Objects, Consumption, and Desire

March 23, 2006

Names and the State

For anyone who does not know it, I thought that "The Unknown Citizen" by Auden is a goodpostscript to our discussion.

The Unknown Citizen
by W. H. Auden

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

Posted by Leah Strigler at 3:16 AM

March 20, 2006

Taking Culture Seriously

Lieberson and McCracken give us important conceptual apparatuses for understanding shifts in culture. Lieberson discusses internal and external mechanisms, as well as idiosyncratic historical developments. McCracken discusses displaced meaning as a way to understand why individuals and cultures consume. While Lieberson is interested in names, or fashion and McCracken is interested in things, or consumption, they both make an important point – that culture should be taken seriously for culture’s sake.

While Lieberson uses three concepts to help us analyze why names change, he is careful to point out that changes in fashion cannot be reduced to any of these three concepts, nor can we easily attribute causality to historical changes, internal or external mechanisms. Instead, sometimes fashion changes just because, or in ways that aren’t explained by “larger” issues. In short, shifts in fashion, and culture itself, are not always a dependent variable, contingent on the economy or politics or whatever the important issue of the day may be. This idea resonates with what Jeffrey Alexander would call the strong program in cultural sociology, where culture is autonomous, or uncoupled from social structure, rather than something to be explained “by something else entirely separated from the domain of meaning itself” (see Alexander 2004).

McCracken continues in a similar vein with his discussion of displaced meaning. Here, he discusses what things do for us. Consumption, or the desire to consume, is a foundation upon which people build hopes and ideals, futures and alternative spaces. This all happens in what McCracken refers to as the cultural domain (106). So this search for meaning is enacted as a way to make sense of culture, writ large and small. McCracken states that displaced meaning can help us better theorize “the role of inanimate objects in the representation and recovery of cultural meaning” (105). In short, the act of consumption can help us make sense of culture, and cultures (as McCracken does make it explicit that he is studying Western culture). In this piece, as well as the Lieberson, culture is placed at the center.

What is also interesting for me about McCracken is his argument that in our pursuit of meaning, consumption becomes insatiable. Yet, in the process of our desires not being met, we continue to consume more. I wonder how we can continue to theorize about excess using the foundation that McCracken has laid down for us.

Posted by Jane Jones at 7:30 PM

Seeing Shapes

I went to the Diane Crane piece searching for some other take on fashion that might help me in thinking about the sensory nature of fashion.

I went to the Diane Crane piece searching for some other take on fashion that might help me in thinking about the sensory nature of fashion. Since the word “fashion” refers to the shape of something (the fashioning of an object) I always think of fashion as being reliant on the sense of sight – on being able to see the shape of an object, admire it and copy it. (It would seem to me that this is true of crafting objects in general, from those most basic to those most fanciful – how does an artisan learn his/her craft, or how to make particular objects? Usually by watching others make things.) And so I often wonder about the importance of visual media in enabling the proliferation and commercialization of fashion. To that end, I appreciated Crane’s consideration of the media in the diffusion of fashion trends. I wonder though about the extent to which the development of visual media that can be accessed by larger numbers of people from different segments of society has enabled the proliferation of fashion trends – and perhaps their time trajectories as well. It seems that every innovation, from print advertising to the internet, has pushed the boundary of fashion and marketing further. Hence they have also continuously redefined “top-down” and “bottom-up” diffusions of fashion sensibilities – two terms that Crane uses. What I am trying to follow in part is the “line of sight” and how that evolves over time – who crafts the object, who then sees it (and is able to see it), and how does interest in that form of the object then proliferate? Also, with what effect?

I wonder too if this thinking might relate to some of the discussions we have had in class about what constitutes “an object” especially as related to the internet and multi-media innovations. Will customized Web sites such as those found on myspace.com ultimately be understood as objects, even if that conceptualization is problematic to some of us today? Was an advertisement originally considered an “object” in the way that one might think of it today? Was a photograph? What allows for the evolution of what is considered an object and how does that relate to the communication and marketing tools at our disposal, as well as how accustomed to them the populace has become? Usefulness or adaptation seems to be part of the process here, as does the sensory experience of the product and its material.

I thought of this question as well when reading “Claptrap,” because of the significance of the medium of television and as well because of the interplay of two senses: sight and hearing. The response to expectation to me is related to the phenomenon of observing and copying a form. I wonder about a typology that looks at relationships to objects and to adoption of fashion or other collective behaviors and trends as sensory response.

In thinking about perfume and fragrance I appreciate McCracken’s ideas of the “bridge” and the “ideal” but in a different application (pun intended) – because perfume, as much as it is a product or object in itself, is also designed and marketed to be a “bridge” – to evoke, by the wearing a particular fragrance, an idealized sense of oneself and the life one leads or might lead. Hence perfume itself is valued not just for its quality, uniqueness or desirability but for its ability to conjure imagined attributes. This is a form of synecdoche too. The term “displaced meaning” is also useful in thinking about this but I find that it takes me away from the concreteness of the object.

Posted by Leah Strigler at 11:17 AM

March 19, 2006

retail therapy

The McCracken reading reminded me of the credit card advertisement which tempts the viewer with a wide range of consumer durables, then ends the ad with prospect of attaining something non-durable (like love or family or memories) as “priceless,” because “for everything else there’s MasterCard.” The advertisement suggests the relationship between the items we propose to purchase and our motivations for doing so, implying that good credit can help the consumer (also known as an American) locate one’s “displaced meaning” for purchasing. The better life is possible to purchase, even in the face of devastating tragedy, as recently exemplified in September 2001 when American President G. W. Bush encouraged us to shop the terrorist attacks away. I would love to read McCracken’s essay on post-9/11’s retail therapy.

