Creativity versus branding: totemism,animism and the pursuit of uniqueness in fashion

ABSTRACT

In the contemporary organization of the economy, creativity and branding constitute two distinctive imperatives which generally point in different directions: the former towards newness and change, the latter towards continuity and recognisability. Numerous agents in corporate organizations thus face a conundrum of creativity versus branding, which is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the fashion business. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a fashion company, I argue that these seemingly incompatible imperatives are inextricably entangled, as their paradoxical relation is solved, even dissolved, in a dynamic interplay between ‘a totemic logic’ and ‘an animist practice’. Thus, a dynamics of totemism and animism unites creativity and branding in the continual pursuit of uniqueness. While totemic and animist modalities are most commonly associated with non-western ontologies and perceived as mutually exclusive, I contend that they are also at work in contemporary commercial processes and that they are enmeshed in, and propelled by, each other. This suggests that these modalities operate together particularly when the making of distinctive identities is critical – as in economic competition today.     

‘The current gold coin of the New Jerusalem’: perception,symbolization, and money in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

ABSTRACT

As an external visual marker of what is supposed by other characters in the novel as its wearer’s ‘internal,’ spiritual state, Hester Prynne’s Scarlet ‘A’ is, among other things, an emblem of a powerful American anxiety regarding the gulf between appearance and reality, symbol and meaning. The desperate and dangerous need for fixed signs and self-evident identities that obsesses Hawthorne’s Puritan-era characters is directly related to the gold-paper money debates that dominated the politics of Hawthorne’s own time, with their concern for issues of ‘character’ and value and what we might now call the gap between the symbolic and the real, or face value and material value.     

Moral barriers between work/life balance policy and practice in academia

ABSTRACT

Despite the proliferation of work/life balance policies in Australian universities, academic staff continue to report experiences of time pressure, anxiety, and over-work. This paper contributes to the research of academic time and career planning by exploring how early career academics engage with work/life balance policies, utilising a critical reading of Richard Sennett’s work on the corrosion of character in late capitalist economies. We find that policy engagement is tied into academics’ professional identities and perceptions of ‘good’ conduct. Drawing on interviews from a sample of 25 Australian early career academics, we argue that the failure of early career academics to use formal work/life balance policies is partially explained by the presence of workplace cultures that reward demonstrations of commitment to work roles. The use of work/life balance policies hence carries a moral cost, which participants report reflects on their character. This paper contributes to an understanding of how work/life balance policies are enacted at the level of department and individual, and argues that future research projects would benefit from attending to the construction of worker ideals within workplace cultures.     

Methods as forces of subjectivation: experiments in the remaking of official statistics

ABSTRACT

We develop the concept of methods as ‘forces of subjectivation’ in relation to experiments we have encountered in a study of government methods for generating official population statistics. These experiments problematise the subjects of traditional methods based on paper questionnaires and offer new digital technologies and data sources as possible solutions. We reflect on these experiments in relation to recent work on sociological and digital research methods as inventive and live. What this work identifies in relation to questions of research methods we take up to think about government methods in two ways. One concerns how government method experiments offered as solutions to problematic subjects, once put into action, change initial problem formulations and are inventive of new ones. Secondly, they are also inventive of their subjects who do not pre-exist but come into being through the agential capacities that methods configure. Both aspects of methods, we argue, are the result of the interactions and dynamics between human and technological actors, the outcomes of which cannot be settled in advance.     

Giving Perverse Accounts

Abstract

This paper critically examines the questions of agency and subject‐formation in Judith Butler’s book Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). The article problematizes Butler’s defense of agency and argues that her theorization of the subject (however in‐process) as individuated and differentiated from the other involves an economy of le propre (the proper, property, ownership) that establishes the self as a Gestalt totality that must be symptomatically, i.e. narcissistically and aggressively, defended. In contrast to Butler’s ‘account’ of ‘oneself’ I proceed to offer a non‐humanist, non‐individualist, non‐Oedipal perverse model of the subject that rejects the ideological demand of Gestalt totality of identity and destabilizes the borders between self and other. In such a model of perverse personhood there is no identifiable and coherent ‘one’ for which to give an ‘account’.     

