Lecture Script

Begin without formal introduction. Start speaking as the room settles.

Here is a Tim Hortons cup. You have seen ten thousand of them. You didn't choose to see them — they were simply there, the way weather is there. That cup is not a cup. It is a proposition. It is a machine for producing a particular kind of person: a Canadian, specifically, who relates to their Canadian-ness through warmth and ordinariness, through the democratic ritual of the double-double shared by the hockey parent and the oil worker and the newcomer from the Philippines who is learning, among other things, that this is what Canadians drink.

Now here is a John Lewis advertisement. British. December. A small child watches a penguin. You feel something. The feeling arrives before you've decided to feel it, and it dissolves almost immediately because you know you're being sold something and you feel faintly compromised. But the feeling came first. That is not an accident. That sequencing — emotion before cognition, feeling before critique — is the mechanism. That is what we are here to discuss.

And here is a Future song. "Stick Talk." The beat is enormous. The lyrical content is, in the most straightforward sense, commodity display: brands, currency, accumulation, surveillance of one's own wealth. There is no narrative. There is only now, and now contains only things that can be purchased. I want to suggest that this is not poverty of imagination. I want to suggest it is the most honest cultural document of our moment — the moment in which the horizon of the possible has been successfully contracted to the dimensions of the market.

Three objects. Three cultures. Three genres. One apparatus. The question this lecture is going to ask about all three of them — and about every cultural object you will encounter after leaving this room — is not what does this mean? It is whom does it make?

Roland Barthes called this mythology. Not mythology in the sense of ancient stories, but mythology as a second-order sign system — a way of encoding historical, contingent, politically interested arrangements of the world so that they appear simply as the world. The Tim Hortons cup does not announce itself as an ideological operation. It announces itself as coffee. That invisibility is the operation. What we are going to do over the next hour, and across the four seminars that anchor this unit, is make it visible.

Three theorists will do the analytical work. Michel Foucault will help us understand how subjects — the kinds of persons it is possible to be — are produced by the discourses and institutions that organize social life. Louis Althusser will help us understand how those institutions reproduce themselves without appearing to, by hailing us into identities we then inhabit as though they were always already ours. And Fredric Jameson will help us understand the historical condition of all this: why it has become increasingly difficult, in the cultural moment we occupy, to imagine things being otherwise. A fourth voice — Stuart Hall — will give us the methodological vocabulary we need to actually read specific texts against this theoretical map.

Let's begin.

Foucault's most radical claim is not that power is repressive. It's that power is productive. It doesn't silence subjects; it makes them. The prison doesn't merely punish the criminal — it produces the category of criminality, and in so doing produces the law-abiding subject who is not criminal as a coherent identity that needs managing. The clinic doesn't merely treat illness — it produces the category of the normal body against which the ill body is defined and through which the healthy subject is constituted as an object of continuous surveillance.

Hold that thought. Now look at this.

Now. A Foucauldian reading of that advertisement does not say: Dove is lying. It does not say: Dove cynically exploits women's insecurities to sell moisturiser, which is true but insufficient. A Foucauldian reading says: this advertisement is a node in a broader discursive apparatus — a network of beauty magazines, diet culture, cosmetic surgery discourse, wellness industries, and now cause-marketing campaigns — that constitutes the female body as an object requiring continuous self-assessment. The Dove campaign does not disrupt that apparatus. It extends it. It opens a new front. Now women are invited to assess not just their appearance but their relationship to their appearance. The apparatus deepens. The discourse proliferates. The subject it produces — the woman who knows she is "more beautiful than she thinks" and buys Dove because it told her so — is as thoroughly produced as the woman the campaign claims to liberate.

This is not cynicism. This is Foucault's most important insight: discourse is not something external to subjects that distorts their authentic understanding of themselves. Discourse is the condition under which subjects become thinkable at all — to themselves and to others. The "authentic" body the Dove campaign invokes is itself a discursive production. There is no body before the discourse on the body. There is only the body that discourse makes legible.

Now here is a far more extreme version of the same argument, made cinematically.

The Armitage household is a dispositif. It is not a horror-film aberration; it is a distillation. What Peele has built, with extraordinary precision, is a model of the liberal-racial apparatus — the network of discourses, gestures, investments, and social arrangements through which white liberal subjects constitute themselves as anti-racist while continuing to exercise the racial power that produces their position. Chris is hailed, repeatedly, into the role of the post-racial subject — the man for whom race is an interesting identity rather than a material condition, the man who is safe in this house because these people voted for Obama. The sunken place is not supernatural. It is the condition of the subject who has been successfully interpellated into a discourse that conceals the apparatus it depends on.

The preferred reading of Get Out — the reading it encodes most powerfully, the reading that the Armitage family's discourse is designed to produce — is the reading that Chris has already been offered before the film begins: that this is a post-racial household, that these are good people, that his discomfort is his own problem. That reading is precisely the one that blinds. Foucault would say: the most effective discursive formations are those that make their own operation invisible. Power at its most effective is power that does not look like power.

