PoMo Marketing

Via Gary Sauer-Thompson's excellent blog, The Economist offers a provocative (if rather simplistic) treatment of how postmodern theory has been appropriated by mass marketing firms to sell crap.  It starts off with the obligatory Lyotard quote describing "eclecticism" as "the degree zero of contemporary general culture; one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.”

Despite the fact that most thinkers associated with postmodernism (Lyotard, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida) were leftists, they unwittingly have produced ideas that are compatible and even useful to capitalism.  Of these thinkers, it seems that only Foucault came to recognize, late in his career, the irony of the relationship between the "postmodern condition" and the emergence of a new, more rigorous form of free markets:

In one of his last lectures, in January 1979, four months before Margaret Thatcher came to power in Britain, he shocked his students by telling them to read the works of F.A. Hayek if they wanted to know about “the will not to be governed”. Hayek was the Iron Lady's guru. Surely there was nothing post-modern about her?

But Foucault had belatedly spotted that post-modernism and “neo-liberal” free-market economics, which had developed entirely independently of each other over the previous half-century, pointed in much the same direction. One talked about sex, art and penal systems, the other about monetary targets. But both sought to “emancipate” the individual from the control of state power or other authorities—one through thought and the other through economic power. Both put restoring individual choice and power at the hearts of their “projects”, as the pomos like to describe their work.

One can certainly dispute the comparison but there was certainly a libertarian strain in Foucault's thought, one seeking to demarcate sites of resistance to various power/knowledge formations.

Perhaps more insidious, the article describes the influence postmodernism has had on both the way business markets itself and how a market segment gets constituted in the process:

Modern retailers are only just getting to grips with two of the consequences of the breakdown of authority and hierarchy that they hoped for half a century ago: the “fragmentation” of narratives and the individual's ability to be “the artist of his own life”.

Modern business uses a different language to discuss the same ideas. In “The Long Tail”, an analysis of the impact of the internet on the music industry, with wider ramifications, Chris Anderson describes the “shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards”. The post-modern “fragment” becomes a “niche” and the mass market is “turning into a mass of niches”. “When mass culture breaks apart,” he writes, “it doesn't re-form into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of microcultures which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways.”

The other trend the pomos predicted was the individual's desire (and ability) to take control—to become “the artist of his own life”. Maybe they were talking about something more profound than teenagers' ability to burn their own CDs. Nevertheless, this second trend has shaken existing businesses. iTunes has threatened the music industry by undermining its ability to charge consumers for buying the songs on a CD they didn't want, as well as the ones they did. By allowing surfers to select the topics they want to be informed about, Yahoo! News and Google News have threatened both the business models of newspapers and the power of editors to determine the news that is delivered to readers.

The consumer's rebirth as artist has also created whole new businesses. YouTube is the closest realisation yet of the pomos' vision. Through video, people turn their lives into art and put them up on the web for others to consume. The pomos would not have been surprised by the power of this vision; but they might have been astonished to see Google, a search engine, paying $1.65 billion for the business when it was less than two years old.

After reading this article I was reminded of an old song sung by Peggy Lee - Is that all there is? Whatever postmodernism was (is), if it actually refers to a coherent body of work or set of ideas, is it really so easily mapped on to a marketing strategy to sell ipods or the latest fashion?  Perhaps it is naive to think that any text is immune from such appropriation.  But I wonder if you could imagine American Pragmatism, Thomism or even Rawlsian liberalism being so easily coopted?  If not, than what does it suggest about those texts that are?

Comments

[Toadvine]

Maybe it just suggests that to many MFAs and PhDs are stuck writing ad copy?

[John Emerson]

In the US leftists and Communists have almost always been fringe minorities, whereas in France there was a Communist establishment which had a degree of real influence and its own power structure. Many or most of the post-modernists passed through Communism, and their new thinking was partly in rebellion against the dominant left forms, and many ended up with a real animus against the French CP, often for good reason. But there really wasn't an active new left politics which replaced the old.

When I first read Lyotard I kept waiting for the good part. His rejection of grand narratives seemed identical to the "end of ideology" stuff (Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, et al) that I had had to escape from in the Sixties.

