assignment
twinkle22
ICS392tastestatusandauthenticity.pptxICS 392: Consumer Culture
Taste, status and authenticity
Created: October 14, 2019
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Taste, status and authenticity
Coolness grew out of rebellion
Politicized nonconformity against mainstream society and their status system
Coolness displaced social class
Authenticity displaced (is displacing) coolness
Coolness done in by frictionless information transfer
The hipstream
What killed cool?
Technology, which removed friction from transmission of culture.
Potter’s alternative record store example.
It used to take a long time for countercultural information to hit the mainstream.
The cutting edge was privileged information.
It is now much easier to learn and copy what is cool.
The hipstream: MTV to BoingBoing (taste impresarios)
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Taste, status and authenticity
“Rebel consumption died when it became a game anyone with an Internet connection and a decent job could play”
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Taste, status and authenticity
“Status seeking never disappears – when it is exposed to the light, it simply scurries away and hides until it can transform itself into a subtler and less obvious form” (p. 125).
“You can only be a truly authentic person as long as most of the people around you are not. In many ways, the quest for authenticity is just a deeper and more all-encompassing variation on the quest to be cool. Where cool was about nonconformity and the rejection of mass society, authenticity is a root-and-branch reaction against the entire social, economic and political infrastructure of modernity” (p. 133)
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Taste, status and authenticity
A form of distinction
Subtler and less obvious
Authentic consumption
The example of organic food
Authenticity replaced coolness as a status system
Also a form of distinction
“A Veblenian social conceit” (p. 134)
Like prior systems there is an abstract essentialist aspect.
Like being a WASP to Lang Phipps.
Also poses questions: is there a limit to what’s left?
How much less obvious can it become?
Fragmentation?
Authentic consumption needs to appear useful (recall Brooks code of Financial Correctness “lavish spending on necessities”)
and socially beneficial (society as benefiting)
It has to have the veneer of being virtuous.
“In order to be successful, the signs of conspicuous display need to portray themselves as at least superficially useful or socially beneficial. That is, it needs to masquerade as something other than what it really is, which is status-seeking” (Pg. 126,).”
The example of organic food: fringe to mainstream
Then: only food and with exclusive distribution.
Now: shoes, clothing, and dry cleaning
*Issue – health differences illusory.
Consumers will see differences they want to see (recall data from blind taste tests; leads to next slide)
*Issue: 1st on scene will act to protect it from mainstream success
(see NYT and Organic Food) 130A
If unsuccessful, will move on to next thing: localvore movement, CSA
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Taste, status and authenticity
Authenticity is also based on rebellion
Against civilization
Spontaneous, risky and creative
Originality and integrity
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Taste, status and authenticity
Consumers seem to value it and want it
Lots of marketers (try to ) provide it
Consumers can find it/foment it in lots of places
It has a very rich history
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Taste, status and authenticity
Historical roots
The rise of modernity brought about three things
1) The disenchantment of the world
2) The rise of the individual as the relevant unit of political concern
3) The emergence of market economy
CoMS dates to 1960s
CoC dates to 1700’s
Broader target; longer history
300 years in 7 slides
Historical roots
Modernity really disrupted the way humanity experienced the world and understood their place in the universe.
It changed a lot profoundly and very rapidly.
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Taste, status and authenticity
Historical roots
The rise of modernity brought about three things
1) The disenchantment of the world
Humans once experienced the world as a cosmos with humans at the center
Science destroyed this
Historical roots
1) Prior to modernity, humanity had comprehensive religious traditions that ensured that everything that happens makes sense
Ideas from Copernican heliocentrism to Darwinism shook humans’ view of their place in the universe
An Earth centric universe gave meaning
That was all lost
Loss of belief of humans as center of the universe
Loss of meaning
Everything that happens no longer makes sense
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Taste, status and authenticity
Historical roots
The rise of modernity brought about three things
2) The rise of the individual as the relevant unit of political concern
Disenchantment stripped away the metaphysical foundations that justified inherited social roles (princes, queens, etc).
2) Pre-exisiting social relations are no longer recognized as being ordained by the Cosmos
Inherited social roles mattered less
That was a big change, too.
Again: Everything that happens no longer makes sense
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Taste, status and authenticity
Historical roots
The rise of modernity brought about three things
3) The emergence of market economy
The consumer revolution
3) Validated utilitarian pursuit of happiness.
