February 09, 2006
THE TAILENDERS premieres at MoMA Documentary Fortnight
Tailenders, a documentary by Adele Horne. Filmed in the Solomon Islands, Mexico, India, and the United States, The Tailenders explores the connections between missionary activity and global capitalism. A missionary organization founded in 1939 uses low-tech audio devices to evangelize indigenous communities facing crises caused by global economic forces. This documentary explores how the messages and media introduced by the missionaries into remote communities play a role in larger socioeconomic transformations, and how meaning changes as it crosses language and culture. 72 minutes. U.S. Premiere: The Museum of Modern Art, Documentary Fortnight
Saturday, February 25, 4 p.m. (filmmaker will introduce the film)
Sunday, March 12, 2 p.m
Location: The Museum of Modern Art's Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
11 West 53rd Street, New York, NY, 10019
For directions: http://www.moma.org/visit_moma/directions.html)
Posted by BKG at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
Some Assembly Needed: China as Asia Factory
NYTimes
February 9, 2006
Some Assembly Needed: China as Asia Factory
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHENZHEN, China — Hundreds of workers at a sprawling Japanese-owned Hitachi factory here are fashioning plates of glass and aluminum into shiny computer disks, wrapping them in foil. The products are destined for the United States, where they will arrive like billions of other items, labeled "made in China."
But often these days, "made in China" is mostly made elsewhere — by multinational companies in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States that are using China as the final assembly station in their vast global production networks. Read more....
Posted by BKG at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2006
Chocolate That Flashes Its Passport
February 8, 2006
Chocolate That Flashes Its Passport
By KIM SEVERSON
HIS name was Conrad Miller, and he would be our chocolate sommelier for the afternoon.
So it has come to this. Chocolate, a comfortable world that for many people exists between the downscale joy of a Kit Kat bar and the exhilaration of a well-made ganache, now requires a sommelier.
It is no longer enough to understand the difference between milk and bittersweet. Even the know-it-all chocolate cowboys who brag about eating nothing less than 85 percent cocoa bars are out of their league.
Now, the game is all about origin. As with olive oil or coffee, knowing where one's chocolate came from is starting to matter. Even the most casual wine drinker can name a preferred varietal, and the neophyte cheese fan understands that Brie is French and good Cheddar comes from England.
Terroir, it turns out, matters in chocolate, too.
That's where Mr. Miller comes in. He's a part-time musician with Midwest Mennonite roots, but he looks perfectly at home in the Flatiron district, where the French chocolate maker Michel Cluizel opened a shop in November at ABC Carpet and Home. It is Mr. Cluizel's only shop in America and much of the chocolate reflects the specific piece of land where the cacao beans were grown. Read more...
Posted by Andrea Siegel at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2006
Strength of weak ties
Granovetter, Mark. "The strength of weak ties," American Journal of Sociology 78, 6 (1973): 1360-1380.
Granovetter, Mark. "The strength of weak ties: a network theory revisted," Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201-233.
Granovetter, Mark. "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 91, 3 (1985): 481-510.
Posted by BKG at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)
Read about branding
The literature on branding is fascinating. Here are a few places to start. Many of the following books can be browsed online, so check them out!
The Dictionary of Brand: takes up many terms that we were struggling with yesterday, including authenticity.
Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People
Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing. "Wipperfürth, a marketer who helps brands like Dr. Martens and Napster 'appear like serendipitous accidents,' advocates the 'brand hijack,' a process of allowing customers to shape brand meaning and drive a brand's evolution. Using case studies of products that were embraced by young consumers precisely because they lacked traditional, excessive ad campaigns, like Pabst Blue Ribbon and In-N-Out Burger, Wipperfürth shows that seemingly effortless branding is actually sustained by 'no-marketing' techniques. Some of these tactics include marketing first to alternative subcultures and building a brand 'folklore' with 'customs, rituals, vocabulary...and experiences,' much in the way that he claims 'Starbucks created coffee culture.' The book designates three types of brand hijack: the Discovery, which allows people to feel 'in on a secret' (à la Palm); the Commentary, by which a brand like Dr. Martens is associated with a subversive social statement; and the Mission, which 'declares a worldview oppositional to a '"Big Brother" enemy' (à la Apple)." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."
Designing Brand Identity: A Complete Guide to Creating, Building, and Maintaining Strong Brands
Posted by BKG at 07:57 AM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2006
What is the value of "brand"?
After class today, I continued thinking about the question above.
First, value is variable, of brand as with anything else. So a brand like Memorex is no longer worth much despite the fact that, last time I looked, it was around on a variety of stuff: answer machines, video tape, etc. Whereas a brand like Apple obviously counts for more.
But what is this "thing" that counts for more or less?
It is the ensemble-ness, the way that elements are made to cohere:
symbolically
aesthetically
functionally
other ways too?
The value is the potential of one idea ("Mac") to operate among more than one item or service. Maybe this corresponds to style, in the archaeological sense.
A way of doing things that consists of separate items and approaches that cohere -- via, in the case of brand, an easily knowable identity.
Posted by Harvey Molotch at 07:59 PM | Comments (0)
History of advertising
This week's readings took up, among other issues, the relationship of advertising to the history of consumption (Ewen) and, in the case of Klein, the relationship of branding to new ways of organizing production and labor. Since Ewen takes a more historical approach, it might he useful to look at the kinds of advertising that he discusses, especially in the chapter on women as attraction.
