Political communication,neoliberalism and the myth of the end: Critical notes to prepare the end of capitalism rather than the end of the world

Introduction

The main point of my argument is that to imagine the end of the world is easier than to imagine the end of capitalism because the neoliberal solution to the crisis of legitimation of late capitalism is to blame the victim through the projective interpellation of the subject as the sacrificial victim of the death drive inherent in capitalism. To argue my point, I discuss the meaning of the Doomsday Clock and the “war on climate change” metaphors as instances of the ways in which neoliberalism projects the capitalism death drive through the interpellation of the subject as sacrificial victim: a condition in which emancipation, instead of depending on effective collective action, is construed as “salvation” within the symbolic imaginary of the ritual sacrifice.

The starting point of my argument is Habermas’s discussion of the crisis of legitimation in late capitalism. In the next section, I argue that Habermas’s interpretation underestimates both the death drive of capitalism and neoliberal effectiveness in resolving the crisis of legitimation – not by securing political sovereignty or meeting demands for legitimation, but by subverting the subject’s political identity and projecting capitalism’s death drive into it. The result of this projective interpellation is the “sacrificial citizen” (Brown, 2016): the subject that is prepared to sacrifice themselves and command the sacrifice of less worthy others to preserve the faith in and the working of neoliberal social order. As the effectiveness of this solution to the legitimation crisis depends on effective interpellation, to look into the relations of meaning implied in this process is useful for challenging the neoliberal response and its effects on constraining the oppressed subject’s imaginary – leading them to wish for the end of the world instead of the end of capitalism. To argue my case, I will then interpret the Doomsday Clock and the “war on climate change” metaphors in political discourse as instances of interpellation in which neoliberalism projects the death drive of capitalism onto the subject through the activation of the myth of the end and the symbolic meaning of ritual sacrifice. With this notion, I describe the belief that some sort of ending is a precondition for a new and better beginning. This belief has deep roots in Western culture testified by the Greek notion of “apocalypse” and by the role of sacrifice in Judaeo–Christian cultures. As I will argue later, this myth establishes the social ambivalence of the end of the world – something to fear but also to long for – and the ambivalent social meaning of the Doomsday Clock as a signifier of this myth. It because of this ambivalence that this signifier continues to perform disciplinary functions in the meaning Foucault gave to this notion: “an apparatus . . . a type of power, a modality for its exercise . . . a technology” (Foucault, 1977[1975]: 215) that ultimately “makes individuals” (p.170).

In the final section, I argue the case for the rejection of the neoliberal projective interpellation of the capitalism death drive through the conceptual tools of the critical theory of political myth, the critical analysis of martial metaphors, and ultimately the radical subversion of the symbolic meanings of the Doomsday Clock and the “war on climate change”.

This analysis is part of a broader effort to expand the critical approach to the analysis of political communication in ways to better enable this tradition to reveal the influence of ideology in the communicative construction of reality (Robinson, 2019). I rely on Althusser’s (2008[1971]) notion of ‘ideology’ to describe a “Representation of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence” (p.36, emphasis and capitalization in the original) and the notion of interpellation associated with it. In this notion, ideology transforms individuals into subjects that “work by themselves” (p.34] or, in other words, subjects that think and behave in ways compatible with the ideological imaginary. To bypass the definitional problems of traditional approaches to political communication (Brants and Voltmer, 2011; Bucy and Hobert, 2011; Chaffee, 1975; Kaid, 2004; Kenski and Jameson, 2017; Lasswell, 1948; Nimmo, 1978; Nimmo and Sanders, 1981; Rosillo-López, 2017), I define this concept as the competition for the control of relations of power through the competition for the control over relations of meaning. This definition relies on the idea that politics is essentially a competition for control over the distribution of values in society (Easton, 1965; Lasswell, 1950[1936]), but acknowledges the fundamental point that “political communicators not only deal with political realities and reveal their motives towards them, but also create those realities and motives” (Nimmo, 1978: 54). This definition is useful in developing a critical approach to the study of political communication because, by looking at the interplay of relations of meaning and relations of power, it offers the opportunity to interrogate and, if necessary, to challenge both. In the rest of this text, I apply this approach to the myth of the end and the war on climate change metaphor to argue two main points. First, that the relations of meaning implied by these forms of communication support the naturalization of neoliberal imaginary. Second, that the subversion of these relations of meaning is a preliminary and necessary condition for the possibility of imagining the end of capitalism.

