The many lines of suave salesmanship intoned by Don Draper over Mad Men’s ninety-two episodes can now be found recycled into career-lesson listicles on LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, and Business News Daily, an unsurprising afterlife, since Don’s scenes of seal-the-deal philosophizing were often more self-help than sales pitch. Few of these ad-man koans are more quoted than, “Change is neither good nor bad, it simply is.” Read in context, Don’s line aims to flatter representatives of Madison Square Garden hoping to raze old Penn Station, the 1963 destruction of which is bad change par excellence. The line also comments ironically on both Don’s self-reinventions and the show’s own curatorial historicism. Yet what makes the “Change simply is” line appealing to internet career counselors is its embodiment of a managerial ideology very much of our time, not Don’s.
While Mad Men has generated abundant academic commentary including at least three collections of critical essays, none yet attends to its dramatization of ideologies surrounding the “lean firm” of network capitalism. This quality Mad Men shares with AMC’s other acclaimed period drama, Halt and Catch Fire, which follows the careers of four characters from the 1980s PC revolution to the internet’s emergence in the early 1990s. What both shows enact, I argue, is “the new spirit of capitalism,” to use the title of Luc Boltanski’s and Eve Chiapello’s momentous critique of management-theory discourses. That book demonstrated that management-theory began to romanticize a reticular rather than a bureaucratized capitalism in the 1970s, championing lean, project-based labor formations, touting entrepreneurial mobility over security, and urging the incessant cultivation of personal employability at the market’s mercy. Mad Men and Halt retell America’s recent economic past in ways that naturalize and romanticize its precarious economic present.
About the presenterAaron Chandler
Associate Professor of English at Stevenson University. Primary literary research interests include post-1945 fiction in the United States; representations of poverty in literature and the social sciences; African American literatures and cultures; theories of emotion and affect; race, ethnicity, and migration; class, identity, and poverty; postmodernity; American studies; and twentieth-century American popular culture.