Here are some useful sites:
Ad Access: 1911-1955
19th-century advertising in Harper's Weekly
The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920
Posted by BKG at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2006
Life of buildings
1. Paper idea: I recently picked up a book called BUILDING LIVES by Neil Harris (Yale 1999) that discusses the lives of buildings from their planning phase to their wrecking-ball phase, and I wondered, Is a Store an OBJECT that could be written about for this paper? Could I use some of Stewart Brand's stuff to talk about this? It's been so long since I read that book I don't remember....
While I haven't Harris's book yet, in the intro Harris writes, "In these essays... I shall ask simple questions about how buildings are introduced and presented, maintained, celebrated, disposed of, and remembered. The subject in the first chapter is conception and birth; the next, growth and maturity; the last chapter... aging and death."
I have done a little writing about the aftermath of Klein's Department Store (I wrote about after the stores closed in 1975, what became of the physical plant, especially the Mother store at Union Square and the store in Newark) but also I have in my archive a photo of the first location on Union Square in about 1918, and also photos of Klein's Union Square glory days in the 1930s when it filled a block-and-a-half in Manhattan (including a photo by Berenice Abbott and etc.), and I have photos of the Union Square store after its death, in its decrepitude. Also there's a strange cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker in 1932 where Klein is caricatured as a fat man with his waistcoat comprised of the buildings of Klein's. In other words there's this kind of fusion between humans and buildings ... Also lots of descriptions of the physical plant (E. L. Doctorow and etc.)....
How would I tie this in with literature of objects? Ideas anyone? How does it look from the big-picture perspective? What about the expansion and contraction and death of something like this becomes interesting?
2. What stuck me about NO LOGO was the activists' line on p. 440 "The more significant way to resolve these problems...lies with the workers themslves, inside the factory." Third party solutions don't work. "It has always been about self-determination." According to this logic, we American activists have no business coming in and patriarchally imposing a better working standard.
The idea of "self-determination" is both good and incomplete. Capital has done an extraordinary circumlocution to cut worker power out of manufacturing, by moving factories out of countries like the U.S. that (even marginally) allow organized labor. The "Free Trade Zones" are designed to destroy the power of laboring people. The minute people organize, the "swallows" with the money fly to another country.
What I think will work is some combination of self-determination, and a canny use of the very networking technology that these "Free Trade Zones" are manufacturing. Suppose, through the use of cell phones and text messaging (and some sort of language translation program), activists in every "Free Trade Zone" throughout the world remained in contact, and they SIMULTANEOUSLY called for labor walk-outs. And they informed the media.... And got the attention. Where would the swallows fly then? If the whole world went on strike, what would capital do?
Posted by Andrea Siegel at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)
Consuming Machines
Ewan and Ewan analyzes the operation of the “world-machine,” Lears describes how peddlers disappeared as department stores took over their function, Klein reports on the total dehumanization of workers in Third World countries as well as in the Western service sector, and Ewan talks about families as “consuming units” where children have become “debit” for the family. Klein later also quotes young businessmen saying that the secret of success is to “Brand yourself.” Although each of these texts criticizes mass production and structures of capitalism from different perspectives, they all suggest that in the transformations which led to mass production and mass consumptions also resulted in the machinization and objectification of human beings.
What I find fascinating is that according to the articles, this process of ‘machinization’ or ‘objectification’ happens by appealing to something which is deeply human in the consumers. We are seduced to buy / try / consume certain goods by appealing to our curiosity / desire. When Mintz writes that there might exist “a natural craving for sweetness, few are the world peoples who respond negatively to sugar,” he proposes a question which I am sure many times has been posed and answered, nevertheless I am still struggling with: to what extent is our taste and need socially constructed?
I feel that these texts approach this question from two different critical perspectives: while some of them see mass production and distribution as a demonic force which create the desires of the masses (in other words they find that our consumptive choices are wholly socially constructed), other articles sees the formation of mass consumption more as an interaction between existing human needs and the manipulation advertisements. (Of course here the question arises again: to what extent these afore-mentioned ‘existing human needs’ are socially constructed.)
Where analysts attribute demonic force to mass consumption, they describe it as a power structure, which turns people into “machines” who automatically respond to the interpellations of advertisements. In Lears’ article “Beyond Veblen” the words fear and anxiety constantly reoccur. It is not the machinization of consumptive human behavior which Lears emphasizes in his article on “Consumer Culture,” but that fear and anxiety, whether it is about the question of authenticity / artifact or the loss of control, have also become formative forces of modern consumption. (And this reminds me of our conversation with Kim and some other PS students last night about consumption of ‘health care.’ One of us was pointing out how pharmaceutical / med companies make consumers buy ‘health care goods’ by implanting fear into the consumers. This made me wonder about the dynamics of advertisements, how they appeal to or construct fears and anxieties in ourselves.)