The ideal of shopping for a better world merges in the readings as Atkinson presents an example of how we are sold a type of idealism. Most fascinating was his introduction of the technology of the ‘sincerity machine,’ a teleprompter. In addition to opening his analysis of the claptrap from the presentation/performance of written speeches to those that are teleprompted, the suggestion of this device implies another layer of removing – where the ideals of the politician are one step further in production from that of the audience or viewer. Already politics are as stylized as the Academy Awards, beginning with Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats to the first televised Nixon/Kennedy presidential debates, but the ‘sincerity machine’ exists to make this sale even more seamless. This machine further invisibilizes the whole team of idea-makers from the lobbyist to military interests to the speechwriter. Placing faith in the machine makes the politician more realistic, natural and potentially convincing. In juxtaposition I am reminded of Errol Morris’ documentary about Robert McNamara, “Fog of War.” Morris interviews McNamara using a very visible distorting type of TV-like monitor, McNamara can see himself in the monitor while being interviewed and the monitor is present in all shots, there is no attempt to hide the arrangement of interview subject and filmmaker.

The conflation of fashions presented in the readings range from those that are sold for a meaning beyond their tangible use, to political/cultural ideals, to those that have no product – like a name. Lieberson explores a type of ‘product’ on the cultural surface that is not at the mercy of advertising or gimmicks like claptrap and sincerity. Naming a child could imply similar evocations like that of ‘displaced meaning,’ especially in Lieberson’s analysis of the naming practices of newly arrived ethnic groups, where the choice of a name could imply a potential future for the child different from that of the parent, a sort of promise or hope.

I am reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s work on the concept of simulation, where devices like the claptrap’s political sincerity machine or the genre of advertising exist to present a world that is imaginary (example: G. W. Bush said Hussein was behind the WTC attacks and that Iraq was producing WMDs; FOX news reports this breaking story. Later a series of political pundits claim no connection between the attacks, WMDs and Iraq, though the majority of Americans believe in a connection.) The simulation of what is real and what is fabricated is further enhanced by McCracken’s reasoning for why. If my ideal society is a world without sexism and racism, my purchase of coffee at Karen’s at Astor Place is symbolic of my desire to support women-owned businesses, to offer women the potential for more economic and political power (though I spend more on this coffee than the one at Starbucks therefore effecting my own economic status). Reading McCracken, I wonder if this is merely an exercise in ‘displaced meaning’ like buying a Marc Jacobs lipstick pen in an attempt to ascribe to an approximation of buying the Marc Jacobs style. My coffee represents the future of a world that I will likely never see, but is this world any more imaginary that of the claptrap?

Posted by Pilou Miller at 6:18 PM | Comments (1)

If that's your real name

In reading Lieberson’s book, I also have been thinking about those who do change their names in their lifetime, and the reasons behind and for this choice. I have met many a person who has changed their name either legally or simply within a social context (and perhaps it doesn’t really matter either way, although those who go to lengths to make the legal change imply a certain finality to this change), and all for varying reasons. My best friend from childhood legally changed her middle name at least twice in the last 6 years, and a couple of years ago legally changed her last name to Sweater. While Lieberson doesn’t delve into the world of last names as much as first ones, perhaps because they are used for different symbolic purposes than first names, changing one’s last name to sweater is very different than taking on the last name of your legal spouse. I also have friends who have legally changed their first names to accommodate a choice to have a gender-non-specific name or a name that implies the opposite gender of their biological sex. There are friends who assume similar name changes but do not affect them legally, but they are used to the point where no one even knows their legally given name – this assumed name is their “real” one. I also know someone who, as in the case of Sweater, changed his name to one that is not commonly used as a name, but rather a word found in the dictionary – Machine. I myself changed my middle and last name when I was 14 years old, as my mother took back her maiden last name, and I wanted to do the same (I had to change the middle one as well as it had originally been her maiden name).

While I find Lieberson’s book compelling and thoroughly examining, I am curious to see how he would discuss these kinds of name changes. While he asserts that the choice for a name is not one predicated on pure taste alone, and that fashion, and taste itself, are neither arbitrary nor uninformed by culturally and socially persuaded ideals and values, the same would have to apply for names chosen by the individual for his/herself as those chosen for others. Thus, the name is not solely used as a means for practical purposes of identification – it plays a significant role in the way that we understand and portray ourselves, and how we wish to be understood and seen by others. In Machine’s and Sweater’s case, the choice of such an uncommon word as name tells us something about the person, regardless of whether we think or know the name change was given or chosen. It not only allows for the named to perform in a certain way based on the name, but also asks others to consider the name as a component to the self that actively affects the way we understand the person. In the case of Lieberson’s list of famous figures who changed their names, we also see that the idea of persona is achieved in the selection of a name, and that perhaps without this name change, what it is that the person does with this name (act, lead, perform, etc.) may not have occurred. “The difference that a name makes” is a difference found across all named persons – whether the name is given or chosen – as it performs a personality that shapes and guides us to perceive others. The meaning in a name can change the meaning of a personality or persona, implying again that the name plays an active role in the course of understanding a single person or community.

Posted by Kimberly Brandt at 6:02 PM | Comments (1)

A Fashionably Late List of Three

To maximize applause on this fashionably late posting, I'll briefly point to three issues worth contemplating.

First, what is the difference between taste and fashion? At times Lieberson uses the terms interchangeably. It seems that fashion is the changing, and taste is what gets changed. To unpack the how's and why's of change, it seems like he reduces taste to all "social aesthetics." So then my question is, where is the room for the "whoa!" moment, the "aha" of admiration of a thing, a sound, or a sight, that intrinsically strikes our fancy? Is there room in Lieberson (and echo our critique to Becker) for the simple intrinsic love of the sweet sound of "Je - ne - fur?" And if not, well that's fine, but then it seems that taste really is fashion, and he's right to blur any boundary between the two.

