The enemy is Mother Nature
As harsh as it sounds, this is exactly what an ad published in The Wall Street Journal this past August explained. Our focus today is not on the politics of the organization that made the ad, which, in my view deserve some credit. We would rather focus on the use of the figure of the enemy as an empty container of meaning.
The huge headline of the full-page piece read: “How do you deal with an enemy that has no government, no money trail and no qualms about killing women and children?” It then went on to reveal who the enemy is and focused on Hurricane Katrina as support.
This piece of advertising offers an excellent example to understand signifiers, which are empty containers by definition and can lead to a lot of fluff if not identified and tackled on time. What is interesting about them is that they have the potential to reflect a structure of thinking that seems to be embedded in western society: we tend to think in pairs simplifying and dismissing actual meaning under the pretext of associations.
Martin McQuillan, a professor in Cultural Theory and Analysis from the University of Leeds, offers great insight on how to break with the misleading pattern of western thinking (binary associations) in his introduction to Deconstruction: A Reader. First, it is important to understand what deconstruction teaches us, which is that “we should not assume that the way we perceive the world is the same as the world actually is.” So, the enemy is not necessarily the enemy.
When explaining binary oppositions, McQuillan uses the example of the “way the West has traditionally considered its other, the East,” and summarized a list of terms that characterized the way in which the East as a “non-Western world” has been represented, among the list of pairs are rational-irrational, recognizable-exotic, scientific-mystical, reason-superstition, etc. I’m sure you get the point.
Going back to Mother Nature as our ultimate enemy, the piece of advertising in question is successful in using an empty signifier to get our attention through all the preconceived connotations of fear and contempt that we usually associate with non-friends. However, by taking this shortcut, the add falls in the trap of binary associations and contradicts itself by simplifying the issue and pointing a finger towards the wrong enemy.
