During the 2018 Christmas shopping season, a revealing blip appeared
on the consumer radar when Payless Shoesource surreptitiously opened a
Beverly Hills boutique under the Italianized label Palessi. They invited
a group of sixty select fashion “influencers” to attend the launch and
give on-camera testimonials about the new line of designer shoes. (An
influencer, if you are new to the term, is like the social media version
of the cool kids in high school—the ones who taught us to listen to
Depeche Mode and trade in our Velcro sneaks for Doc Martens; both groups
have followers, but influencers can get paid for product name-dropping
by advertisers, who stick like ticks on their posts.) The twist with
Palessi was that the shoes were nothing more than Payless’s latest line
of low-budget products. The social media sophisticates bestowed their
enthusiastic blessings on what were, as the shoe company soon revealed,
thirty-dollar faux-leather poseurs listed at a gargantuan markup. It was
an egg-on-the-face prank that won a nod of approval from the broader
media audience. Having already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Payless
had nothing to lose.
To lick their wounds, some of the influencers went to New York City in February to attend Fashion Week, an event at which the fetish for designer wares is annually consecrated into a cult of the brand. It’s true that the spectacle isn’t for normal people per se. It’s for fashion culture itself. But as it fortifies its own image, Fashion Week grossly aestheticizes the fantasyland of desire in our social imaginary. And in come the influencers to set the trends a-trending with real-time Tweet-storming, Instagramming, and emoji-winking commentary on all the gaudy swank of live-streamed runway shows parading outfits that often climb north of $100,000. No one pretends we are going to buy this ridiculous stuff. It’s a strategic calculation to stoke consumer desire by provoking our sense of alienation from stylized satisfaction. Lend us your screens and the fantasy will be yours.
But all the hoopla was itself
indirectly pranked by an off-runway product coming out of New York at
the same time. A different sort of influencer, the Pushcart
Prize–winning writer Melissa Broder, published an unusual personal
reflection in the New York Times, “Life without Longing.” In the
article, Broder relates how she came to realize that her adventures in
search of stylized romantic love were at root a “yearning for yearning
itself.” What had been driving her was the hope of “making meaning in
this life” and sustaining “the sensation of a forward motion…a reason
for being.” But when the “illusion” of finding erotic “completion” gave
out, she found herself with a “spiritual longing…for some kind of
eternal beauty or ineffable truth” that was “more nebulous, always just
out of reach."
Broder’s testimony reveals more than she may have realized. Although they seem synonymous, longing wants something different from what desire wants—and not just in the sphere of fashion or romantic love. Desire is the particularizing and possessive agenda of self-creation—the self in the mode of a performance aesthetic. Longing is the self’s yearning to be grounded in something irreducible to the object in front of it or the designs within it—the self in the mode of a storied aesthetic in which it is not the primary author and satisfaction is not its ultimate endgame. But the trouble today is that longing must vie with a state of affairs in which desire is shaped by those influences of commercial finery and technologically mediated fantasies that supervene on the very ways we sort out who and how we are in the world. Although desire appears to be that which is most our own, it tends to be cultivated in us and places us at a distance from the true experience of longing. Desire has become longing’s counterfeit.
It’s time to pull a Palessi and call desire’s bluff. To do that, we need to work our way through a formative paradox: The nature of desire is expansive and the nature of longing is restrictive, but longing is the better influencer in our authentication of identity and truth.
Anxiety of Influence
Influencer is the perfect word for what our advertising and marketing cultures have wanted to devise all along, and in an obsessively technological age their strategies are all too effective. The term owns up to the larger paradigm of commodification that shapes our relationships to commercial objects, ideas, and even ourselves. I needn’t rehearse the well-documented perils attendant upon our penchant for materialism and greed, digital dwelling, or device addiction, and all the spine-bending and psychological debts these accrue. Historian William Leach named all this the “culture of desire.” Political theorist Sheldon Wolin called it a “whirl” in which the world is “continuously redefined by contemporary science, technology, corporate capitalism, and its media.” One does not have to be glued to digital marketing or fashion trends or Internet porn to come under influencer sway. When a click-baiting signal, message notification, or neatly packaged podcast courses through the wires and pumps a little dopamine into our brains, or when our minds spin with the estimated 5,000 ads we take in daily (to the tune of nearly 200 billion marketing dollars in the United States), these are just the latest pointillist strokes of a deeper figuration of who we are and how we perform the “reality” that is curated for us.