Second, given the first inquiry and my acceptance of the social nature of taste, these readings are great methodological angles for sociologists. Like Durkhiem on suicide, Lieberson and Atkinson map out the social patterning of phenomena we consider to be so personal, so unique, and so individual that they must be isolated from social forces. But as these authors show, they aren't, and this angle gives sociology a good way in to tackle individualist accounts.

And finally, much of this week read like case studies of Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping points," where a phenomenon reaches a critical point among the right crowd in the right set of social conditions so that it catches on and becomes a hit. Thus there is a huge set of contingencies and arbitrariness as to what tips and what doesn't, what gets "locked in" and what fades away - everything from Hush Puppies shoes to VHS hit a tipping point and was picked up, imitated, and now locked-in. So to what extent are all of these hits really just flukes? That is, how much can we attribute the popularity of goods to the kind of arbitrariness that seems inherent in capitalist markets?

Posted by Ashley Mears at 5:51 PM

Mr. Arrow, perhaps it can be done better?

Arrow does a good job with presenting us parsimonious models of self-reinforcing mechanisms, the lock-in and path-dependency. I have two things to add that would in my opinion enrich an analysis based his approach: the issue of historical accidents as beginning of a mechanism and ‘anything’ can be an outcome problem.

As long as Arrow’s ‘historical accident’ refer to something like Liberstein’s external influences it is acceptable but if it means that people’s initial preferences, before things get locked-in or reach a level of path-dependency, than I find it as superficial and leaving exogenous important societal constraints on decision-making. He simply takes people’s preferences as given at the beginning an object is introduced, which makes it look like things are based simply on chance. They are but within certain constraints, people don’t pick things randomly (at least initially) but it depends on their position and background and after one thing has been acquired by many Arrow’s argument that it achieves ‘selection advantage’ and people will switch (apart from diehards) seems plausible. What I’m saying is something like Liberstein about different groups adopting different names and imitating certain groups but not others. People’s choices are constrained by the groups they belong to but within those constraints we can go to Arrow’s unpredictability. One could argue against the usage of groups because in modern societies people occupy positions in many groups and live at their crossroads, therefore, strongly limiting their constraints. Here perhaps one could answer choices would be narrowed down by situation, mere presence, and pressure from relevant others. We could say that a person ranks the groups between she has to choose and comply with the demands of the most salient one in a given situation. Therefore she has a preference but not about the good but about belonging to a group (otherwise she risks sanctions and possible loss of membership). But what about choosing between VHS and Betamax, which is Arrow’s example? There seem to be no prescribed behavior (constraints) by groups apart from some tech-geeks. Here we also need to look at the higher-level control of those who make and distribute products as constraining choices of individuals.

The other thing that I find problematic about Arrow is that it seems that any equilibrium is possible until only some choices become reinforced and are the only or one of few possible outcomes. While before Arrow’s starting point was weak now it is the end point of his self-reinforcing mechanism. I believe the outcome cannot be just a result of reinforcing decisions since the final outcome might not fit the larger structures that it will need to be enrolled or simply those structures will not be available. I’m talking about problems of lash-ups, that the final outcome of choices needs to fit into a whole lash-up thing. An outcome that does not fit a bigger structure or does not build it itself will fail in the end. Now Arrow does give an example of a bigger structure emerging along with that of individual choices when he talks about rental places providing more Betamax movies, because people buy Betamax players. However, these two different levels of analysis are not visible in his formal models (although I didn’t understand them completely). They are one-leveled. Does there need to be some communication between actors on different levels or do they simply need to read signals or is it possible to collapse different levels into one (Arrow does not really give an explanation for any of them)?

Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 4:01 PM | Comments (1)

Where names come from....

Lieberson’s excellent analysis of the practice of name giving reveals how an apparently individual choice is determined by societal taste. The author determines external social forces as well as internal mechanisms of change to give insights in how parents choose the first name for her child. Lieberson examines carefully the concept of taste both individually and socially. He discovers trends in name giving as well as providing us with models to understand these trends. Similarly to clothes, names as well are not just based on utilitarian functions, but there are structures, which can explain trends in taste.

Besides relying on an immense amount of empirical data, Lieberson adapts models of consumption, which were already examined in class. Bourdieu as well as Veblen are his point of entry but he goes far beyond his analysis in pointing out that a high-to-low-adaptation-model can only explain a diffusion of one name determined by a specific place and a specific time. The static models of class structure and goods as a way of distinction and imitation does not seem to fit in a society which is highly diverse both in its taste and in its values. The “reflection theory“ –the notion that cultural events reflect social order- translates social developments one-to-one in a cultural phenomenon such as name giving. Lieberson points out that this sort of model remains on the surface of a profound analysis. Furthermore, the author prevents us of making common-sense conclusions of cultural phenomena which might be obvious but which are not proven by any empirical data (see iceberg fallacy, p. 266).
Lieberson’s observation that the sound of a name is important in the choice of a name goes beyond a mere statement of individual taste. The sound of a name is not only a mean of assimilation for parents with ethnic background to an overall American identity, which then reflects on the status of the family in society. It also contains social reality, and allows comprehending a name not as a symbol or index (like semiotics do), but as a quality of the material world.