I also remember that many of the people I knew who escaped from the chaotic Vietnam-era New Left into the politics of the personal (identity politics, sexual politics) continued their journey on to a post-political upper-middle-class life which rejected most of the old Left issues (not just the authoritarian New Left structures and leaders) in favor of the lefestyle/subculture issues. That's just anecdotal personal history, but that's what I saw happening.

I had a terrible time on the Valve arguing with Scott Eric Kauffmann, because to me the New Left was what was happening 1962-1972, whereas for him the New Left was the lifestyle politics that followed the collapse of my New Left.

[Brett]

For those who haven't seen it Part 3 of Adam Curtis's documentary The Century of the Self runs the same line about the 1968 generation and Reagan, Thatcher, Hayek, neoliberalism.

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0

BBC/The Economist - same difference, makes me think there are interests on some island vested in pushing this narrative.

Still you get to see interviews with Marcuse and footage of Reich's organon accumulators, which is small consolation.

[Matt]

Despite the fact that most thinkers associated with postmodernism (Lyotard, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida) were leftists, they unwittingly have produced ideas that are compatible and even useful to capitalism.

Unwittingly? And to "capitalism" (as opposed to "communism," one supposes?) They may have described a situation, diagnosed an era, even a condition, but was it really a matter of certain (entirely new?) ideas being put to "use" (without bastardization)? And in a manner they completely failed to anticipate, really? Perhaps, you know, some tolerance for writing with a popular audience in mind is in order.

[bram]

I don’t have the impression that, say, Foucault has been successfully recuperated by mass marketing firms. The credibility of the argument depends on the teleological twist it gives to the history of capitalism: a statement such as “capitalism recuperated postmodernism in a way that the postmodernists had never foreseen” gives a teleological representation of history. Foucault’s work on genealogy tries to break with forces that present history as teleology, as finality. Genealogy tries to counter this teleological twist by “repairing the singularity of events, outside any monotonous finality.” (Dits et Écrits I, Quarto/Gallimard, p. 1004) Genalogy wants to “bring into play [faire jouer] local, discontinues, disqualified and illegitimate knowledge [saviors] against the unifying theoretical insistence that pretends to filter and these knowledge to put it in a hierarchy, that puts them in order in the name of a knowledge [connaissance]of the truth, in the name of the rights of a science that is uphold by someone.” (Dits et Écrits II, p. 165) Foucault’s concept of resistance follows in the wake of this definition of genealogy: resistance is genealogy put to practice. In other words, from Foucault’s method of analysis (which I think has not been recuperated) follows not an idea but a practice (resistance, and this has not been recuperated either, I think). Neither the idea of genealogy nor the practices of resistance are ‘compatible’ with ‘capitalism’ – but they do emerge within capitalism. So, whatever else may be said, I think the mass marketing firms/capitalism may have a hard time recuperating Foucault.

Postmodernist philosophy presented itself as ‘resistance’. That’s when it becomes interesting to see whether that resistance has been recuperated by what it’s trying to resist. Rawls had a huge influence on the democratic left, but you wouldn’t say he’s recuperated. We just call it “influence”.

[John Emerson]

As far as American Pragmatism being coopted, that's somewhat of a non-question. From the beginning there have been mainstream political-realist "pragmatists". (In Menand's anthology, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes represents this strain; today Justice Posner carries on this line). This means "getting the job done" without regard for ideals or long-term goals. James, Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Kenneth Burke all had a longer vision, but the pragmatist teaching contributed to the development of American imperialism, the consumer society, etc.

At some point along the way Sartre and Foucault marched together in a demonstration. This was supposed to have been the "passing the torch" of the left. Bourdieau claimed that French intellectuals are structurally alienated and that they have to be men of the left regardless of the content of their ideas. Foucault's ideas certainly were anti-Sartrean in most senses (anti-humanism and how he deals with the subject), though that isn't ecident from the perspective of generic American thought.

I say this with great regret, because I think of myself as a pragmatist.

Part of what we're talking about is just a marker of an unsolved problem -- if not Communism, what is the alternative to capitalism? Zizek seem to want to maintain Lenin in a high place of honor, and I find it very hard to follow him. The best actual alternatives to freemarketism, the European welfare-states, are unexciting and embattled and really just amount to ameliorated capitalism.

[daniel]

Does the heart of this argument even make since? That "thinkers produce ideas" and that these ideas might then be co-opted?

