Abstract
This article focuses on the facilitation, consent and consumption of state violence, as an aspect of the state’s hegemonic control in the current stage of neoliberal capitalism. We suggest that the commoditized symbols of state violence are a part of everyday life for millions within the United States and are embedded within ideologies of nationalism–national security, supported and reinforced through consumerism. The consumption (figuratively and literally) within the confines of neoliberalism is disconnected from the actual course of state violence, facilitating their own pacification while giving consent to hegemonic control. In this sense, the population’s consumption becomes more than pacification and consent, but rather an active constituent in the production and reproduction of state violence: making it the accepted and banal violence of the spectacle.
Keywords
Introduction
State violence is neither a new phenomenon nor a new subject of academic inquiry. Critical criminologists in particular have spent the past near three decades (1989–2015 respectively) researching an abundance of cases of state crime, violence and harm. Likewise, there is a wealth of research that examines the militarization of society as well as consumption and the consumption society. Yet, what has been generally neglected in most of the previous research is the examination of the consumption of state violence/power. Our focus is on the consent and consumption of state violence in its most overt commodification form as an aspect of the state’s hegemonic control in the current stage of neoliberal
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capitalism. A few scholars have touched on the subject of the public’s consumption of US violence. Retort (2005: 102), in the volume titled Afflicted Powers, states: ‘The Blue Angels fighter planes are roaring and booming only a few feet overhead, with many in the crowd on the ground cringing, then laughing nervously, and finally nodding casually at “just entertainment.” The same planes over Gaza City reveal their true business.’ While air shows of military might and capability serve as a carnival, entertaining the crowds as a sterile display of state power, the consumption and pacification of state violence runs much deeper. They are a part of everyday life for millions within the US and are embedded within ideologies of nationalism–national security, supported and reinforced through consumerism. The consumption (figuratively and literally) within the confines of neoliberalism is disconnected from the actual course of state violence, facilitating its own pacification and giving consent to hegemonic control. After all, state power should be viewed in terms of violence and consent and how ‘the manufacturing of consent goes hand in hand with the exercise of violence’ (Neocleous, 2014: 3). Given the population’s consumption of state violence, it becomes more than pacification and consent, but rather an active constituent in the production and reproduction of state violence: making it the accepted and banal violence of the spectacle. Debord refers to the spectacle as
the autocratic reign of the market economy, which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government that accompanied this reign … the spectacle has thus continued to reinforce itself, that is, to spread to the furthest limits on all sides, while increasing its density in the center. (2005 [1988]: 2)
Additionally, ‘modern society is a society of spectacle now’ (Debord, 2005 [1988]: 3). Debord also suggests that the integrated spectacle’s
influence has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the totality of socially produced behavior and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacular is that it integrates itself into reality to the same extent that it speaks of it, and that it reconstructs it as it speaks … The spectacle is mixed into all reality and irradiates it. (1990: 21)
Within the integrated spectacle ‘the commodity is beyond criticism’. The spectacle’s discourse ‘isolates all it shows from its context, its past, its intentions and its consequences’ (Debord, 1990: 28). Debord (1990) continues to discuss the commodity in terms of manipulating individuals’ passions rather than active participants in the consumption and reproduction of state violence.
As Retort (2005: 19) notes, ‘the spectacle is the sovereign – the state that has colonized all of social life in the interests of neoliberalism’. It is ‘the colonisation of social life by capitalism: it is the submission of ever more facets of human sociality to the “deadly solicitations” of the market’ (Retort, 2005: 19). The integrated spectacle is one where ‘ritualized spectacles are integral to the production and reproduction of national images in which a savage form of neoliberalism governs all of social life; a militarism shapes both foreign and domestic policies’ where structures of terror and oppression merge with cultural apparatuses that produce depoliticized forms of subjectivity wedded to consumerism (Giroux, 2015: 1). The state micromanages everyday life, constructing society and our lives as thinned and atomized, disconnected from its violence and power.