Fear and anxiety, of the factory’s workers as well as the book’s readers, is a central issue of “No Logo.” The objectification of humans is fully accomplished in the zone factories of the third world, which Naomi Klein describes. Ironically, these workers are not even part of the consumer culture they manufacture for. Not being part of the Western consumer culture is not inevitably a bad thing, as many of these articles highlight, nevertheless Klein’s account suggest that these workers have no relation to the world of objects at all. If I think about Appadurai’s thoughts on the social role of gifts and goods, it makes me wonder whether these cultures/ peoples once had their own established rituals related to certain things and whether these rituals have been abolished by the invasion of Western corporates. I get the impression that these workers live in a world without things (besides the products they manufacture and the instruments they use). But is it possible at all to live in a world / to establish a life without objects?
Klein’s reports made me anxious and nervous (as I am sure it made most of us) and I would like to hear more about the background of this book. I would like to know how much of what is described there had been publicly known before this book was published and how the named corporate reacted to this book. I would be curious to know whether this book initiated any changes in the corporate world (as naïve as it may sound).
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)
Leisure as Duty
Ewen and Ewen talk about three realms inherent in the “consumer culture”: leisure, beauty, and pleasure (E&E:47). My posting last week was about categorizations and repetition in the everyday life, and one of the points that seems interesting to me in this week’s readings is how we categorize time and how we use goods to separate these two categories: working time and leisure time. Talking about advertisements for women, Ewen says that sexuality becomes a “duty of leisure” since the early 1920s. “The two, work and leisure, could not be separated. Consumption provided an idiom for the unity of the two.” (Ewen: 182-183)We talked about the “consumer culture” and what separates our age from the previous ones in the sense of consumption. I am curious as to what extent we utilize goods when separating the time categories from each other. Veblen talks about the shift in the leisure class from the predatory to the next “stage” of culture (Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class). He gives the example of hunting as it became to gain two meanings: on the one hand as a trade (for gain) and, on the other, as a sport for the leisure class. But what exactly is it that gives the same practice different meanings?
For the leisure class, abstention from labour is the evidence of wealth (like patina) and for this reason starts the ownership of slaves. It was the duty of women and slaves to make sure that the head of the household was in comfort. Their leisure time vas a “vicarious leisure” (Veblen) spent for this sole purpose. They were “on duty” when it seemed like leisure. Similarly, for Ewen as cited above, leisure and work are not separated from each other and it is the consumption practice that links them together.
So we reach to this point: one, before the “consumer culture” some would use the leisure time to prove their wealth (which might mean that they were “on duty” in their leisure time too) and some had to spend their leisure to serve the former. When we come to the consumer culture, we see that the accumulation of things, that is, consumption, is what proves our identity; and this practice occurs in the leisure time. Before, there were servants at home, for some people, and then there emerged the (entertainment) service in the market, most of the time for everyone, at least in the sense of display. They are supposed to greed you with pleasure when you get in to a department store and you are to be treated like a guest. Customer is always right and might put on the role of the “father” if she does not find the right service. Workers themselves have to be given enough buying power so that they would be able to create a consumer economy. Marx had warned us about the separation between the consumer and the producer, but is this sill valid? On the other hand, is it only “conspicuous consumption” or do the malls function (as new versions of fairs) as a denial of class antagonisms? Do they refer more to a present leisure or a (possible) future use of these commodities displayed?
Posted by Ilgin Yorukoglu at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)
Seeing and Wanting
Since I am thinking about studying perfume (probably a single fragrance or brand) as my object I am trying to attend to the ways in which sensory experiences relate to the commodification and consumption of goods. I am struck by the dominance of the sense of sight as the primary sense used to create desire I am as well struck by the lack of needing to see an object in its actuality in order to desire it. This is facilitated enormously by the growth of media, which in our day seems to continuously provide new tools for exposing potential consumers to images of (and information about) objects to be coveted.
Since I am thinking about studying perfume (probably a single fragrance or brand) as my object I am trying to attend to the ways in which sensory experiences relate to the commodification and consumption of goods. I am struck by the dominance of the sense of sight as the primary sense used to create desire I am as well struck by the lack of needing to see an object in its actuality in order to desire it. This is facilitated enormously by the growth of media, which in our day seems to continuously provide new tools for exposing potential consumers to images of (and information about) objects to be coveted.
“Through the media, we see the most available and imposing panorama of the social world.” (Ewan and Ewan, p. 267) In a world that did not have mass media with the reach and speed that we have come to expect today, images had less influence and value in sparking the market. McCracken’s description of “patina” reinforces this dominance for me. The signs of patina are to be seen and felt close-up, when actually using an object. (This would include touch as well as sight.) The care of its make and the quality of its materials seem to matter as much as its look or design. (Quality and rareness of materials would take me to trade routes and spices and ultimately perfumes.) McCracken states “Its function is not to claim but to authenticate it. Patina serves as a kind of visual proof of status.” (p.32) But it is a status that is based in time, in how long an object has been owned. The rules governing the status of patina were countered, as McCracken notes, by the rise of the “consumer society.” (p. 39) The shift to buying new objects in response to fashion innovations and marketing shifted value away from the worth of an object held over time to the latest fashion. Additionally, as McCracken reports, “There was now an explosion of imitative behavior on the part of low-standing consumers. Fashion had erased one of those of the most important ways of differentiating the belongings of the high from those of the low.” (p. 40) A quandary would emerge: if an “imitated” object could look just as fashionable as the original, then what would allow one to differentiate between the “high” status and “low status objects? Branding, or the official stamp of the designer, and now, by extension, the corporate entity that has produced the object, serves to differentiate this type of status.