The moral economy of face: marketized gift and depoliticized solidarity in South Korea’s fair trade

ABSTRACT

Metaphors of ‘face’ are often found in South Korea’s fair trade activism, as fair trade is frequently described as ‘face-to-face commerce’ and its goal is presented as pursuing ‘global trade with a human face.’ By asking how and why fair trade relies on the metaphors of face, this article analyzes the political implications and limits of the trope. I first examine the intimate connection between gift-exchange and face based on Marcel Mauss’s analysis of the gift and I present face as a locus of symbolic recognition and politics. Next, drawing on ethnographic research into Beautiful Coffee, the largest fair trade organization in South Korea, I illuminate fair trade as a hybrid practice of ‘marketized gift-exchange’ in which the various faces of producers and consumers are produced and circulated along with market transactions. In examining the meanings of those faces, I maintain that the prevalent metaphor of face in fair trade betrays the contradictory nature of market-based solidarity that is sought through the activism to redefine the whole economic structure based on moral and ethical practices.     

The ‘Negotiated Space’ of University Researchers’ Pursuit of a Research Agenda

The paper introduces a concept of a ‘negotiated space’ to describe university researchers’ attempts to balance pragmatically, continually and dynamically over time, their own agency and autonomy in the selection of research topics and pursuit of scientific research to filter out the explicit steering and tacit signals of external research funding agencies and university strategies and policies. We develop this concept to explore the degree of autonomy researchers in fact have in this process and draw on semi-structured interview material with research group leaders in Finland and the UK, in the former in seven research fields, in the latter in two fields. First, the analysis reveals that topic selection is strongly filtered by the intra-scientific factors. In topic selection researchers have more leeway, a broader negotiated space than in research content, that is, in the ways in which they pursue their research, which are more affected by funding opportunities and other contextual matters. Second, the ways which affect researchers’ agency include individual- and more aggregate-level acts and factors: at the individual level, researchers resort to different strategies to create a negotiated space, but at the more aggregate level field-specific factors play a role. In fields with multiple funding opportunities, which we call ‘shopping mall’ fields, researchers can have a broader negotiated space than in fields where funding is more based on ‘lottery’. In the latter, the researchers’ negotiated space is narrow and contingent on the outcome of the funders’ decisions.     

Deal or no deal? Some reflections on the ‘Baker-Thompson rule,’ ‘matching,’ and ‘market design’

ABSTRACT

This article raises the issue of why the idea of a ‘deal’ has become so prevalent in the discussion of political matters and policy proposals associated with future economic developments. It does this by linking the deal with several features of market design. Principal amongst these are game theory and matching algorithms. The Barker-Thompson Rule is presented as an example of a particular type of market construction operating in a game theoretic context, while the ‘matching engine’ is explored in a variety of contexts where it is argued to have become a standardized technique indicating to a possible reshaping of the economic terrain more generally. The consequences of these developments and trends are the emergence of a ‘dealing culture’ that threatens to overwhelm other forms of decision-making and consume the policy-making environment with the immediacy of its dealing logic.     

From shanzhai chic to Gangnam style: seven practices of cultural-economic mediation in China and Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the social construction of ‘fashionability’ – namely, what is ‘desirable’ and ‘fashionable’ – with reference to the concept ‘cultural mediators’ that foregrounds agency, negotiation and the contested practices of market actors in cultural production. It zeroes in on the cultural mediators’ attitudes and positions in the two markets by drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with industry veterans. It shows that the mediators in South Korea and China increasingly occupy hybrid occupational roles and social positions across industries and sectors yet achieve limited success in countering the status quo of Western fashion through mediation. The analysis contributes to the literature with a categorisation of seven mediation practices that shape the valuation of fashion products (i.e. ‘fashionability’) in two ways. Empirically, this categorisation illuminates how cultural mediators make reference habitually to the broader social and cultural contexts to co-construct cultural-aesthetic objects. Theoretically, it advances a cultural-economic approach to the understanding of cultural mediation and challenges the reductionist viewpoint of actor–network theory through the notion of a matrix of cultural-economic agency.     

Between business and morality: cultural politics in independent bookshops in China

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how cultural businesses may facilitate contentious political activity in authoritarian contexts. Existing research in Western liberal democracies has shown the widespread political activism of actors in the cultural and creative industries. Whether such activism exists in authoritarian society, how it may differ in character and form, and what implications this will have for our understanding of relations between business, politics, and culture in authoritarian countries remain to be addressed. Drawing on data collected from 55 ‘independent bookshops’ in China, I illustrate how these organisations perform ‘cultural politics,’ a type of political participation in which actors employ mainly symbolic means to express social and political concerns. The organisations’ economic relations and conditions facilitate their efforts to create spaces in which contentious questions can be raised, sensitive topics explored, and alternative ideas expressed, despite the Chinese state’s political regulation of the cultural sphere. The finding of the economic embeddedness of cultural politics sheds new light on our understanding of the political economy of cultural businesses in contemporary China.     