The spectacle and its violence require and include the consent of the colonized. The manufacturing of consent by the spectacle takes place through the ideology of nationalism, national security, freedom, and the potential threat to us all (fear). It is reinforced with further spectacle discourse designed to legitimate and normalize state power and violence. This ‘truth’, however, is disassociated from the realties; rather, it is centered on maintaining the status quo, which is inept and violent. As noted by Žižek (2008: 14), state/spectacle violence is systemic violence, inherent in the social conditions of neoliberalism along with the subsequent symbolic violence that is embodied in language and its forms that in turn naturalizes the systemic violence. As noted by Bourdieu and Wacquant, symbolic violence is ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (1992: 167). They refer to this complicity as ‘misrecognition’: ‘recognizing a violence which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such’ (1992: 167–8). The violence then becomes banal, disavowed, depoliticized and normalized (Neocleous, 2008: 73–4). It becomes the abnormal normality or, as Mark Neocleous (2012: 189) calls it, a ‘training in resilience’ that hardens the public to the exercise of power and violence.
The Spectacle’s Display of Power and Violence
As we write this piece, fighter jets soar over our homes, Blackhawk helicopters fly above houses, roads, and sidewalks, filling the airways with mass noise. There are roughly 200 military bases and installations across the US that routinely run exercises, trainings and special operations drills that are a part of the everyday lives of the communities that surround them. These exercises are focused on domestic and international threats to state interests; as such, they constitute more than the ‘expected’ or ‘normal’ training on military bases or property. The headlines often note these events. For example, in Arcadia, California, Portsmouth, Ohio, Jefferson County, Missouri, and areas in South Dakota, military exercises have been conducted against domestic insurgents and militias (Ernst, 2014; Murray, 2013). In December 2014, we had the spectacle of Special Forces Blackhawk helicopters buzzing the skylines of major US cities, including Dallas, Texas, and Los Angeles, California. In July 2015, for eight weeks, operation JADE HELM took place where elite branches of the military (1200 personnel from Green Berets, Navy Seals and Special Operations from the Marines and Air Force) will hold training in seven southwest states. The troops participated in what has been called ‘realistic military training’ in towns in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and Utah. For others in the country such visualization of state power and violence is an everyday activity where major bases are situated within highly populated areas, leading to a barrage of fighter jet noise, Blackhawk helicopters, and maritime vehicles (e.g., Virginia Beach, Virginia). Special operation events are occasionally publicly announced with phone calls (to those with landlines) or small, obscure notices:
Camp Pendleton State Military Reservation will be conducting a training exercise between 8 a.m. and noon tomorrow, May 1, 2014. This notification is to advise citizens and businesses in the surrounding area (S. Birdneck Road and General Booth Blvd. – Croatan) that there will be an increased level of activity on the base and there may be loud noises due to the training exercises being conducted. Residents should not be alarmed. (City of Virginia Beach, 2013; emphasis added)
The training exercises carried out across the US are neither unique nor new; after all, the military and their bases have been a part of this country since its post-colonial onset. In areas where bases are located, especially air force bases, these military exercises and training are an everyday penetration of the normal operations of citizens’ social life. Consider, as one small example, the Oceana Air Base located in the heart of Virginia Beach, Virginia, the East Coast home of the US Navy’s fighter-attack jet fleet where the average is one take-off or landing every two minutes for approximately 325,000 flight operations per year.
As many scholars have noted, the militarization of the US has significantly changed the landscape from the fusion of military and police, border control, to the increased numbers of domestic emergency training exercises (Kappeler and Kraska, 2015; Kraska, 2007; Palafox, 2000; Salter, 2014). As argued by Kienscherf (2012), the blurring of fighting wars with fighting other domestic threats such as crime has been accomplished through the logics of security which serve to configure and re-configure space. As noted by Weizman:
The logic of ‘security’ … presupposes that the danger is already inside, presented by a population in which subversive elements exist … If defence engages directly with the concept of war, security engages with the temporarily ill-defined and spatially amorphous ‘conflict’ not only between societies, but within them as well. (2007: 106)
Whether it is based on the threat of terrorism, illegal immigration, or environmental and infrastructural threats such as global climate change or the energy crisis, the state can then identify certain populations and categorize them in terms of risk – those at risk versus those posing risk – and enact policies that will preempt the consequences of the risk going unchecked. Consider the policies on insurgency where the US military has been increasingly deployed both domestically and internationally for the purposes of controlling civilian populations (Feldman, 2004; Kienscherf, 2012).
