Oct 10, 2020
Blood for the Blood God.
Originally published on: https://readyaiminquire.com/post/631171909973934080/blood-for-the-blood-god
The year of our Lord two-thousand and twenty, or 20–20 in common vernacular, has been a wild ride. It’s been the kind of year when time compresses and six months simultaneously feels like six weeks and six years. The year started with an almost-war, a continent almost burning to the ground, then a pandemic, and now we’re almost back where we started: a(nother) continent is on fire, the pandemic is coming back for its own electric boogaloo, and perhaps this year will include a war after all. To misquote the LEGO Movie: everything is awful. What may be at the top of most of our shit-lists at the moment is the growth of the COVID-19 infections, despite what has felt like a constant bombardment of information, PSAs, commentary, and debate surrounding this global pandemic.
Most countries had a time-out over the summer, but now we’re headed back into the ring, so to speak, to see how this next round plays out. This long and rather mixed metaphor is, in effect, to say that across the globe people are deeply aware of not only the COVID-19 virus, but the risks associated with it, and the threat it poses to society. Which in my mind raises one question: what brought people to swarm shops once lockdown was eased? What caused such a quick return, and willingness to return, to business-as-usual: to offices, to pubs, to shops, to restaurants? With everybody being aware of the risks that still hover above us, surely one would expect to see much more caution? Here, I will argue that under capitalism shopping — and consumption more generally — functions as a cultural equivalent to sacrificial rites, and under late-capitalism more specifically, this form of sacrifice becomes more closely tied to the individual subject. With the uncertainty hanging above us all at the moment, sacrificial rites as a means to pacify a Divine Other becomes a completely rational thing to do — despite the apparent risks of breaking social distancing measures, individual action becomes key to managing the uncertainty of the present future.
We’re all aware of the general functioning of a capitalist economy, specifically how it is prone to crises when there isn’t enough growth, and therefore keeping the machinery going through spending in one form or another is key. I am not going to comment or analyse this because, frankly, I am not qualified for that particular discussion. If you want to read a critique of capitalism, growth, and crises, I might suggest turning to someone like David Harvey and his work on the ‘spatial fix’.
Indeed, as much as our current economic-political system maintains its economic imperative through spending and the flow of capital, so, too, does it create sociocultural imperatives. Though these imperatives have emerged to support and work in concert with the broader economic imperatives, they exist in a separate arena, of course. While the economic arena is driven by the cold, harsh economic calculus of PNLs, the social and cultural have a different currency: meaning. Anthropologist Danny Miller makes the case for shopping — that is, the leisure activity of spending hard-earned cash on ‘frivolous’ or luxury items — being the equivalent to a rite for sacrifice in contemporary capitalist societies.
This is a bold statement, you might think, but Miller’s argument is rather convincing. Sacrifice, firstly, shouldn’t be understood by its action, but rather its purpose. Therefore, the equivalent of ‘sacrifice’ across cultures may look wildly different, but they fulfil the same function. What Miller argues is that through shopping, “the labour of production is turned into the process of consumption”. In other words, shopping is done specifically to spend the money we have made in order to consume. The purpose of sacrifice is to establish or maintain a link with a divine entity or otherwise larger-than-human forces. This connection exists to elicit protection, pacification, or otherwise positive outcomes for the society which engages in said sacrificial rites. In the case of contemporary capitalism, what is sacrificed is money, that we earn with our bodies (labour), to maintain the economy as a near-divine force. In turn, The Economy takes care of our future income: through economic booms. Viewed from this perspective, shopping doesn’t function so differently from a farmer sacrificing some of his harvests to ensure larger harvests down the line.
This consumption, Miller notes, shouldn’t be read as “mere” consumption, or as consumption born from pure pragmatism (indeed, not all buying of goods constitutes shopping). The shopping/sacrifice that he discusses is one that from its very inception is understood as either an improvement or at the very least, a maintenance of society at large. The object of consumption is used to constitute a material connection to the divine force. This material connection is indeed key, as we must understand the sacrifice to be both in the material object being consumed, and the act of consumption itself. In other words, the performance of shopping is equally important. This might explain why online shopping doesn’t quite scratch the same itch: it lacks performativity. It is, in a sense, closer to “mere” consumption. This sounds far-fetched, without a doubt, and extremely abstracted, but bear with me.
One of the defining aspects of late capitalism is that everything either has been commodified or is potentially understood as a commodity: from good ol’ resources, to human labour, and more abstract concepts like personal identity. By consuming goods, be they clothes, or where we buy food, the restaurants we frequent and so on, we do not only consume the goods themselves, but we also use this pattern of consumption as a means to establish, re-establish, and reproduce our personal identities. As Jill Fisher notes: “[T]he late capitalist economy has created a structure in which our lives and bodies have been violently commodified”.