Ginzburg in Harlem: History,Structure and the Politics of Primitivism

Abstract

The historian Carlo Ginzburg is renowned for his critique of modern, scientific reason and his articulation of an alternative form of knowledge which he labels ‘conjectural’. This form of knowledge, supposedly more attuned to the historian’s interest in the singular and specific fragment, as opposed to the abstract and universal concept, is so rooted in the practices of the prehistoric hunter that Ginzburg sometimes describes it as a ‘venatic’ form of deduction, binding ‘the human animal closely to other animal species’. In this essay, I explore the ramifications of this alternative form of knowledge, attending especially to its relationship to the modernist theme of ‘primitivism’. I do so by juxtaposing Ginzburg’s critical appraisal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous literary invention, Sherlock Holmes, and Rudolph Fisher’s own literary invention, John Archer, the physician who sometimes aids criminal investigations in African American Harlem. I argue that the differences between Archer and Holmes draw attention to some troubling implications of Ginzburg’s historiographical argument. Folding this analysis on itself, however, I also suggest that what might be at stake, when Ginzburg insists so troublingly on the importance of the singular, venatic trace, is the evocation of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the historical ‘event’.     

Beyond Binaries and Condemnation: Opening New Theoretical Spaces in Jewish Television Studies

Abstract

The objective of this article is to critique the current literature on Jews and Jewishness in North American television. It is our contention that this work is problematic in a number of ways. First, it insists on a strict binary between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ television images, and ‘bad’ and ‘good’ audience responses to these images. Second, it assumes that a unified, ‘acceptable’ Jewish identity pre‐exists the production of these images, and that this identity merely needs to be incorporated into the television landscape to make its images ‘better’. Third, it assumes a direct and unproblematic relationship between what the viewers see on television and how they understand the world. In the second half of this essay we introduce scholarship in other areas of television and media studies, as well as in the emerging field of Jewish cultural studies, to point to the need to theorise a much more complex relationship between identity and spectatorship than is realised in much of the current literature on Jewishness and television. We argue that our relationship, as viewers, to television is inherently complex, contradictory, ambivalent, and shifting, and thus cannot be pinned down by rigid and hierarchical binary structures. Further, we argue that Jewishness cannot be reified as a single, visible, knowable identity, and that the ambivalent pleasures of viewers viewing Jewishness on television, including our own, must be accounted for rather than dismissed.     

Curating disaster: a way to turn science into action in times of the Corona pandemic

ABSTRACT

To cure Covid-19 on a medical, political, economic, and societal level, there is a need to ‘curate’ between science and politics in such a way that decision-makers and societies can address the practical requirements at hand. This commentary introduces and discusses ‘curating’ as a socio-material practice mediating between science and decision-making. It reflects on the current Covid-19 pandemic and compares ‘curatorial’ aspects here to the field of natural catastrophe risk finance. As both areas try to manage disasters, the space between scientific knowledge and economic and/or political decision-making becomes a particularly important node. By employing a focus on catastrophe simulation modelling, this essay looks at several issues of the natural catastrophe field that may yield ways to deal with epidemic crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. This commentary suggests putting greater emphasis on (and encourages a research focus on) the ‘curation’ between science and politics to improve decision-making for socio-material disasters.     

Silicon Valley,disruption, and the end of uncertainty

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects on the relationship between high-tech disruption narratives and uncertainty. My main argument is that an economic sociology of the future is incomplete without addressing the ‘demonic’ or rather eschatological elements apparent in the promissory twin rhetoric of disruption and inevitability that a number of contemporary technology firms employ. The conjuring up of liberatory high-tech futures implicates a political-philosophical perspective of the end game. It utilizes at once the productive power of uncertainty to create visions of ‘absolute riches’ and societal gain but at the same time narrows these futures down to one inevitable alternative to the status quo. Through the examples of two Silicon Valley disruptor firms, I argue that these eschatological narratives need to be opened to social scientific critique in order to examine their potential societal consequences above and beyond the narrow geographic confines of ‘the Valley.’     

