Politically, I came of age during peak No Logo, although I hadn’t read the book until just now. I did “policy debate” in high school, and my specialty was postmodernism applied to whatever the topic was.
I didn’t actually go to protests or anything, but I lived in Washington state when the WTO riots happened in Seattle in 1999. I graduated in 2001, so I’m the most millennial of millennials. I turned 18 a few days after the 2000 election, so I didn’t vote, but I had hopes Ralph Nader would break 5% or whatever so the Green Party would get federal funding. I went to college in Seattle and I’d buy Adbusters from the news stand. I was in the last class to graduate high school before 9/11, when Everything Changed.
What defined my college years were the largest global protests in history, against starting the Iraq war, not accomplishing anything. Under Bush, cops were like…fucking Never Again about the WTO riots. The expectation became that leftist protests would be met with mega robo cops and you’d get beat up and charged with terrorism. All for nothing.
Bush was, like, an awful nightmare. Between the crackdowns and Nader getting blamed for 2000, my kind was basically wiped out of existence, and I’m a remnant clinging to the Old Ways. The feeling was johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com. That was an actual website. Also the last time I voted for a Democrat for president. I remember reading What do they have to do to lose your vote? in 2008 and voting for Nader. The zeitgeist went from “it’s cool to hate corporations and advertising” to social media and Barack Obama getting marketing awards.
The Occupy movement tried to revive the spirit of the anti-globalization movement, but without any coherent demands. The terrain of being against the “globalists” was left to the anti-Semites.
So I came of age during a very brief, specific moment, literally 2 years long (!), before the left was crushed for a generation. Now things are bad enough that you can be socialist again.
No Logo is a time capsule of that moment. It’s important for people to learn from my generation’s failure.
Even the hindsight looks different in hindsight. There’s a 10-year retrospective preface:
Looking back on this period, what I liked most was the unapologetic wonkery of it all. In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I had never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.
The contrast with Occupy Wall Street is pretty striking. They explicitly refused to make explicit demands, and it was hard not to suspect it was because learning about finance was hard.
Klein herself planted the seeds of vagueness, though. This is from the post-9/11 afterword:
Thankfully, anti-corporate and pro-democracy activists are engaged in no such fire and brimstone crusade. They are instead challenging systems of centralized power on principle, as critical of left-wing, one-size-fits-all state solutions as of right-wing market ones. It is often said disparagingly that this movement lacks ideology, an overarching message, a master plan. This is absolutely true, and we should be extraordinarily thankful. At the moment, the anti-corporate street activists are ringed by would-be leaders, anxious for the opportunity to enlist them as foot soldiers. It is to this young movement’s credit that it has as yet fended off all of these agendas and has rejected everyone’s generously donated manifesto, holding out for an acceptably democratic, representative process to take its resistance to the next stage. Will it be a ten-point plan? A new political doctrine?
In other words, she had no idea how to solve neoliberalism, and neither did anyone else, so we didn’t.
The passage is ironic because No Logo itself is called the movement’s manifesto. Graeber’s Direct Action: An Ethnography is important here. The movement became focused on procedural questions, how to hold meetings, and Occupy was sort of Graeber’s grand experiment with that.
Reading Klein now, the absence of psychoanalysis is tragic. This is from the 10-year retrospective again:
In the United States and many parts of Europe, it is far-right parties and even neofascism that are giving the loudest voice to anti-corporatist rage.
Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. Sure it was annoying, but after the apolitical eighties, when there was, according to Margaret Thatcher, “no such thing as society,” it also seemed like a good sign that these brands believed otherwise. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping–for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren’t as passe as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.
For Klein, corporations are still the “big Other.” They’re not strictly enemies. She wants validation from them. It’s connected to her childhood (we’ll get to that).
