-ISM is so influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. It's not that Deleuze and Guattari believe that the Schizophrenic breaking down of Signifiers is always a good thing, but that a system becoming too rigid and unchanging is a dangerous thing because it causes the system to be averse to anything that is new.

And Schizophrenia is something that has the power to fight against that which is rigid and stagnant. It is the Schizophrenic tendency to break things down that opens up space for new possibilities, new political movements, new artistic movements, new cultures, new theories, even new modes of Subjectivity.

So, to oversimplify in conclusion, the crucial difference is that Jameson used the Schizophrenic state negatively, while Deleuze and Guattari view the Schizophrenic state as not necessarily positive, but at least possibly liberating. And this fundamental difference manifests itself in very different ways, in the political theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and philosophy of the respective authors.

When Peretti wrote his essay, he was writing as an anti-capitalist. Today, as the CEO of a huge company, he is applying the very concepts he once used critically to accelerate the advertising culture himself. I think the fact that he was able to create such a successful advertising model testifies, at least to an extent, to the validity of the theories here discussed.

But for most of us, who are neither CEOs nor professional advertisers, the task is to find possibilities of liberation. The solution is not merely to adopt an elitist attitude towards those who are easily affected by the Ego-forming advertisements of Late Capitalism. It is important to see that both Jameson's hope to overcome Schizophrenic culture, as well as Deleuze and Guattari s hope to liberate the revolutionary potentials of Schizophrenia, will require massive changes in the very foundations of the Societies we live in. Whether hope is to be found in overcoming Schizophrenia, or liberating it, I will leave up to you to decide.

Now, if you'll excuse me, the result I got is "Astronaut Barbie", and I've got some Ego formations to complete. I would also like to thank these Ego formations from my Patreon...