Patina, and the authenticity of an object with history, is certainly the calling card of the traditional object-centered museum display. A cartoon that sends up this idea shows a stern guard standing over a shattered vase. Behind him, a suited museum official is leaning over and smiling. The caption reads “Fortunately, I think we have an extremely accurate copy of it in the museum’s gift shop.” The “look” of an object can be more important than its history. (I should also point out that museums routinely use reproductions or reconstructions of objects, sometimes without labeling them as such.)
Ewan’s look at advertising in Captains of Consciousness continues on this theme. I was especially struck by his depiction of how advertising helped to inform women of what they should doing their capacities as “home managers.” (p. 177) That the ads echoed this perception with he use of mirrors is funny: “The women in ads were constantly observing themselves, ever self-critical. Throughout the twenties, a noticeable proportion of magazine ads directed at women depicted them looking into mirrors.” (ibid.) Advertisements became a venue for women to “check” themselves against the dominant image of a successful homemaker: “In the middle of her mechanically engineered kitchen, the modern housewife was expected to be overcome with the issue of whether her ‘self,’ her body, her personality were viable in the socio-sexual market that defined her job. Ads of the 1920s were quite explicit about this narcissistic imperative.” (p. 179) This ability of advertisement to serve as a societal “mirror” created a new way for people to measure themselves against others and to see the availability of mass-produced goods as the means by which they could gage and improve their place in a market-driven society. What one could buy – and what one desired to buy, based on a reading of the fashionable images put forth in the marketplace – determined one’s apparent social position.
In reading No Logo I was struck by the extent to which workers in service industries are extensions of the brand, perhaps “objectified” but certainly “branded” by their uniforms marked by corporate colors and logos. (The photo on p. 234 of the book, which depicts two McDonald’s workers, helped to crystallize this thought in my mind.) They are certainly not seen as equal to the people they serve, those who consume the goods and services that they produce, as is made clear by the Starbuck’s employees who describe their salaries in terms of what they could purchase at one of the company’s franchises. While there is nothing new about social inequality and servants who tend to the luxuries of those more prosperous, there does seem to be something particularly striking about the uniformity with which workers at corporate retail and service outlets are expected to perform. It could be that I have heard too much grumbling at the local Starbuck’s about the lack of speed of service – which would suggest that their scheduling system is not as efficient as Klein’s reporting might suggest. Although, to be fair, her point is that the system serves the technical needs of the company rather than creating positions or conditions that are amenable to workers.
I want to think more about the importance of taste, given that taste is so closely related to smell and that the ingredients of foods and fragranced products sometimes overlap. While these ingredients are far more ephemeral that those that were used to produce the objects of high status which were able to accrue “patina” they two were, originally, specific to particular places or climates, or were, as Mintz points out, cross-cultivated between the Old and New Worlds, creating new markets and means of production. I am also curious to think more about the shift from hand-made to machine-made and mass-produced items and how that shifts the sensory experience of objects and object-making – that is, for the producers as well as for the consumers.
Posted by Leah Strigler at 04:07 PM | Comments (1)
Critiquing the Critique and Suggesting an Alternative
In this response I argue against Ewen’s Channels of Desire and I devote the whole commentary to it because I see it is as something that should not be done any more in social science. Channels of Desire is about morals, about what is ‘humanness’, and about partial analysis with weak evidence. I do not reiterate their points but critique the critique and propose an alternative for thinking about human fulfillment.
First, how was work organized before ‘the machine’ (bureaucracy might be a better word)? I would propose that what Ewen is nostalgic about are craft guilds. I believe that because of strong personal links the control in craft guilds automatically spills over into personal life of the subordinated person. The master can interfere into other spheres of his employee’s. A contemporary example is that of small businesses. The owners who are at the same time managers and supervisors exert a substantially higher degree of control over employees than would happen in factories. In the same way that such a businessman exerts himself because his life investments depend on his business he also exerts pressure on his employees. In such close personal relationships the control easily spills over into other spheres of subordinate’s life. I believe that this kind of work relationship is less desired than that present in ‘machines.’
Ewen regrets the weakening of social ties in general and attributes it to the emergence of ‘the machine’. I would argue that this weakening of social ties is linked to greater freedom of individuals. Strong social ties increase pressure for conformity on individual and for identity, which an individual might not feel comfortable with. Weak ties could allow for expression of ones individuality and one of the highest degrees of freedom possible, freedom from the need to conform, freedom from social norms, and freedom from firm identity. Perhaps this kind of freedom could be unbearable for some people and would simply feel lonely although surrounded by people.
Here I think it would be in place to suggest that people whose networks consist of a mix of strong and weak ties are those whose needs are satisfied to the greatest extent. Actually, I draw this idea from economic sociology where research showed that firms with networks consisting of a mix of ties perform best. This to me makes sense for humans as well. I already mentioned the benefits of the weak ties and the benefits of the strong ones would come from findings in psychology that people need at least some sort of constancy and stability. Strong ties in terms of close family and friends (or some other form) could provide for such stability. Only strong ties would create too much emotional tension like studies on nuclear family have shown as well as simply boredom due to lack of new information/experiences. I believe that there is no such system of beliefs that would make people completely ‘happy’ in either networks consisting completely of strong or completely weak ties. The question is what kind of institutions would provide networks with both types of ties.
Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)
The World is a Crumby Place to Be
I was very unhappy with the readings for the last class and I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy this course at all. Using Harvey’s terminology, I found the “fuzziness” level of the readings from last week very high. The discussion in class I also felt was very much in the “fuzzy” realm. The only solid topic I could put a finger on was the issue of the value of a commodity being related to its utility or on some other basis other than utility. This idea and the last class are still very “fuzzy” in my mind.
Thankfully, the readings for this week made up for it. Not only did they make sense, and were easily digestible, I found myself very much in agreement with their arguments and very much persuaded by their evidence. At the same time, acknowledging the state of affairs in the world at this time is a very disconcerting and depressing endeavor. It strikes pain in my soul to know how hard most people are getting screwed in this world and that things are only getting worse.
Ewen’s writing make a point that is so real in everyday life in this society. Everywhere you go everything you do, everyone is constantly brainwashed with this consumer mentality that the only way to have pleasure in life is to buy it. Women buy clothes and makeup so they can feel a little less insecure about how they look. Men spend money to demonstrate their potency. The sad thing is precious few people can conceive of any other way to live. It’s the only way to live that most people have ever known and could ever imagine.
The Klein book carries so much meaning with it too. Most of the world’s population, and the population of this country, are getting shafted so badly and so few people are making so much money off all of us. Its not just abstract economic theory, its so easy to see how so many people suffer from free market capitalism, how so few prosper. And what really rubs it in is that its all on purpose. The people who make the decisions know what they’re doing and how much other people suffer because of those decisions, and rather than have any conscience, they feed us their propaganda that explains away everything. I find myself having no other course but cynicism.
Posted by Robert Weide at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)
In anyone else anxious?
As I read the texts for this week, I could not help but feel anxious. The readings, or at least my interpretation of them, propose a conspiracy theory. In fact, I feel like I am an object – an object under surveillance, or an object that a nameless advertiser or marketer is eager to control or seduce.
Lears pinpoints this sense of anxiety when he discusses the Victorian fear of consumption. This fear was rooted in the argument that the market was a place of seduction, avarice, and individual accumulation (Lears, 82). The result was a loss of individual control and agency. Thus, consumption practices had to be redirected to focus on what could be controlled – the body through cleanliness, the household through interior design. Objects had to be put to the service of consumers, rather than vice versa.
Ewen continues the theme of control in his discussion of technologies of communication. Far from being just a “visionary escape…technology performs, organizes, stores surveillance” (Ewen 37). So now we return to the point where we no longer have control over objects. It appears as if we are on a seesaw, with no way to predict who comes out on top.
Last week’s readings provided an “anthropological scan”. This week’s readings toe the line of psychoanalysis. We inhabit a society in which we are overwhelmed by abundance yet fearful of scarcity. Despite this antagonism, we continue to consume, to act in the service of objects. Ewen states: “Consumption is a social relationship, the dominant relationship in our society – one that makes it harder and harder for people to hold together, to create community” (Ewen 77). It’s important to interrogate this excerpt. Can we agree with Ewen that consumption is the dominant relationship in our society? If it is, what does it mean to consent to a relationship that is so tenuous and unpredictable (if we consent at all – maybe we are coerced)? I almost feel that I should talk to my therapist about this relationship, because it does not seem like a healthy one. In closing, I will attempt to marry the sociological and the psychoanalytical with this question: Does consumption facilitate anomie?
Posted by Jane Jones at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)
The Discount Apocalypse is Coming!
In their critical approaches to consumption, this week’s readings at times denounce an unholy alliance between our psyches, capitalism, and marketers. Here I want to address a deeply-embedded, but unfortunately wrong, assumption that underlies critiques of mass culture. What Viviana Zelizer has termed the ‘separate spheres – hostile worlds’ assumption comes out most clearly in the Ewen readings.
Ewen and Ewen sound Marx’s alarm bell by warning that with the rise of the consumer society, there goes the sacred social. That is, given the never ending quest for newness, the drive for the immediate, and the individualization that can be purchased with goods, the old bonds of humanity and nature will inevitably collapse. Love, sex, friendship, forget it - the cold economic calculation of capitalism will wipe them away, leaving us left only to consume more goods and images.
Ewen maps out the flip side of to the ‘impending doom of the market’ framework. Businessmen and liberal feminists alike, writing in the early 20th century, saw capitalism as the great rationalizing hope with its promise to ameliorate non-economic relations, like patriarchy, in the spirit of efficiency. Gone is the authority of the family or the temple; our new father is Corporate America. The good news, in keeping with Simmel’s ambivalence, is that we are left with a cleaner separation between business and intimacy, which provides the basis for true friendship and sociability.
Whether they’re sounding Marx’s alarm or celebrating with Simmel, these critics rely on a false conceptual opposition between the public and the private spheres. On the one hand, we have men toiling in the cold, profane instrumental relations of commerce and commodification. On the other hand, thank goodness for the sacred private sphere of love, intimacy and the family, usually maintained by women and idealized in the cult of domesticity.
