The Politics of the Advertized

Anustup Basu 

“Technopolitics of the Global South" is a modest proposal for naming an aggregator site of new and relevant research that can easily be lost in one disciplinary silo or other. This occasional series on Borderlines inaugurates an effort to connect questions regarding contemporary political forms and practice with numerous other intellectual vectors, of data and digital colonialism, computing from the South, platform imperialism, and mass mediation.

This inaugural dossier begins with introductory framings by Arvind Rajagopal and Francis Cody. This is followed by a set of reflections from Shahrukh Alam, Kajri Jain, Shubhangi Heda and Ishita Tiwary, Anustup Basu, Joyojeet Pal, and Mehak Sawhney.

I begin with a few random phenomena drawn from the recent Indian scenario ruled by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I do this with a fair degree of confidence that readers embedded in other contexts will discover commonalities with their own situations.

These are four different, but illustrative instances of a larger electronic informational environment I have called Hindutva 2.0. The first belongs to an overall Hindu right-wing drive of perception management, propaganda and trolling, led by the BJP’s IT cell, which regularly feeds innumerable WhatsApp groups with a steady stream of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and mythologies. The second pertains to the reinvention of the almost entire Indian media space as an electronic Hindu ethnoscape over the last decade. The biggest television news channels in India are currently owned by three billionaires close to Modi. These and dozens of other portals make what is now known as India’s Godi (lapdog) media.[1] Over the last decade, these entities have faithfully worked as veritable PR machineries for the regime, doing propaganda and damage control, demonizing or blacking out the opposition, persistently pathologizing Muslims, identifying critics of the regime as “anti-nationals”, communalizing almost every issue, and using diversionary tactics to cover up failures. A personality cult around Modi has been created by way of sycophantic interviews with carefully curated questions, choreographed photo-ops of the Prime Minister (scuba diving, fighter jets, meditation inside a Himalayan cave etc.), inaugurations of monumental vanity projects (new parliament building, Ram Temple etc.) and other ceremonials of pomp and theatrical fervor. Meanwhile recalcitrant or critical media houses, including BBC offices in India, have been subject to Enforcement Directorate (ED) or income tax raids. Prominent editors and journalists have been forced out of the mainstream to alternative platforms; others have been incarcerated under non-bailable laws on charges that the government almost always failed to prove.

The third example is also not an outlier. Here are some similar claims made by BJP members of parliament, ministers and ideologues: that a concoction of cow urine, cow dung, and milk can cure breast cancer, that ancient Hindus had developed internet, nuclear, aviation, and missile technologies; that Indian cows had radioactive horns and exhaled oxygen; that every liter of cow urine had 3-10 mg of gold, and that the Vedas contained a theory superior to Einstein’s relativity. In October 2014 Narendra Modi himself speculated in front of a gathering of doctors at a Mumbai hospital about the origins of the elephant headed deity Ganesha: “There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant's head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”

Fourthly, Yati Narsinghanand’s hate speech was not exceptional. Similar statements, triumphalist as well as paranoid, were made around that time in more than a dozen Dharma Samsads and other religious gatherings. In contemporary India, the Muslim, the Dalit, and other minorities are differentially excluded from a purported Hindu upper-caste-upper class mainstream not just in terms of religion and culture, ideologies, or imputed pathologies of high breeding or terror, but increasingly in terms of custom, attire, speech, food, hygiene, habitat and other details of lived life. In recent times, Indian Muslims have not only been accused of serious matters like terror, forced religious conversion, or “love jihad” (Muslim men conspiring to seduce Hindu women), but also something like Corona Jihad (conspiring to spread the contagion among Hindus) or Thook Jihad (food being allegedly spat upon at Muslim owned eateries before being served to Hindu customers). The ‘other’ is thus excluded by means of already advertised, and already industrialized suspicions and disaffections.  

