Unleashing a Flow of Desire: Mad Men, Desiring-Production, and Corporate Capitalism

This essay will examine how AMC’s popular TV series, Mad Men represents the pinnacle of the modern American corporation and pre-1970s consumer capitalism. As featured on the series, the fictional Sterling-Cooper is one of the leading national advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. The ad agency serves as a perfect example of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) Adesiring machine@ in that its primary function is to re-imagine and re-code their client’s products to associate them with particular desires that link to wider social networks of desires, which comprise modern society. Several of the product ad campaigns (deodorant, lipstick, brassiere) deliberately and intimately re-inscribe the body as a central object within a flow of desires. At the helm of these ad campaigns is Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the agency’s enigmatic, creative director. Draper is a master in fostering his creative team to connect various mundane consumer goods and services with seemingly innate desires that lurk deeply in the hearts and psyches of middle-class American men and women.

For contemporary viewers living in the unstable, fast-paced work environment of flexible capitalism, Mad Men serves as a nostalgic vision of pre-1970s capitalism when working for a corporation was the aspiration of most middle-class American professionals. The modern corporation provided workers with a sense of stability, a hierarchal career tract, and a social identity. Although on-demand production, flexible labor, and new communication technologies have provided workers with more freedom within the workplace, nevertheless, they have also led to increased instability and insecurity for American workers. Since the 1970s, the corporation, once the nerve center of modern capitalism, has become dominated by fickle shareholders governed by short-term speculation coupled with a risk adverse mindset. The company that downsizes, gets taken over, or has to reinvent itself is no longer a stable place for workers. Mad Men, however, does not view the corporation through rose-colored glasses. Sterling-Cooper, as an exemplar, is rigidly hierarchal, numbingly conformist, and generally resistant to change. Mad Men provides viewers with a unique opportunity by which to examine and contemplate the social and cultural changes in their workplaces and their lives in the temporal shift from modern to flexible capitalism in American society.