Avon's Retroactive + Repair Creme makes promises it can't keep.
Retroactive used Rejuvi-Cell Technology to re-energize skin cells to slow the signs of aging so that when skin cells act younger, you look younger. Retroactive + uses Rejuvi-Cell Repair Technology that recharges aging skin cells so they act younger, stimulates the repair of damaged skin cells at the molecular level, and protects against future cell damage. Retroactive + is still a silky smooth gel cream with the same signature fragrance, and is still suitable for sensitive skin and is alpha-hydroxy acid free.
As mortal creatures, aging is an inevitable fact of our lives. In many cultures, aging is embraced, but in North America, aging is not only undesirable but also actively resisted through cosmetics and cosmetic surgery. While the desire to live forever is by no means new, recent developments in biotechnology have somewhat successfully enabled the defiance of visible signs of aging.
This comes as no surprise considering our society’s late-capitalist neoliberal predilections, for growing old and dying means the dwindling and ultimate cessation of production and consumption. The notion of perpetual youth is heralded because it ensures consistent exchange value. But perpetual youth is not actually possible. So while aging and death are not desired outcomes, they can be rendered profitable by inciting fear and anxiety, and an insatiable market for anti-aging cosmetics and surgeries.
This anti-aging project is a collaborative enterprise animated by both capital and biotechnology. My concern is, how is this anti-aging project rendering life? It is rendering life as retroactive, reparable, reversible, and regenerative. As such it is an extension of the logic and discourse of biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era that seeks to extend life and value beyond perceived limits, chasing the speculative promise that always lies “beyond.”
Take for example the above promotional spiel for Avon’s Retroactive + Repair Cream. Avon claims that the cream actively “seeks out” age damage and repairs it even before it shows up on the skin. It’s preemptive in this way, “stopping wrinkles before they start.” The cream re-energizes your cells, making them “act younger” and protects them again “future cell damage.” The cream is both retroactive and proactive. It mobilizes the past (from the perspective of the present), and preemptively mobilizes the future (from the perspective of the present).
The body and life can be continuously modulated, in space and in time and as such they are conceived as topological forms. Topology, Melinda Cooper intimates in Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, is the formal expression du jour for biotechnology which currently has its fingers submerged in many pies (developmental biology, experimental embryology and regenerative biology). While she doesn’t mention anti-aging strategies, much like tissue engineering, cosmetic interventions force us to rethink the morphogenesis of the body outside of metric space, and outside of metric and genealogical time (105).
Cooper examines the ways in which biotechnology and neoliberalism not only emerged in tandem, but are also in fact mutually constitutive. She diagnoses the current bioeconomy as suffering from the systemic pathology she terms “capitalist delirium.” This delirium “seeks to refashion the world rather than interpret it” and is “intimately and essentially concerned with the limits of life on earth and the regeneration of living futures—beyond the limits” (20).
Furthermore, she suggests that, “as long as life science production is subject to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, the promise of a surplus of life will be predicated on a corresponding move to devaluate life. The two sides of the capitalist delirium—the drive to push beyond the limits and the need to reimpose them, in the form of scarcity—must be understood as mutually constitutive” (49).
So while the anti-aging project seeks to transcend the limits of life (morphologically and temporally), it also seeks to impose limits on life, ensuring that we are reminded of our inevitable decline and death. Like the Grim Reaper brandishing his scythe, the anti-aging project reminds us of the scarcity of life: that we are dying from the moment we are born; that we are living on borrowed time, and that we must eventually repay our debt, with interest. Under this logic, the narratives of our lives run in tandem with the narratives of our economy. The very condition of the creation of our fractional-reserve banking system is that of an insurmountable debt that continues to accumulate capital for the bank–but must be paid back, plus interest at some time in the future by the borrower.
And this is just another way in which cosmetic technoscience aligns with biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era to form a veritable asymptote that seeks a limit that cannot be reached, makes promises that cannot be kept and strives for surplus that is never sufficient.
Cooper, Melinda. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2008.
Really interesting rendering. You write that “the anti-aging project reminds us of the scarcity of life: that we are dying from the moment we are born”. I wonder if our changing perceptions of what to do with this death are changing. The product description above assures its future consumers that it is alpha hydroxy free, and I wonder if this signals a change in tact from getting rid of dead cells, to revivifying the cells before cell death occurs (I have visions of cell zombies floating through my head right now), and points to a nervousness about processes of life death and renewal through which we presently understand our skin. Is there isn’t enough renewal? Cooper reminds us that this delirium “seeks to refashion the world rather than interpret it” and I question whether this failure to interpret entails a simultaneous stasis even while we activly try to refashion. Are we stuck with our same understandings? Is the anti-aging trend going to continue simply because we refuse to acknowledge the problems with our present frame?
Very interesting rendering! The lengths people will go to to maintain the look of youthful vitality is quite remarkable. Your post also reminds me of other pharmaceuticals like Rogaine intervene at a molecular level. The thing about Rogaine and many face creams is that once you stop using them, crisis ensues once again, your hair falls out and your wrinkles come back with vengeance. Built into the product is the crisis and the need for further technological intervention, anything more would make the product too effective. So not only are nations bonded through debt and the promise of continual financial renewal, but through products like Rogaine our bodies become bonded to the consumerist ethos through “stolen” time/beauty. P.s. Dolly Parton’s orange hoochie nails are a little frightful.
Very interesting conversation taking shape here. The search for ways to prolong life has a long and very broad history, and given that we have so much trouble designating anything as ‘natural’ anymore, is there any viable position left in opposition to these efforts and the violence they engender? How do we interpret a situation that is inherently in constant flux?
I’m not sure if this comment is specifically appropriate here, or just in general with regards to this weeks reading (and perhaps it was addressed in class, which im sorry to have missed)… what i keep coming back to is that ‘stolen’ time. as if the discursive shift that typifies the current moment is precisely that it is not historically constructed, as we in the humanities are so fond of saying, so much as being constructed retroactively by our own (imagined) future.
to be honest, this is blowing my mind at the moment.