Neoliberalism and capitalism’s death drive

If it seems easier to think of the end of the world rather than the end of capitalism, it is not because people lack imagination but because one important effect of ideological interpellation is precisely that of confining people’s imagination within limits compatible with neoliberalism’s vision of reality. When demands for more and better democracy challenged the very logic of late capitalism in Western societies of the late 1960s and 1970s, neoliberalism’s defensive response drew on the imaginary of myth to reject the rationality of democratic legitimation. In this response, the imaginary of sacrifice and its associated morality were activated to project capitalism’s death drive onto its subjects and to justify policies that systematically eroded both individual and collective ontological security. The effective enforcement of this morality of sacrifice also suppressed contestation and consecrated the neoliberal imaginary as “sacred”.

When Habermas discussed late capitalism’s crisis of legitimation, he argued that the structure of formal democracy contributed to this crisis suppressing, instead of resolving, class conflict. This suppression, in turn, reduced the people to the role “of passive citizens with only the right to withhold acclamation” (Habermas, 1975[1973]: 37). For Habermas, the crisis was caused by the suppression of class conflict and the exclusion of people from the processes “of rational formation of will”, relegating them into a condition of passivity that makes legitimation impossible. Through this suppression and passivity, “the substance of classical democratic theory is finally surrendered” to elites who, by “replacing the self-determination of the people, [make] privately exercised social power independent of the pressure of legitimation and immunize it against the principle of rational formation of will” (pp.123–124).

The myth of the end and the Doomsday Clock

In its essence, the myth of the end is a story which establishes a symbolic association between death and rebirth and, by so doing, performs a very important function: it allows the storyteller to bring the attention of the listeners away from the fear of death and into the longing for the salvation believed to come with death. This myth and its functions are useful for understanding the significance of the Doomsday Clock in the ideological interpellation of the neoliberal subject.

A key element here is the ambivalent signification of this artefact. Once the end of the world is construed within the relations of meaning of the myth of the end, the signifier of the time that separates us from the end of the world becomes a signifier of fear but also hope: the fear of the end and the hope that the end may lead to a new and better world. The paradoxical result, voiced in cultural texts, is the longing for this end to come.

Established in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (some of whom had participated in the Manhattan Project), in those days the Doomsday Clock was a metaphor of the time separating humanity from the possibility of its apocalyptic end brought about by the risk of a nuclear escalation in the confrontation between East and West. As today the end is brought about by climate change, this metaphoric role presents at least two elements of continuity. The first is the idea, as Marcuse (2002[1964]) suggested, that the representation of the threat – an “atomic” or environmental “catastrophe – “also serves to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger” hindering “the search for the the potential causes of this catastrophe in contemporary society and enforcing a process in which “defense . . . deforms the defenders and that which they defend” p.xxxix). The second and broader element is the idea that the significance of the Doomsday Clock, now as in the Cold War, depends on the relations of meaning associated with the myth of the end.

Since Barthes (2000[1957]) suggested myth performs political functions as “a second-order semiological system” and “depoliticized speech” supporting “bourgeois ideology” (pp.114 and 143, emphasis in the original), the political role of myth has been the focus of many studies (Blumenberg, 1985[1979]; Flood, 1996; Lincoln, 1989, 1999). Botticci (2007) discussed the contributions of Cassirer, Sorel, Blumenberg, and others in the development of a political theory of myth. This theory is all the more necessary because, when the aspiration to “to get rid of the grand political narratives” makes “the work of political myth . . . much more insidious than it has ever been in the past”, it is important to understand “in what conditions political myths are respectively a means for liberation or for oppression” (p.16).

