“When Liberation Coincides with Total Destruction”: Biopolitics, Disability, and Utopia in Walt Whitman’s Afterlife

Abstract

In 2009, Levi’s Jeans launched the “Go Forth” campaign, a series of commercials and print advertisements drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman. As Wieden + Kennedy, the marketing firm that designed the campaign explains, “The campaign is inspired by the passion Walt Whitman felt for the potential of America and promise of the future. Films were created to demonstrate Levi’s awareness and relevance in the world through ‘America’ and ‘Pioneers! O Pioneers’ accompanied by readings of Whitman’s poems of the same name. Outdoor and printed material evoked the spirit of the new pioneer – today’s progressive – by featuring such optimistic statements as ‘Will work for better times,’ ‘All I need is all I got,’ and ‘Tough as your spirit’” (Campaign). Situated in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, these sentences suggest that Whitman performs a reparative function: Whitman rescues America’s faith in its own futurity; he salvages the conflation of the United States and futurity by revising Manifest Destiny as the “spirit of the new pioneer.” The campaign’s optimism consists in coding futurity in terms of American exceptionalism and capitalism. America’s potential entails putting people back to work (“Will work for better times”) and cultivating endurance for austerity measures (“All I need is all I got”). The commodity form becomes the vehicle for a renewal of America, so that the symbolic value of the Whitmanian future does not simply presuppose the material conditions of capitalism but also contributes to sustaining them. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the campaign’s manifesto-like prose poem, printed on posters plastering the walls of the New York City Subway system, reads like a call to reinvest in neoliberalism: “I am the new American pioneer, looking forward, never back./No longer content to wait for better times ... /I will work for better times. ... All I need is all I got./Bruises heal. Stink is good. And apathy is death,/so I strike up for the new world!” (Campaign). It is tempting to read Wieden + Kennedy’s campaign as little more than the abduction of poetry for the service of capitalism. At the same time, however, the “Go Forth” campaign also calls attention to Whitman’s role