Such sets work in synergy. Hindutva 2.0 is an ecology of non-linear and non-obligatory solicitations and enrollments in which fierce talking points about Vedic science or Islam and Indian history converge and concert with the Mars Mission, the Hindu Bomb, or visions of double-digit growth. It is a new age metropolitan assemblage that includes right wing politicking, ideology, and Islamophobia, but also motivational therapy, feel-good nostrums, pop-philosophy, yoga, Ayurveda medicine, lifestyle products, Vaastu, digital religion, and astrology. Its energies have percolated all avenues of culture, from techno-music to animation, advertising, commodity culture, or graphic novels. A section of Bollywood has been mounting sumptuous spectacles of neo-traditionalist heritagism and libidinal and voluptuous digital recreations of a glorious Hindu bygone in the historical film, regularly obliterating the distinction between mythology and historical fact. Over the last two decades especially, Hindutva 2.0 has celebrated the vision of a secure Brahminical existence – traditionally rooted, jealously protective about religion and culture, but at home with hi-tech, hi-finance, and conspicuous consumption – as the only form of life worth living in the new metropolis. This form of life requires daily assertions of masculine pride as well as paranoid protection.  

Theses on the Politics of the Advertised

It could be justifiably argued that much of the things mentioned above come out of standard authoritarian playbooks or long incubated Hindu right-wing obsessions. The pseudo-scientific impulse, for example, can be traced back to the late 19th century. This was part of an essentially self-orientalizing project of memory to establish the primacy of the original Aryan-Vedic civilization of India that had anticipated all western science and instrumentation. However, it is my contention that in the current state of mediatization, the relationship between ‘Vedas’ and ‘Einstein’ or between any pathology and Islam are neither discursive, nor dialectical; it is informational. That is, in the current dispensation of publicity, they do not have to be put together in a discourse based logico-syntactical relation marked by argumentation and evidence via the book, the essay, or the pamphlet forms. In an informational environment, “Vedas” and “Einstein” can operate as loose, fungible particulars that can be orchestrated together in memes, thirty-second sound-bites, or 100 character tweets in an overall climate of deregulation of liberal bourgeois norms, institutions, and disciplines of publicity. I am calling this  a politics of the advertised rather than that of norm-based discussion. However, this is not to say that in the past Hindu nationalist ideologues actually managed to square tradition and the modern using the protocols of norm-based discursive modernity. Rather, whenever figures like BG Tilak (1856-1920) or MS Golwalkar (1906-1973) attempted such a synthesis, they inevitably set up an agonistic relationship between Hindu tradition and western modernity, one keenly aware of its own unhappy consciousness and normative insufficiency. The agon and the unhappiness were attributed to a self-defeating Hindu oblivion and a conspiratorial exclusion of a glorious Hindu past on part of history, science, and other modern disciplines. In the age of the politics of the advertised, a neo-Hindu electronic publicity loses this massive historical weight of agon and unhappiness and can operate with a triumphant lightness of being.         

The politics of the advertised primarily involve issuing signals and controlling noises; it is essentially not about politicians having a plausible story to tell. That is, ‘plausible’ in an epistemological sense, following certain normative rules of modern disciplinary argumentation in terms of propositions being backed up by evidence and a rational structure of reckoning. Advertised’ is obviously a concept metaphor here. We have long since adjusted ourselves to a certain civic indulgence to the phenomenon of the advertisement dealing with identifiable commonplace feelings and objects. That is, we accept hyperbolic declarations about beer, clothes, or cars, without believing that such goods will absolutely live up to their primary product promises and contribute ancillary effects like improving one’s love life or professional success rate. The advertisement is supposed to render an innocuous ‘take home,’ a ‘feel good’ sensation or, in some cases, a consumable fear. It is designed to fix an often-intangible sense of prestige, pride, or belonging in relation to a particular brand. It is supposed to do so without narrative obligation to truth or closure and without reference to a realistic world-picture to formally authenticate its claims. Even though it might cannibalize select scientific referents or data, it has no scientific imperatives of argumentation and proof.

