The Golden Arches of Good and Evil

In his introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau sees consumption as “another production” at work in society. Even within capitalist, colonizing, totalizing, authoritarian systems – consumption is (almost invisibly, but nearly ubiquitously) an active “making” by the “other” within the dominant system. As de Certeau observes:

For instance, the ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers' "success" in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians is well known. Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. (xiii)

From this observation, I point to the arches. Golden ones. Evil, colonizing, oppressive emblems of capitalist consumerism. And yet… A Business Week book review of Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause paints an amazing picture of contradiction during a scene that resembles post-apocalyptic mayhem:

During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, vandals caused tremendous damage to businesses in the area. Yet not one of the 60 McDonald's franchises there was harmed. McDonald's executives attributed this good fortune partly to its Ronald McDonald Houses, which provide support for families of children with cancer, implying that what a company reaps is ultimately connected to what it sows. (December 3, 2008)

John Hood, in his book Heroic Enterprises, more finely details this incident to the specific area of South Central Los Angeles:

There are some thirty McDonald’s franchises in south-central Los Angeles, but none were torched and few were damaged at all that fateful week in April 1992. Rioters avoided the restaurants, except perhaps to eat in them (along with the police and firefighters) everyday after curfew was lifted. “We were spared – if we can use that term – because of our involvement in the community,” says franchisee Leighton Hull. “The folks know we’re involved in the community. To them, we aren’t just the guys who take the money and leave town.” (pp. 93-94)

What does this mean in relation to de Certeau’s ideas on consumption as production? First, south-central Los Angeles did not invent McDonald’s. Presumably, there no petition for a McDonald’s to be established there. McDonald’s franchises came there via the same commercially imperialistic wave of invasion that McDonald’s franchises go everywhere. And for the same culinary colonizing purposes. But, a funny thing happened as the billions and billions of burgers were being bought by the colonized. The consumption made something new out of the “product.” The consumers (re)created the culture of the producer. (see the two video clips below.) The consumers re-framed the franchises as “ours” rather than as “theirs.” By making the franchise through their “use” of the product, the consumers brought over the franchises into an associative identity of otherness.

McDonald's commercial circa 1986

McDonald's commercial circa 2008

It is also from this same observation of de Certeau that I wish to interrogate another poesis (making) factor in the mis(dys)topic world of John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up. Let us assume the (postmodern) stock casting of business/capitalism (a la Prosser Enterprises) as the colonizing, dominant, oppressive power – which is a reasonable read for Brunner’s book. I propose that we look within the ranks of the producers themselves for more consumer/makers. I propose that individuals within this dominant system may be viewed as “other” than the producing system itself – indeed, that they may be viewed as a “consumer” of the dominance as a product. I illustrate here by showing the “heart” of the colonizing capitalist employee as voiced by Alan:

Know what I like about my job, Phil? They talk all the time about the businessman, the entrepreneur, being an ‘enemy of mankind’ and all that shit, and it is shit! I mean… I got my chance to be fat… and do I have to be ashamed of how I do it? I do not. Here I am offering a product that people really want, really need, and into the bargain creating jobs for people who’d otherwise be on relief.

Alan may be viewed as a producer, but isn’t Alan also a consumer? A consumer of entrepreneurism as a “product?” Is he any less a cog in the works of the dominant system? Is he any less disposable than the other “consumers?” It is interesting that the individual within the system finds ways to rationalize, justify or otherwise mediate his position as “producer/colonizer” in relation to “consumers/colonized.” Perhaps this betrays his innate understanding of his tenuous position as producer.