Operation I Can't Believe It's Not Butter
Plastic. Shit, isn't it? One minute it's a principle component of your toothbrush, your garden furniture and your exfoliating face wash, the next it's forming into a massive, country sized, floating island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean or dissolving into micro-particles and getting into your drinking water and air with consequences no-ones bothered figuring out yet. I mean, credit where it's due, it's versatile and cheap, but increasingly the cons seem to be outweighing the pros, to the point where even the Daily Mail has been campaigning to get people to stop using it. They've declared the Great Plastic Pick Up.
There are prizes for teams who pick up the most litter and Kirsty Allsop raves about it. It's great, she says. Sure it is. It's great. The enemy of my enemy is my friend – and all that.
Far be it for me to piss on the idea but something doesn't quite sit right with me about this. Is the Mail about to have a change of heart and become bold campaigners against the climate destruction that they've denied for decades now? Not likely. Their hearts still beat Oswald Mosley's blood round their veins, if not quite as openly as in 1939. Even if you think that's hyperbole, if you don't agree that the Daily Mail is a propaganda mouthpiece for a particular branch of elite interests you may as well stop reading now because we're not going to agree on anything. So I'm going to forget, for a second, the positive gloss on their, and their Tory chiefs, new found environmental concern and ask what are these sneaky fuckers up to?
Our society's propaganda model operates in a different way to the Nazi or Stalinist, state directed propaganda that people usually think of when they hear the word. Chomsky and Edward Herman examined our model in Manufacturing Consent. In state directed propaganda, a centralised propaganda body usually controls and censors information to eradicate or reduce dissent but Chomsky and Herman exposed how our culture has developed a number of different mechanisms that ensure our dominant ideology is re-enforced and that Jeremy Corbyn’s gets attacked and undermined at every turn.
Not via some malign, Ministry of Truth but because that's the way the system works. Alternate ideas and voices do get exposure but they're drowned in terms of quantity and often distorted qualitatively. In fact, our propaganda model could be so effective precisely because it allows some air to the dissenting view, at least in part because when you accuse the media of having a bias it gives opportunity for denial. For example, a swift counter you'll often hear when you bring it up is something along the lines of 'but look, there was this article about how someone said capitalism is evil on page 19 of The Guardian. You should try living under Stalin.' etc etc etc
But the active declamation of one of society's ills and apparent activism to do something about it, by one of the social order's most vocal defenders isn't just giving voice to an alternate idea, it seems of a different order, so what might be going on there?
Roland Barthes, in his 1957 essay Operation Margarine, examines one method our Established Order uses to perpetuate its mythology. In it he describes how our media sometimes “inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one” and he uses the example of a margarine commercial to demonstrate this. Margarine commercials often work by demonstrating, initially, the disadvantages of margarine. It promotes it in reference to what it is not - it's not as tasty as butter and that sort of thing. But then saves it with its supposed advantages – it's cheaper, it spreads more easily and that sort of thing. It seems to be criticising margarine but is actually promoting it. It's an advert after all. This still happens today. The brand mentioned in the title of this essay is doing this, the name of the brand itself is alerting you to what it isn't.
You see this technique reinforcing the established order in mainstream pop culture all the time. Two examples that spring to mind are the Bourne films and the recent Bond movie Spectre. In these films the villain (spoiler alert) is a corrupt person or body within the political establishment or the intelligence agencies. The films flirt with a counter cultural distrust of institutional authority but, ultimately, end up reinforcing those institutions via the protagonist's embodiment of the authority's 'actual' mythological values.
And perhaps this explains the Daily Mail's valiant battle against the evils of plastic. It allows a contingent evil - an environmental problem - and heroically pits itself against it, allowing those who join in the Great Plastic Pick Up to feel as though they're doing something about the environmental catastrophe bearing down upon us. But this handily allows us to ignore the greater environmental problems of climate change and the structural issues that actually cause it. That is - the essential evil - late industrial capitalism and its compulsion toward endless growth on a finite planet. It does all of this while reinforcing the underlying myth that responsible, individual behaviour - consumer behaviour - will actually make much of a difference.
Not that I'm saying we shouldn't be ending our culture's obsession with plastic but we should guard against convincing ourselves that taking that hessian bag to the Sainsbury's local is doing anything substantial in reducing the looming effects of climate change. I'm just concerned that while we're focusing on our plastic pick up on the beach, we've not noticed King Cnut sat on his throne in the sand, the tide lapping around his ankles as it keeps coming in, ever higher and higher than it did just a few years before.