McCracken makes a similar attempt. The author connects culture and consumption to an anthropological understanding of meaning. By rejecting a semiotic approach, he sets up cultural categories, which provide the structure for meaning transfer between objects and goods. Even if the idea of meaning as an inherent part of an object is appealing, I do not quite understand how to understand meaning as something tangible. Meaning can change and it is the consumer who has to decode the message of the advertisement, but I seriously doubt her/his ability to decode the message properly. McCracken thinks of advertising as something the consumer participates actively in, even though advertising is proved to be most effective when consumers are passively involved. Emotional advertising wants to reach consumers by arousing their desires. I do not really see how consumers decodes the meaning of the message first and “complete the work of the director”.

A similar problem of understanding occurs to me when McCracken talks about displaced meaning and consumer’ ideals of goods and objects. Goods as bridges, which give the consumer access to, displaced ideals (p.116), sounds to me like a psychoanalytical model of desire put into social space. I would like to discuss McCracken’s model more in detail in class, especially his use of terms such as meaning, ideal and world confuses me. Does he try to embrace semiotics and psychoanalysis in his theory? How can I grasp his understanding of the real and the ideal of social life?

Posted by Teresa Reiber at 2:28 PM | Comments (1)

displaced meanings...

The assignments for this week explore what influences our decisions in selecting certain products over the others. In this loose summarization I consider names and political speeches also as goods, since the articles all aim to demonstrate the social / economical / rhetorical forces which sell us on certain names, political speeches as if they were commodities.

Lieberson, by the analysis of naming customs, attempts to establish a theory, which provides a general description of the dynamics of ‘cultural surfaces.’ Lieberman’s main argument is that not only external (social) forces shape our taste, but also “internal mechanisms are at work generate new fashions even in the absence of social and cultural change.” (14) The real challenge for Lieberson (as well as for us) is to describe what these ‘internal mechanisms’ are, which, either independently or in interaction, operate with the external social forces.
Lieberson proposes the ‘ratchet-effect’ as an internal change mechanism. He argues that “it is based on the joint operation of two feature of taste change.” (93) The first is “that new tastes are usually based on existing tastes” (93), and the second is that “fashion must shift fairly persistently in one direction rather than oscillating back and forth.” (95) In summarization, Lieberson describes the ‘internal change mechanism’ as something that develops from that which already exists, and describes this development as a linear, one-directional process.
After reading the assigned chapters from “A Matter of Taste,” I am still not sure whether Lieberson also expands his analysis to the motives which evoke the ‘ratchet-effect,’ whether he explains how and why this process starts to operate and what consequences it has (on the ‘cultural surface’ as well as on the dynamics of internal and external forces). Perhaps I got lost among the statistics, the lists and Lieberson’s general (and often obvious) comments on the changes in the fashion of names, but I have to admit that I had the same frustration which I felt after reading Becker: despite the detailed description of a social phenomenon (in Becker’s case the art worlds, and in Lieberson’s work the naming practices), I found the theorization behind the description, the “taking it to the next level,” which we were talking about in relation to Becker, dissatisfactory. What I learnt from our discussion on Becker is that instead of looking at solely what the author does argue / emphasize in his text, I should also consider his intentions; the implied questions and methodological propositions, which are not explicitly articulated in his work.
McCracken’s, Arthur’s and (to a certain extent Atkinson’s) texts surely helped me expand Lieberson’s analysis. For example, introducing McCracken’s ‘displaced meaning’ into Lieberson analysis of naming practices could help us to explore more about the motivations of internal (or maybe external?) changes in name practices. McCracken argues that ‘displaced meaning’ “consists in a cultural meaning that has deliberately been removed from the daily life of a community and relocated in a distant cultural domain.” (104) In McCracken’s understanding, that which is ‘displaced’ is the ideal, which needs to be inaccessible in our everyday life.
He argues that consumer goods “serve as bridges;” since through the possession of these goods the individual anticipates “the possession of certain ideal circumstances that exist now only in a distant location” (110). This explanation should allow us to consider names that are chosen to imitate a higher class in Lieberman’s analysis as bridges to approach ‘distant meanings;’ in other words, to create the illusion that a child enters into a different (ideal?) social class by bearing a different name. Then my question is how does a name with a ‘displaced meaning’ effect the child’s identity? Does it effect identity at all? For instance, does it create different expectations of that child? Does it create a bridge at all between reality and the idealized connotation (which is the displaced meaning) of the name?

I believe that that McCracken, to a certain extent, leaves it open, what “ideal” really is. In my reading, the ideal for McCracken is something that is abstract, distant and unreachable. I am surprised that McCracken considers objects merely as bridges to the ‘ideal,’ and does not identify objects with the ‘ideal.’ I believe that in contemporary society often objects themselves constitute the ‘ideal.’ It is the paradox of being real and not real (ideal) at the same time; it is their material tangibility which generates the promise of a possible possession, and disguises the ‘ideal’ nature or ‘displaced meaning’ (in other words the reality) of these objects. I hope this makes sense. I'll try to clarify my thoughts for tomorrow.

I am running out of time and space but just a few more questions:
- How can we apply Arthur’s notion of “self –reinforcing mechanism” to naming practices and to fashion in general?
- I am fascinated by Arthur’s idea of the “lock-in.” How can we expand this economical concept into the field of fashion?
- How does the body language / intonation / rhetoric which Atkinson describes in the political world can be translated into everyday life? What role it might play in establishing McCracken’s ideal (for example in the mass media)?
- How is it possible that the word ‘manipulation’ did not occur in any of these texts?

Posted by Aniko Szucs at 2:14 PM | Comments (1)

What about the name changers?

