A cure for the squib

[imomus]

Well, today I am dyspeptic. Perhaps there is, on the market, some sort of liver salt remedy to quench the distaste I feel for Clast, the new blog Marxy is penning for his employer, Tokyo-based market research group The Diamond Agency. The market, after all, has a remedy for all ailments, all maladies. Medical, spiritual, political, ideological. The market will cure us all!

I am dyspeptic because, since 2004, I have been contributing comments -- often polemical ones -- to Neomarxisme, a stimulating, fruity blog written by W. David Marx, aka Marxy. While remaining on very good terms with this man on the few occasions we've dined or drunk together, I invariably clash with Marxy on his blog. I vaguely knew that he worked in marketing, but didn't realize until today just how seamlessly what he describes as his "antagonizing and often über-ironic critical judgments on the state of Japanese popular culture" dovetailed with his marketing job.

Today Marxy thanks his readers "for all the support and ideological passion and word reading over the last three years". Neomarxisme the blog will continue, but in a radically different format which Marxy has outlined to me privately, and he will unveil in due course.

Blame radical puritan dyspepsia, but I responded to the announcement of the Clast blog with a parting broadside. It starts relatively politely:

"I'd be interested to see what you make of my next Wired column, going up on Tuesday. It basically says that the kind of market research behind junk mail is responsible for generating junk space and junk politics. It compares the class models of Marxism with the class models being proposed by market research companies like Experian Business Systems, whose Mosaic tool offers companies and politicians 61 distinct social classes, expanded with lively "pen sketches".

If you check out what they say about Scottish types you'll see that these descriptions are very close to your Clast descriptions of Can Cam readers. I'm assuming that "clast" comes from the word "iconoclast" and is meant to suggest that you're going to be blasting the status quo. Yet this will be extremely difficult if what you're doing is providing pen sketches in the Experian style for marketers and politicians.

If my theory that this produces "junk politics" is right, you will be entirely complicit in a process which leads directly from junk mail to junk world. And absolutely central to this process is the use, for the greater glory of marketing, of all the tools developed by academic disciplines -- geography, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, demographics. Anything that works.

That appropriation of academic disciplines for market research means the replacement of the ideologies underpinning all these disciplines (Enlightenment ideologies about knowledge, humanist ideologies about mankind, or the cultural relativist ideologies underpinning comparative social studies) by a single rationale: the ideology of the market.

Clearly this is not the kind of comment anyone at clast is ever going to make, because over there it's a foregone conclusion. This battle has been won. Everybody thinks the same way, and is getting on with the job. It's the kind of place where there can be no more conflict, only the daily business: a slow, methodical mapping-for-manipulation of consumer-citizens by means of knowledge tools developed by sucker academics whose methods were used, but whose worldviews, intentions and ultimate goals were thrown away.

Otsukare samadeshita!"

When I saw that Jean Snow had announced the Clast blog too ("expect the same sort of cultural coverage and dissection readers of his Neomarxisme blog will already be familiar with") I commented dyspeptically:

"Expect this sort of insight:

For fashion magazines, however, it’s a different story. Internet media has yet to prove an authoritarian status.

Authoritarian, not authoritative, Marxy? Why? Ah, because you’ve read the Frankfurt School. Because you are an “icono-clast”.

But what sacred images does this iconoclast smash, writing pen sketches of the Japanese market for a market-led Japan? Why, the sacred images of the very people who developed the tools being used, of course! What’s being smashed here is the image of a human nature in any way bigger than the market.

I can promise you that Theodor Adorno — author of “The Authoritarian Personality” — clutches his head in his hands and rains a great cloud of tears down from the neo-Marxist heaven from which he glimpses this travesty of his terms, his methods.

All those great books, those risks, those critical concepts — so that Au can sell a pink cellphone more effectively to an office lady? So that the LDP can win another privatization-themed snap election using targeted celebrity assassins? Is this where it all ends up? Do we have to start this thing all over?"

And now my dyspepsia is all mixed up with guilt and sympathy. Should I be criticizing Marxy like this? The guy has to make a living, and that means taking his insights to the market, right? We should be nice to people, even people who work in marketing, right? Even if we think marketing is totally the status quo, and they're posing as iconoclasts, right? And even if they're misappropriating concepts we hold dear, right, and handing them to the enemy?

I mean, if I dislike marketing, well, wow, I must really hate Japan, right? (Or do I just hate it when people dress their marketing up as salutary cultural critique?) And, come on, Mr Dyspepsia, if we picture Adorno looking down from heaven at just about anything we picture the man weeping in frustration, because that's what he did when he was alive! Right? Come on!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

What will you write about in the future, if you're not going to follow Marxy's blog anymore?