Do thinkers produce ideas? Are thinkers idea-producers? And does capitalism really require ideas? Is that how it works?

[Craig]

Reminds me of that article on the Isreali army and Deleuze from the summer. If I recall, the left-blogosphere heartily condemned that as a facile reading. Why are we easier on the economic colonization? (Didn't Boltanski and Chiapello already write the book on this anyway?) Perhaps the writer at the Economist missed the anti-essentialist standpoint of the "pomo" writers: concepts have no necessary relation politics and are always open to being co-opted. Hence that whole "genealogy" thing Foucault was into.

[cameron]

Remember that the Economist was not immune from perpetuating the 'phallusy' fallacy (when some dons went to the press to non-placet Derrida's honorary degree from Cambridge and, in the name of defending academic rigor, attributed to Derrida something that he had never written, evidencing that they had never read a word of what they wanted to censor) even on the occasion of Derrida's death (check out this unapologetic erratum: http://tinyurl.com/y2mcb4). Going to the Economist for views on Theory is like asking Social Text for investment advice.

[dave]

First thoughts:
"The future is now, it's just not widely distributed." The still-being-distributed future is a totally different capitalism than the one being opposed by PoMo sympathizers... in future-capitalism, the workers own the means of production. Media and knowledge creation is the future of (First World?) economics, where we are all producers and consumers (on a personal level) in equal measures. This "First World" doesn't include all of the First World - someone still needs to produce food and pick up garbage - but this new economy is more than just a fracturing of identity, it's a re-ownership of the means of production. Those farmers and garbagemen will be making their media in their off-hours as well as consuming it (which brings up the question of gift-economy vs. aspirational production, and the possible coexistence of the two?). This is systemically beneficial in that it decentralizes the nodes of economic power that are immediately oppressive, but problematic in that it entrenches us further in a spectacular (Debordian sense) society, leaving us further separated from actively detaching the political control methods over our lives. Only, these political control methods should necessarily move toward liberalization as the means of production flow out of the hands of oligarchistic capital. So, the postmodern thoughts on the relationship of humanity to media also predict to the development of capitalism into something at once more hegemonic and more individual. In our new media society, The workers have seized the factories, because the factories are the minds of the workers.

[Rigoletto]

"Zizek seem to want to maintain Lenin in a high place of honor, and I find it very hard to follow him"

Agreed. The LS cadre have yet to deal with what VI and big boy's closing of the Constituent Assembly really entailed, in terms of any rational sort of politics. Viva Fanny Kaplan! (and it's all phunn and games until one starts to read about the approx. 8000 deaths ordered by VI following the attempt on his life)

[E.J. Cerealboxcar]

This is a very confused string of comments, but Daniel's statement is not, and it needs to be confronted. The question is, in what way are ideas "produced" and "put to work," for moral or immoral ends, however one concevies of those. The resistance provided by postmodern theory is decidedly theoretical, i.e. textual, and one wonders if pamphlets and blog posts are capable of enacting the resistance to political economy that their contents hope to accomplish. McLuhan is an unfortunate but telling example-- he asks, can we "educate" the media, arm our vehicles of thought with enough force to counteract the corrosive power of their mass, industrialized distribution? And his legacy suggests that all this postmodern eclecticism is simply a think-tank for advertising agencies. We have "smart" cars and "intelligent" ad designers. You may disagree with his exemplarity. In any case, I find it telling that postmodern theorists and commentators are so enamoured of their own names that one can have a whole conversation cncerning postmodern theory (and perhaps not just postmodern theory, perhaps philosophy is the real culprit) that consists entirely of names: Kant? Hegel. Nietzsche? Frued? Deleuze! Derrida... Agamben. Heidegger! Levinas, Lyotard! Butler! Zizek! et. al. Theoretical discussion is sounding more and more like the passages of Genesis we skip over. I think a large part of the problem is that MAs and PhDs and onward sometimes think that they are learning about the world by reading books about the world. Books are important, of course, but you cannot claim to understand "Government" if you haven't done a bit of rooting around in the social services, in the halls of the legislature, in police departments, car factories, oil riggs, bingo halls, bus driver lounges, etc. Remember empirical research? The problem of "what shall we replace capitalism with," when stated as such, is so ridiculously unweildly as to send up the pretensions of the questioner. What do you know about capitalism? How to redeem your Chapters gift certificate online? And...? The question pertains to the place of theory in the modern political economy, and it may be that theory is no longer a "captain," nor even a lieutenant; that theorists may have to content themselves with reflecting trends that are wholly out of their control. Or perhaps not. Perhaps massive change does occur at the level of thought and shudder its way out into the world. "I suspect a bias of my own toward the intellectual revolt voiced by Mark Pattison against the vaunted power of the press when he wrote, 'Writers with a professional tendency to magnify their office have always been given to exaggerate the effect of printed words.'"