For Boer and Petterson (2014), the formation of early economic thoughts depended on biblical myths “to create a new and autonomous entity” –“the economy” or “the market” – in a manner comparable to the method by which theology creates its objects of analysis” (p.129). Similarly, for Thompson and Shrempp (2020: 7) myths help individuals and groups to establish the “meaning of existence” and the relationship between ourselves and the cosmos, thus contributing in fundamental ways to the ontological security of the subject. This contribution becomes political relevant when, as Botticci (2007: 180) argued, the myth tells a story that impacts on “specifically political conditions for a certain social group or society . . . concerning the struggle for the distribution of power and resources which can, as a last resort, have recourse to physical force”. However, when sense-making functions are performed in relation to politically relevant issues, the role of ideology becomes essential. Krader (2021), for example, argued that ideologies are systematizations of meanings that draw from available myth in relation to political purposes. From this perspective, myth is “an active element in political ideology” (p.297) and ideology itself can be interpreted as “the activation of the Myth” (p.319).

In this, perspective, the myth of the end is a narrative that performs a sense-making function in relation to the hopes and fears associated with eschatology, “the part of theology concerned with death, judgement and destiny” and, as such, common to almost every human community throughout history (Oxford, 1999: 486) The same myth, however, performs ideological functions when activated to make sense of the capitalist death drive, ontological (in)security and sacrifice within the ethical framework of neoliberal imaginary, for example through the symbolic appeal of the Doomsday Clock.

The appeal of the Doomsday Clock is fascinating and ambivalent, not only because it activates the myth of the end and its ideological function, but also the anxieties associated with neoliberal re-configuration of ontological security and the ethics of sacrifice, projecting them in the countdown to a catastrophe. Thanks to the mediation of the myth of the end, the catastrophe is both feared and longed for to the extent that the end of the world becomes a necessary condition to bringing about a new and better world. In such a post-catastrophic future, salvation and the community are restored through the blood sacrifice of collective death. As at the end of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the belief that “we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when . . .” transforms the nuclear holocaust in a romantic moment.

As a marker of the passing of time, the Doomsday Clock is a reminder of a catastrophic ending interpreted as a moment to fear and, at the same time, to long for because it brings about a promise of liberation and change: liberation from the isolation and anxieties of capitalism and the change of communal regeneration through the collective experience of death. The song at the end of the movie Dr. Strangelove is a promise (“We’ll meet again, don’t where, don’t know when”) that was popular during WW2, presumably for its capacity to inspire hope by evoking the aftermath of that war. Performed against the background of nuclear explosions signalling the catastrophic end of humanity, the meaning of the same song is that of a cruel irony or, as I suggest here, the expression of suppressed desires associated with the interpretation of that catastrophe within the interpretative framework of the myth of the end. In other words, “we’ll meet again in a better world once we have done with this.”

This ambivalence has received critical attention. Discussing the movie, I Am Legend, for example, Eva Horn (2018[2014]): 3), noted how “The narrative of humanity’s sudden (and slightly miraculous) disappearance is strangely comforting” suggesting that, identifying itself as the “sickness” afflicting the world, “humankind blissfully dreams of its own extinction.” In the “pervasive apocalyptic fantasy” populating mainstream movies, scientific non-fiction, philosophical essays and novels, “the fantasy of the future as catastrophe is the emblem of a new, highly ambivalent attitude toward the future, marked by a strange fixation with catastrophe as a moment when an ultimate truth is revealed ” (p.5).This ‘truth’ is not the truth of positivist science but the ‘revelation’ of the Greek notion ἀποκάλυψις (apocalypses) or the true value or essence that is revealed at the end (Horn, 2018[2014]: 22).

This fixation with and fascination for an apocalyptic end, however, also reveals that the implicit desires hidden in the apocalyptic fantasy is a desire of justice, hope and value:

This destruction is a promise that mundane power will end, that the current world will be subject to a final reckoning, and that those who, at present, are powerless and virtuous will eventually be rewarded. The end of the world . . . thus implies a promise for the future: the advent of supreme justice, where evil will be punished and virtue rewarded. This is why destruction, within the model of classic apocalypse, always contains a perspective of hope. Within the catastrophe, a final truth will emerge, and the value of every being and every thing will eventually be revealed. (Horn, 2018[2014]: 22)