Reading over Owen’s post, I started thinking about a special case within the purview of the already unique case of naming: the people who change their own names. Owen argued that fashion, at least fashion as we know it and fashion as Naomi Klein would have written it, has a fair amount to do with its commercial aspect. So what if Lieberson had looked at the people who change their own names? I suppose the most common case of this would be women who change their names when they get married, but that isn’t really the example that I had in mind. I am thinking about the people who have gone by one name, or one particular nickname for a long time and then suddenly stopped going by that name in favor of some other name. I have known a few of these people. I knew a Molly who became a Mariah, but didn’t consider it a name change because Molly had been a nickname and Maria had been her real name all along. Adding an “h” and changing the pronunciation made it a different name to me, but not to her. To me, her name was completely different and I had to think hard about what to call her every time I saw her. To her, the real name hadn’t changed at all. Underneath Molly she had been Maria, and underneath Mariah, she was still Maria. Why did she feel like she had to change her name in the first place, and once she did, why was the compromise position better than a brand new start with no ties to any name that had come before? Another person I know went from being Vilene to being Lisa—no compromise there. And another did the nickname slide and went from being Betsy to being Lyz, all the while still really being Elizabeth.

What about these name changers? Would Lieberson have found that name changers use different criteria for naming themselves than they do when, say, naming their own children (if they had any)? Are name changers more or less likely to be influenced by naming trends and are they the same trends? On the one hand, in two of my three examples, the name changers felt compelled to somehow retain their original name which would indicate a much more circumscribed set of choices than would be available to a parent naming a child who starts with no moniker at all. On the other hand, Molly and Mariah do not strike me as being similar to each other so there appears to be more play there than I maybe would have guessed. (What nicknames are available for Laura? Could I decide to be called Lauren as a “nickname” a non-changed new name? Could I be Laurel? Could I just be L? What about Lola? Is that a new name or just another nickname?) I don’t see Mariah as some special form of Maria nor do I see Molly as a likely nickname for Maria either. I do happen to know that the name change to Mariah happened at about the time that Mariah Carey was becoming popular. What kind of impact did her rise to stardom have (and what about her reputation over the past couple of years)? Can a person change their name more than once? Can a person have more than one name in play at any given time? Both Molly and Betsy are still Molly and Betsy to their families, but Mariah and Lyz to the rest of their worlds. Are they doing this out of a sense of honor, trying to honor the choice their parents’ made for them? Or is it more that it isn’t consequential to be “cool” to your family, but it is important to be “cool” to the rest of us? In other words, Vilene understands that some people might make snap judgments about her based on her name, so she is responding quite strategically to naming fashions by changing her name to Lisa, which was popular at the time she made the switch, to make sure that her first impression represents the fashionable woman that she is. Are Molly, Betsy and Vilene (or Mariah, Lyz and Lisa) acting as socially astute actors, changing their names to keep up with naming fashions over time, to overcome some stereotype they ran into with their old names? This begs another question that Lieberson didn’t answer, or at least not in the chapters we read, but what difference does a name make? More broadly, what difference does it make to be fashionable? Why do we care? How and for whom does it matter?

In the case of names, a study out of MIT’s management school whose authors and name escape me right now, has shown that names matter on resumes. Applicants with black sounding names are less likely to receive interview invitations than applicants with white sounding names, and applicants with just plain strange names are more likely not to get called in either. Are these the kinds of things Vilene, Betsy, and Molly were consciously considering when they changed their names? Or was it something else, something more intangible? I wish Lieberson would have gone down that road, and he did begin to a little bit in the chapter about immigrant naming practices. For him, maintaining a cultural tie to the old country through an ethnic sounding name was an important, but rather unexplored phenomena. Why maintain the tie through a name rather than trips home, foods, religious practices, language, etc? What does a name mean for immigrants? What about the rest of us? And why switch to a more American sounding name at all? To get more respect from Americans? To feel like they are making a relatively shallow nod towards assimilation that is just a nod and not particularly meaningful after all? If a name has meaning, then what difference does it make to have any given name? Is Molly/Mariah different now that she’s gotten a new name? If people do perceive her differently with her new name, how is that consequential for her conception of self? Should we start changing our names as often as we change our wardrobes? Why do names last a lifetime? If they didn’t would they mean more or less? If I could be Lola today and L tomorrow and Laura last week, would that turn my name into something more like an accessory than a functional label that allows others to easily refer to me outside my presence? What is in a name, after all?

Posted by Laura Noren at 1:18 PM | Comments (1)

"Better murder an infant in its crib..." Blake

I am in a whiny mood. If you don't want whiny, skip this entry. I kind of cheer up by the end.

Lieberson, a man who has never heard of active verbs, writes about naming. His writing style has all the complacent monotony and repetition of Gertrude Stein's work without the fun referrences to European cultural celebrities. I do not understand why I could not get past this. And also understand that my classmates may help me see better what is going on.

However, I am relieved to report readings about my own paper's subject, Terra Cotta, have proven to be fruitful and interesting.

Other readings: Arthur writes about economics. Arthur's mathematical formula left me in the dust, and the photocopy with the letters in the gutter just discouraged me. Somehow, if it had been McCracken's clear-ish prose, I would have been able to transcend the copying technique. Maybe he's saying before things in the economic market lock into a pattern they flail around awhile? Maybe he's saying something about "self-reinforcing mechanisms" which seem to boil down to something like Inertia: once something starts economically speaking, it tends to keep going. What helps is how well something is set up, what is efficiently learned, how things are well-coordinated, and how things adapt well. If this keeps on whatever product can dominate a market. I don't understand Lock In or Path Dependence, allocating or recontracting. In short, I am lost.

Atkinson discusses what makes audiences clap. This seems to group itself more with the TV writing analysis for the last class. In an odd way, does clapping become an audience created auditory "object"/service that speakers work to obtain?

