When I initially saw the above video and its familiar anthropomorphic pink bunnies, I assumed that this was an ad for Energizer batteries. But I was mistaken–it’s actually an ad for Duracell batteries. Apparently the Duracell bunny predates the Energizer bunny: Duracell’s campaign appeared as early as 1973 and the Energizer bunny was conceived as a parody of the Duracell Bunny. Who knew? I certainly didn’t, but that probably has something to do with the fact that the Duracell bunny doesn’t appear in North America due to Duracell’s failure to beat Energizer in the race to secure a trademark claim. There are small differences in appearances between the two animal signs as well—the Energizer Bunny is a different color pink with a different body shape, it has larger ears, wears sunglasses and plays a drum. While the Energizer Bunny is a single rabbit, the Duracell Bunnies are a species and are usually presented en masse. And the Energizer bunny beats his drum but the Duracell Bunnies are usually depicted doing something highly sporty and competitive.
But all that is beside the point. What I find most striking here is that two of the largest battery manufacturers in the world have elected bunnies as their marketing mascots; they have specifically chosen them to bear and animate the symbolic capital of their products.
A battery is a container that stores chemical energy that is to be converted into electricity and used as a source of power. As an energy source, its most important feature is endurance. A good battery is one that is indefatigable, unflagging.
But in the spirit of Nicole Shukin’s attention to multiple entendres, a battery is also: a fortified emplacement for heavy guns (an artillery subunit of guns, men, and vehicles); a set of similar units of equipment, typically when connected together (an extensive series, sequence, or range of things); the crime or tort of unconsented physical contact with another person, even where the contact is not violent but merely menacing or offensive; the pitcher and the catcher in a game, considered as a unit. A battery is a source of energy and power for technological tools, which inevitably animate networks of industry and capital. But as the additional meanings intimate the term “battery” also marionettes notions of action and movement through military references, criminal violence and sports.
Bunnies by contrast, are none of these things. First and foremost, they are not exactly tireless–particularly the domesticated ones. Rabbits are actually quite languorous and mellow.
They are grazers and typical like to just hang around, albeit cautiously. Of course, every now and again they get frisky and exhibit little bursts of energy.
But this kind of behaviour is intermittent, and rarely unflagging. The only time rabbits ever actually exhibit such unfaltering persistence is in the realm of sexual behaviour.
We’ve all heard the adage “doing it like rabbits”: it’s fair to say that rabbits have a reputation for having sex a lot. This is not a baseless accusation. They really are eager and insatiable creatures. They don’t have an estrus cycle—they are always ready and willing to engage in a little hanky panky. While their sexual behaviour is not always heterosexual nor reproductively driven, when it is, they can reproduce very quickly. Their gestation period is only a month, and depending on the breed, a litter can be anywhere from 1-10 rabbits. Of course these “rough-and-tumbles” are furtive and fleeting, lasting a minute or two at most (I’ve raised rabbits in case you’re wondering).
It is very telling that Duracell and Energizer would seize upon the rabbit’s intrinsically insatiable sex drive to market the endurance of its batteries. Perhaps it is not endurance they are selling after all, but efficiency of their sex drive and its ability to continuously renew and redirect itself. Drives are, at least in psychoanalytic terms, inherently erotic. Rabbits are animated by the “blind insistence” of the drive, and Duracell and Energizer wish us to equate this with the blind insistence of their batteries while calling upon ideas of fertility and productivity especially with the large number of rabbits on display here, it’s difficult to not think of their incredible efficient and powerful fecundity).
Shukin writes that in biopolitical times, animal signs must “encode the innocent place of ‘life itself’” (179). And that disinterested place is that of the drive. For Jacques Lacan, drive is a kind of “acephalic” knowledge that has no intrinsic relation to truth. It is non-subjectivized. For Lacan, drive does not anticipate a specific final goal, but instead is sustained by its perpetual aim. And the eternal way of the aim is ironically its very goal. It circles around it endlessly, without satiation or closure. It is reminiscent of a closed loop, not unlike that of industrial ecology of capitalism as outlined in Shukin’s book.
A battery, in Duracell’s sense, is transmissive and transformative. In the advertisement above, the rabbits, as spectral animal signs are also likewise continuously morphing. These rabbits are animal automatons under the spell of mimesis, they move in unison to form various shapes, from a human, to an elephant (I thought of Edison’s sacrificial Topsy here), and finally a car. These forms are all tied to industry. The rabbits are caught up in the logic of equivalence that characterizes the capitalist market, they become the figures they mimic. These bunnies are denied real presence, not only because of the species divide–they are further displaced by being rendered as toy reproductions of bunnies, not “real” at all, and then further denied by being forced into an anthropomorphic economy that animates them as excitable, energetic and above all willing participants in the labour and life of the world.
