CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Robert Kirsch Performing Savviness: How to Make Wise Consumer Choices at the End of the World
Who is getting ready for an apocalyptic rupture, and how do they know what to do? There is a dazzling array of behaviors to choose from, including hoarding shelf-stable food, producing or consuming “tradwife” content on social media, demonstrating masculinity through extreme camping, harboring skepticism of state policy, forming opt-out communities, hoarding weapons, and securitizing homes. This project argues that these are not unrelated behaviors, but rather indicate that the political subjectivity at the end of consumer society is that of the savvy consumer. In these increasingly mainstream behaviors lies a quest for special knowledge that savvy individuals can deploy against their less-savvy fellow citizens to survive catastrophic conditions. The stakes of this savviness are raised against an apocalyptic backdrop: one’s ability to accumulate esoteric knowledge and make the proper consumption choices produces a political subject unconcerned with the shared exposure to systemic catastrophe and the collective action needed to face those problems together.
This behavior makes sense as the apotheosis of neoliberalism, where personal consumption choices are the only response to social problems, even recasting sovereignty as an individuated discernment of purchasing choice. This project critiques savviness as an apocalyptic political subjectivity because it produces the savvy consumer as an ersatz katechon—a force that resists the end, but also cannot imagine a future that is different from the present. In other words, the savvy consumer fails as an apocalyptic subjectivity because it can only posit that the other side of catastrophe will be like the present, even if at a different, dismal scale.