Althusser's most famous illustration is the simplest imaginable. A police officer walks down a street and calls out: "Hey, you!" A person turns. In the act of turning — in the recognition that they are being addressed — the subject is constituted. They did not exist, as a subject in the ideological sense, before the hail. The hail produces them. And here is what Althusser says that is most unsettling: ideology is always already operating. There is no moment before the hail. We are always already subjects, produced by the ideological apparatuses we were born into — the family, the school, the church, the media — before we have the capacity to reflect on what is being done to us.

Now. Three advertisements. Same mechanism, three different subjects.

Watch what that advertisement does structurally. It does not say: here are some attributes that Canadians happen to have. It says: here is a Canadian subject — and then it names the attributes that retroactively justify the positing of that subject. The subject was always already there, waiting to be hailed. Joe is not describing Canadians; he is producing the Canadian who will recognize themselves in his description and turn. That turn — that moment of recognition, that surge of pride at the hockey reference, that relief at being distinguished from Americans — is the interpellation event. You are being made, in real time, in a beer commercial.

Notice also: the ad is produced by a company that is not Canadian. Molson Coors is a multinational beverage conglomerate. The Canadian national subject being interpellated in this ad is the consumer that Brazilian private equity needs in order to sell beer. Althusser's point is precisely this: the ideological apparatus serves the reproduction of the relations of production. The ISA does not merely produce subjects — it produces the specific kind of subjects that the economic structure requires. The warm, modest, hockey-adjacent Canadian is the subject who buys Molson and feels good about it. That is the work the ad is doing.

Bell Canada is a telecommunications monopoly. It is also, on the evidence of this campaign, a mental health advocacy organization. The ISA here is performing a remarkable operation: it is annexing the discourse of mental health — a discourse that belongs, historically, to medicine, psychology, and community support — and relocating it within the brand. Bell does not merely sponsor mental health awareness. It is mental health awareness, on the evidence of this ad. To speak about your mental health is, within the logic of this campaign, to participate in the Bell community. The apparatus is not the school or the church in Althusser's classical account. It is a phone company. But the operation is identical: a discourse that produces subjects who relate to an institution as though it were the natural home of their most intimate experiences.

Now I want to show you what happens when the apparatus colonizes not just experience but interiority itself — not just how we feel, but how we narrate feeling.

George Saunders, in his 2003 short story "Jon," gives us a narrator who has been raised in a corporate focus-group facility and whose entire interior life — love, grief, desire, moral uncertainty — is expressed exclusively in advertising language. When Jon falls in love, he describes the experience in the vocabulary of brand preference. When he mourns, he reaches for the language of product discontinuation. There is no register below or beneath the discourse. The discourse is not something Jon experiences; it is the medium in which Jon exists as a subject.

Saunders is doing philosophically what Althusser describes structurally: showing us a subject for whom the ideological apparatus has been so thoroughly internalized that the apparatus and the subject are indistinguishable. The question the story poses — and that we cannot answer with certainty — is whether Jon's love is real. And the deeply unsettling answer that Althusser forces us toward is: the question of whether it's real is the wrong question. It is the only love Jon can have, within the discursive conditions of his existence. That is what ideology means.

In 1989, Public Enemy released "Fight the Power." The song was commissioned for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing — a film about racial violence and institutional failure in Brooklyn. The opening lyric: "1989 the number, another summer / Sound of the funky drummer / Music hittin' your heart 'cause I know you got soul." The song then names the disciplinary apparatus directly and without euphemism: the police, the prison system, the white cultural canon that has systematically excluded Black artistic production. Elvis Presley is described as a racist. John Wayne is described as a racist. The song does not make these claims as an aside; they are its central argument. This is counter-discourse: the naming of the apparatus in the language of those the apparatus disciplines.

Fourteen years later: Jay-Z, "99 Problems." The same disciplinary apparatus — specifically the police stop, the search, the encounter with institutional power on the road. But encoded now within the commodity form of the commercially successful rap record, within a persona that is simultaneously the victim of racial profiling and a figure of immense financial power. The critique of policing is still there, in the second verse — it is one of the most precise accounts of the legal dynamics of a police stop in the American popular canon. But it coexists with a persona that the commodity form has produced: the rapper as capitalist, the counter-discourse as brand.

And then, 2018. Nike. Colin Kaepernick. "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything."

Let me be precise about what has happened here. A man knelt during the national anthem to protest the killing of Black Americans by police. He was blacklisted from the NFL. He became, for a period, the most visible figure of resistance to racial violence in American public life. And then Nike — a corporation whose supply chain depends on the labour of workers in the Global South who have no recourse to the protections Kaepernick was protesting the absence of — made him their spokesman. The radical gesture is not suppressed. It is incorporated. It is re-encoded as brand equity. The oppositional reading becomes the preferred reading of a product. Resistance is the content; the commodity form is the container. And the container wins.

Kendrick Lamar knows this. To Pimp a Butterfly is, among other things, a sustained meditation on precisely this trap: the Black artist whose work is celebrated and consumed by the culture industry that benefits from the conditions the work critiques. The album stages the problem without resolving it, because the problem cannot be resolved from within the commodity form. You cannot make a record about the commodification of Black culture without making a commodity.