But why should salvation come only from an apocalyptic end rather than organized rational action? Because, in these fantasies, humans are part of the problem rather than the solution. According to Ebert (2012), “‘we humans’ and our ‘technological civilization’” are now responsible for the catastrophes that constitute “our new environment . . . inside which we exist, but without noticing the strangeness of it, precisely because of its very ubiquity” (p.1). “If we want mercy”, Ebert observed, “we had better start rethinking the layout of the current civilizational order, since we were the ones, and not the gods, who set it up in its present configuration” (p.4). As Kaplan (2016: 10) argued, “in circular fashion, the real catastrophes caused by humans generate fantasies that in turn have material effects.” This circularity, however, is too similar to the neoliberal construction of the victim as the ultimate responsible for their condition: it hides the causes of the “collective anxieties” discussed by Horn (2018[2014]) and leads, for example, to interpret the social meaning of Doomsday Clock narratives in terms of a “pre-traumatic stress syndrome” or (pre-TSS) in which, as Oramus (2023: 147, 148) argued, the “fears and apprehensions of people who are subconsciously waiting for a . . . catastrophe to come” motivate them to “search for ways to overcome their elusive anxiety” which they find by “reading Doomsday Clock Narratives”.

To express the meaning of catastrophic ends in terms of a relationship of circularity that starts and ends with the individual – construed as both victim and victimizer – neglects the role of society and ideology. On intellectual grounds, this is a sterile exercise because, beside introspection, it does not tell us how to deal with this condition, and ultimately leads to denial or incredulity (Oramus, 2023: 154). The circularity of this relationship also neglects the way relations of meaning shape relations of power, thus making resistance futile and collective action impossible. In other words, the formulation of this circularity seems an intellectual response that resonates with Walter Benjamin’s (2003[1936]) idea that fascism brings about “humankind’s self-alienation” to the point “where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (p.270). My suggestion here is that neoliberalism does the same.

If anxiety is a response to the inability to fight or take flight, we need to avoid the circularity described above and to establish more productive grounds to tackle its causes. If the social significance of the Doomsday Clock (and perhaps the source of its fascination) consists in the ideological activation of the myth of the end and in the activation of more or less unconscious desires of liberation from its effects, these same desires can establish the grounds for resistance.

Martial metaphors and ritual sacrifice

The metaphor of the “war on climate change” in political communication contributes to the legitimation of the capitalist ‘economy of violence’ (Han, 2021[2019]: 6) and to the interpellation of people as sacrificial victims. Metaphors are quite extraordinary objects discussed at least since the time of Aristotle. Their power goes beyond communication, involving conscious and unconscious emotions, thinking and behaviours, and beyond the present and its reality, involving memories of the past and imagination of possible futures. According to Horn, “metaphors are modes by which we understand reality . . . we anticipate and plan for the future and, above all . . . try to prevent catastrophic futures form occurring” (Horn, 2018[2014]: 10).

Because of their power, metaphors are useful and dangerous (Black, 1962: 47). Paul Ricoeur’s (1978[1977], exp ‘Study 3’(Its a section of the book)) suggestion that metaphors are fundamental in the creation of meaning, undermines the positivistic belief that language can describe reality “in a manner that was clear, unambiguous, and, in principle, testable”, and instead supports the idea that the “objective world is not directly accessible but is constructed on the basis of the constraining influences of human knowledge and language (Ortony, 1993[1979]: 1–2). This epistemological ‘move’ prepared the ground for the influential work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and numerous studies on the power of metaphor in the organization of the human experience of life (Cameron and Graham, 1999; Cameron and Maslen, 2010; Demjén and Semino, 2017; Gibbs, 2017; Goatly, 2011 2nd; Kövecses, 2000, 2002, 2005; Low, 2010; Semino, 2008; Xiugui and Yi, 2022).