Funny though, I always thought you were in marketing as well.

der.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What's your take on marketing, then, der?

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

you've put a lot of words into his mouth, haven't you? The three posts that are already there are pretty much a rehash of his greatest (driest) hits.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

I've probably said this before, but the worst thing about geodemographics, is that the categories inevitably become self-fulfilling prophecies. Keep punting pleb stuff at people and they're bound to act more like plebs; target people with Mail-reader prodcuts and they'll develop a Daily Mail mindset.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That is exactly the problem, McGazz. And one of the most troubling things to have emerged at Neomarxisme is the use of a pseudo-Marxist class model to denigrate the kind of consumers being studied. In this class model, power comes from above and is oppressive class power wielded by a minority. The subjugated classes are dupes.

But while this model is used in Marxism "not to interpret the world but to change it" by whipping up indignation and revolution, in marketing -- which also, clearly, wants to change the world -- it's used to better delineate the desires of the dupes, in order better to dupe them.

I feel very mixed feelings about marketing and consumerism, but I think I object to them much less when they are based on respectful and positive views of the consumer. Marxy's writings on Can Cam Woman, in particular, betray a disdain I find disturbing. To see Marxist class politics reduced to a kind of lofty, contemptuous market segmentation in this way really gets me reaching for the Anadin.

[vertigoranger.livejournal.com]

That's what i've always thought, because the public wants what the public gets.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I really have to work on a LOLMARX macro.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe I am not cut out for the public life, but I think this post is why the Marxy-Momus clash stresses me out so much. We keep the ideological spat confined to my blog comment reel. I don't make whole posts nitpicking your personal life choices and employment decisions and why they are go against my moral values. I sold out, I guess, but don't you have to be somebody first for that to matter.

Marxy

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Of course I feel bad about it -- which of us has the right to stand in judgement on another person? Especially private life.

And yet we all judge each other's public positions all the time. We judge our friends, and advise them privately according to the way we see their actions -- if we care enough, that is. We also stand -- sometimes publicly -- in judgement of whole cultures. And we try to influence the course of our time by debating the way things are going.

Interestingly, what you and I have been doing over the last three years is the least "Japanese" thing imaginable. Polemic. Did you ever wonder why the English Pingmag has so many comments and the Japanese Pingmag -- exactly the same content -- has none? Men's handbags (http://pingmag.jp/2007/03/07/style-report-tokyo-mens-handbags/): 28 English comments, starting with "Looks gay!" 1 Japanese comment, starting with "Interesting article!"

[akabe.livejournal.com]

one nice thing about marxy's gesture is that everyone is level now. i can not believe that even marxy's most avid supporters do not feel a certain sense of 'betrayal' behind marxy's retreat behind the glass wall - quite a different thing to what he admits to as 'selling out'

a (somewhat bitter) Thank You marxy.

[19091977.livejournal.com]

Maybe if you two fight or fuck, your head-aches will go away.

[mme-furiosa.livejournal.com]

--- marketing ideology, built into market research software, actually impacts on the world in the form of what some cultural geographers have called "the automatic production of space"---

This is SUCH an enormously important, rather than simply tangential, point! I am a landscape architect, and what I find myself most fascinated by is urban space, and how it appears to have a relationship to humans that goes far beyond the mere physical. America, great land of manifest destiny, has been sold a neatly packaged version of a city that dictates to people what they want: convenience, efficiency, "autonomy", and above all convenience. This is never more perfectly manifest than in our modern city structures, where the main drag has become a glorified strip mall, glittering with chain stores, fast food, and indistinguishably ugly gas stations. These strips separate people from the old nucleus of the city, the downtown areas. So, while historic areas of beauty and individuality fall into decreptitude and disrepair, these soulless commercial strips thrive, draining the vitality out of a city.

The real point I want to make is that as people are innundated with ugliness and manufactured homogeneity, they increasingly lose their sense of aesthetic reasoning, their ability to discern between a beautiful place that is designed well and with a slopped together cinderblock reality that is all facade, no design. This is creating a feedback loop, so that people demand more of the same, so much so that they become disoriented in new places that are unfamiliar to their palate, which has become entirely trained to bland junk culture.

The point at which a population is collectively unable to recoil from the manufactae that is consuming all sense of place, style, history, etc is the point at which the "mapping for manipulation of consumer-citizens" is most relavent, and potent a force.

