Klein
– No Logo: Introduction
In the
introduction to No Logo, Naomi Klein
provides a brief history of the emergence of brand name marketing. She pinpoints the rise of brand
promotion in our economy to an important shift in the theory of corporate
management. Simply put, the
transformation into a marketing economy was brought about by the idea that
“successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products.” It turns out that companies can do without
the cost and complexity of manufacturing their own goods. The obvious solution is to focus on the
primary concern, to pitch the product to consumers.
Klein
outlines the transformation of goods from local production to industrial
mass-production, out of which brands emerged. Mechanization necessitated branding by homogenizing
mass-produced goods and products, as familiarity of brand names also came to
advocate for the quality of products that were otherwise anonymously produced
and packaged. Brands came to
epitomize the values that manufacturers wished to project into their
products. Companies realized that
brand names carried enormous cultural capital in themselves, and this justified
a steady rise in advertising spending.
However, there was a crisis in the 90s when premium brands began to lose
business to their bargain equivalents.
It seemed that in times of economic hardship, people cared more about
the product itself, which could be easily duplicated by no-name companies, than
its brand name.
This
is the situation out of which rose contemporary marketing. Companies like Nike, Apple, and
Starbucks are built exclusively around branding. Every aspect of their corporate structure serves a set of
cultural values geared toward selling their brand name. Branding allowed companies to drive up
prices and diversify their range of products. In this model “the product always takes a back seat to the
real product, the brand.” Today,
most brands will describe themselves as “not a product but a way of life, an
attitude, a set of values, a look, an idea.” Successful corporations today are marketing-oriented in
nature, not production oriented.
This is a dramatic shift from the industrial economy critiqued by Marx,
since the commodity is no longer the central concern. The contemporary focus on marketing is more akin to DeBord’s
spectacle.
Klein
– “Patriarchy gets funky” from No Logo,
chapter 5
Here,
Klein focuses on the ways in which corporate marketing swallowed up the
political controversy surrounding media representation of racial, sexual, and
social identity. She sets the
scene in the late 80s, a time at which the politics of social equality were
focused on media representation of minorities and alternative identities. At first, the media and authority
figures reacted strongly against accusations of political incorrectness.
However,
corporations drew on issues of diversity and identity politics, seeing them as
the key to a multitude of market niches, demographics waiting to be
represented. Nike sold racial awareness,
MAC sold gender fluidity, etc.
Political radicals who had formerly thought they were instigating social
revolution found that their ideas had only fueled the prevailing system.
Klein
concludes that companies were able to accommodate cultural differences while
remaining internally coherent by homogenizing the world’s needs and
desires. Enter the age of the
global corporation.
Claire
Bishop – Relational Aesthetics and Antagonism
In
this article, Bishop criticizes artists whose work is based on interactivity
with the viewer. A prominent
proponent of the movement, Nicolas Bourriaud, lays out a new realm of
aesthetics that encompasses real human interaction (on the part of the viewer)
and the social realities that it represents. Bishop focuses on the artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam
Gillick, both of whom set up installations whose primary purpose is to outline
a distinct social interaction between viewers.
While
interactive work is novel in that it replaces detached opticality with intersubjective
relations, Bourriaud’s analysis is inadequate in that it does not address this
phenomenon with any distinct set of standards that would equip it with
aesthetic value. Bishop introduces
the idea that democratic social structures are based on antagonisms that are
never quite resolved. Antagonism
is the result of collisions between incomplete identities, which necessarily
characterize the subject under Lacan’s definition.
Relational
aesthetic judgments must be formulated with respect to the according realities
of social interaction. Bishop
discusses two artists, Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, whose work
highlights social antagonisms without resolving them via ‘microtopias,’
superficial notions of community evoked by the aforementioned artists. Art that assuages reality by glossing
over social divisions with shallow notions of community is dangerously akin to
entertainment. Even in the sphere
of interactive performance and installation art, the goal remains to mirror and
thus reveal deep, ubiquitous realities.