The Hidden Persuaders is conspicuously absent from No Logo. Yes, she cites it, but only to talk about 1970s and 80s worries about subliminal messaging in ads. The bigger picture of psychoanalysis-based marketing, subject of the awesome BBC series Century of the Self, is missing. So of course companies are invoking our innermost longings. That’s why prior generations were offended when they started doing it. Klein is delighted the companies recognize those longings in herself.
A book like McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets goes deeper. For McGowan, we find satisfaction in the perpetual failure to satisfy our longings. Repetition compulsion is involved.
Does Klein really want to succeed? Do Democrats really oppose Republicans? Do people want what they want?
Another book that captures something important she missed is Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, a history of cooptation itself. She saw hip marketers as a new phenomenon, when they really weren’t. She seems to buy into the myth of an original hipness that wasn’t marketing-driven, despite sort of knowing it’s a myth:
There is no need to further romanticize the original Woodstock. Among (many) other things, it was also a big-label-backed rock festival, designed to turn a profit. Still, the myth of Woodstock as a sovereign youth-culture state was part of a vast project of generational self-definition–a concept that would have been wholly foreign to those in attendance at Woodstock ’94, for whom generational identity had largely been a prepackaged good and for whom the search for self had always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not they believed it or defined themselves against it.
The original introduction to the book starts by talking about her Toronto Fashion District apartment in an old London Fog factory building. Y’know…outsourcing and sweatshops…but we’re also supposed to understand that Naomi Klein lives somewhere cool.
The book is based on the idea that it’s describing a new, hyper-modern phenomenon, but the introduction also acknowledges that there really isn’t anything new under the sun:
It would be naive to believe that Western consumers haven’t profited from these global divisions since the earliest days of colonialism. The Third World, as they say, has always existed for the comfort of the First. What is a relatively new development, however, is the amount of investigative interest there seems to be in the unbranded points of origin of brand-name goods. The travels of Nike sneakers have been traced back to the abusive sweatshops of Vietnam, Barbie’s little outfits back to the child laborers of Sumatra, Starbucks’ lattes to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala, and Shell’s oil back to the polluted and impoverished villages of the Niger Delta.
The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I’m told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition.
Not-wanting-to-know is an important part of colonialism, so there was something novel about Americans caring about the people who made their stuff. But the result of all that “wonkery”, once you integrate all of that information, is that we’re fucked and there’s no obvious way out. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism captures what came next.
The opening of Chapter 1 is a quote from David Ogilvy, the advertising guy,in 1963:
As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases,man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?
I think the conclusion weren’t intended to draw is: look at us, how cool we are for actually doing that. I think what she missed is that advertisers aren’t psychologically simple either, and they have their own shadows and self-loathings. They still want to be Good People despite their jobs, so some of the corporate virtue signaling is even sincere.
So the movement expressed a yearning that was already inherent to capitalism. The opening sentences:
The astronomical growth in the wealth and cultural influence of multinational corporations over the last 15 years can arguably be traced back to a single, seemingly innocuous idea developed by management theorists in the mid-1980s: that successful corporations must primarily produce brands, as opposed to products.
Until that time, although it was understood in the corporate world that bolstering one’s brand name was important, the primary concern of every solid manufacturer was the production of goods.
She overstates the case. A contemporary review in Yes! Magazine pointed this out:
Marketing differentiates otherwise similar products in the light industrial, retail, and service sectors. But once you get to the technology-intensive sector, manufacturing matters. Intel, for instance, functions like an old-fashioned brand. It does not denote a distinctive lifestyle like the Nike swoosh does; it signals that you are using state-of-the-art chips.
As in earlier eras of capitalism, the edge in production today is provided by superior capital resources, monopoly over high technology, and control over markets. Market dominance is not simply a function of good marketing. It is dependent on generating the capital resources that give the firm a lock on cutting-edge technology that it can translate into a superior product. Light industry, retail, and entertainment are critical sectors of the economy, but they dance to the tune of the revolutions in the techno-manufacturing sector.