Does a culture eventually become what it consumes (visually, physically, aurally)? Can culture be comodified by the culture that is selling it what it "wants?"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It is a massively important question, I agree, and I think geo-demographics has an interestingly "culturalist" riposte to those of us disgusted by the world it's producing. Rather than giving in to our argument that they are "wrong about people", they will tell us that our viewpoints fit right into their survey of attitudes. "Ah yes, your profile fits the "Dyspeptic Aesthetes" group, E37. You do realize that you're only 0.39% of the total population, though, don't you? What impact of the visible environment can such a small group really hope to have? But you'll be glad to hear you do attract a better class of advertiser. Advertising spend intended to reach you will be disproportionate -- in select publications -- to your actual numbers."

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

This comment has opened up a can of worms for me on a few tangents. It explains a lot and is why I read LJ. Someone else can give the insight.
As I was reading I began to reflect on your points personally and realised that more and more I am becoming freaked out when visiting rural friends when I move out of my imposed "junk" location. There is no longer even the comfort zone of the earlier glamourisation of the exotic.
I thought I had a handle on this but now I realise it has crept up on me.
Of course I didn't ask for any of this and yet did I complain when they put bollards at the end of the street to redirect my traffic my so called rat run?
No. I stayed at home and read and wrote about it. On the so called free screen of the Internet.
Yet, every now and then I might dive over a fence through someones private property for a detour(n) to mix up the flow of space.

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

"Clast" already has at least one specialized meaning, as well.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A+clast

I for one am more intrigued by the idea that junk mail contributes to junk politics than whether or not there is integrity in the fashion magazines of Japan. Do all of those unread calls for viagra and Nigerian princes who wish to make me rich really contribute to campaign slush funds and uninformed, apathetic voters? I suppose it's possible.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about electronic junk mail, but about physical junk mail, which costs more to distribute and therefore uses more sophisticated market research -- the kind that matches post-codes to attitudes, lifestyles, disposable income etc -- to target the right offers to the right people.

(By the way, if you like my blog you'll love my record!)

[(Anonymous)]

You're obviously both cut from similar pieces of cloth, otherwise you wouldn't have spent so much time hanging out in the toilets and showing each other your willies.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Do pieces of cloth really show each other their willies when we're not looking? I must store my clothes more carefully in future.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

I mind marketing and advertising interesting as in learning to analyze it, understand how it works and what makes other people feel the impulses of buyingbuyingbuying.

Have you read No Logo?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I haven't read No Logo, but I know roughtly what she's saying there.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

there's this viral trend in advertising of "you make the ad, we'll just watch and pick and choose the winner"--make our product seem real (like you) and we'll make you famous and rich (like us). Real Dorito chips for real men, real Dove soap for real women. What's fascinating about this is that the "marketing team" of the participating public gets to interpret the constraints and wants of the "client" (which is a cross between the actual client, the corporation, and the actual marketing team). So you get into this weird space where the marketed become the marketers, and the market they are interpreting is themselves.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There have been so many successive waves of spectacular capitalism that it's impossible to dismiss marketing without dismissing the souls of a lot of people, at least in advanced capitalist nations. But it's the difference between "this stuff is inside me" and "this stuff is all I am" that's crucial.

[jean-djinni.livejournal.com]

Could a similar critique be made of a musician who licenses clever songs to the latest major label youtube pop tart from Japan? Alternatively, couldn't the logic be inverted? Could the introduction of Adorno into advertising be a subversive move?

(I haven't read the Wired piece yet).

[akabe.livejournal.com]

>Could the introduction of Adorno into advertising be a subversive move?

oh, please, not this one.

bad taste

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I have been dyspeptic because 1) new medication makes me angry and that comes out in bad tasting burps! 2) R says I have old cronies hangiing out in my stomach and every time I expel one by going another healthy day they exit the throat with an sour exhalation

You have to give the econo-clasts some credit

[lupoleboucher.livejournal.com]

They are the only people in the world who are really talking about class in america. Most people in america just dance around the word "class" like it is something that doesn't really exist, or that "lower class" is a code-word for non-white people or something. Marketers; they actually know stuff about class, and talk about it in a straightforward way which anyone can understand. I bet you can't find a sociology course in an american university which is as honest as marketers are.

I don't think relentless marketing and junk mail (which, incidentally, gets done via some pretty sophisticated mathematics these days) results in junk culture. I think the underlying weltanschauung of, well, just about everything is what has done it. In the 1960s, the west rid itself of evils like colonialism and racism, and with those evils, substantial public goods, like modesty, civic-mindedness and self-restraint. The marketing paradigm at present is the same as everything else in our society: a shrill catering to the self, right down to the very Id. I don't think making junk mail go away will make junk society go away, nor do I think the disease was mail-borne in the first place. It's just a symptom of over all illness; like shingles.