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Taste, status and authenticity
Historical roots
Shortly after the arrival of modernity came the attendant malaise
Criticisms:
Loss of place within society (and the universe)
Social alienation
Loss of meaning
From this springs the critique that powers authenticity
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Taste, status and authenticity
Historical roots
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
Discourse on Inequality
JJR
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (DAS)
Arts and Sciences made people soft and conformist
Discourse on Inequality (DI)
Society is characterized by status competition, selfishness and pursuit of private interest
Man alienated from man. Alienation.
These essays influenced and were built upon by many subsequent thinkers and writers.
Such as
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Taste, status and authenticity
Historical roots
Denis Diderot and Rameau’s Nephew
The nephew complains that in order to advance in the world, he must perform “the beggar’s pantomime” and assume various social roles
The nephew is a bitter, antisocial nonconformist who rejects the values of bourgeois society.
The nephew’s critique is a restatement of Rousseau’s critique of civilization
See also Freud and Civilization and Its Discontents
Raneau’s Newphew:
admired by Marx, Freud and Hagel
Influential
The critique of civilization:
authority is oppressive
status seeking is humiliating,
work is alienating,
conformity a form of death.
Those who embrace these things are termed: drones, squares, widgets, yuppies or fascists.
You can see the connections and expansions
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Taste, status and authenticity
Florent Lemacon, his wife Chloe and their three year old son Colin set sail from France in Summer 2008.
They had quit their jobs and put their life savings into a sailboat called the Tanit. Destination: Zanzibar, Tanzania, with another couple (so they could sail around the clock). After briefly docking in Egypt, they headed into the Indian Ocean.
Where they were captured by Somali pirates and held for ransom. Mr. Lemacon was killed when French Commandos launched a rescue operation.
Why?
Their dream was to protect their son from the depraved elements of the modern world, the sterile government and its bureaucracy, the shallowness of the mass media and the meaninglessness of consumer society.
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Taste, status and authenticity
“We don’t want our child to receive the sort of education that the government is concocting for us. We have got rid of the television and everything that seemed superfluous to concentrate on what is essential” – Mr. Lemacon
“We don’t want our child to receive the sort of education that the government is concocting for us. We have got rid of the television and everything that seemed superfluous to concentrate on what is essential” – Mr. Lemacon
They were looking for authenticity.
They are not alone.
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Taste, status and authenticity
“Stirring in the souls of Americans a deep-felt need to reconnect with the truth of our lives and to disconnect from the illusions that everyone from advertisers to politicians tries to make us believe are real.”
“Collectively, we Americans might not know what ‘authentic’ is, but for the most part we know what it is not, and we know that we want whatever authentic might be” (Zogby, 2008).
2008 book The Way We’ll Be, by pollster John Zogby
Several years of national polling data
Americans seek authenticity
But it is an elusive concept. When asked what makes a person authentic, pollsters at Zogby found one third of respondents said “personality” while 38 percent could do nothing better than “other”
In subsequent question (choosing words from a list) 61% chose ‘genuine’ and 19% opted for ‘real.’
The punchline. - Zogby: “Collectively, we Americans might not know what ‘authentic’ is, but for the most part we know what it is not, and we know that we want whatever authentic might be.”
Abstract essentialism and competitive ratchet
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Taste, status and authenticity
“Recognizing that authenticity is a positional good with a built in self radicalizing dynamic helps us make sense of a lot of the seemingly bizarre behavior that manifests itself as authenticity seeking” (Potter, 133).
One-way competitive ratchet
It explains why the tendency over time is to engage in ever more extreme versions of authenticity seeking
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Taste, status and authenticity
This Victorian Life
September 2015
Sarah and her partner Gabriel live in a Victorian port town in Washington State.
They have slowly divested themselves of modern amenities like refrigerators and heating.
They wish to escape the incomprehensible technologies of our age and avoid the disconnection from the natural world that comes from modernity
Sound familiar?
They also wear period dress (wool clothes even to the gym), ride around on reproduction bicycles
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Taste, status and authenticity
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Taste, status and authenticity
and clean their teeth with toothbrushes made of boar bristles
They espouse simple pleasures and moral superiority
What are the inherent contradictions here?
What’s oxymoronic?