McCracken talks about notions that have found themselves lodged in comsumer goods. And that whole French-pomo-sociological notion of slippage creeps in with the "goods as bridges to displaced meaning." Could we connect the goods as a "medium of non-linguistic communication" with Atkinson's discussion of mass/group communication patterns? I thought his take on collecting was interesting, the idea that rich people need to narrow their buying power to the "scarce and rare" so they can still be shoppers with the hunger...(113) Does it tie into Arthur's economics when he talks about what's good for the economy is bad for the individual who could use some "internal limits" (115) Is there an implied critique of Arthur b/c he doesn't even take a moment for the larger impact of his analysis--that an economically driven world-view often lacks?

I disagree with McCracken's idea that "It is however absolutely essential for us never to receive what it is we want." (116) From owning a really good keyboard so I type without tendon strain, to using an affordable gym where I can swim as much as I want, having the things I want makes my life happy, useful, bearable.

I also disagree with the implication in his statement (105) "When goods serve as bridges to displaced meaning they help perpetually to enlarge the individual's tastes and preference and prevent the attainment of a "suffiency" of goods." He seems to imply that goods or learning about more goods (education) creates an endless gaping maw of need for stuff. A pop-culture financial planning book "Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Domniguez and Vicki Robin (Penguin 1992) takes on the counter idea that one can have "enough stuff," economic satiation and sufficency of goods, if anyone's interested.

I would love to say I have a unified field theory that unites all these authors, but I can't, because I don't. I am, by the end of this, cheerfully and deeply confused. Also, sort of bummed. The subject heading this week was "Fashion." Fashion for me starts with Marx's analysis of Engel's family fabric mills. (OK, we have quotes about fashion back to Tertullian, but anyway) Fashion, labor, and modernism are so incestuously intimate as to provide an endless spectacle for the cheerful egghead. Also I love a pretty dress. There were no pretty dresses in the assigned reading.

Posted by Andrea Siegel at 12:51 PM | Comments (1)

Collecting and fashion

These essays deal with fashion (broadly conceived) as a shared understanding of meanings. The choices people make for themselves (or, in the case of names, those they chose for others), while on one sense individual, tie in inextricably to larger societal trends. The essay on claptrap takes place at a broader level than the others, as it focuses on generally shared understandings of actions. The works by Lieberson and McCracken not only show the importance of breaking out subgroups in order to better understand these trends, but show that class alone (and understanding taken from Veblen) is much to simplistic a tool for understanding diffusion of fashion.

McCracken’s essay on displaced meaning was intriguing, especially on how collecting can provide higher levels of consumption to collectors. There seems to be some assumption that this is generally the recourse of the very rich (his examples of people winning the lottery or wanting to collect every Renoir outside of public collections), although what I find interesting is the vast number of collectors/collections that happen outside of this context.

Record and book collections may contain monetarily valuable pieces, but rarity need not equate to scarcity (I have a copy of a Polka Mass recorded in Wisconsin in the 1970s – it may be rare, but I picked it up for 50 cents at a Salvation Army, and doubt that I could get much more than that in return). But even then, these sorts of collections open themselves up to higher levels of collecting once a certain level has been reached: you may have every album officially put out by a specific band, but then you can look for bootleg recordings of concerts. Other sorts of collections don’t necessarily involve scarce objects – collecting a shot glass or spoon from each of the 50 states serves as proof that the collector travels (or has friends that travel), and has something inherently limiting to it, at which point the collector may move on to another type of object.

The different fields for fashion are extremely important to demarcate, as different groups (however defined) approach ‘value’ differently. This is as true for collecting as it is for Lieberson’s account of how different social or ethnic groups approach naming. Research that looks into this, then, has to figure out how these groups are defined.

Posted by Mark Treskon at 12:23 PM | Comments (1)

How free of external mechanisms can fashion be?

Lieberson’s conclusion on tastes and culture somewhat concerns me; what does it mean to argue that changes in fashion follows some patterns that are not directly related to external factors? He argues that it is treacherous to use an external social development to explain an observed change in fashion, but is not that what the methodology of our class ask us to do?

We are looking at objects and their changes in use, function, and meaning over time, and by observing the changing characteristics of the item, we unearth some social changes, which might not have been aparent in the first place. However, reading Lieberson, it seems like he wants to tell us that change in fashion is merely a perpetual back and forth movement, following the “ratchet effect,” or some repetitive collective behavior. In fact, he argues that internal mechanisms are much stronger in organizing fashion changes, than external ones, and that this can probably be applied to the entire cultural surface. The study of internal mechanism is fascinating and totally relevant, but what bothers me, perhaps, is that his thesis could be understood as essentialist. This is may be misunderstanding or simplifying Lieberson’s finding, but we could think that he argues that fashion naturally changes following patterns that we cannot really explain.

As he suggests, name changes are an ideal place to study internal mechanisms, but I wonder how his study could really apply to other spheres where fashion is present. Because of many social and historical factors, name choosing is an activity that can be done free of external constraints, but this is not the case in every cultural realm where we can make a choice. Choosing a name is an activity that cannot really have a big impact on the social system; choosing clothes could be more disruptive, but it is still pretty inoffensive, therefore internal mechanisms can be strong in those fashions (because the social system can allow it, perhaps.) But when I try to think of internal mechanisms in my area of inquiry (which is, you know, sexual cultures and sex industry), it is much harder to separate them from the external ones, as a choice making in this realm might more probably have an impact on the broader social system.

