>The apparatus of the nation-state is thus both essential to the
>existence of capital, as well as in constant contradiction to such,
>both in the sense of regulating local or private interests for the
>sake of the system as a whole (legislative agencies and court
>systems), as well as the creation of specialized semi-autonomous
>fields (the realm of the political, academic, scientific, symbolic,
>etc.) increasingly exempt from the direct play of the market
>forces. It is the harmonization of these two tendencies, i.e. a
>transcendent capital-logic and an immanent cultural logic of capital
>respectively, which particularly interests us here
The Molson Annual Report for the (fiscal) year 2000, at the very moment of
their almost gleeful realization of the hopes they had placed in Canadian
nationalism is I suppose an instance of the harmonization referred to here.
Of course Molson's not the state but it's making a credible bid to become
the nation, and it did show an awareness of the importance of a:
>sense of regulating local or private interests for the
>>sake of the system as a whole
Here, the questions of exports (US sales declined 3.8%, p.42) and the
closure of the Barrie brewery in Ontario which, to put it mildly, take a
back seat. That is "regulation" - once the decision was made that to gain
Canadian market share for beer was a "top priority "(p.14) - right up there
with "the need to improve the competitiveness of our eastern Brewing
network" (p.8).
The first words of p.1 of the Annual Report for 2000 are "Molson's national market share increased for the first time in nearly a decade." Then follows as the central image on page 1 a still from the "first TV commercial in the new campaign, 'The Rant'..."
>in marked contrast
>to the medieval canons of reciprocal familial obligations, the
>hieratic tenets of the Church or the political jousts of the nobility
>vis-ý-vis the Absolutist monarchies, the 18th century revolutions did
>not need to incarnate or symbolically represent their claim to
>universality. Rather, the revolutionary process directly embodied this
>universality, in the same sense that the capitalist nation-state did
>not accidentally stumble upon its universal content, but was this
>content. The state produced the nation, but the nation also produced
>the state, everywhere from the Napoleonic levee en masse and the civic
>republicanism of the British Empire to the popular mobilizations of
>revolutionary America. The shocking but irresistible conclusion Adorno
>draws from this is that Kant's post-Absolutist morality is the
>legislative prehistory of English-metropolitan nationalism.
An excellent phrase ( "the legislative prehistory of English-metropolitan nationalism" - though I would insist that by 1615 you have the core of the legislation, both the welfare statutes in England and the work of the nasty poet Sir John Davies as Attorney General in Ireland) - and interesting that a fault line should open up (with excellent results this quarter) within the main branch "of English-metropolitan nationalism" - through profit, a universal aspect of one 18th century revolution (France), but absent in the other (Haiti). And that other one wasn't a revolution at all (is, was, Canada counter-revolutionary?).
>It is precisely here, where one would expect either the pithy
>denunciation of these nationalisms (their subsequent transformation
>into the Napoleonic wars of plunder, British imperialism and the
>American frontier annexations) or the whole-sale dismissal of the
>Kantian categories as the extinguished and irrelevant thought-forms of
>a decadent bourgeoisie, that Adorno unexpectedly asks us to pause for
>a moment and to think nationalism through from quite a different
>perspective: namely, that of Freudian psychoanalysis.
> Freud's concepts
>were meant to negate Absolutism's notorious claim of "L'etat, c'est
>moi" [I am the state] with the insight that the bourgeois self is
>organized very much like a miniature state, with rulers (the superego)
>and the ruled (the id), a process of legitimation (the mediating ego),
>and a complex symbolic economy (cathexes) predicated on the psychic
>accumulation of pleasure (the Trieb or drive) - the photographic
>negative, in short, of the turn-of-the-century Hapsburg civil society
>of Vienna, whose latent contradictions (a decaying monarchy just
>barely recontaining the claims of budding nationalisms) could be
>registered in micrological form.
And pause long enough to see that Freud can't account for whatever bears on the question of nationalism in the 2000 Molson Annual Report, however well it may have worked on the Ring; balding reddish haired Board Chairman (photo on p.2) Harvard grad Eric H. Molson's superego is boring. Interesting is that the guy standing to his left, lawyer E. James Arnett (rimless glasses) "President and Chief Executive Officer" is leaving that lucrative position on June 27th, to be replaced by the guy on his right MBA Daniel J. O'Neill (dimples) "Executive Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer." Dimples O'Neill was hired at the end of the preceeding fiscal year, and his main achievements seem prominently to include (p.4) the hiring of one Michael Downey, Senior Vice President Marketing (presumably responsible for the campaign so successful in the last quarter).
Stills and text of "The Rant" (which includes "I believe in PEACEKEEPING not policing..." -emphasis in original) are on page 15 to illustrate the section "Strategic Brands."
Board of Directors are on p.72 - the last page. 13 mature white men, 6 balding. 3 Molsons - one Harvard, one Princeton, one McGill. Two French, one out of PR and the other from hockey. One Jew (Brandeis and Columbia Law), director of Playboy and (is it still Perelman's?) Revlon. One Italian who makes a thing of it (director of Italian Chamber of Commerce, governor of Canadian -Italian Community Foundation). Six Anglo&Irish, of whom only one - departing CEO Arnett lists a US degree (Harvard LL.M. - honorary?), and Arnett is a director of the American Society of International Law (to which I haven't belonged for ten lovely years now), where I hope he speaks up for the undoubted rights under governing international law of the Sherritt International directors denied entry to the United States.
So I go along with Chuck who to the Freudbabble prefers:
>"The triumph of capitalism thus involves not just an objective or
>diachronic set of revolutions, though these are hardly unimportant,
>but subjective and synchronic ones as well: the conscience registers,
>in a particularly acute form, the most profound and far-reaching
>spatialization of subjects previously delimited to the temporal
>registers of familial or hieratic allegiances. The seismic eruption of
>national capital out of its proto-national, regional and urban
>predescessors was, in short, the zero-hour of an identity-politics of
>the national subject.''
("The creative for our flagship brand has evolved from defining the brand as being about sociability and being Canadian into what consumers tell us - they aren't just Canadian, they are proudly Canadian." p.16)
john mage