Political metaphors are vital “to the language of leadership” because they mediate “between the conscious and rational basis of ideology and its unconscious mythical elements” (Charteris-Black, 2011[2005]: 30). As Musolff (2010: 145) argued, “the metaphors by which nations define their destiny have the potential to shape that destiny.” Charteris-Black’s Critical Metaphor Analysis is a method that studies the ideological dimension of the relationship between language of leadership, revealing the persuasive intentions and the ideological elements that influence the choice of political metaphors (Charteris-Black, 2004: 246–253). Among political metaphors, martial metaphors have a special status because war itself is constitutive of the modern nation-state, the distinction between domestic and international politics, the notion of political sovereignty and, in some traditions, of democracy itself (Walker, 1993). As Heinz argued, “the war metaphor is strong and socially valid because it is connected to very basic social values and their everyday practices: community, patriarchy, masculinity” (see Steinert, 2003: 281). In other words, martial metaphors are especially influential in political communication because they activate relations of meanings, myths and ideologies associated with the impact of war on relations of power.

Despite their usefulness in the legitimation of leadership, however, available research shows that the use of martial metaphors undermines the policies it is supposed to promote – such as in the case of US President Johnson’s war on poverty (Hinton, 2016: 3; Zarefsky, 1986), in medicine and healthcare policies (Arrigo, 1999: 318; David and Priesz, 2021; Board on Global Health Forum on Microbial Threats, 2006; Maccaro, 2021: 1; Malinowska-Sempruch and Gallagher, 2003; Servitje, 2021: 2), and in Bush’s “war on terror”, in the aftermath of 9/11 (Hartmann-Mahmud, 2002: 427–428). More recently, Sheehan (2023: 51) argued that neglecting the epistemic implications of the “war on mis- and dis-information” may transform this war into a war on dissent and a source of “regression in media studies”. For Merlingen (2023: 744), the Western “war against disinformation” is designed to “entrench international epistemic privilege anchored to the global geopolitical hierarchy of knowledges”.

In relation to the idea of a war on climate change, the fundamental problem is the contradiction between the competitive logic of war and the logic of cooperation required to effectively tackle climate change as a global phenomenon. The use of martial metaphors (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Climate_War) is not only inadequate in establishing the cooperative conditions necessary for effective action, but it is also risky as it lays the communicative grounds for the securitization and militarization of climate change, facilitating the shift from metaphoric to actual war for climate change.

For Floyd (2010: 3), the use of martial metaphors in the politics of climate change contributes to the securitization of environmental policy which leads to “de-democratisation, depoliticization . . . security dilemma and conflict” but has the advantage of giving “those policy-makers with little interest in environmental issues a shield to hide behind” (p.192). Pyszczynski et al. (2012: 363) offered convincing evidence “that increased awareness of the shared threat of global climate change can, at least under some circumstances, reduce support for war and promote efforts at peaceful coexistence and international cooperation.” McClanahan and Brisman (2015: 417) rejected the “war on climate change” metaphor because this metaphor inspires “solutions that parallel the very human actions that contribute to climate change” suggesting in its stead, “a ‘peace treaty with the earth’”.

These and other studies suggest that martial metaphors are frequent not because they support effective policies but because they are effective in politics and the legitimation of leadership: not to address the problems framed in their terms but to suppress dissent and preserve cohesion. The obvious risk of transforming the “war on climate change” into a non-metaphoric, global conflict for the control of the shrinking resources of the planet, resonates with the workings of neoliberal governmentality and with the interpellation of people as “sacrificial citizens”. This metaphor, in other words, harvests collective anxieties to activate the myth of the end and the hopes that sacrifice will bring about a better and “purified” future in which truth and justice will prevail, and puts them at the service of neoliberal governmentality and non-democratic leadership.

The Doomsday Clock and the “war on climate change” metaphor are communicative tools that actualize the projection of the capitalist death drive onto the subject and the interpellation of individuals as sacrificial victims in the sacralization of the neoliberal imaginary. As in other process of social signification, however, this one also contains elements of ambivalence relating to fear and hope, awareness and suppression, disruption and integration, oppression and emancipation, death and rebirth. These elements of ambivalence constitute a fertile ground for the possibility of resistance.

Liberation

The power of myth and the martial metaphor is great but resistance is possible. In this final section, I outline two steps of a tentative response to the strategy of projective interpellation that neoliberalism deploys to erase both the problem of legitimization and the possibility of its own demise from the collective imaginary. These steps consist of the subversion of the political functionality of the martial metaphor through the demystification of war and the critical re-interpretation of the myth of the end.