Even in light industry, the focus on marketing instead of production is actually a defensive move stemming from developments at the level of production. The move from pushing the product to flogging the brand came after Asian producers began to swamp the US market with imports that were not only cheap but damn good.
Moving upmarket and leaving the lower end to the Asians and other developing country producers provided only temporary relief, since it was only a matter of time before the Asians could match the Northern firms in design and quality. Unlike the smaller garments and textile firms that sought to save themselves by pushing their governments to limit Asian imports via quotas, the megabrands, seeing that this was dead-end solution, chose an innovative defense: subcontract your production to the brutally cost-effective Asian producers but keep them in line by tightening up on “intellectual property rights” and securing the passage of draconian international legislation protecting the brand.
In contrat, Klein believed…enough of the hype. She’s telling a story of paradigm shift and discontinuity, rather than continuity. It was a mistake to assume the ideology was held in good faith at the highest levels. From Brzezinski’s The Choice:
International power…still needs social legitimacy. That legitimacy is required both by the dominant and the dominated. The former crave it because it gives them the self-confidence, the sense of mission, and the moral conviction to pursue their goals and to assert their interests. The latter need it to justify their acquiescence, to facilitate their accommodation, and to sustain their submission. Doctrinal legitimacy reduces the costs of the exercise of power by mitigating resentment on the part of those subject to it. To this end, globalization is the natural doctrine of global hegemony.
For an anti-corporate manifesto, No Logo is surprisingly defensive of them at times. This is after she explains how neoliberal cuts to the public sector are what necessitated “public-private partnerships” in the first place:
At first, these arrangements seemed win-win: the cultural or educational institution in question received much-needed funds and the sponsoring corporation was compensated with some modest form of public acknowledgment and a tax break. And, in fact, many of these new public-private arrangements were just that simple, successfully retaining a balance between the cultural event or institution’s independence and the sponsor’s desire for credit, often helping to foster a revival of arts accessible to the general public. Successes like these are frequently overlooked by critics of commercialization, among whom there is an unfortunate tendency to tar all sponsorship with the same brush, as if any contact with a corporate logo infects the natural integrity of an otherwise pristine public event or cause…
This picture of our culture’s lost innocence is mostly romantic fiction. Though there have always been artists who have fought fiercely to protect the integrity of their work, neither the arts, sports nor media have ever, even theoretically, been the protected sovereign states that McAllister imagines. Cultural products are the all-time favorite playthings of the powerful, tossed from wealthy statesmen such as Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, who set up the poet Horace in a writing estate in 33 BC, and from rulers like Francis I and the Medici family, whose love of the arts bolstered the status of Renaissance painters in the sixteenth century. Though the degree of meddling varies, our culture was built on compromises between notions of public good and the personal, political, and financial ambitions of the rich and powerful.
But is our culture good?
It was more innocent times, though. Back then it was still considered tacky that a book review online might have links that let you purchase the book.
Wanting to be cool makes our emotional life resonate with corporate executives’:
The quest for cool is by nature riddled with self-doubt (“Is this cool?” one can hear the legions of teen shoppers nervously quizzing each other. “Do you think this is lame/”) Except now the harrowing doubts of adolescence are the billion-dollar questions of our age. The insecurities go round and round the boardroom table, turning ad writers, art directors, and CEOs into turbo-powered teenagers, circling in front of their bedroom mirrors trying to look blase. Do the kids think we’re cool? they want to know. Are we trying too hard to be cool, or are we really cool? Do we have attitude? The right attitude?