Understanding this degree of commodification through Marilyn Strathern’s seminal work The self in self-decoration, a potentially hidden set of processes begin to emerge. Strathern argues that decorating the body doesn’t necessarily serve to highlight the body itself, but to hide it. Just as “the body hides the inner self […] [Strathern] argue[s] that the physical body is disguised by decorations precisely because the self is one of their messages”. In more straightforward English, decorating the body serves to hide it specifically so that one’s ‘true self’ — what cannot be typically seen — can emerge; one’s individual subjectivity.
Applying this to late capitalism, the consumption of goods becomes a means through which we assert our sense of individual subjectivity (and take note of this being individual, it will be important later). The consumption of goods, therefore, establishes a metaphysical connection between ourselves and capital, as it is only through capital that we are capable of asserting our own independent selves. Shopping, thus, becomes the necessary prerequisite to such consumption, the act that sacrifices our hard-earned cash facilitating the consumption that connects us with the Divine Other of Capital.
How does this relate to the COVID-19 experience? As I mentioned at the start, people are, broadly speaking, aware of the risks that such a pandemic poses. However, much of this is undermined by the presence of several uncertainties in how this information is both presented and understood: uncertainties with regards to the virus itself, or of the economic uncertainties, the social impact, and the future itself. Typically, scientific (or specialist) knowledge has existed to legitimise governmental or state action, however, in times of great(er) uncertainty, this paradigm breaks down and such legitimation cannot take place. What we, as subjects, are left with is a sense of uncertainty and that something needs to be done, but without any clear sense of what this ought to be.
As anthropologist Mary Douglas outlines in her work on risk, the risk calculus has been individualised, like much of society at large, after the emergence of neoliberalism. The doing of the something mentioned above, therefore, falls to the individual, rather than any collective, though what this something is remains unclear. Here, the link between the individual and the Divine Other comes into focus. Much like the uncertainty that surrounds the virus itself, there is also a lot of uncertainty around how capital actually works: most people broadly understand capitalist economic structures, but not beyond the general. Seen from this perspective, the drive to go out and shop: to buy new clothes, go to restaurants or pubs, and in general to spend money, becomes not so much an articulation of ‘Western overconsumption’, but a genuinely sympathetic and rational drive to re-assert some control over a situation marred with feelings of uncertainty and lack of direction for individual action. This latter point is particularly damning in late capitalism given the onus placed on individual choice as being valued above all else; the collective action required to handle a pandemic like this requires the opposite sociocultural responses that many of us have been inculcated to understand as responses at all.
However, there is without a doubt a hidden dimension to this sacrifice, which is far more implicit and therefore not as clear, particularly as it is a result of circumstance rather than design. By engaging in our ritual shopping, we’re opening the door to additional COVID-19 spread. The culturally driven ‘need’ to maintain our connection with Capital (spurred on and reinforced by politicians, pundits, and indeed capital itself) becomes detrimental to what we, through these individual actions, are attempting to achieve. Instead, we’re entering a stage of meta-sacrifice, whereby we carry out the rites to ritually exchange our hard-earned cash for goods to consume, but due to the sheer scale of shopping and consumption taking place we are also indirectly sacrificing the weakest in society: the elderly, those with underlying conditions, and so on. This individually-driven response in dealing with our collective uncertainties appears, then, to come with the implicit acceptance that some individuals will simply be lost in the process.
At the end of the day, we neither understand the intricate processes of economics nor epidemiology, and alas we find ourselves in a moment where the economists and epidemiologists themselves do not have clear ideas of what will happen next. We’re stuck in a quagmire of uncertainty, with a need for individual action. Shopping, despite the continued threat of COVID-19 and a second wave emerging as I write it, is not merely an outlet of individualistic greed or rabid hyper-consumerism. Instead, with shopping and consumption understood through the framework of sacrifice, as a rite to pacify a Divine Other and, through an all-important individualisation of such action, re-establish not only our own connection with this Other, it emerges as a response to the uncertainty that hangs over us all. Haven’t we been told that shopping and spending money might keep the (alas, inevitable) economic crisis at bay? But at what additional cost, specifically a cost we might not see directly? If blood is for the blood god, capital is without a doubt for Capital.
Selected bibliography
Douglas, M. 1994 Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory. Milton Park: Routledge.
Fisher, J. 2002 “Tattooing the Body, Marking Culture”. in: Body & Society 8(4) pp. 91–107.
Miller, D. 2013 A Theory of Shopping. Hoboken: Wiley.
Strathern, M. 1979 “The Self in Self-Decoration”. in: Oceania 49(4) pp. 241–257.