The very nature of insurgency conveys a threat from within that is hidden amidst the civilian population. Consider the planning and potential of the exercise of state violence and redaction of civilian rights that remain disengaged from the everyday sights of the process and planning. For example, some of these exercises noted above are a direct response and preparation that has occurred since the early 2000s defense planning, ‘which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis – or all three’ (Ahmed, 2013). These exercises incorporate the notion of civil unrest with domestic threat-terrorism: ‘These training events focused on integrating the military within the mutual aid framework and are different because we are the potential victims of a domestic terrorism event’ (Brigadier General Richard Hayes as cited by the Illinois National Guard, 2014).
Those tasked with counterinsurgency efforts are required to identify the threat preemptively to prevent an attack. For example, consider the increased security measures implemented at US airports post 11 September 2001, 2 such as pre-screenings, metal detectors, x-ray screening of luggage, pat-downs, full body x-ray scanners, as well as passenger watch lists (Bajoria, 2010). Built on the notion that the threat of terrorism is omnipresent and hidden within the civilian population, these intrusive measures are readily consumed by citizens because of a widely propagated rhetoric of fear that provides their justification. According to a Pew Research poll conducted on the tenth anniversary of 11 September 2001, US citizens say they value ‘protection’ from terrorism over civil liberties.
Pew Research has asked whether people’s greater concern is that anti-terror policies will go too far in restricting civil liberties, or that they won’t go far enough in adequately protecting the country. The balance of opinion has consistently favored protection … 47% said they were more concerned that government policies ‘have not gone far enough to adequately protect the country,’ … and 40% said that ‘in order to curb terrorism in this country it will be necessary for the average person to give up some civil liberties.’ (Pew Research, 2013: 2)
When asked if it was generally right or wrong ‘for the government to monitor telephone and e-mail communications of Americans suspected of having terrorist ties without first obtaining permission from the courts … nearly twice as many Republicans (74%) as Democrats (39%) favored the phone and email monitoring’ (2013: 8). Ordinary citizens approve of measures of social control that hinder their liberties, accepting them as being in their own/best interest opposed to a microcosm of the broader symbol of state power and violence.
Detachment and consumption of state violence is reinforced daily through the ingesting of state discourse and ideology. As stated by the US Army Special Operations Command news release (2015: 1), training exercises aid in the practice of core special warfare tasks, ‘which help protect the nation against foreign enemies’. Nationalism, national security and fear provide the conditions where military training exercises and expansionism of these exercises redirect populations into security-oriented consumption. This discourse serves to isolate the violence of the state and the everyday exposure to military training and expanded state control from its context, its past, its intentions and its consequences. Hegemonic discourse is not new either, as nationalism has long undergirded the reification of state power since the modern state. Nationalism is one step in the consent of state violence. As Neocleous (2000) suggests, a larger ideological frame that normalizes state violence and conceals the fundamental intentions is an active constituent in the fabrication and maintenance of state power. Likewise, as the famous quote by Hermann Goering (1938) during the Nuremberg Trials suggests, ‘the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.’ Fear has long been a tool of the state to ensure social control and placation of the population. Terrorism and the war on terrorism is a convenient and durable symbol that stirs middle-class social anxieties that are in many ways analogous to those brought on by the rising inequalities and precarity of late-capitalism projected as a constant state of risk – even when manufactured (see Cheliotis, 2013). Citizens become active constituents in the reproduction of state violence. Campaigns such as ‘If You See Something Say Something’ acclimatize the public to the ongoing threats of terrorism and crime, encouraging citizens to report suspicious activity. Fear is reinforced through spectacle discourse designed to legitimate and normalize state power and violence.
