In 1947, the American public was canvassed for its opinion on the 'Metallic Metals Act'. As is usual with opinion polls, there was a sizeable minority of 'don't knows', with about 70% of people offering a definite response in favour or against. What was unusual was that its subject was a fabrication. There was no 'Metallic Metals Act' (a metallic metal being like an ironic irony, or a tautological tautology). Of course, opinion surveys aren't bogus. They do very effectively canvas responses to simple poll questions. If they select a representative sample at random, and appropriately weight the results, the responses will closely match those for the public as a whole. And when the question is something straightforward like 'how do you intend to vote in the upcoming election?', quantitative surveys have some predictive ability, notwithstanding the periodic difficulties which we will come back to.

On the other hand, 'public opinion' is a mirage. The very phrase implies a general social will, and the methodology implies that it is composed of individuated, definite, latent 'opinions' which will then determine behaviour. The mirage of public opinion is invoked typically to provide a pseudo-mandate for policies that elites have already decided to implement. In this respect, polls often conceal and suppress far more than they reveal. Pierre Bourdieu, whom I cited in a previous post, put it like this:

Public opinion is an "artifact, pure and simple, the function of which is to dissemble that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of forces and tensions and that nothing is more inadequate for representing the state of opinion than a percentage".

The practise of opinion polling, says Bourdieu, rests on a number of false assumptions. In the first place, it assumes that those answering have the same range of competences as those who interpret the polls - politicos, commentators, etc. This is not usually the case. The example given at the start of this article shows that people often feel pressured in such interview situations to have an 'opinion' on something they haven't really thought about. In that instance, they will try to base their opinion on whatever information they have gained from the very mass media that is polling them. The large numbers of "don't knows" and "not applicables" offered by respondents in polls show that many people have a realistic sense that they simply can't answer the question as put to them, but these responses are usually set aside or just factored out of surveys to produce this artifact known as "public opinion".

Secondly, Bourdieu says, it assumes that all opinions have some sort of equivalent value and are formed in a similar, individualised way. But not all opinions have the same weight or conviction behind them, and they are formed in circumstances that don't mimic the isolated, individualised survey interviewing situation. Most people form their opinions on something by talking it through with others. The context in which such discussion takes place means that actual opinion is usually formed through group experiences, such as those arranged by class, race, religion, nationality and gender. In this sense, the collective logically precedes the individual: rather than some general public will being derived form individual units of 'opinion', individual ideas are usually derived from collective experience and ideas. But the practise of opinion polling does not reproduce this aspect of the way ideas are formed. These are some of the reasons why there are consistent problems with even the more reliably predictive election polling. Pollsters tend to blame discrepancies on voters misrepresenting their views. But it is just as plausible that the individualised context in which polling questions are put forces people to rely on their impressions of successful media campaigns, whereas their actual decisions as to how they will vote will take place after argument, reflection and a certain amount of discounting for media hype. The brief 2010 'Cleggasm' was arguably a pure spectacle phenomenon with little real traction in the population, but pollsters have tended to blame the fake Lib Dem surge on voters deliberately concealing their true opinions ('shy Labour voter' etc).

This is - of course - not to say that all such surveys are useless. I do recommend a careful, scrupulous, discriminating use of opinion surveys to assess the prevailing view on various political issues. But this should be done bearing in mind what polls are for. They polling industry is not an extension of the democratic process, but a quite deliberate attempt to subvert democratic reasoning and debate, to 'settle' important issues before they have been discussed, to bully opponents and put them on the back foot etc. Polls are taken to provide elites with raw materials the better to manipulate us with, not so that they can respond to our genuine concerns. Further, taken collectively they tend to disclose a set of apparently contradictory dispositions, ideas, and values, suggesting that the pseudo-finality of "a percentage" is indeed hopelessly inadequate as a register of the real ideas that people have. So, if majorities appear to support you on an issue, this may mean nothing more than that they are open to your argument, and that there might be an overlap between their priorities and yours. Similarly, if a poll says the majority opposes your position, it does not mean that they really do, and that if they really do, they are particularly settled in their view, or set much store by it, or will allow it to dictate their behaviour. There are undoubtedly issues on which clear majorities have a clear view one way or the other, and the polling evidence on such matters should not be ignored or discounted. But there is no 'public opinion', and any idea that opinion polls could by themselves provide a 'mandate' for certain policies has to be dispensed with. Polling is a weapon in struggle, and it is a weapon that is largely in the hands of the ruling class.

People say the most unlikely things about films. They say Toy Story 3 is a miraculous film. They say it's a marxist parable about exploitation and authority. Or a treatise on Stalinism, or the Nazi holocaust. Neither Walt Disney nor its Pixar subsidiary will comment to make it clear which of the various interpretations is accurate. John Lasseter, whose long apprenticeship as a writer in the CGI end of the business has culminated in the Toy Story franchise, won't speak up either. This is poor customer service. Someone, somewhere, has to break the silence and let us the consumers know what the commodity does, forchristsake. Well, here's a thought.

Toy Story 3 is a story of how freedom is achieved through commodification, and how "the consent of the governed" roughly equals the willing embrace of bondage. You only have to bear in mind that the main characters are themselves commodities. It's a jocular, mocking, morality story about toys, their particular role in pedagogy and socialisation, the pseudo-history and televisual cliches they condense. Toys are a micro-cosm of the adult universe, produced so that the child doesn't have to invent the mainsprings of her future life, but can instead go about constructing her ego-ideal around these always-already present objects. They come laden with meanings which naturalise the myths of adult life, meanings that the franchise knowingly smirks about but doesn't really explore or problematise. They allow for the minimum of creative input and construction from the child.