They are not really living like Victorian.
Sarah published her book and sold it via Amazon and posted her story to Vox
They have website: thisvictorianlife.com
They recall the quaint elements but ignore its difficulties
I doubt they’ve forgone vaccines or modern medicine or dentistry
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Taste, status and authenticity
For every consumer seeking authenticity, there is a marketer seeking to provide it.
Levi’s
Storied history
Long time success: by mid 1990s they had 19% share and sales of $7 billion
Then they missed hip-hop and attacks on both the low-end (Old Navy; Walmart) and the high end (Juicy Couture and Seven)
By late 1990s: 12% share and sales of $4 billion
Reponse: low-end (Walmart) and high-end vintage: Cinchback Jeans $350, 1967 Beat-up $275
Levi’s and missed changes in market for jeans
They tried (unsuccessfully the author argues) to traffic in authenticity
What did Levi’s do wrong?
They tried too hard to convey authenticity.
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Taste, status and authenticity
“authenticity is like authority or charisma: if you have to tell people you have it, then you probably don’t” (p. 114)
Markets by their nature are the opposite of authentic
Markets: fake, planned, calculated and marketed
Authenticity: spontaneous, natural and innocent
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Taste, status and authenticity
Where authenticity lurks
Mexican Coke
Craft beer
Mason jars
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Taste, status and authenticity
Where authenticity lurks
“Mason jars suggest resistance to the mass production of food and culture; they emphasize the values of self-sufficiency and community”
“This current incarnation of the Mason jar has a lot to do with the hunger for greater legitimacy: How can I be more real, and more unique in my realness?”
Mason jars – the Atlantic notes millenials hungry for a homespun aesthetic have fetishized the jars in photographs on instagram and pinterest.
“150 years ago, these jars meant survival” Key to preserving food.
150 years ago, they were ubiquitous
Found in their grandmothers’ pantries
Recall the air of social usefulness.
It has a utilitarian veneer.
Recall the code of financial correctness
Also see: Retro-brands and nostalgia
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Taste, status and authenticity
"I started buying Carhartt clothes when I moved to Montana and took up trail work. I think their clothes are really well built,“ one carpenter told a reporter from the WSJ.
“In my perfect and naïve universe, where brands have meaning and meanings matter, only people like these should be allowed to buy Carhartt.” (Dan Neil, WSJ)
Carhartt clothes, WSJ, March 2011
Mr. Gaines, now a carpenter, was wearing scuffed-up canvas Carhartt "logger" pants, the kind with a double layer of fabric riveted to the leg fronts.
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Taste, status and authenticity
My own Carhartt jacket was forever my sartorial entrée to the working class. Whenever I needed to pass among them on some journalistic assignment (sprint car racing in Knoxville, Iowa, sand dragsters in Oklahoma), I'd shoulder on the Carhartt and begin speaking in the hard, flat drawl of my youth (Dan Neil, WSJ).
Carhartt clothes, WSJ, March 2011
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Taste, status and authenticity
“As one blue collar brand after another – Levi’s, Wrangler, Doc Marten – has descended into galling hipsterism, co-opted by soft handed college students who wear their irony like John Deere baseball caps, Carhart has managed to stand apart”
And then…
Carhartt clothes, WSJ, March 2011
Carhartt are working clothes
Reporter used his Carhart to gain entre with blue-collar informants
Until now.
Delayed for a while, but now following other blue collar brands to hipsterism
Slim fit women’s jeans, logo hoodies, cool kid casual wear
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Taste, status and authenticity
They went from this
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To this
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Taste, status and authenticity
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Taste, status and authenticity
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Taste, status and authenticity
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Taste, status and authenticity
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Taste, status and authenticity
“Finally, a pair of jeans that look like they have been worn by someone with a dirty job…made for people who don’t” (Mike Rowe, former host of the show “Dirty Jobs”).
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Taste, status and authenticity
“But what is really driving the quicksilver character of the search for authenticity is the underlying competitive structure of the quest. That is, we should not blame those who are selling the authentic, but rather those who are buying” (p. 115).
“Just as the phenomenon of keeping up with the Joneses needs to be blamed on the Jones for starting the competition in the first place, the one-way ratchet of the search for authenticity is the fault of those who set the bar, not those who try to meet it” (p. 135).
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