[CR]

And his legacy suggests that all this postmodern eclecticism is simply a think-tank for advertising agencies.

Perhaps instead the advertising agencies should serve as think tanks for postmodern eclecticism. Seriously!

[The Management]

A humble request to please stick to one pseudonym, Cerealbox (and Rigoletto). Or, at the very least, one pseudonym per thread. Thx.

[daniel]

"The idea is to destroy the model, to prevent it from spreading."
- Simon Bolivar

[daniel]

"We should be especially careful not to confuse, as Engles said, "the ideal driving forces" from "the real driving forces, the driving forces behind the driving forces." Though this is a spiritual conflict we are in, it cannot be regarded as an internal conflict within the philosophical tradition. It may become that, and some German writers may wish to make it such, but as long as the driving forces have not been ideas, I do not see what particular relevance philosophic evaluation of the "forbears" can have to an evaluation of the ideology of national socialism."

- Lewis White Beck, 1942

[Rigoletto]

The real issue for cyber-Bakunins, alas, is not spiritual; it's more akin to, who's the mutha-f-n Shot Callah today. And you instantiate Ivy League snatch or street skank or illiterate thugs or espresso-swilling, Derriere or Foocault-quoting phags in the Shot Callah role, and cadre you have not.

[Rigoletto]

That's a trifle barbaric. But PoMo could, it would seem, rather easily result in subjective and/or narcissist views in regards to politics or economics. If there is nothing but text, and that text has no real "meaning"--and no connection to a materialist, economic reality-- except as it is perceived, or constructed--by individual readers, then why not booj-wah instead of not-booj-wah. Didn't the marxistas of the 50s say the same about Sartreans, at least in terms of choice, instead of semantics....Marx would probably have hung, reluctantly, with a Searle than with PoMos.........

[daniel]

On whom Marx hung out with:

"One of the mythical figures of the old American South is the pirate Jean Lafitte: his name is associated with his and General Andrew Jackson's defence of New Orleans, with the buccaneer romantic, and so on - what is less well known is that in his old age, when he retired to England, Lafitte made friends with Marx and Engels, and even financed the first English translation of the *Communist Manifesto*. This image of Lafitte and Marx walking together in Soho, a nonsensical short circuit of two entirely different universes, is eminently postmodern."
- Zizek

[Rigoletto]

Heh. The Yid came up, in my estimation. All about which type of Aunty Khrust you prefer: Freedom or Nature--and Marx--and Lafitte?--- still a bit more with Team Nature. Don't mess with Mr. In-between.

[daniel]

"I was in New Orleans recently where the specter of Jean Lafitte is everywhere - parks, businesses, restaurants, a town, etc. are named after him. Seems he died in 1820s (there is some debate as to whether this was in 1826 or 1829) in Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. In other words, he never retired to England, he never befriended M&E, he never financed The Communist Manifesto."

"Now, perhaps, we have encountered what Greg Ulmer calls 'mystory', collection of set of elements gathered together temporarily in order to represent nexus of history, politics, language, thought, etc... And maybe anecdote is akin to Michael Ryan's fictional artist Fiona Burns in his essay "Neo-Political Art After Post-Modernism" (Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-Revolutionary Society) that explores boundary between materiality and culture. Or maybe readers have taken something that Zizek made up to be historically accurate. After all, he doesn't present anecdote as fictional
truth (or should that be truthful fiction?) nor does he cite source. Perhaps reason that few people know about Lafitte-Marx relationship is that one never existed and only Soho stroll two made together was in Z's head."
- Michael Hoover

[Rigoletto]

Tell that to postmodernists. I'd say you didn't understand the point, Cumrade--it was as y'all say philosophical. Conceptually, Marxism, whether one buys into it or not, depends on a certain type of external realism: humans are subject to economic and social conditions, and those conditions are not merely phenomena, or subjective perceptions, or "text", as the postmodernist would seem to hold (tho' yes that opens up other cans of worms). Marx does not really discuss "epistemology" in detail; he's no skeptic who doubts the reality of ding an sich, or causality (tho' he could have used a bit more Hume): he's really more of a Hobbesian, though with the dialectic draped over the materialist causality.