State violence becomes difficult to recognize as anything but legitimate and necessary because it is a category of understanding produced and guaranteed by the state. It is disconnected from the fact that state power and violence kills. Consider that between 1775 and 1991 there have been 1,190,110 wartime deaths of US military personnel according to government statistics (US Department of Veterans Affairs, 2014). What is less discussed is the volume of death that has resulted from US military actions abroad. Over the course of the past decade, the US actions in its ‘war on terrorism’ and pursuit of state interests has led to the deaths of approximately 12,789 US military personnel in Iraq, 2356 in Afghanistan, and 1487 US contractors in Iraq (through March 2015) (Griffis, 2015). On the other side, estimates of the number of civilians killed in Iraq alone are between 136,903 and 154,918 (Iraq Body Count, 2015) with a grand total of 1,455,590 when factoring in all parties to the conflict and civilians impacted by the war on Iraq (Just Foreign Policy, 2009). If we expand to include Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, and other places where the US is actively conducting missions and targeted assassinations, we need to add at least an additional 2500 deaths (as of January 2015) (Serle, 2015): the number of deaths attributable to the state’s exercise of power and violence is staggering. Yet, the underlying state violence that is symbolized by the everyday military events and showcasing of its might remains disconnected from public consciousness.
As we noted in the introduction, Debord (1990: 28) states that the spectacle ‘isolates all it shows from its context, its past, its intentions and its consequences’, manipulating individuals in the consumption and reproduction of state violence. This occurs through the banality of acts such as the Pentagon paying for staged ‘patriotism’ events during the largest professional sports games, from the National Football League to Major League baseball. Spending more than US$9,000,000 between 2011 and 2015 (see Table 1), the Pentagon paid for events that ranged from full-field displays of the US flag to enlistment or re-enlistment ceremonies and emotional reunion events of service members returning to the shock of family members who are attending the carnival of sports theatres.
Professional teams that received the largest amount from Defense contracts.
Source: Theobald (2015).
These paid patriotic events not only reach the hundreds of thousands that attend the professional games but millions of viewers that tune in for the sport season to watch their teams. ‘Unsuspecting audience members became the subjects of paid marketing campaigns rather than simply bearing witness to teams’ authentic, voluntary shows of support for the brave men and women who wear our nation’s uniform’ (Theobald, 2015: 1).
The disconnect of state violence is further congealed through the number of air shows yearly where citizens can be ‘spectators’ and consumers of the carnival of ‘awe’, of state power and violence, while disavowing the underlying purpose and violence (International Council of Air Shows, 2014; Milavia, 2015; Spears, 2014). From our perspective these air shows represent one of the overt commodified forms of spectacle violence. ‘The increasingly popular air shows and festivals in the USA, including the EAA AirVenture recognized as the world’s largest and most significant annual aviation event, now showcase highly sophisticated and elaborate planes from past and modern eras including the best stunt pilots’ (Top Events USA, 2015: 1). In Florida,
the Florida International Air Show, a popular event for more than 32 years, offers a wide variety of entertainment for the whole family, from exciting air displays including military and civilian aircraft performing death-defying stunts, aerobatic passes, and dozens of aircraft-related displays, to a special play area with fun rides for children. (Top Events USA, 2015: 1)
The large East Coast Oceana air show promises food and entertainment, including a quarterback challenge, a place where children can hold military rifles, sky messages in honor of the wounded warrior, and Uncle Sam on stilts walking the runways, all infusing patriotism and consumption. Facebook pages are created by military bases highlighting the upcoming air show events, advertising the many forms of entertainment they will provide. ‘Come on out to the #oceanaairshow today and check out the interactive displays! … We’ve got lots of lunch options at the #oceanaairshow! (9/20/15) … Check out the Super Bowl trophy and do the quarterback challenge at the #USAA tent #oceanaairshow!’ The Facebook sites include collections of photos taken during the event for the spectator to relive and post comments: ‘Our Family, had a GREAT Time at the Air show, and even the Beach Blast, and then went to Appomattox Court house the next day. GOD BLESS you all. Thank you all’ (24 September 2015). Other posts inquire where they can purchase commodities, from t-shirts to mugs. These events are embedded within the neoliberal selling of state violence, where tickets are sold to participate in these carnival attractions, ranging from US$35 to $175 for the events, with VIP tickets costing much more (Sun n Fun, 2015). Consider Table 2, that lists only the top 11 US air shows, as an illustration of the consumption of the carnival or spectacle of violence.