Posted by Etienne Meunier at 7:31 AM | Comments (9)

March 18, 2006

Locating the Ideal in the Bodum Frenchpress Coffeemaker

Ever since I enrolled for this course I have found myself to be pondering a lot more about material things than I did before. It is not that I walk around and ponder deep and heavily about things or objects, rather they are more mundane reflections free of academic categorizations and the like…and they all revolve around a particular object’s relation to me, me and me.
As I was walking down the street a while ago I saw a billboard add for Duane Reade (at least I think it was DR, it may have been a different chain of drug stores), featuring a hotchpotch of stuff. To the best of my knowledge there are several variations of this add, but the point of them all is that they each demonstrate the wide array of unrelated things you may be in the need of at a fixed point in time, say Pringles, toys for dogs, painkillers, gum, etc.

The one I saw that day caught my attention because the add people had placed a press coffeemaker amidst the color-coordinated still life. I doubt that it was the original Bodum French Press Coffeemaker -http://www.bodum.com/pages/products/productshow.asp?rid=1477&rtit=products&dom=1019 - but nonetheless it had the evocative power of the real thing, at least on me. When I identified it, I remember getting a feeling that I later, during my mundane ponderings, identified as “all is good” or “all will be good”.

When I read McCraken’s piece on the evocative power of things, I felt that the idea of goods helping “the individual contemplate the possession of an emotional condition, a social circumstance, even an entire style of life, by somehow concretizing these things in themselves” (110), was right on in terms of understanding why it made me feel “all is/will be good”. It is not very complex, but it seems so true in all its simplicity. The Bodum coffeemaker is very familiar, a household thing in the community where I grew up in Denmark, and it makes me think of going to my mother’s house for nice gourmet dinners after which we all have coffee and dessert. In many ways it evokes a lifestyle and a “golden past” that I have not been able to sponge much on since I moved to NY far away from my parents and whatever other social capital I had managed to save up during the first 24 years of my life.

Now, I just moved into a new apartment during spring break, which unlike my former place, has an actual kitchen. The kitchen makes me feel wonderful, because now I can sort of establish my own feinschmekker lifestyle, with pretentious baked fennel and other things that need to linger for hours in the oven. And so today I went out and bought baking utensils and the 18 piece essential homemaker set as well as TADA: the Bodum Chambord Frenchpress coffeemaker!

In relation to Lieberson’s distinction between a “custom” and a “fashion”, the former involving taste that does not change, the latter involving taste that changes in accordance with fashion, I wonder where my little fad with the Bodum coffeemaker fits into the larger scheme of things. While I am sure that there are so many New Yorkers that have the Bodum coffeemaker (I got mine at Wholefoods, where they had shelves upon shelves with Bodum hot beverage brewers of all kinds, side by side with delicious Le Creuset pots and pans....it’s my next project to acquire one of those I think), I personally do not know of knowing anyone in the city who has one. So to me it becomes incredibly idiosyncratic: the coffeemaker belongs to my peculiar character.

Basically, I feel that I have acquired an object, the taste for which I would consider a fashion in the social and geographical setting where I grew up. But here I make myself believe that my taste for it is more custom-based, as in “yeah, in Denmark we know good coffee”. I mean, already I can see myself as I am, in a state of serious “illusio”, standing in my new kitchen among friends waxing poetically about the brewing qualities of this coffeemaker, not mentioning one word about the socio-cultural meaning that this thing holds to me.

However, I guess that is exactly what it evokes to me, the “illusio”, which is not entirely illusionistic, because the coffee IS good and better than what I have had in a long time. I guess what it all comes down to - and I do not know if this makes sense to anyone but me – me realizing that I have a taste for “illusio”.

Ah, all is good, I tell you. This coffeemaker is the perfect location of my glorious future’s unfulfilled ideals.

Posted by Sarah Carlson at 10:08 PM | Comments (1)

rescuing the object

Collecting is an experience which is able to transfer the traces of the past, the utopian thinking and the anticipation of the better time to “distant locations in time and space”. On the other hand, it can be perceived as an attempt to settle one’s self in a world which resists it. Although it seems to be the object as a collectible (as a “dream that has taken on a substance”) that makes this displacing of meaning possible, what is important is the search for the object: the process of collecting as a practice of “rescue”.

For Walter Benjamin, to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. The best thing for a collector is the moment when he/she rescues a book which has seemed “lonely and abandoned on a market place” and whose freedom the collector gives back. What does Benjamin mean by rescuing a thing? The glorification of the thing through the possession of it? Rescuing a thing from the market place and thus, from its commodity character? Replacing the auratic experience by the search for the aura? Does stripping the object of its commodity character mean rescuing the “real” of its commodity character?
Yet, this relationship between real and ideal- between the collector and the world the object-carries another aspect. We should remember what McCracken says about the “synecdochical” character of the ocjects:a fragment is used to represent the whole. We should also remember that for Benjamin, it is not the object that comes alive in the collector, it is the collector who lives in the objects. So, does rescuing the thing mean rescuing the aura of our world, or, on the contrary, does the collector transfer the fragmentation into his/her own world and identity? Let me put it this way: Doesn’t the collector deal with a fragmented reality? If so, doesn’t this bring that he/she fails to distinguish between things and images- differentiate the fragments from each other? Or is this not a failure but actually a systematic approach, a tactic, to reinforce that we all are nothing but fragments?

Posted by Ilgin Yorukoglu at 12:15 PM | Comments (1)

March 17, 2006

The Perils of Uniqueness

In his book, Stanley Lieberson argues that the uniqueness of naming enables it to be a useful insight into some more general aspects of fashion. Unlike other fashions, there are no external, commercial interests that engage in advertisement for certain names. There is no Jennifer organization. In addition, because few people actually change their names over the course of their lives, naming fashions are more stable and less fickle than other fashions. By stretching out the temporal dimension, naming fashions allow for an easier analysis. Lieberson takes full advantage of the uniqueness of naming as a fashion and, in the process, aptly pointing out internal as well as external mechanisms that drive naming fashions. But there are always perils to appealing to unique cases to draw more general conclusion. In this case, I question the extent to which Lieberson’s findings can be generalized to other fashions.

