Post-modernism is the new black
Dec 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition
How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some
unlikely seers
DOMINATED by 22 pillars, the long grey neoclassical 1909 facade of Selfridges, one of London’s great department stores, seems anachronistic. The exterior suggests values of grandeur, dignity and authority from another era. The interior doesn’t. Consumer anarchy reigns, with over 3,000 different brands, all in their own concessions, screaming for attention.
Selfridges nearly went out of business (as so many department stores have done) in the 1990s. But it reinvented itself by dismissing the order, formality and stillness of the old stores. Every brand was given its head and allowed to do what it wanted. Uniforms are out, as is standard decor, shelving and
presentation. There is no hierarchy of goods; watches compete with perfume,
luggage with high fashion, cafes with fast food. Shows, action and stunts break up the day. Selfridges calls it "shopping entertainment". So successful is it that two years ago a panel of style gurus voted it Britain’s “coolest brand”.
Jean-Francois Lyotard might not have enjoyed an afternoon at Selfridges. He was a French philosopher not known for his interest in handbags. But, had he dropped in for a little retail therapy, he might have recognised what he saw. As he wrote, eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture; one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.
Lyotard’s name would not be the first that springs to mind when tracing the
roots of contemporary retailing and business. Of course many unlikely thinkers
and doers, from Sun Tzu, a Chinese general and purveyor of top strategy tips, to Sir Ernest Shackleton, a British explorer celebrated as the ultimate
team-builder, have been unwittingly roped into management. The sub-genres of marketing, branding, trend-spotting and business organisation all have their own thought-leaders.
That said, the French philosophers whose interest in accessories was limited to a Gauloise drooping stylishly from the corner of the mouth do not seem natural retail gurus. Yet there is a curious (and, given their contempt for consumption, somewhat ironic) relationship between today’s shops and the ideas of the French post-modernists.
Pomo power
Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were all from the far left. The pomos (as they are affectionately known to adherents) wanted to destroy capitalism and bourgeois society. The students whom they inspired took to the streets in May 1968 hoping to do just that. Yet, paradoxically, the pomos predicted with eerie precision how capitalism would reinvent itself in the 1980s and 1990s. Even worse (for them), they gave modern retailers, advertisers and businessmen the tools to do so.
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?
But 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.
Niches and fragments
Liberal economics has probably had a greater role in transforming capitalism than a few French Marxists using long words. But the pomos’ ideas have had a certain influence, seeping into common consciousness through the lecture halls and student campuses. Many brands have been developed by people who were brought up on the idealism of the 1960s, post-modernism’s heyday. Entrepreneurs such as Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson and Body Shop’s Anita Roddick bring an emancipatory, anti-corporatist tilt to their business. Modern marketing has consciously co-opted the tools of post-modern discourse to sell more stuff. Brands such as Nike explicitly adopt rebellious attitudes in their advertising campaigns. Thus capitalism employs the critique that was designed to destroy it.
It is what one American critic, Thomas Frank, has called liberation
marketing, in the words of a cosmetic company’s appeal to potential
customers, "because you’re worth it". Mr Frank sees it as a woeful
bastardisation of the American counterculture and post-modernism; others might enjoy the irony.
More surprising, perhaps, than 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.
Modern business uses a different language to discuss the same ideas. In The Long Tail, an analysis of the impact of the internet on the music industry, with wider ramifications, Chris Anderson describes the "shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards". The post-modern fragment becomes a niche and the mass market is turning into a mass of niches. When mass culture breaks apart, he writes, "it doesn’t re-form into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of microcultures which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways." That is a good description of what post-modernists were trying to achieve, and pretty much what a shop like Selfridges actually aspires to look like.
This fragmentation has changed the way businesses operate. Joe Staton, the head of the Knowledge Centre at JWT, an advertising agency, argues that selling people things has become more difficult than it has ever been. Craig Mawdsley, at Abbott Mead Vickers, another advertising agency, argues that the old stores used to offer "edited choice"; now companies scramble to provide customers with almost unlimited choice, as well as the technology to create their own products.