Before terms like branding, targeting, and influencer entered our parlance, the keyword was propaganda. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays published a book by that name that famously began with this psychosocial observation:
David Ogilvy solidified this vision in a cut-to-the-chase way when he built what would by 1964 be the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency. You know their work if you’ve ever felt your heartstrings pulled by the likes of Dove, American Express, Merrill Lynch, or IBM. Today the firm is in eighty-three countries, with 132 offices, and Ogilvy’s strategies for engineering consent are lauded as “timeless in marketing” and well suited to “the new challenges of the era of Social Media.” Advertising, he declared, “is a message for a single purpose: to sell.” How to do this? Make the product irresistibly interesting by using customers’ language, “the language in which they think.” That is another way of saying that advertising’s goal is to win over the inner grammar of our minds, tastes, and ideas. Apple, for example, as blogger and Ogilvy fan Camila Villafañe puts it, “knows how to whisper their beliefs into the ears of their audience.… Apple’s positioning strategy focuses primarily on emotions and the consumer’s lifestyle, their imagination, passions, dreams, hopes, aspirations.”
Business school students today learn how to whisper on the basis of the “integrative marketing” model of consumption outlined by George Belch and Michael Belch in their textbook Advertising and Promotion (1997). The science identifies a sequence of psychological stages in the consumer’s makeup that advertising can appeal to and catalyze on its own terms: shaping motivation, perception, and attitude, then formation, integration, and learning. Integration is the moment of a “purchase decision,” and presumably “learning” involves realizing that I will have a more integrated life if I purchase more and more.
The integrative marketing strategy has a sincerity about it, almost like a vocational calling. Brian Martin, CEO of Brand Connections, has implored his sector’s leaders to invest more wisely by serving consumers’ aspirations to be cared for and connected with others, their desires to “feel that they matter” and “believe there is a higher purpose.” Martin lists American Express, Lexus, Rolex, Starbucks, Twitter, and Facebook as brands that help us integrate our personhood. Bernays would be impressed. Integrative marketing plays into our core existential project and what has become our late-modern inclination to, according to Buddhist scholar David Loy, “make ourselves feel more real by reorganizing the whole world until we can see our own image everywhere, reflected in the ‘resources’ with which we try to manipulate and secure the material conditions of our existence.”
Wanting to feel more real, I think Loy would agree, is not the problem. Rather, it’s the illusion of “making” this be so—securing it on our terms and giving it the bottom-line sheen of goods and services. We are just so good at making things. Why not the self? Why not the world? Why not the fundamental truth of both, wrought in the self’s aspirational image? It’s almost irresistible. But making assumes, among other things, an outcome-based calculus and narrowly utilitarian means. What if the real conditions of reality exceeded the reach of human production, and the real life of purpose could not be contained on a grid? What if the inconclusive, ever-unfolding scope of meaning sounded in our ears or flashed its own faint figure beyond the territory of self-imaging? What then would become of desire?
by Christopher Yates, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Plato’s Cave, by Cveto Vidovic
To lick their wounds, some of the influencers went to New York City in February to attend Fashion Week, an event at which the fetish for designer wares is annually consecrated into a cult of the brand. It’s true that the spectacle isn’t for normal people per se. It’s for fashion culture itself. But as it fortifies its own image, Fashion Week grossly aestheticizes the fantasyland of desire in our social imaginary. And in come the influencers to set the trends a-trending with real-time Tweet-storming, Instagramming, and emoji-winking commentary on all the gaudy swank of live-streamed runway shows parading outfits that often climb north of $100,000. No one pretends we are going to buy this ridiculous stuff. It’s a strategic calculation to stoke consumer desire by provoking our sense of alienation from stylized satisfaction. Lend us your screens and the fantasy will be yours.
But all the hoopla was itself
indirectly pranked by an off-runway product coming out of New York at
the same time. A different sort of influencer, the Pushcart
Prize–winning writer Melissa Broder, published an unusual personal
reflection in the New York Times, “Life without Longing.” In the
article, Broder relates how she came to realize that her adventures in
search of stylized romantic love were at root a “yearning for yearning
itself.” What had been driving her was the hope of “making meaning in
this life” and sustaining “the sensation of a forward motion…a reason
for being.” But when the “illusion” of finding erotic “completion” gave
out, she found herself with a “spiritual longing…for some kind of
eternal beauty or ineffable truth” that was “more nebulous, always just
out of reach." Broder’s testimony reveals more than she may have realized. Although they seem synonymous, longing wants something different from what desire wants—and not just in the sphere of fashion or romantic love. Desire is the particularizing and possessive agenda of self-creation—the self in the mode of a performance aesthetic. Longing is the self’s yearning to be grounded in something irreducible to the object in front of it or the designs within it—the self in the mode of a storied aesthetic in which it is not the primary author and satisfaction is not its ultimate endgame. But the trouble today is that longing must vie with a state of affairs in which desire is shaped by those influences of commercial finery and technologically mediated fantasies that supervene on the very ways we sort out who and how we are in the world. Although desire appears to be that which is most our own, it tends to be cultivated in us and places us at a distance from the true experience of longing. Desire has become longing’s counterfeit.
It’s time to pull a Palessi and call desire’s bluff. To do that, we need to work our way through a formative paradox: The nature of desire is expansive and the nature of longing is restrictive, but longing is the better influencer in our authentication of identity and truth.
