Note
In 1998-99 I had my last research and study leave from the University of Auckland and spent most of it in London working on a book with the horrendously serious sounding title Contested Terrains: Culture and Commerce in the Market Millennium. The book was to contain a rethinking of the framework of my 1993 book Business and the Culture of an Enterprise Society but was never completed and will never be completed, at least not by me. Working on this book was amongst the most fun I ever had in the research part of my academic career and the incomplete work contains I believe some of my best writing. I have already raided the work in three earlier blog entries, (8) "A Place to Stand, A Place to Sit", (9) "The Adventures of a Banknote" and (11) "In the Name of God and of Profit". These have clearly proved readable so I intend to add to them in this and subsequent blogs. The piece below is from the introduction to the book, which opens with the description of a 1998 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
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Just inside the Victoria and Albert Museum
, between the main Cromwell Road entrance and “The V&A Shop”, are a small number of glass-fronted display cabinets. Set into the walls on each side of the foyer and reception area, these cabinets are used for temporary displays. They contain the only collections of artefacts that can be viewed without paying to go into the main body of the museum, other than during the free access period from 4.30pm to 5.45pm each day. There are eight cabinets in all, each measuring about two feet in depth, five feet across and five and a half feet in height. In the autumn of 1998 a new display is set up, arranged by the Museum’s curator of ceramics.
Some cabinets contain just a single item: in one, an Austrian-designed Italian-made tea and coffee set fabricated in electroplate and metacrylate; in another, “Danae Light” (London
The other four cabinets are busier, more cluttered. One contains a number of clothing items and accessories from the archive of the London-based fashion label, Antoni and Alison. Raised in the foreground of another cabinet is a 1993 carrier bag from the Barcelona store, Vincon, on which is printed a reproduction of a 1987 work by New York Canada
The ‘last’ cabinet - only in the sense that I choose to describe it last, since the cabinets are not numbered and, as far as I can judge, are in no particular sequence - is devoted to Barbie. It being half-term, the Barbie cabinet is attracting some interest and photographic attention from visiting school-girls and their mums. It displays Barbie, “An Icon of Modernism”, alongside Barbie in India
This curious juxtaposition of artefacts, accompanied by texts emphasising the commodity value of art, mark the whole off as a very ‘postmodern’ display. On each glass front, printed in black lettering, is the question
WHAT WAS POSTMODERNISM?
There are many ironies in this little exhibition. If, as the display’s written texts claim, postmodernism is ‘always defined by what it is not’, then how do you choose a set of artefacts to illustrate the nature of postmodernism, or, indeed, not to illustrate the nature of postmodernism? Yet these artefacts, in their eclectic mixture of styles, textures, materials, histories, do give the flavour of the fusion and confusion of categories of things, of boundaries, that was part of the postmodern ethos. Nowhere is this process more evident than in the fusion and confusion between the commercial and the cultural - in shopping as entertainment, stores and malls as tourist attractions, news as commercial product, architecture as advertisement, and sport, leisure and play as business. And, perhaps as the epitome of the commercial/cultural merger, are museums themselves, increasingly funded through commercial sponsorship, marketing and merchandising entrance-fee-payable collections through the sale of reproductions in free-access museum shops, running joint promotions with textile firms and department stores, reconstructing supermarkets and burger bars within their galleries. How ironic then that the “V&A”, ‘the Harrods of the museum world’, that set out to become ‘the Laura Ashley of the 1990s’, that promoted itself as “An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached”, should at the end of the 1990s declare postmodernism passe.
Nevertheless, with what relief and delight do I read that black inscription! What was postmodernism? Does this mean that whatever it was it can now be safely relegated to the trash can of the historical past? Is the not-so-secret society of self-appointed postmodernist intellectuals, literary critics and artists now itself in the process of dissolution and deconstruction? Can I now justify my past laziness in refusing to take seriously sentences that I have to read multiple times before I can elucidate even a glimmer of their meaning?** (Am I thick or are they opaque?) Now that the metanarrative that denied metanarratives has come to its logical conclusion, can I, in guilt-free bliss, contemplate new metanarratives, even millennial ones?
Well, why not? Although calendars are purely artificial constructs, we characteristically seek at the end of a decade, a century, a millennium, to try and make some overall sense of the period that has just closed. As the year 2000 approached, reviews of the twentieth century, and utopian and dystopian predictions for the twenty first, were published with gay abandon. Distrusting labels of all kinds in this age of marketing, nevertheless we like to label times present and times past, decade by decade (“The Sixties”, “The Me Decade”), or generation by generation (“The Baby Boomers”, “The X Generation”), or in terms of some mix of social, economic and technological landmarks - Feudalism, Mercantilism, the Industrial Revolution, the Post-Industrial Society, the Nuclear Age, the Computer Age, the Information Age. And as we individually grow older, we try to make sense of our own lives too, to see the patterns and discontinuities of our individual pasts, and to explore the idiosyncratic alongside the broader contexts of the social, economic, political and cultural changes that we have lived with or through. So at the end of a millennium, we are tempted, I am tempted, foolhardy as it may be, to jettison the overpowering self-consciousness imposed by postmodernism and to try and capture a millennial story line.
My label for the millennium 1000AD to 2000AD is “The Market Millennium”. The millennium starts out with embryonic elements of a Market Economy and a Market Society. It ends in a fully fledged Market Culture. The story of the market is, however, but one story of the second millennium. It must ride alongside, often moving in sequence with, other major narratives of the last thousand years - the stories of science and technology, of religious and political change, of military aggression. I seek merely to peg out the landscape of the market narrative, to explore the historical interplay of commerce and culture, and to illustrate ways in which ideas and values associated with market exchange, have come to permeate everyday life - in the political and public arenas, in the workplace, in the home, and in the ‘interiority’ of our private selves.
** The first prize in the 1998 bad-writing contest run by the journal Philosophy and Literature went to the following extract from an academic article: ‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’ [The sort of sentence that would make you want to Foucault Althusser up your Derrida.]
** The first prize in the 1998 bad-writing contest run by the journal Philosophy and Literature went to the following extract from an academic article: ‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’ [The sort of sentence that would make you want to Foucault Althusser up your Derrida.]
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