The above ad thus represents and celebrates the virtual transformation of animal life into energy that powers the automobility of capital. But as Shukin explains such a virtual transformation is not without real, bodily/material violence: just because it is not visible does not mean it is not there.
Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Trying to find out why both companies use pink bunnies, I went searching for color psychology and found this corporation with clients including the Body Shop, Proctor & Gamble, and Shell, among others (unfortunately no Duracell or Energizer listed as clients). Here is what they have to say about the color pink, which seems pretty representative of these sorts of sites:
PINK.
Positive: Physical tranquillity, nurture, warmth, femininity, love, sexuality, survival of the species.
Negative: Inhibition, emotional claustrophobia, emasculation, physical weakness.
Being a tint of red, pink also affects us physically, but it soothes, rather than stimulates. (Interestingly, red is the only colour that has an entirely separate name for its tints. Tints of blue, green, yellow, etc. are simply called light blue, light greenetc.) Pink is a powerful colour, psychologically. It represents the feminine principle, and survival of the species; it is nurturing and physically soothing. Too much pink is physically draining and can be somewhat emasculating.
http://www.colour-affects.co.uk/psychological-properties-of-colours
Very interesting stuff. In the first place, I had no idea that Duracell also used a pink bunny – nor had the connotative link with the popularly-imagined sex drive of rabbits ever crossed my mind. But in retrospect, it’s so obvious! How did I miss that?!
Seems that both ad campaigns figure the bunny-critter as an inexhaustible stock of energy, but in very different ways – the one is bunny-as-population, swarming (perhaps reproducing) uncontrollably all over the place, while the other is a steadily drumming automaton.
And: you mention multiple entendre: did Shukin actually use that phrase in the text, and I just overlooked it? I also used that little turn of phrase, and kind of took her to task a bit in my post for not paying sufficient attention at the outset to the multiplicity of so-called entendres at work in ‘rendering’ (and now I can’t help but think of the phonocentrism at work in ‘entendre’)… Now I’m curious, about so many things!
No, Shukin doesn’t actually use “multiple entendres” in the text..funny that we both picked up on that. As you point out in your post she only makes reference to “double entendres” (with regards to rendering). But she also attends to the double meanings of monstration and gorilla as well, so I took some liberties with the term “multiple entendres” to account for her multiple “double entendres” and then of course, my own multiple readings of “battery”!
In keeping with the conversational themes of bunny rabbits and multiplicity, I offer an ‘alternative’ way in which the market hooks into the downy covered flesh of rabbits, animating them through ‘different’ routes of capital but nonetheless for the ends of the market place.
From whale based blubber lipsticks, too musk based perfumes too the use of rabbits in the testing of eye make- up, the cosmetic industry is entangled in what is now a well documented history of the use and abuse of animals. As a response to these practices several N.G.O.’s and non- profit organizations concerned with animal welfare have since formed.
“Leaping Bunny Organization” featured in this link http://www.leapingbunny.org/indexcus.php is a prime example of such organizations Notably rabbit’s bodies appear as a common trope, trafficking across several of these divergent organizations and appearing on a wide array of “natural” cosmetics companies’ products. These companies are in direct competition for consumer’s attention, however; the discursive frames that organizes and give meaning to bodies in these marketing strategies are underscored with notions of benevolences and stewardship. In other words these companies compete for the title of the most ecological friendly.
In context of “cruelty free” manufacturing products rabbits are positioned as meaningful signs to the consumer, affectively working to soothing anxieties about labour practices, modes of production and the extraction of resources. Their fluffy bodies are rendered harmless for the purpose of countering the ways in which the market cuts open and extracts from bodies. The symbolic potency of rabbits is charged with the emancipatory possibilities of re-organizing the circuits of capitalism.
However, what I find particularly interesting and troubling about this as a marketing tactic is that the rabbit usurps; nullifying other bodies involved in the chain of production. To this end the bunny forecloses the possibility of certain critiques of capitalism. I wonder what would it take to hold on to all of the ‘bodies’ involved in the chain of production of a product? This question is shot through with my interest in whether or not capitalism as a system of organization is inherently predicated on the stratification of life? Or is the ways in which “life’ becomes hierarchically stratified in a rooted to uneven modes of accumulation?