Anxiety of Influence
Influencer is the perfect word for what our advertising and marketing cultures have wanted to devise all along, and in an obsessively technological age their strategies are all too effective. The term owns up to the larger paradigm of commodification that shapes our relationships to commercial objects, ideas, and even ourselves. I needn’t rehearse the well-documented perils attendant upon our penchant for materialism and greed, digital dwelling, or device addiction, and all the spine-bending and psychological debts these accrue. Historian William Leach named all this the “culture of desire.” Political theorist Sheldon Wolin called it a “whirl” in which the world is “continuously redefined by contemporary science, technology, corporate capitalism, and its media.” One does not have to be glued to digital marketing or fashion trends or Internet porn to come under influencer sway. When a click-baiting signal, message notification, or neatly packaged podcast courses through the wires and pumps a little dopamine into our brains, or when our minds spin with the estimated 5,000 ads we take in daily (to the tune of nearly 200 billion marketing dollars in the United States), these are just the latest pointillist strokes of a deeper figuration of who we are and how we perform the “reality” that is curated for us.
Before terms like branding, targeting, and influencer entered our parlance, the keyword was propaganda. In the 1920s, Edward Bernays published a book by that name that famously began with this psychosocial observation:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.… It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.As a descriptive account, Bernays’s point is not wrong. But one expects a discussion of ethics to follow. It doesn’t. What does, rather, is an earnest proto–Mad Men case for how advertising could “bind and guide” the demos in a helpful way by shouldering the burden of complicated life decisions. Unsurprisingly, the case was a slippery slope, and before long Bernays was envisioning how what he called “the engineering of consent” could infuse our (often unconscious) desire function with a faith in vigorous acquisition. Advertising could effectively become the “invisible government” and profitably relieve us of the duty of seeking Aristotle’s “good life” on the feeble basis of what our minds, tastes, and ideas might sort out on their own. Among his clients were General Electric, Procter & Gamble, the American Tobacco Company, CBS, and President Calvin Coolidge.
David Ogilvy solidified this vision in a cut-to-the-chase way when he built what would by 1964 be the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency. You know their work if you’ve ever felt your heartstrings pulled by the likes of Dove, American Express, Merrill Lynch, or IBM. Today the firm is in eighty-three countries, with 132 offices, and Ogilvy’s strategies for engineering consent are lauded as “timeless in marketing” and well suited to “the new challenges of the era of Social Media.” Advertising, he declared, “is a message for a single purpose: to sell.” How to do this? Make the product irresistibly interesting by using customers’ language, “the language in which they think.” That is another way of saying that advertising’s goal is to win over the inner grammar of our minds, tastes, and ideas. Apple, for example, as blogger and Ogilvy fan Camila Villafañe puts it, “knows how to whisper their beliefs into the ears of their audience.… Apple’s positioning strategy focuses primarily on emotions and the consumer’s lifestyle, their imagination, passions, dreams, hopes, aspirations.”
Business school students today learn how to whisper on the basis of the “integrative marketing” model of consumption outlined by George Belch and Michael Belch in their textbook Advertising and Promotion (1997). The science identifies a sequence of psychological stages in the consumer’s makeup that advertising can appeal to and catalyze on its own terms: shaping motivation, perception, and attitude, then formation, integration, and learning. Integration is the moment of a “purchase decision,” and presumably “learning” involves realizing that I will have a more integrated life if I purchase more and more.
The integrative marketing strategy has a sincerity about it, almost like a vocational calling. Brian Martin, CEO of Brand Connections, has implored his sector’s leaders to invest more wisely by serving consumers’ aspirations to be cared for and connected with others, their desires to “feel that they matter” and “believe there is a higher purpose.” Martin lists American Express, Lexus, Rolex, Starbucks, Twitter, and Facebook as brands that help us integrate our personhood. Bernays would be impressed. Integrative marketing plays into our core existential project and what has become our late-modern inclination to, according to Buddhist scholar David Loy, “make ourselves feel more real by reorganizing the whole world until we can see our own image everywhere, reflected in the ‘resources’ with which we try to manipulate and secure the material conditions of our existence.”
Wanting to feel more real, I think Loy would agree, is not the problem. Rather, it’s the illusion of “making” this be so—securing it on our terms and giving it the bottom-line sheen of goods and services. We are just so good at making things. Why not the self? Why not the world? Why not the fundamental truth of both, wrought in the self’s aspirational image? It’s almost irresistible. But making assumes, among other things, an outcome-based calculus and narrowly utilitarian means. What if the real conditions of reality exceeded the reach of human production, and the real life of purpose could not be contained on a grid? What if the inconclusive, ever-unfolding scope of meaning sounded in our ears or flashed its own faint figure beyond the territory of self-imaging? What then would become of desire?
by Christopher Yates, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Plato’s Cave, by Cveto Vidovic