Top air shows in the US.
Source: Top Events USA (2015).
Moreover, air shows that hosted the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds in 2013 had 4,341,000 consumers attend. Military airshows serve as entertainment and a commodity where the public becomes active participants in the consumption and reproduction of state violence. The commodity of violence is beyond criticism (Debord, 1990).
Beyond the annual military carnival air shows, the public can consume tours of bases that are proudly promoted and advertised:
Enjoy a memorable, close-up tour of the US Navy’s Master Jet Base, NAS Oceana, home to almost 300 F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet strike fighter jets. Watch the awesome power of our military aboard a British-style double-decker bus as these jets streak across the sky! And while on the NAS Oceana base tour, you’ll also have the unique opportunity to tour the Aviation Historical Park and see the jets that have been proud to call NAS Oceana their home base for more than 60 years. Get up-close and see the Tomcats, Panthers, Banshees and more … the aircraft that helped make US Naval aviation history! Climb aboard the museum’s double-decker bus and enjoy a close-up tour of Master Jet Base NAS Oceana, home to almost 300 F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet fighter jets. Get up-close views of today’s Navy fighters, catch a glimpse of our Naval Aviators and ground crews in action, and tour the Aviation Historical Park. (Oceana Air Force Facebook, 2015: 1)
Consumers can purchase their tickets, ranging from US$12 to US$16. These air shows and base tours are a ritualized carnival including consumption and consumerism that is depoliticized from the systematic violence (Giroux, 2015). Active participants consume and support the overt displays of carnival entertainment and the neoliberal economic mantra of consumption.
Having noted the daily show of military power that occurs across the US and theconsumption of the ideology of national security through nationalism and fear that has facilitated the acceptance of the militarization of everyday life, knowingly or not, we do not wish to partake in the general tendency to focus upon militarization as more expansive, potent or insidious than normalized everyday state power and violence. After all, ‘structures of terror merge with cultural apparatuses that produce depoliticized forms of subjectivity wedded to consumerism’ (Giroux, 2015: 1). Nor do we focus here, though important, on the particular nuances and contours in terms of how people understand their consent, participation and consumption or how they relate their consumption and consent to their perceptions of state violence. Rather we hope here to engage in a broader discussion of the role of the spectacle in the neoliberal capitalistic system where everyday state power and violence is commoditized and consumed than to be limited by the militarization of society, as this fundamentally obscures the relationship between the state and its subjects. After all, there is little recognition by most scholars and students of the relationship between the harms and violence of the state and our own consumption, pacification, tacit support and facilitation of these crimes – where such violence and harms are commoditized, consumed, digested, and are a part of the banality within our mediatized lives.
Neoliberal Capitalism and the Consumerism of Spectacle Violence: Consent, Consume, and Reify Power and Violence
We believe it is useful to recall how willing citizens are to fetishize products symbolizing and hailing state power and violence and, as such, being complicit. These products serve to further inure the population from the overarching meaning behind them or, as Žižek phrased it, the fetishistic disavowal, a cultural-cognitive process which permits the public to say, ‘I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know’ (Žižek, 2008: 53). We do not suggest simple mystification or even willful ignorance, but rather a useful diversion which allows the public to avoid confronting more difficult realities of the spectacle’s violence, or as misrecognition where violence is not perceived as such (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).
After all, an insidious ideology lies within the marketing, consumer pacification, consent and consumption of state violence. This is especially the case when we consider the hegemonic control in the era of neoliberal capitalism where control, power and the exercise of state violence is sold not only as a commodified security that obscures and justifies state violence and killing, but where consumerism becomes a major aspect of the processes of consent and consumption – where neoliberalism is at the heart of the process of spectacle.