Haute finance in the not-so-quiet revolution: colonialisme Anglo-Saxonne and the bombing of la Bourse de Montréal

ABSTRACT

This paper examines a situation in which finance is perceived as imperialist – as immanent to, and serving the interests of, a single ‘culture’ in the colloquial sense. The analysis centres on the long-forgotten 1969 bombing of the trading floor of la Bourse de Montréal (the Montréal Stock Exchange), a moment in an intense phase of the Québécois movement for independence from Canada. Because of the way in which the bombers framed the attack, and its political-economic and discursive contexts, the bombing presents an opportunity to think about key features of the relation between finance and cultural domination or imperialism. These features relate to finance’s specific articulation to the future, uncertainty, and, in the words of the séparatistes of the time, cultural ‘destiny’. The paper has three parts. The first describes the bombing of la Bourse and the public, media, and state responses, linking it to Québécois cultural-political geographies at several scales. Part two places the bombing in the longer-run cultural-politicization of finance in the francophone independence movement, to outline a specifically Québecois critique of finance capital. The third part considers finance’s perceived and real connection to, and thus capacity to shape or constrain, the cultural-political construction of collective possibility.     

LIVE Baccarat calculations: Macau machine gambling and the production of the post-socialist subject

ABSTRACT

Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, and the subsequent liberalization of the city’s 150-year-old casino monopoly, Macau was transformed into the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming. Today Macau attracts more than 30 million annual tourists, the majority of whom are from mainland China. This article analyzes an electronic casino game called LIVE Baccarat, which was created by a Hong Kong biopharmaceutical company, and designed to appeal to Chinese gamblers in Macau. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon and Michel Foucault, I explore the ways in which the LIVE Baccarat gaming machine ‘economizes’ the game of baccarat by introducing novel betting functions which require gamblers to engage in various forms of financial calculation, including calqulation, hedging, arbitrage, and portfolio management. LIVE Baccarat is a biopolitical apparatus of subjection of a post-socialist Chinese homo economicus, a form of ‘human capital’ which Foucault might call an ‘entrepreneur of the self.’ This subject not only plays a remunerative role in Macau’s gaming industry, but conforms to China’s macroeconomic goals to engender ‘quality’ citizens equipped to support a domestic consumer market which may supplant the unsustainable production-for-export regime that drove the country’s initial post-reform development.     

The Elasticity of Thought: A Note on the Drive in Worringer and Freud

Abstract

The essay approaches recent discussions of ‘life’ and biopolitics from the historical context of early 20th century German vitalist thought. By closely analysing the concept of the ‘drive’ in art historian Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the essay shows how the paradoxes of those texts prefigure and contribute to the contemporary problematic of ‘life’ in theoretical discourse across the humanities. In Worringer and Freud, the drive is an ‘elastic’ concept stretching beyond – and yet constitutive of – the epistemological object (‘life’) that it is called upon to describe. The distortion of the drive in each author's thought – from an impulse of organic vitality to a principle of inorganic primordiality – manifests the contradictory ‘life’ of vitalist concepts themselves in their elastic potential for transformation, regression and contradiction.     

Redefining Resistance: Seeking Fanon's Subject Between ‘the Unified’ and ‘the Dispersed’

Abstract

This essay reads two differing conceptions of subjectivity in Frantz Fanon's work as corresponding to a shift in subjective orientation in certain moments of crisis, from what I term a unified individual – the subject of psychoanalysis – to a dispersed subject, the frenzied participant in collective activity. I believe that such a potential duality within the subject is best adopted when analysing Fanon's oeuvre, as well as when examining a subject's behaviour as participant in forms of unstructured collective protest such as rioting. Whereas the unified subject of psychoanalysis best expresses the consciously self-reflective individual in society, the dispersed subject expresses a subjectivity operating in excess of individualism. This dispersed subject acts collectively, as an object moving in tandem with other objects, without individual reflection. I argue that this shift comprises the initial spark of insurrection suggested in Fanon's work, the moment in which he sees the people pitched ‘in a single direction, from which there is no turning back’; and what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the explosive moment of ‘conflagration’. The two subject positions between which the subject shifts exist as two potential sides of every subject and comprise the ‘Manichean’ world in which Fanon's subject is entrenched.