The advertised is therefore an expressive economy, a mode of transmission and distribution of the ‘sensitive’ that is not beholden to the basic postulates of a Kantian modernity and public sphere based communicative action that we can roughly trace up to Habermas or Rawls. That is, realist narration, science as opposed to dogma, consensus, discourse ethics designed to provide a moral validity to the law, reasonable pluralism, and reciprocal efforts to reach an ‘overlapping consensus’ in which a basic set of values can be affirmed from radically different perspectives. The idea of the advertised is indifferent to that Rawlsian guarantee of liberal publicity that responsible citizens either refrain from bringing their ‘comprehensive doctrines’ (religion) to the table or translate religious sentiments into secular categories and values acceptable to others.

The advertised, as an overall ecology, can include propaganda material but is not exhausted by conventional ideas of propaganda. Rather, it can be said that propaganda today is only a genre of the advertised, which can take a million conceivable forms, from the provocative tweet waiting to be deleted, the meme, the lampoon, the narcissistic reel, the rant, the troll, snuff pornography of minority rapes and lynchings, or the joke that elicits nervous laughter. It could justifiably be said that in India and many other contexts the distinction between advertising and political propaganda has been a tenuous one, without the categorical Cold War separation between classic fascist or communist propaganda and liberal discussion. However, I think the advertised, as I see it, has a wider armature than propaganda in the age of information, covering a greater spectrum between the civilizational to the absolutely quotidian. Similarly, when it comes to secrecy, that inevitable twin of propaganda, the state can choose to reveal or not reveal secrets, but what it can always do is to advertise the phenomenon of executive secrecy itself in broad daylight, as a warning to its enemies.

The politics of the advertised is primarily informational. The advertised gains preeminence in an order of ‘information’ which Walter Benjamin called already ‘shot through’ with explanation and feeling. In this particular Benjaminian sense, the cryptic economy of ‘information’ is contrasted with ‘storytelling’ or news. Marked by the temporality of the instant more than content, information is a cognitive bullet that is used up in its usefulness before it can be officially or institutionally verified as true or false. The aim and target of information may vary, but the point is, it always leaves an affective trace. When the electrified instantaneity of information dominates the slow, ponderous methods of news and knowledge, its cumulative traces may dominate the ‘Overton window’ of political perception. The clustered information about Pakistani nuclear reactors or Karachi Harbor circulated by the Indian media turned out to be wrong news at the end, but by then they had already fed into an intangible and massified ecosystem of jingoistic triumphalism and Islamophobia. The judgment of right or wrong is always belated because information is always immediately followed by more information. This is therefore also a plebian politics of the burning edge, beyond the language games, editorial intelligence, and interpretive privileges of bourgeois institutions of ‘truth’: law courts, the statistical bureaucracy, the state archives, public television or radio, the enclosed movie theater, the censorship office, international news agencies, the academy, or the domains of physics, chemistry, or history as determined by experts.

 The advertised becomes indispensable at a particular stage of capital when it produces social life itself through social media networks and a range of affect, emotion, and consensus industries. The challenge, in recent decades, has been to account for a sense of temporal disorientation that comes with a widening gap between technical systems and older principles of social organization. The late modern screen-city couple has been understood by Deleuze and others as a sensorium of mutations, stochastic experiences and what Bernard Stiegler calls the industrial temporalization of consciousness and memory. The speed of information tends to compress remembrance and consolidate an absolute vision of the past (there is always lost greatness in the past).  In this order, massification becomes not so much an agglomeration of alienated individuals as a principle of erotics between atomized bodies and majoritarian ‘lumped’ populations. That is, as an industrial, pre-individual erotics of elation, unease, anxiety, race instinct or xenophobia This spells a foundational crisis for classical liberal politics with the self-conscious human subject at its center, as citizen and as part of the ‘people’. This ideal figuration stands to be epistemologically and mathematically taken apart by systems and cybernetic autopoiesis in the overall capitalistic production of social life. Matteo Pasquinelli has written about the late emergence of a global Metadata Society (alongside Castell’s networked society) where he invokes Deleuze to elaborate a cybernetic order of semi-autonomous social and psychic systems of control that deconstruct individuals into numeric footprints or ‘dividuals’. Increasingly, these environments do not produce or address the individual, but modulate posthuman collectivities of psychic traits, social energies, or behavioral clusters that Deleuze calls superjects. One does not have to view politics and political communication in a totally techno-deterministic manner here; Pasquinelli is careful to point out that this dispensation is ultimately beholden to processes of human labor, knowledge extraction, and the social relations of production. However, what cannot be denied is that cognition and cognitive capital no longer remain the sole prerogative of humans. Rather, informational environments seem to point to a neuropolitics of the 21st century in which multi-directional stimulations, attention spans, diversions, or boredom become potent political factors. To put it in colloquial terms, the micropolitics of the advertised, amongst other things, can industrialize the gut-feelings of nobody in particular.

