|
April 06, 2004
This post over at John Quiggin's blog is interesting. It find faults with this article in The Age, which I blogged about here.
What I found interesting is how, in picking holes in the argument (about postmodernism, generational explanations, all-round-stupidity and apologies for the exploitation of workers), Quiggin and the various commentators miss the wood for the trees. These hardboiled econs and politicos, in generally condemning The Age article, missed the postmodern consumer culture they inhabit. The sexualised nature of this market culture and our contradictory responses to it is what the The Age article was talking about.
Little fire power was directed at this culture or the male pornogaze this sexualized culture presupposes.
To put the point at issue in more philosophical terms for the moment. This market culture represents a fusion of what was once separate in modernity: the instrumental system of money and politics with its concerns of profit and power; and the lifeworld with its concerns of meaning, communication, personal identity and integration. This newly formed market culture in postmodernity is about making money and aesthetic hedonistic lifestyle, and it is all about marketing, creativity, advertising and design:
G.Bourdin, Beer.
Missing the wood makes you wonder. How do men do it? Are the hardboiled realist econs and politicos, who often talk amongst themselves about being rational maximizers of a utility function, aware of how their desires are daily shaped as consumers? Do they walk around with eyes closed to everything but numbers? Do they just drink the beer without seeing the world created by Bourdin?
I don't know the answers to these questions.
To put it in philosophical terms once again. Bourdin and the advertisers are wearing the mask of the artist to sell their sophistry to producers to persuade (seduce) consumers to buy their beer. And the consumer exercise their choice and buy a particular brand of beer. It's a clever strategy and it works. These artists deploy aesthetics to socially construct reality through deploying the beautiful to further the interests of the big producers.
Or more rarely, by deploying the sublime:
G. Bourdin
He seduces the consumer with a powerful image rather than the product it promotes.
|
Gary, maybe you could explain all this to the teenage workers who were bullied into wearing the T-shirts at the centre of the debate. I'm sure they'd be pleased to know that their concerns were the result of a failure to appreciate the postmodern sensibilities of Gen X.