Re: You have to give the econo-clasts some credit

[(Anonymous)]

"Marketers; they actually know stuff about class, and talk about it in a straightforward way which anyone can understand."

This is rather like praising torturers for their deep intuitive understanding of human anatomy and nerve endings.

Unless someone is acting from a position of respect and compassion for others, I don't respect them or what they do, regardless of how deeply they understand people.

-Sebastien Bailard

Check these out...

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

I was at my daughter's school again today, reading your post on my lunch break, when I spied a pile of economics books, for sale, in the school's "gift shop". One was by Gaudenz Assenza, several others were by Christopher J. Budd. These books were incredibly interesting. Assenza is a proponent of "associative economics" (apparently a Rudolf Steiner coinage). What he describes seemed remarkably close to what I have been considering as I've read your recent posts-- I had a visual of something bigger than capitalism or communism, something more, well, spherical. Steiner wrote about the economy as a rose bush-- we wouldn't have to cut out the whole root, just judiciously prune, knowledgeably tend. Why must we choose between communism and capitalism, when neither has been shown to be practical in long-term use? And furthermore, why must we continue to pawn the future of civilization, our environment and our resources in pursuit of the perfection of faulty economic systems? I would recommend reading some of his work, I am at aloss to describe it succinctly (as usual).

This was also synchronicitous with my morning reading of Epictetus. I have been chipping away at the same Epictetus book for a few years now, at first I didn't understand it, but the more I applied it to my life, the more practical it showed itself to be. It seems that if more people would live the kind of life Epictetus espoused, something like associative economics would not only be "possible", but self-evident, and in the end be much easier for everyone. Epictetus would certainly have a dim view of marketing-- creating the desire for things often outside of one's control, distracting attention from the tasks at hand and what one CAN control, creating shame, basing merit on what one possesses, relinquishing one's mind to an outside force, etc.

And what about the marketers? Are they comfortable with and accepting of their "demographic"? Do they consume accordingly? Wouldn't you feel a bit odd if you went out to buy a bottle of wine with your wife and you purchased exactly the kind of wine you knew your "Upper Echelon" would buy?

I think we can all agree that with the current state of the world, there is a lot of hard work to be done. At the gym, people walk on treadmills-- why not just go for a walk? Or the weights-- why not do some yardwork? A waste of labor. Marketing seems equally backward, as well as aesthetically obscene. Look at nature-- aesthetically elegant. Certainly we could model ourselves parallel to this.

As for the Budd books, I haven't read them that deeply yet. They appear to be treatises on looking at economics through a spiritual lense, seeing how and where money is used as a real moral force, perhaps the most important one.

I'll leave you with my favorite Epictetus passage for today:

"Most of what passes for legitimate entertainment is inferior or foolish and only caters to or exploits people's weaknesses. Avoid being one of the mob who indulges in such pastimes. Your life is too short and you have important things to do. Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind. If you yourself don't choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest. It is the easiest thing in the world to slide imperceptibly into vulgarity. But there's no need for that to happen if you determine not to waste your time and attention on mindless pap."

Re: Check these out...

[(Anonymous)]

...what could be done with all the wasted energy from gyms...

Marketing

[(Anonymous)]

"And absolutely central to this process is the use, for the greater glory of marketing, of all the tools developed by academic disciplines -- geography, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, demographics. Anything that works."

Are we talking about...Google here?
Do no evil, except copy and collect all yr informationz and scan yr gmailz and scan yr bookz in tha academic librariez and scan yr Google Docs and Spreadsheets to collect info on you to datamine and cross index with your google searches by logging yr IP address or searches when you're logged into Google Accounts, and analyze to flash you with targeted ads...hopefully coming soon on yr TV too, targeted ads based on Google-collected demographic information!

(wall street journal piece on Google's moves into television ads)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117349709482933055.html?mod=hps_us_pageone

Does anyone else see the problematic issues here, including class and privacy issues?
I mean, like you were describing the Mosiac class descriptions--
so, say Google knows I am in a low income demographic and maybe of a specific race. Do they start showing me Church's chicken ads, Payday advance loans ads, rent-to own ads, and malt liqour ads?
While higher income people get Wall Street Joural ads, ads for university enrollment, Kaplan and Kumon and LSAT program study program ads, Whole Foods and Trader Joes ads? So like, highbrow people get exposed to high brow culture in ads and lowbrow people get exposed to lowbrow culture in ads? It could be like a ghettoization of the television media ad space? Along with readers' comments here about the sort of self-fulfilling prophecies of ad representations--all faciliatated by the smart people in Mountain View using the latest academic and technological techniques?

MattGar

[(Anonymous)]

Totally agree