|
January 11, 2007
Now here is a racy account of postmodernism from the Economist. It connects continental philosophy to shopping and argues that capitalism employs the critique that was designed to destroy it.
The founding post-modern text (as books are called in pomo) is by two Germans, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Published in 1944, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” examined the culture that had given birth to Auschwitz. It declared that “enlightenment is totalitarian”—that the 18th-century attempt to replace religion with rationalism had supplanted one form of mental slavery with another. God had been elbowed out by fascism, communism, Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism, socialism and capitalism. The post-modernists thought their job was to “deconstruct” these grand theories, which they called the “meta-narratives”. The pomos would free people from them by exposing their sinister nature.
The pomos wrote about pretty much everything in society—literature, psychoanalysis, punishment, sociology, architecture—except economics. This was perhaps odd, given that they emerged during the longest economic boom in European history and the birth of the consumer society. The only pomo who tried, far too late, to come to grips with this irony was Foucault. 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?
Well I for one never thought so. Not even when I think abnout it. She was sooo Victorian and petit-bourgeois in the English tradition as Marx would say.
The Economist goes on to say that 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.
The Economist goes on to say that the pomos' influence on the way business presents itself was the accuracy of their predictions and the perspicacity of their perceptions. 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”.
How does this impact on shopping.Presumably it is more than an experience or retail therapy. The fragmentation means the decline of department stores—that clung too long to the idea of a mass market, of a one-stop store Those that have prospered embrace fragmentation and cater to the niche. The second means the The consumer's rebirth as artist has created whole new businesses such as Google. The Economist is unclear how that relates to the shopping experience. I will hazard a guess--the culture of shopping in Japan is highly designed and very fluid spaces in stores that appeal to the sophisticated artistic sensibility of discerning consumers caught up in fashion.
|
