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]

I am enjoying the self-cancelling rhetorical figure I call "double denial" here, by the way. We saw it yesterday when we combined two quotes on greed which stated that greed was a sort of poverty, and that poverty was good -- with the unintended implication that greed was good. Here double denial has Der defending Marxy, but saying that I am in marketing too, which either damns Marxy or praises me.

Double denial: Not only is the IT rather like the OTHER, wrongly considered bad, but the OTHER is good. Therefore -- WHOOPS! -- the IT is good!

In this way, would-be unorthodoxy comes 360 degrees (http://imomus.livejournal.com/256533.html) back round to orthodoxy.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I really have to work on a LOLMARX macro.

[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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Also I want to say that my Wired piece is very much about self-fulfilling prophecy, or recursiveness -- 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". And yet marketers claim that the data on which they base their demographic analyses "organizes itself" -- that it is not, in other words, prescriptive or ideological. This is simply not the case. No data organizes itself.

[(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

[(Anonymous)]

How do you know it was a defense? I tend to think that corporate blogging is not a good idea in general. (And I think that that is what you, having become a brand, do here as well.)

Call me old fashioned, but I think adherence to the good old principles of making testable predictions / statements that could be wrong (which is what you more often find on neomarxisme) still beats "produce one outrageous / inspiring / outside-of-the-box thought / nice-sounding claim a day" (which is your line of work). We'll see what the move from `doing this in spare time / on the sly' to `doing this fully paid' does to the content; if things go bad, it may move the direction more towards the latter.

der.

[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!"

[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?"

[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.

[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.

[polychromatica.livejournal.com]

Yes, it seems clast has no place for comments, which I can see the reason for seeing that it is related to Marxy's work, but it still removes the interaction.

Also this "overhaul" makes me nervous, but I guess I'll have to see.

[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."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

...And as I pointed out when I talked about Geo-demographics last year (http://imomus.livejournal.com/242229.html), the problem with this kind of specification (a correlation of attitude to micro-class) is that it's amazingly reductive. It would have the ideas of a Gandhi, a Buddha or a Jesus dismissed because only a tiny minority of the population are in the Fisherman-Messiah group (Z66).

[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!)

[mme-furiosa.livejournal.com]

As long as our precious minority can jam up the gears of the advertizing machine (which is oblivious to the fact that most of our demographic abhors new product, but adores the shiny selling schemes) from time to time. I suppose that is something to be glad for.

[(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.

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

Men's handbags: 28 English comments, starting with "Looks gay!"

Here you are giving the impression that the other twenty-seven comments were similarly juvenile, whereas many of the other comments were more thoughtful on the matter. And there's the chance that this "But it looks gay!" comment may have been ironic.

[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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I wasn't trying to make the English Pingmag comments look "juvenile", but simply to point out how English-language commenters are more voluble and outspoken than Japanese-language commenters.

But actually, if you read through the English comments on that thread, they do reveal a lot of hostility towards gay or effeminate men. This comes from both men and women on the thread -- the men using "gay" pejoratively, the women saying they wouldn't date men who carry handbags.

[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?