The Ewen readings seem to fear a perversion of the sacred domestic from the commercial, but it’s my assertion that the whole conceptual ground on which they’re working is flawed. The ‘separate spheres – hostile worlds’ assumption keeps us from seeing that in fact, binaries like public/private, economic/social, work/family are moot. In reality, commercial ties are social ties, the family is fundamentally a place of commerce and economic activity, and the two spheres are not separate or oppositional at all. The forces of capitalism are not likely to either wipe out social relations, and nor will they enhance them. Rather, people mingle business ties and personal relationships all the time, and social institutions like patriarchy and job segregation by sex live on despite the promise that pure market forces will reign supreme.
Posted by Ashley Mears at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)
Producing and Consuming
No Logo was certainly an interesting read, and to a liberal like myself the passages that were more overtly political weren’t at all offensive. It took me a while to make a link between what I take to be the subject of the class and what I felt she was writing about. We are looking at objects, and she is looking at the economic production structure, winners and losers. For me, the sections we read in the book (and I apologize for not having time to read any more of it), were about social stratification writ globally. While all sorts of workers in both the North and the South get little or nothing, CEO’s and that general ilk gets much wealthier, so her story is really a story about the grand scale of inequality that capitalism has worked itself into.
But how does inequality relate to objects? It is much easier for me to see inequality expressed through the stratified consumption (Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is close to my lived experience) of objects than through their production and distribution, but I think this is one of the things Klein is after. Her project points out that producing and distributing the actual physical objects that brands are attached to has become devalued labor. It isn’t because the work is dirty or hard, but that the multi-national companies whose interests are served by the production of these objects have decided to privilege the brand at the expense of the object. The ethereal quality of brandedness leads to the profits while the physical qualities of objects are seen as rather unimportant, the objects are just shells waiting to be filled with branded meaning. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then, that the physical bodies of the producers/distributors of these goods and services also seem rather secondary to the multi-national decision makers. It isn’t the condition of their tangible bodies that matter, it is the somewhat less tangible (to me at least) cost of employing these bodies that is really of interest.
The relationship between objects as items that are produced and objects as items that are consumed can begin to overlap in the very arena in which the multi-nationals seek to emphasize: the brand. When she writes about the atrocious conditions of the contract workers, Klein seeks to represent the voices of the multi-nationals, as a good journalist should. She quotes a vice president at Champion clothing as saying, “we have no interest in our competition learning where we are located and taking advantage of what it has taken us years to build. ( 201-202)” This kind of statement makes no sense in terms of Klein’s argument that the objects themselves have little meaning without the brand behind them. If that is true, who really cares where and how Champion clothing is produced because what is important is the production of the Champion brand not the cloth on which the brand will be emblazoned. If it isn’t about the cotton weave secrets leaking out to the competitors, why do companies like Champion care? It isn’t tough to see that they care because the knowledge associated with them (whether it be about the athletes that endorse their products or the location and conditions in the factories that produce them) is part of the Champion brand. Consumers may alter their consumption habits based on changes to the branded image which is so tightly controlled that I can see why the introduction of any bit of brand related information by outsiders like human rights groups and investigative journalists would be cause for tight-lipped responses. It is only here, where the conditions of the physical production of objects is in danger of being related to the branding of objects that objects as produced and objects as consumed comes together.
Posted by Laura Noren at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)
Centuries of criticism on consumer culture
This week’s readings make an interesting account of different kinds of criticism on consumer culture. We could be tempted to think that the discontents against mass marketing such as those expressed by authors like Naomi Klein, in movies like The Corporation, or in magazines like Adbusters have taken form in the past decade or so. However, since Veblen and even before, industrial capitalism and its strategies of marketing have been criticized from different perspectives. The idea that corporations are damaging the quality of life of the most, at the same time as they nourish the illusion that they make them better seems very enduring. But as critics denounce the faults and problems of mass market, no new economic model seem to really be able to take rise. Therefore we may ask what really are the flaws of such a system. How we relate with marketable products and brands tells a lot about social life, and it must be taken into account if one seeks an alternative to the actual situation.
It is interesting to realize that the mass communications that are the vehicle of the visual and vernacular aspects of commodity capitalism were perceived in the start as a solution to the dissatisfactions of industrial society. As Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen recall, at the end of the 19th century, there was a discontent with the machine-like organization of industrial society, which was not seen as to serve the needs of the most. The new iconography of capitalism was fulfilling the need for visionary escape that was attacked by the restraining structure and organization of the machine-world. The aesthetics of social-democratic capitalism would claim to solve the contradiction of modern life, it would reconcile the demand for a better life, with the priorities of corporate capitalism. In this context, new pleasures and new ways of seeing emerges to from the spectacle of utopia that is consumer culture. Consumer and audience merge together: consumerism is a creative power that takes its source in objects.
Veblen, in the end of the 19th century, severely criticized what he saw as the irrationality of consumption. Adding a cultural dimension to economic behavior, he saw the symbolic value in consumption, principally status-striving. His suggestion, that Lears links to a long traditio in Anglo-American Protestant culture, was to remove the artificial aspects of display and to promote rational and disciplined structure of the market. However, as Lears shows, this Puritanism in consumption, which made its way to consumers, easily enters the marketing logic of corporations, and in a simple rhetorical change, they can keep the consumer attracted to their products. Many of the authors refer to Freud in their argumentation. As this one suggested, civilization requires the human to repress many instinctual desires, such as the immediate, inconsequential gratification. Therefore, consumerism offers a possibility to satisfy those impulsive needs at the same time as one respects the social organization.