To show our support of the violence of the spectacle we can purchase products from major corporate endeavors through military Facebook pages or stores across the country. We can buy our military family stick people stickers for our vehicles that display out nationalism and service to our country, bumper stickers, vehicle tire covers, coffee mugs, shirts, hats, bags, toys and a host of other products all displaying our consent, knowingly or not, and consumption, regardless of the point to which they represent particular messages for individuals. These products we see as the more banal forms of commodification and consumption of state violence.
The commodification facilitates the inuring of the population to its violence as well as bringing the population fully into the integrated spectacle, including through products targeted to populations that endure extreme levels of noise in their everyday life as military power is being exercised in training for its violence, as discussed previously.
Not only can we consume products of support, we can continue to merely be ‘agitated by the “noise” as it disrupts our phone conversations’ or the mediatized zombification of us as we sit in front of our televisions or talk to neighbors, aggravated that one must use the pause button on the remote while jets fly overhead before we can return to our infotainment zombification. Nonetheless, the irritant of the everyday life intrusion of military exercises is often followed by comments of how ‘cool they are to watch’ but how they would rather watch them fly ‘from a little further distance away’ to reduce the noise level (comments taken from a preliminary dataset on local reactions to everyday displays of state violence).
When criticisms are voiced they remain devoid of the violence behind these jets. As noted by a recent Facebook post on the Oceana Air Base Facebook page (2015):
I love it when you guys fly 27 feet above my house. I love to behold the awesome power of your jet engines as they rattle my windows out of the wall, and sound like your gonna crash into my house, AWESOME. Keep up the great job, of constantly ruining any of the very rare free time I get. :) Doug
In response, the post from the military reinforces the spectacle’s use of symbolic violence embodied in language that naturalizes the systemic violence, ‘Hey Doug, those are our planes over our houses. The best possible combination of possession and location from which to observe war planes.’
Likewise, one may see resistance to the overt displays of military might through class action lawsuits against the government. However, these too are devoid and disconnected from the underlying violence of the state. Instead, they focus on the ‘acceptable’ level of noise as a result of the everyday occurrences of military exercises.
As noted by the US Justice Department:
The Justice Department and the U.S. Navy have reached a settlement agreement with approximately 3,400 property owners in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, Va., regarding litigation relating to jet noise at a naval air base … We are pleased that the federal government and residents near the Naval Air Station Oceana and Naval Auxiliary Landing Field, Fentress have been able to reach an amicable resolution in this matter and avoid further litigation … This resolution signals an end to six years of litigation and provides positive results for the citizens as well as the government. (US Department of Justice, 2007: 1)
The lawsuit was not related to resistance of spectacle violence, merely the inconvenience and level of noise when Hornets were introduced into the Virginia Beach area, increasing flights and jet noise. The settlement provides a symbolic token to appease residents while the whole case is devoid of addressing the underlying issue of state violence. The violence represented and impending deaths associated with each test flight are ignored, instead seeing the fighter jets, drones, or Blackhawk helicopters as an annoyance but nonetheless ‘pretty cool to watch’, bereft of violence: the awe of a carnival show brought to your local area on a daily basis. From a preliminary data set the authors are working on, when we asked locals near the Oceana Air Base at Virginia Beach, Virginia, if they ever think about the violence behind these fighter jets, nearly all of those asked responded with a ‘hmmm, but they are cool’, ‘never thought about it but they are still cool to watch’, or ‘not really’. These responses are part of the overall fetishistic disavowal – ‘I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know’ (Žižek, 2008: 53) – and an example of Bourdieu and Wacquant’s concept of misrecognition or ‘recognizing a violence which is wielded inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 167–8).