The advertised is thus a plane of consistency and transmission, an informational enrollment of native thought and feeling amidst the welter of the neoliberal profane. In the age of the hyperlink, ‘google juice’ and sidebar peripherals in ‘pull’ media like the internet, advertising does not work according to David Ogilvy’s ‘push model’ anymore When we say advertised, we therefore no longer mean a frontal encounter with the consumer through a classic thirty-second ad or via a message that politicians ‘approve.’ Campaigning becomes interactive, driven by continuous feedback loops and data processing, between partial attention and complete immersion, between statements and signals.  In politics as well as commercial marketing, it becomes a matter of acquiring “lovemarks” across a range of media ‘touch points,’ blurring the lines between entertainment and ideological affirmation, and passing the brand through a circuit of emotive or cathartic experiences. It involves navigating a sea of variables, no longer under expert editorial control, to achieve a workable signal to noise ratio, critical densities of affect, recall value, or regularities of reference. Partisan and non-partisan humans are inducted into ‘affinity spaces’ visited by ‘loyals,’ ‘zappers,’ ‘minglers’ or ‘casuals.’ Voters are energized or disaffected more than converted.

Conclusion: The Politics of the Advertised and Political Society

The phenomenon we have described so far depends upon socio-technological affordances and realities, but it is not exhausted by any systems theory of communication. Nor am I offering a total theory of contemporary nativism and demagoguery. In my understanding, the politics of the advertised is only one, albeit major, form of popular backlash against unipolar globalization and there are identifiable political and historical reasons behind it. It is important to remember that Deleuze’s diagram of ‘control’ is a metropolitan one, operating in a postindustrial, post-discipline west, not because living labor and surplus extraction have vanished, but because production has been shifted to the Third World.  On the other hand, as we know, celebratory ‘end of history,’ one McWorld, neoliberal fantasies launched in the 1990s and 2000s projected a globalization of a techno-governmental apparatus of finance capital beyond Cold War geopolitics and national economies. While this has come true in terms of the circulation of capital, what has not come true are a set of ancillary benefits promised for human politics when markets open up, sometimes aided by imperialist ‘nation building’ in places like Iraq or Afghanistan -- freedom, advancement of rights, civil society formation, and liberal democracy.  It is now clear that this export expectation has not been fulfilled and there is no symbiotic tie between the careers of finance capital and political liberalism. The former can operate very well without the latter. But it is not just a matter of Rawlsian democracy and Habermasian communicative action not being punctually replicated in Third world scenarios.  What has really alarmed ardent liberals of the west is that the long-identified malfunctions and malaises of the polities of the global south seem to be visiting their own backyards. There is enough undisciplined, irrational clamor – revivalist, nativist, and fundamentalist – to imperil liberal hegemonies in metropolitan centers themselves. Societies of ‘Control’ seem to be sustainable not through measures of Foucauldian capillary power, but by pure applications of force in the form of gated elites and statist security and surveillance. As Partha Chatterjee puts it, “various features that are characteristic of democracies in Africa or Asia are now being seen in Europe and the United States because of underlying structural relations that have long tied metropolitan centers to their colonial and postcolonial peripheries.”