In the franchise, the toys inexplicably have personalities, aspirations and purposiveness remarkably like those of their human masters. In fact, in the CGI universe, their level of reality is no different from that of their owners (who are, in their different ways, also commodities). But their ultimate fulfilment is in being owned, being put to work, "being there for" Andy. That this "being there for" involves being totally placid, pliable, silent and impersonal does not detract from their, er, humanity. That is the required performance. Everyone, and everything, has its place in the Toy Story scheme of things. That scheme is a hierarchy of commodities with toys near the bottom, subordinate and devoted to their owners. And ultimately, their devotion is reciprocated as, when the time comes for Andy to go to college, he emotes more about parting with his toys than he does about parting with his relatives.

Any attempt to break free of such mastery is illusory, merely a search for another master who will be even more tyrannical. When, after years of neglecting them, Andy appears to leave most of his toys out for garbage collection before heading off to college, the toys respond by sneaking into another box of toys destined for donation to the Sunnyside Day Centre. They refuse to heed Woody's pleas that Andy didn't mean for them to be sent to the incinerator, and instead revel in what appears to be a toy utopia, "without owners". But utopia is soon revealed as a totalitarian nightmare run by an embittered big boss toy named Lotso. The toys are forced to stay in a room where they are smashed up by crazy, dysfunctional kids who don't know how to play with toys. Buzz Lightyear, brainwashed (re-programmed to factory settings) by Lotso and his henchmen, is chosen to guard the prisoners. (Worth saying, this is the first scene in which any black characters appear at all. It is also the scene where the usual Toy Story ritual of sado-comical limb amputating, beheading and eye-gouging is repeated with maximum gusto.)

When the toys orchestrate the standard great escape from the prison camp, it is foiled by Lotso and his henchmen. There follows a cliched scene wherein the bad guy tries to break the defiance of the good guys with a demoralising patter about how the world works, and how they'd best try to fit in. Among the toys, Barbie suddenly erupts with the indignant cri de coeur: "Government should be based on the consent of the governed, not the threat of force!" It is immediately ironised, because such earnest expostulations don't really fit in with the tone of the film. But the writers will certainly have been aware of the long tradition of Disney films regurgitating tropes from liberal political theory, albeit slightly more subtly than this. Not only that, but they will be aware that the first CGI Barbie movie, adapted from the Nutcracker, was based around precisely this struggle between liberalism and tyranny. (I watched it with my nieces one day.) This is merely one example of the constant self-referential ironizing that regurgitates these tropes in a knowing way without really problematising them. And of course, the "consent of the governed" that is referred to here is the commodity's enjoyment in bondage, her revelling in being used and owned by a master, her sense of freedom in such subjection.

The story is thus an ironic, potted re-telling of American mythologies, as related by commodites, especially through the medium of television. Woody and Buzz Lightyear, the main characters, are traditional models of upright American masculinity, Woody a fifties prototype of the overland frontiersman, Buzz Lightyear a sixties prototype of the space frontiersman. The female characters exist principally as helpmeets and romantic encounters for the toy boys, highlighting their natural heteronormativity, confirming their dominant status, reinforcing a gendered dichotomy that, as everyone knows, real toys themselves do a great deal to produce. The toys exist as a community of sorts, a community of heroes, living the strenuous life, their shared pain and sacrifice bonding them together, the mortal peril elevating them to new planes of existence - all of this struggle so that they can continue to be the willing bonded serfs of rich, white yanqui scum. The narrative confirms that commodities are the most important things in life, real friends, closer friends than anyone you'll ever meet, and that to be a commodity is the most rewarding mode of existence. The latter claim is hardly unique to Hollywood films, but in drawing out and embracing the servitude implicit in commodification Toy Story takes it a step farther than others.

The extravagant praise for the Toy Story franchise therefore demands some sort of explanation. It is a crashingly dull series, manipulative and predatory toward child consumers, tedious in its little nudge-nudge gestures to adult consumers, punctuated with aesthetic cliches that don't really qualify as ironic (oh the weather's taken a bad turn, so there must be trouble afoot), etc. I suppose the terms "feel good" and "life-affirming" must apply here. The films leave a warm little glow in the heart, reminding you that your alienated, commodified relationships are perfectly normal, human, desirable and moreover actually protected as human rights in the advanced capitalist states - it's in the constitution, dammit. There's also, though, a calculated element of Rorschach, wherein elements and motifs from history and ideology are scavenged and re-deployed, so that you can retrospectively read into the movie - whose effects you have just involuntarily responded to at a basic physical level - whatever rationalisation for so responding that makes you good with it. Indeed, there is marxism in the film, and the American revolution, and Stalinism, and the Nazi holocaust, and freedom, and sacrifice, and family values, and so on... because the film proves that all such aspects of experience are susceptible to being broken up and rearticulated in the commodity form. It is capital's highest tribute to itself, to its mode of production, distribution and exchange, its ability to convert all materials into some exchangeable, fungible base. In the furnace of capitalist culture, all of human existence is silly putty or play doh, malleable, protean, and saleable. That too is the basic message of the Toy Story franchise.