Captives and capitalism
This weekend, I took in a presentation about the life and philosophy of Theodor Adorno, famed theorist who contributed to what’s known as the Frankfurt School. During the show, the presenter, Dr. Kyla Bruff, began talking about Adorno’s thoughts on cultural products.1
At the same time, I began thinking about the photo of one of the extracted hostages from the massacre in Nuseirat. (I say “the” photo, because it’s fairly ubiquitous by now, probably the most recognizable from the operation in Nuseirat.)
In this photo Noa Argamani, newly sprung from her ordeal, is prominently holding a bottle of Coca-Cola; and her father is at her side, also imbibing cola and hugging her around the shoulder.
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I think about this photo fairly regularly because, from the first time I saw it, it struck me as being a prime example of crass consumerism. There is no real reason to release a photo where such product placement is so prominent. Surely, in the span of that photo shoot, there were enough genuine moments without a Coke in hand that could have made it to newspaper spreads and television screens.2
But listening to Dr. Bruff talk about Adorno’s ideas about cultural products, I linked that photo to an ad campaign going back decades, not of Coca-Cola but of Disney, where an interviewer would hunt down the triumphant quarterback of the Superbowl that had just finished. The flushed, jazzed-up quarterback, asked what he would be doing next, would exclaim, “I’m going to DisneyWorld!”
That campaign relies on the device of transfer, where the audience member, not only seeing the elation on the player’s face but is also him- or herself filled with excitement after just watching the Big Game, transfers that excitement onto the idea of visiting DisneyWorld. That ad is a classic application of that propaganda / advertising device.3
It strikes me that something very similar is going on with Argamani, dubbed “the face of the Nova Music Festival,” and her smiling grasp of a Coke bottle.
Even more submerged than that is the fact that, in Israeli society, captured soldiers are considered sacred. While none of the captives were active in the IDF when they were taken, all of them, unless exempted due to Orthodox beliefs, would have served as soldiers, so the extraction of these four people absolutely produced a sense of elation among the Israeli population (especially as nearly everyone in the society has served in the Israeli armed forces). The 274 Palestinians who perished during the extraction get folded in — much like the child labor involved in crafting iPhones, or the deaths of those who, way back in the day, were forced to work in sugar mills. The blood is part of the product, as a buried cost.
That’s how I see Coca-Cola operating in that photo. The flesh, the bone and the blood of those 274 victims are embodied in that hourglass shape, cradled in the triumphant hand of 26-year-old Argamani but also in the minds and hearts of all who consumed that photo.
How many more Cokes were sold that day, that week? That’s product placement — one full of phantoms.
In response to the interviewer’s questions, Dr. Kyla Bruff said,
“In your initial question, you mentioned four terms: capitalism, mass culture, alienation and commodification. And, in Minima Moralia, as in The Dialectic of Enlightenment [two of Adorno’s works], we can see these as related. And the way I see them as related is that, of course, capitalism — through exchange value or through this sort of society predicated on exchange relations or reified relations and things — is what produces commodification. . . .
“So the commodification and the alienation is produced in capitalism through this mediation of relations on the basis of exchange value, and this produces sort of standardized cultural products for the purposes of exchange, which includes cultural products. . . . And because our lives are organized by these exchange relations (or what Adorno would call the Tauschprinzip, the principle of exchange), our society is now just an exchange society, and that’s what’s determining this sort of situation of the things that you mentioned: a problematic mass culture of commodification and alienation. […]
“You can see one of the big points in Minima Moralia [regards] how our freedom is limited by exchange society, and how our scope of possible, genuine activity and self-expression is reduced. And this is especially true in regards to how we think about other people, right? So we reduce the Other, and our relationship to the Other is mediated through exchange. And the commodification of culture is just making this worse, because we are consuming these cultural products, and we’re doing so in a standardized and sort of homogenized culture factory or culture industry, where everything that is produced is designed to keep us all entertained in the same way and assure a kind of homogeneity of experience.”
See “An Introduction to the Life and Philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno with Dr. Kyla Bruff, (Carleton U),” The Young Idealist, YouTube, published June 14, 2024, beginning ~ 54:50.
Indeed there were other photos that showed the ebullience of Argamani reuniting with her family. It remains a mystery why this photo ran so prominently in news outlets around the world. I suspect it has something to do with Western audiences having come to expect Coca-Cola to be associated with images of moments of togetherness and happiness.
See “Propaganda Devices Lecture - Part 2 of 2,” UD English Language Institute, YouTube, published June 19, 2013, particularly the section from ~ 0:12 to ~ 3:35.