The strength of the case of names is also its weakness. The absence of commercial interests allows Lieberson to bracket out external economic forces driving fashion and, in turn, illuminates internal mechanisms that might otherwise be obscured. However, when trying to extrapolate from this unique case, the absence of these commercial interests becomes a glaring deficiency. A comprehensive story of fashion cannot be told adequately without acknowledging the central role that commercial mechanisms, especially advertising, play. Take for example the shoe industry. When cannot explain changes in sneaker fashions over the past two decades without placing commercial interests, especially Nike, at the heart of the analysis. The framework that Lieberson establishes, derived from his unique case, is therefore inadequate to the task of explaining why, as a child, I pined for $150 Air Jordans. If we are to take Naomi Klein’s arguments to heart, the role of external commercial mechanisms on fashion is even more important and significant in the ear of the brand.

In addition to ignoring commercial interests, the case of names also allows Lieberson to ignore another crucial aspect of fashion – the fickle individual consumer. People do not trade in names willy nilly. Giving someone a name is a decision usually made once in a lifetime by those who are not actually “the consumer” (i.e. parents). This is a situation dramatically different than most cases of fashion, where the individual consumers decides for his or herself what one consumes and can change that decisions once fashion evolves. It seems to me that the uniqueness of a one time “purchase” of a name is restricted to this one specific case. This leads me to wonder whether we should appeal to such an anomaly for general understanding. I’m unsure as to how this uniqueness skews the analysis, but it remains unsettling regardless.

I found Lieberson’s work compelling. And I think he does an excellent job in exploiting the uniqueness of his case. But in the end, this very uniqueness leads to a less than satisfying take away - a partial, limited theoretical framework on fashion.

Posted by Owen Whooley at 1:58 PM | Comments (1)

March 15, 2006

objects at auction

Tobias Meyer, chief auctioneer of contemporary art at Sothebys:
"People make the mistake of describing our business as being about objects. It's not. I think we handle the interaction between people and objects. The cliche in the auction world is: 'We bring objects alive.'" Meyer puts it slightly differently. "What I love to do is put people in front of art and make them feel it, make them stop everyting else they're doing and experience it, deeply," he says. "That's how I make art expensive. And that's my job, for the company and for my clients. To make art expensive." NYer 3/20/06 p.89

Posted by Andrea Siegel at 1:44 PM | Comments (2)

I Change History like I Change my Hair Cut

Stanley Lieberson in “A Matter of Taste” is able to unravel some of the complexities of collective behavior and cognition, in this case dynamic systems of fashion and taste. He goes past mere description (where we ended last weeks discussion) and investigates external influences and internal mechanisms of change; focusing on media, class imitation and ethnic assimilation. (You may now clap after my grotesquely over simplified three part series)

Chapter 6, Models of the Fashion Process, combined with the reading of McCracken lead me to thinking about fashion and taste in modes of history making or historical representation. Like names and objects, ideas and cognitive styles move in and out of fashion. Views of history can change according to these different styles. In museums or universities this can happen when a new theory or paradigm is utilized. An individual’s perception of history depends a person’s disposition, temporal perspective, and social/economic situation. We assume history never changes, something that already happened cannot change, true. But how we interpret and explain historical events can and does change; thus changing history or our historical perspective.

“Displaced meaning” is one way to explain how history can change. McCracken explains that placing a culture’s ideals in the past leads to ideas of history such as the ‘Golden Age’ or ‘cultural classicisim’. Following McCracken’s argument, these ideal histories can change due to the wants of people, just as tastes in objects change due to the wants of a person. The unobtainable historical ideal changes with the experiences of the ‘here and now’.

I wish McCracken expanded on his discussion of collecting. He limited his ideas to the very rich who could buy anything they want, leaving no boundaries in obtaining their ideal ‘whatever’. He says that the very rich engage in collecting because antiques are limited and not always available. He leaves his discussion in the private sector of collecting. What about collectors of the mundane or public collectors such as museums? Do they have a place in the discussion of ‘displaced meaning’? The discussion of collecting antiques is interesting in thinking about history as influenced by fashion or taste. Antiques go in and out of fashion; does this change our view of history? Once categories of antiques are collected together does this increase our understanding of history? Does it matter who is doing the collecting? Will the fact that they are be collected now, influence how their history is viewed in the future?

Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 1:15 PM | Comments (2)

March 14, 2006

Daniel Miller

Daniel Miller is giving a talk on April 6th

The Eighth Annual Annette B. Weiner Memorial Lecture
Thursday, April 6, 2006, 6:00pm
NEW LOCATION: The First Presbyterian Church
12 West 12th Street (entrance on 5th Avenue, between 11th and 12th Street)
Beyond Social Science: Social Reproduction in South London
Speaker: Daniel Miller, Anthropology Department, University College London. Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture in the Department of Anthropology, University College London. A pioneer in the new Material Culture Studies, Professor Miller's research interests include material culture/objectification, mass consumption/shopping, and Internet and mobile phone use. He has authored and edited many publications, including:Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987); Capitalism- An Ethnographic Approach (1997);
A Theory of Shopping (1998); The Dialectics of Shopping (2001)
The Sari (2003, with Mukulika Banerjee); Materiality (2005)
His forthcoming book is titled: The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of
Communication.

Posted by Jane Jones at 10:12 AM | Comments (2)