The collage of spectacular violence and commodification of state power serves to normalize the abnormal. There are a broad range of children’s toys that celebrate increased surveillance, military power and state violence, indoctrinating children from an early age. Likewise, there are a wide range of drones available for consumer purchase that include plastic imitation versions for very young children, more sophisticated versions that are akin to remote control toys for older children and young adults, as well as more sophisticated versions that are for the adult consumer. These toys serve to reify consumption and the normalcy of state power while minimizing the purpose of these products. Of course, military toys are nothing new – generations have long played with guns, G.I. Joe soldiers and tanks. We are not suggesting the commodification of state violence is new, merely that more often than not we forget the role we all play in the process of consent through commoditized consumption, especially so in this era of neoliberal hegemonic control.
The commodification of state power also permeates popular media through film, television and video games. From shows like 24 and Homeland, to films such as American Sniper, Zero Dark 30 and United 93, to video games such as Battlefield and Call of Duty, these popular depictions of military or covert state power amplify the threat of external violence to the state’s citizenry and reinforce the message that state violence is a necessary defense, reinforcing nationalism. For example, in the popular show 24, rogue counter-intelligence agent Jack Bauer frequently engages in the torture of detainees. More often than not the story leads to the revelation of valuable information that is vital to stopping the threat on our lives and ‘freedoms’. The cultural narrative is overly simple, revolving around a basic morality of good versus evil with the use of state violence and military power deployed only for ‘good’. In the case of 24, the message to the audience is clear that torture is not only endorsed by the state but is justified when committed against ‘bad’ people (Bowes, 2013). By oversimplifying, the reality of state violence is repackaged and propagated as being a tool effectively and justifiably used against ‘bad’ people – those that pose a threat to US citizens and the freedoms the state represents.
The same argument is more acute with video games whereby ordinary citizens find themselves being able to engage in direct imitations of state violence for the purposes of entertainment. Consumers can deploy military grade weaponry such as drones, missiles and assault rifles, ride in tanks and military aircraft, deploy aerial and nuclear bombs as well as engage in drone warfare. Consider that in the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops II consumers take the role of a US operative who faces down drones that he is unable to defeat due to the pure technological power of the drone weaponry. In order to defeat the enemy drones the operatives have to deploy their own drone technology because of the power imbalance between soldier and machine (Anderson, 2014). The reality of the power differential between the state and the human soldier is most likely lost on the ordinary consumer of the video game, who from the safety of his/her living room continues to be entertained by the spectacle’s violence while simultaneously consuming and legitimating it. The training of resilience is perfected in the banal consumption of self as participant. Aside from their profitability as a commodity, war games are a powerful medium to elicit consent for the US military and to ‘enable the expression of militaristic fantasies’ by inviting individuals to participate in a ‘militarism of consumption and pleasure’ (Power, 2007: 274). Consumers participate in benign versions of spectacle ‘power that offer a sense of security and trust in a state that seems increasingly distant, unresponsive and disconnected’ (Power, 2007: 285). Representations of war and combat in games join consumerism to citizenship ‘within a militarized ideology’ (Hall, 2000: 1).
Consumption of commoditized products becomes the larger neoliberal ideological frame that normalizes state violence and conceals the fundamental inequalities of late capitalism (Linnemann et al., 2014). Products – beyond showcasing your consent, consumption and nationalism – are sold to be incorporated into our homes and our bodies, making state violence integrated spectacle violence, where the population becomes complicit through symbolic violence, thus reinforcing the systematic violence of the state. Moreover, these products we display every day have come to be seen as a ‘fact of life’ that ‘nicely captures the dominant social meaning of banal goods’ (Goold et al., 2013: 978). So much so, that their meaning in the popular consciousness is assigned a level of sanctity (i.e. to criticize the product is akin to criticizing the military personnel) and the product itself comes to represent national pride and patriotism. The products take on their own ideological meanings and hold value beyond the state itself as they have become synonymous with military support, patriotism and freedom beyond the cultural production of the state – a production that originally introduced them into the public consciousness. A bumper sticker about ‘loving’ jet noise serves as a public display of unity for the US military and their training exercises; the accompanying values have been propagated and consumed, but not the reality of the military power and state violence that it represents. Here again, the notion of misrecognition and the banality of state violence is central. As a consequence, the state is no longer tasked with directly defending its own use of violence; rather it now can rely on consumers to come to its defense and, by proxy, its use of state violence and power, while consumers distance themselves and participate in fetishistic disavowal from the state’s violence.