And Future? Future does not engage this problem. Future has moved past it, into a space where the problem is not even imaginable as a problem. DS2 inhabits a temporal horizon in which resistance has no content — not because Future has been defeated, but because the horizon of the possible has contracted to the point where accumulation is not an ideology but simply the texture of existence. This is where Jameson enters.

Every year, in late November, John Lewis — a British department store — releases a Christmas advertisement. The ads have become, over the last fifteen years, a significant cultural event. People watch them and cry. They are shared on social media. They are discussed in newspapers. They are, by any measure, extraordinarily effective pieces of emotional communication.

They are also, on Jameson's account, machines. Not machines for producing affect — machines for producing the simulacrum of affect. What the John Lewis ad delivers is not feeling but a feeling about feeling: the experience of what it would be like to feel the warmth and generosity and childhood innocence and familial belonging that the ad's imagery invokes. The historical content that would ground those feelings — the actual memory of a specific Christmas, the actual relationship with the specific child or parent or friend — has been evacuated. What remains is the aesthetic of the feeling. Pastiche: the blank imitation of an emotional form without the substance that would make the emotion real.

Don DeLillo, in White Noise, gives us the "most photographed barn in America." Two characters drive to see it. There are signs along the road: "THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA." There are forty cars in the parking lot. There are tourists with cameras. Murray, the more theoretically articulate of the two characters, observes: "No one sees the barn." What they see is the accumulation of images — the photographs that preceded their visit, the photographs others are taking around them, the cultural significance that has accumulated around the object. The barn has been superseded by the image of the barn. The referent has been displaced by its own representation. "We're not here to capture an image," Murray says. "We're here to maintain one."

This is Jameson's end of history as lived experience: not the absence of events but the loss of the historical position from which events would be legible as historical. The John Lewis ad does not invoke Christmas. It invokes the image of Christmas — the cultural accumulation of Christmases, the style of what Christmas is supposed to feel like, the barn that no one sees. And Future's DS2 is, on this reading, not poverty of imagination but its logical conclusion: a music entirely of the present, in which the past is not nostalgia but simply absent, and the future is not deferred but simply not available as a category. The nostalgia mode and the trap mode are mirror images: one is all past, one is all present, and both are equally unable to imagine something different.

Mark Fisher, writing in the aftermath of 2008, calls this condition capitalist realism: the pervasive sense that capitalism is not merely the dominant economic system but the only possible horizon for social existence. His most devastating observation is a rephrasing of a remark attributed to Jameson and Žižek: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." This is not a provocation. It is a description of a cognitive condition that cultural analysis can diagnose — that the unit you are taking is designed to diagnose.

Four movements. Four problems. One apparatus, visible now from four different angles.

Foucault gives us the genealogy: the subject is not found, it is made. Discourse — the regulated system of statements that constitutes what can be said and who can say it — produces subjects as its effect. The Dove campaign does not address a pre-existing woman who has insecurities about her body. It produces that woman, and it produces the solution to her insecurity, and it sells her both.

Althusser gives us the mechanism: the hailing. The subject turns because they recognize themselves in the address. The Tim Hortons cup, the John Lewis ad, the Nike campaign — each is a hailing, a "Hey, you!" directed at a subject who does not yet exist as such, constituting them in the act of address. The ISA does not coerce. It invites. And the invitation is almost impossible to decline, because to decline it is to refuse recognition — to refuse to be someone.

Hall gives us the method: close reading of the preferred encoding. Every text has a preferred reading — a reading that the text works to produce, that requires the least resistance, that is most natural to adopt if you are positioned within the dominant ideological framework. The task of cultural analysis is to identify that preferred reading, and then to ask what it requires you not to see.

And Jameson gives us the historical stakes: we are in a period in which the cultural apparatus has become so thoroughly integrated with the economic apparatus that the gesture of refusal can be immediately incorporated as a style. Resistance becomes aesthetic. The counter-discourse becomes a brand. And the structural inability to imagine alternatives becomes the background condition of all cultural production.

So what do we do?

I want to resist the demand for an answer to that question — because the demand for an answer is itself part of the apparatus. The unit does not promise a way out. It promises a way of seeing. And there is, in Stuart Hall's account, something important in that promise. Hall is insistent that the encoding of a preferred reading does not determine the decoding. The apparatus does not fully close. There are negotiated readings and oppositional readings, and the existence of oppositional readings means that the apparatus is always also producing the conditions of its own critique. The subject who has been hailed can, in being hailed, also notice that they are being hailed. That noticing is not revolution. But it is not nothing.

The question this unit leaves you with is not: how do we escape ideology? That question has no answer and is probably the wrong question. The question is: having learned to see the seam where the constructed appears natural — having developed what Hall calls the capacity to read against the grain — what do you do with that capacity? What kind of cultural practice, what kind of critical intelligence, what kind of person does it make possible to be?

That is a question you will need to answer outside this room. But it is not a question you could have asked before you walked in. That, on the most modest account, is what education is for.