…The companies that are left out of the crowd of successfully hip brands…now skulk on teh margins of society: the corporate nerds. “Coolness is still elusive for us,” says Bill Benford, president of LA Gear athletic wear, and one half expects him to slash his wrists like some anxious 15-year-old unable to face schoolyard exile for another term. No one is safe from this brutal ostracism, as Levi Strauss learned in 1998…
Cool, it seems, is the make-or-break quality in 1990s branding. It is the ironic sneer-track of ABC sitcoms and late-night talk shows; it is what sells psychedelic internet servers, extreme sports gear, ironic watches, mind-blowing fruit juices, kitsch-laden jeans, postmodern sneakers and post-gender colognes. Our “aspirational age,” as they say in marketing studies, is about 17. This applies equally to the 47-year-old baby boomers scared of losing their cool and the 7-year-olds kick-boxing to the Backstreet Boys.
It starts young, as she describes later in the book. All this was despite her hippie parents who tried to prevent it:
By the time I was 8 or 9, my back-seat daydreams grew more intricate. I spent an entire journey through the Rockies conducting covert makeovers on everyone in the car. My father would lose the sandals and get a sharp, dignified suit, my mother a helmet hairdo and a wardrobe of smart pastel blazers, skirts, and matching pumps. As for me, the possibilities were endless: kitchen cupboards filled with fake foods, closets overflowing with designer labels, unlimited access to eyeliner and perms. I wasn’t allowed to have a Barbie (“a racket”, my parents ruled, “first it’s a doll, then a camper van, then the whole mansion”) but I had Barbie in my brain.
It seemed as if the vanguard feminist-socialist child-rearing experiment was doomed to failure. Not only was I crazy for Shell signs, but by the age of 6, my older brother had developed an uncanny knack for remembering the jingles from television commercials and would tear around the house in his Incredible Hulk T-shirt declaring himself “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” At the time, I couldn’t understand why my parents were so upset about these stupid rhymes, but now I’ve come to feel their pain: despite their very best efforts, they had somehow given birth to an advertisement for General Mills–in other words, to regular kids.
It’s unclear to me that we ever fully “get over” or “get past” things that start so young. There’s always a trace of it, which we have to be self-conscious of. She’s not exactly defending “ironic consumption” here, noting that all it’s resulted in is “so bad it’s good” retroactive marketing for bad movies. But I think it’s interesting that the justification is so similar to empowerment through submission in “sex positive” feminism.
But Levi’s may have, once again, missed a “paradigm shift.” It hasn’t taken long for these attempts to seriously pitch the most generic of mass-produced products as punk-rock lifestyle choices to elicit sneers from those ever-elusive, trend-setting cool kids, many of whom had already moved beyond indie by the time teh brands caught on. Instead, they were now finding ways to express their disdain for mass culture not by opting out of it but by abandoning themselves to it entirely–but with a sly ironic twist. They were watching Melrose Place, eating surf ‘n’ turf in revolving restaurants, singing Frank Sinatra in karaoke bars and sipping girly drinks in tikki bars, acts that were rendered hip and daring because, well, they were the ones doing them. Not only were they making a subversive statement about a culture they could not physically escape, they were rejecting the doctrinaire puritanism of seventies feminism, the earnestness of the sixties quest for authenticity and the “literal” readings of so many cultural critics. Welcome to ironic consumption. The editor of the zine Hermenaut articulated the recipe:
Following the late ethnologist Michel de Certeau, we prefer to concentrate our attention on the independent use of mass culture products, a use which, like the ruses of camouflaged fish and insects, may not “overthrow the system,” but which keeps us intact and autonomous within that system, which may be the best for which we can hope…Going to Disney World to drop acid and goof on Mickey isn’t revolutionary; going to Disney World in full knowledge of how ridiculous and evil it al is and still having a great innocent time, in some almost unconscious, almost psychotic way, is something else altogether. This is what de Certeau describes as “the art of being in between” and this is the only path of true freedom in today’s culture. Let us, then, be in-between. Let us revel in Baywatch, Joe Camel, Wired magazine, and even glossy books about the society of spectacle [touche], but let’s never succumb to the glamorous allure of these things.
Isn’t the book its own form of trend-spotting?
The next post will pick up with her discussion of identity politics after the political correctness wars.