Commodification itself--including use and exchange value--would seem dependent on some "objective," empirically knowable world, isn't it? Ja. But that's not to say KM's description of commodification (or economics) is correct: for one, exchange value obviously is not a constant; humans still barter, and what someone would pay or trade for a good is subject to all sorts of other factors, economic, political, and psychological. Marxism as an explanatory model OK, perhaps (with mucho data to support it); but the surplus labor theory as well as his points regarding commodification are, as with all empirical claims, contingent, modifiable, provisional, even if more often true --or cogent, perhaps--- than not. The Postmods suggest that truth is a fiction anyways, so it would seem that they would view Marxism as another fiction.

[squibb]

i think Alain's original question is really a fascinating one -

I think there is a distinction to be made between postmodern thinkers (prescriptive) and thinkers of the postmodern, (descriptive) and, following two separate questions of appropriation.

The two most dominant accounts of postmodernism – thinkings or descriptions of the postmodern - are by a Kantian and a Marxist respectively. And thus the story of the their appropriation or otherwise can be rendered by considering the fate of their respective traditions, and the question of the appropriation of their peculiar postmodernism is, in some sense, besides the point given their descriptive aim. (Can one really appropriate Jameson’s idea of pastiche? What would that look like?)

It is in the prescriptive, ‘properly’ postmodern thinkers, that I think Alain’s question becomes most pointed and interesting – especially given that many of them achieved a certain level of saturation and popularity that renders them, irrespective of their ideas, brands unto themselves. (This model continues today with regards Theory-in-general, PM or otherwise, clearly, I mean, my god, how many English translations of different Badiou works can appear in a year? How many more reshuffled and renamed Derrida collections? Can Ranciere’s oeuvre be rendered quick enough to satisfy the new york art scene? I digress) So there really are two questions, two fates to consider – first, the fate of the thinkers themselves, what their commodity status means for their ideas, and second the fate of their ideas separate from their reduction to different proper names. The distance between the two fates becomes the crux of the question – given that it is only by knowing the correct thinkers names/brands/histories that we can see their ideas as havingbeen appropriated. It is only by understanding Foucault, as a brand of thought, in all its peculiarities, that the question of the appropriation of his ideas has any meaning whatsoever. It is only because we understand Baudriallard’s Hegelian-Marxist genealogy that the question of appropriation can even be asked etc. etc.

Thus when we declare that appropriation has taken place – and I think the long tail is the best example we have – what we are doing is comparing the claims of one brand against the claims of another. It then becomes difficult, from my perspective, to maintain the requisite distance to distinguish the accusation of appropriation from just another authenticity claim – because we all love his early work, and its all early work when ‘the long tail’ is the other option.

A few postmods might invoke Kant, or at least point to his bust, but few of 'em ever really address any substantial issues from the first Critique. Zizek takes a shot (and misses) at the 3rd Antinomy, that grand romantic parable beloved by philosophical gasbags, links oder rechts, the world over.

[Alain]

I apologize to everyone for not participating in the response to this post. I have to admit I am a bit surprised by some of the comments because I did not think it was all that controversial to assert the commercial viability of postmodern "theory."

Part of what attracted me to the original article is that it was printed in The Economist, which is clearly not a cultural, theoretical or leftist publication. In fact, it takes free market fundamentalism as gospel. While some of this is a rehash of standard political criticisms of "theory," from both the left and the right, it is striking that the business mainstream media would even think to publish the piece at all. I think Squibb is correct that this points to to the question of what "commodity status means for their ideas?" I really do not have an immediate answer to this question, and I am not sure that it necessarily reflects negatively on the theorists or their ideas. The fact that ideas get appropriated for purposes of marketing is not surprising - what it is more significant is whether postmodernism actually works to reinforce or enhance capitalism, or whether it is like anything else - businesses sublate what is useful and discard the subtleties as a useless corpse.