Concluding Thoughts
We hope this article leads to discussions that move beyond normalizing state violence or concealing the fundamental inequalities of late capitalism and our own role. We have attempted here to bring forth a discussion of the relationship between consumption and state violence within this neoliberal system that serves to not only legitimate and reproduce the violence of the state but normalize it, making it part of the banality of everyday life through our own consent. We have chosen to focus on the more overt displays of state violence through commodities and consumption to highlight how state violence is turned into entertainment and products for consumption, while remaining sanitized and removed from the realities of the violence of the state. Moreover, we suggest that regardless of the function or meaning of the consumption of state violence, the fact that it is consumed grants a form of consent. We have attempted to depoliticize violence from the state by showing how the spectacle of violence permeates all of life and, through consumption, consent is given, further legitimating the process, creating a cyclic pattern of violence, consent, consumption, and back to violence. We do not suggest that there is a general failure to respond properly to spectacle violence as this would further mask the sadomasochist marriage of the state and its subjects (Cheliotis, 2013). Nor do we suggest that consumers support this process uncritically. However, we do suggest that the commodification, consent, and consumption by the public is banal and ignores the realities of spectacle violence and power that spans domestically and globally, where oppression and violence is carried out and we are active constituents.
By forgetting the coercive power of the state and its interest in fabricating a distinct sort of social order, critical scholarship has largely engaged in the fetishism of militarization or the ‘rising’ security state rather than providing for a radical critique of the public’s disavowal of its complicity in more banal and normalized forms of spectacle violence: consumption and consent through neoliberal commodification. We hope this piece begins a much needed dialog on the role of consumption and reproduction of state violence, where critical scholars do not participate in the fetishistic disavowal of the state, spectacle, violence and our own role. After all, without this recognition we are active in obscuring the relationship between the state and its subjects. Further, we hope that drawing in the notion of symbolic disavowal is the beginning of further research to clarify the particular function that forms of consumption have for individuals (if not society as a whole), as this remains a largely unanswered empirical question.
We are optimistic that this article is a beginning of a research agenda by critical scholars to continue these investigations of the relationships between consumption, consent and state violence. Future research could include ethnographic studies that delve into the interactional level of how consumers make sense and meaning of their consumption of state violence. After all, as Lukács (1968) noted, commodity production and products shape how individuals experience and understand the world including that of state violence. Additionally a content analysis of social media sites linked to military air shows could be done to conduct an empirical study of responders’ comments to sense how consumers view their experiences.
Furthermore, while we have focused on more overt forms of consumption of state violence, future research should delve into the more hidden forms, including those present in their real and symbolic value within the cultural industry more broadly, including how the role of labor and in particular immaterial labor as conceptualized by Lazzarato (2015) furthers the process of commodities, consumption and state violence where the state relies on consumers to defend its violence.
We close by suggesting that any form of resistance to the commodification and consumption of state violence should begin by recognizing that, more often than not, they are small symbolic gestures of reigning in state violence that serve to currently legitimate that which it critiques and resists. We depart with Debord and the Situationists and see most forms of commodity/consumption resistance as another avenue that legitimates the integrated spectacle. More specifically, what often appears as a form of resistance or ‘detournment’ can be viewed as how this system responds to citizens’ concerns, or where the ‘market’ reacts, and resistance to state violence appears as successful. However, accepting these small forms of resistance as ‘resistance’, we suggest, serves to reproduce the depoliticized side of hegemonic control in the current state of neoliberalism. As such, we suggest it is only when the full realization of our complicit role in the production and reification of state violence becomes a staple of critique that meaningful resistance can occur. Our hope is that future research that examines the role of commodification, consumption and consent of state violence, including that noted above, will serve as a step in that direction.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We want to thank Stephen Muzzatti for his comments on an earlier draft. We also want to acknowledge and thank our anonymous reviewers for their insightful and extremely helpful comments and suggestions.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.