It is in the light of Chatterjee’s observation, and in a global scenario where desire has been democratized by media revolutions, but the means to satisfy them have not been, that I offer this conjecture: the politics of the advertised gains ascendency when the powers of the political society overwrite or informalize the rules of the bourgeois civil society and the rational state. In recent decades there has been a widening gap between the popular sovereignty of the “people-nation” and an increasingly global governmental apparatus made of common markets, common bureaucracies, megabanks, giant tech, and trading blocs that often bypass local or perceived national interests. The direct and ancillary consequences of this include deindustrialization in the metropoles, generalization of labor precarity in the global hinterland, world-wide technologization of agriculture, automation, debt immiseration, increasing income inequality, and the eclipse of the postwar Welfare state.

Chatterjee points out that in recent times people of various nations and sub-nations, in the west, as well as the global south seem to be no longer willing to consent to the governance of an increasingly distant, transnational apparatus in Brussels or Washington. On top of that, the people seem to have noted that the modern state, in being part of that same governmental apparatus, seems to speak only the language of calculative reason rather than moral persuasion. Welfare is now ‘targeted’ rather than universal in the west (it was always so in large parts of the global south). This is because resources in neoliberal economism are finite, and all markets have birthed absolute surplus populations in the era of off shoring and supply-side economics. The absolute surplus population is not Marx’s ‘standing army of the unemployed;’ it is one that is displaced from traditional sectors of production but cannot be absorbed into the social relations of the new economy. In a global sense, they would include the peasantry displaced by industrialization in the east as well as workers and miners rendered redundant in the American rust belt or the Appalachia by way of deindustrialization, automation, and other factors. The absolute surplus population is not just afflicted by deskilling, unemployment or underemployment and economic precarity, but also by loss of traditional race, gender, or caste prestige, dignity, futurity, and thymotic recognition.

Politics is in a crisis because the only firmament of change seems to be the globalized market. What comes into being is a political society of fierce transactions rather than just the state-civil society dyadic arrangement of civic and legislative conversation.  This is an often informal, often differentially illegal zone of negotiations, ad hoc extra-constitutional measures, corruption, bribes, bargains, escape clauses and trade-offs between identities and interest groups and governmental service providers about finite resources, representation, and power. As such, political society is not the sphere where a nation constitutively converses with itself. Rather it is a war zone of strategic and tactical maneuvers between competing groups and therefore the realm of demand politics and revenge bank politics. Political Society inevitably informalizes and often suspends the language games, and constitutional and juridical pieties of liberal democratic politics and communicative action. Part of that informalization is the ‘shocking’ forms it often takes, in Modi’s India, Trump’s America and elsewhere: politicians lying to their enthralled tribes knowing full well that they will be fact-checked in real time; a coarsening of parliamentary language; plebianization of institutions; openly communal, racist, or misogynist rhetoric in the media; regular rituals of public violence and lynching; deliberately outlandish, vague, or hyperbolic claims; or the peddling of paranoid fantasies and triumphalist myths about science or the economy being coupled with hatred and distrust towards intellectuals and experts.

In the realm of the advertised, 21st century fascism is about focalizing the intense energies of the political society and threading them into a nationalist politics of rage and revenge banks. The strongman is the one who messianically closes the door on the kinesis of information and change. It is he who formalizes the ‘shooting through of explanation’ by advertising that no further explanation is necessary, in terms of diagnosing the malaise of the social and identifying the enemy that causes it. The strongman is he who replenishes the masculinity of the nation by monopolizing any civic skepticism about information culture. He simplifies matters and makes choices stark and elemental. In doing so, the father with pithy explanations does not abnegate information culture but claims absolute command over the positivism of information culture.

Endnotes

[1] ‘Godi Media’ was coined by leading Indian journalist, now youtuber Ravish Kumar.

Anustup Basu is Professor in English, Media and Cinema Studies, and Criticism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke University Press, 2020), Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic (Edinburgh, 2010) and the co-editor of the volumes InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen (Routledge, 2012) and Figurations in Indian Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013).

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