But what happens when the pleasures of consumerism are at the expense of the others? As Naomi Klein writes, corporations are not acting as great citizens themselves as they are contributing to the bad living conditions of many workers in Third world countries as well as in the Western world. In this perspective, the flaws of consumerism are more apparent and factual. But as S.&E. Ewen suggested, if we want to establish popular initiative, does consumerism have to be transcended?
As Mintz showed in his fascinating history of the uses of a substance like sugar, there are many ways to relate to commodities that reveal the social and political context of a period, but also that offer different kinds of satisfaction in different contexts. In our relation to objects, we are, indeed, creating and living our lives, and if this is consumerism, it is something were difficult to transcend. But what this also shows, is that our relation to objects is also arbitrary, thus not something natural, and something which we can act upon.
Posted by Etienne Meunier at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)
and here comes the religion question...
Much of what is difficult for me to grasp in these readings is a strong understanding of economics. While I don’t have a strong educational background in this area, regardless, I find it nearly impossible to hold onto and accept an elusive and ever-changing understanding of value that is absolutely necessary for participation in contemporary culture. In reading for class, I found many points and analogies made in most of the readings that hinted at the object or machine as a god-like figure or religious entity. The Ewen’s essay mentions The Book of Progress and discusses the early comparisons between the film camera and the illusions it creates. Film evoked a spiritual world, and thus it was the machine that could now not only capture but also create “a miracle.” The camera itself “cannot be deceived,” much like the all-seeing and knowing god. Stuart Ewen quotes Calvin Coolidge and his statement that “the man who builds a factory builds a temple,” placing the object and commodity as that which deserves worship from its creator. Edward Filene is mentioned as well, invoking the idea that consumerism and the worship of the object and commodity in effect support and sustain the betterment of the larger community, much in the way that living one’s life in accordance with certain rules and lessons in mind afford the larger group a happier life, on earth and in the afterlife. Ewen also mentions Robert Lynd and his idea of the family as a consuming unit that must understand and assume the individually appropriate and “proper” roles, requiring each member to have faith in the economic structure of the family. The shift in “authority” from the home to the workplace is reflected in a magazine for working class families, which declares that the business/factory/workplace is a place for individuals to find “the rules of life” – solidifying the analogy between economics and religion and capturing the challenge to the individual, family and society at large to look towards the workplace and the commodity for a spiritual understanding of self. It is striking to read the religion-laden language used by so many writers, but rings true when I return to thinking about economics, and the fact that I have to have faith in the ideas of money, capital, and value – otherwise, I will never be able to engage with objects/commodities. The idea is akin to the relic, as discussed last week, and while the relic requires a faith in its value that is not based in monetary or capital exchangeability, one must have faith in the idea of an economy to give value to objects.
Posted by Kimberly Brandt at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2006
Technological development and Triscuits
One of the issues I keep thinking of when reading these essays is the transition away from a society defined by its limitations, and the repercussions of that transition. Captains of Consciousness and Channel of Desire both focus on a top-down approach to these changes, but I think the arguments posed in those books leave out a sort of dynamism by focusing on captains of industry and communication. Why did the audience develop for them in the first place?
Channel of Desire couches the “leap from ‘scarcity’ to ‘abundance’” as a rhetorical point used to ingrain consumerism as the basis of social relations. In Captains of Consciousness, Ewen’s assertion (p. 138) that mass industry provided a context rather than a source for socialization and therefore an allegiance to capitalism has to be placed tightly within the societal changes of the time. Ewen argues that Industrial ideology filled the role of the ‘decomposing’ family base in socialization, noting, for example, changes in housing composition (p. 135).
I think the housing example is incomplete as stated – explaining decreasing housing unit size in terms of consumption trends ignores the decreasing levels of household crowding, dropping immigration rates (high in the 1920s, but immigrants were already arriving in considerably smaller numbers than the 1910s), and a move away from extended family living. I am not trying to argue that these other changes are divorced from a consumption standpoint, but I think the point Ewen is trying to make using these data is more complicated than what he states.
Developments in transportation (streetcars and, later, automobiles) allowed people to live further and further outside of central cities and in larger and larger houses. These changes in the ability to remake the built environment have generally happened outside of any agreed upon ideal of just how to remake the built environment – a process that is very much transferable to other societal changes. People have been trying to figure out what to do with those changes (Le Corbusier, Exurbs, etc.), and what they have meant for social relations, since. Lears’ book is a good example of this, in how it shows the ambivalence in how to approach these changes.
Also, on a somewhat-unrelated and less convoluted note, I’m also reminded of an old Triscuit box displayed in the National Museum of American History, prominently advertising itself as the world’s first hydoelectrically created food, with a large picture of a hydroelectric plant and how great it was that new superfood could be created by a machine (an example of the hydroelectric plant in an ad is shown here, although this version doesn't have the mechanical hyperbole of the original).
Posted by Mark Treskon at 10:23 PM | Comments (0)
To Wax or not to Wax?
I have a confession. I am largely susceptible to any intellectual uncovering of why getting rid of body hair can be seen as a bad thing. I admit my aversion toward the hairless body in part stems from my being pure lazy (as well as feeling slightly intimidated by the horrors of waxing), but nonetheless, I am an avid collector of clever criticism towards the overly sanitized body because, in short, I find that the images of the body presented to us in the media are so idealized, that we wind up feeling alienated towards the real and grotesque body (in case you are wondering, I have borrowed the term the “grotesque body” from literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theories I have integrated into my own little collection of clever criticism toward the hairless and overly sanitized body!).
The explanation given above for my rather odd preoccupation, I realize is neither very profound nor progressive. And this dawned on me even more after having read the essays by Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, during which I had been nodding away while thinking they were SO right in their criticism of the media, consumerism and commodity-based sexuality.
Looking more critically at what the Ewen’s have to offer, however, I find that they to a large extent are echoing a lot of Frankfurt Scholl criticism in their arguing that consumption is the dominant social relationship in our society, that corporate America is the father of us all, and that the media imposes on us the most available image of the social world. And more importantly, that consumerism, the most evil of all evil, must be transcended in order to realize a better way of life.
I admit I may be oblivious to crucial points in their texts that render their arguments distinctly different or at least more complex than what I have summed up here. But I will allow myself to ignore that for now in order to get to my point:
The criticism that I am prone to, I realize, is exactly the kind of criticism that I feel my professors have taught me to critically criticize throughout my four year “academic career”: Namely that there is something authentic out there.
And in essence, I find that the Ewen’s are arguing just that. That there is an authentic way of life that is better than what we lead now, and equally important, that they are able to identify it. The better way of life that is.
Instead, many of my professors seem to have argued, I should adopt a more anthropocentric perspective or cultural studies approach toward consumption, allow room for agency, and generally believe that many people of the world ARE able to critically reflect upon the question of whether life is better with or without body hair. That despite our socially constructed personalities we are not complete dimwits.
In case you are wondering where I am getting with this, I can assure you that I am too….I think that it all comes down to me wondering whether the critique that I presume many of us who have spent a couple of years within academia have learned to criticize, still holds a spell on you? Well, I there must be some spellbound “Marx’ies” out there…..
Posted by Sarah Carlson at 05:18 PM | Comments (0)
Critical as can be
I refuse to sit in front of a machine that, so far, is the zenith of the digital revolution. Leaving behind in its wake blurry eyed, flat-bottomed, pale citizens. Soothed by its glow and the gental tapping of the keys, they become content with their lives. I will not participate....this week.
Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 01:56 PM | Comments (0)
The Specter of the Peddler
A number of this week’s readings critiqued, either implicitly or explicitly, the rootlessness of the marketplace. If we take last week’s anthropological readings seriously, objects provide a scaffolding for meaning in our everyday lives. But if these objects “invade” from the “outside”, if they are “imposed” upon us, do we risk the suppression and elimination of local meaning? If the objects that no longer mark our world are not ours, do we risk losing our meaning? Is identity and community replaced by false consciousness and artificiality?
The figure that seems to embody this concern – a concern even more prevalent in the context of globalization – is the peddler. Lears explores the fear attached to the peddler by Victorian moralism. The peddler, through his incessant roaming, detached the market, and in turn, objects from a place. Like hordes of barbarians, goods invaded tranquil communities to destroy their way of life. The peddler seduced people, especially women, with his exotic wares. He misled, scammed, conned. And in the end, the people could not get enough; the peddler facilitated an addiction to goods. Victorians believed “that, without proper boundaries, the market could undermine self-control” (Lears, 81). Goods, not tied to a specific, cordoned off place, threatened the other arenas of social life.
Lears believes that the peddler is a creature of the past. Licensing laws forced him “behind the counter of a department store, transforming him from a liminal figure into a complaisant shopkeeper” (Lears, 86). But are we still haunted by the peddler? It is true that peddlers still exist in a modern form on the fringes of the economy. Street peddlers push pirated DVDs in the Times Square Subway Station, swindlers appear on infomercials in the early hours of the morning, and the carnival still comes to town.
But there is a sense in which the peddler remains as a specter beyond the marginal. Contemporary critics of consumerism seem to still be kicking the supposed corpse of the peddler. Critics of globalization decry the loss of autonomy at the local level through the importation of Western goods. Naomi Klein, in exposing the vicissitudes of neoliberalism, speaks to the seduction of advertising. Corporations have discarded the factories and spend much more time selling exotic, seductive images to lure in consumers. The objects of globalization have no home. Factories remain as long as marginal profits can be squeezed from them, only to relocate when another country is willing to exploit their workers more. Goods, through advertising, seem to become their own peddlers. And the market transcends boundaries, national or otherwise, threatening local autonomy. Indeed, the characterization of corporations in this literature dons the appearance of the long-assumed-to-be-dead peddler.
The question then arises: are we kicking a dead horse? Do the current critiques of globalization represent an out-dated fear of the peddler? Are we hunting ghosts? Surely, the exploitation of neoliberalism should be condemned. But this is the production side of things. One wonders if the concern with consumserism and the seduction of the outside represents anything more than Victorian prudery and self-righteousness. I don’t know. But it’s interesting to consider.
Posted by Owen Whooley at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)