"Far out, Moonbeam! They've co-opted our co-op!"

With a hat tip to Right Reason, I came across an Economist article (reprinted here in Financial Express) entitled “Postmodernism is the new black.” The article suggests that contemporary retail “niche” marketing has been influenced by the likes of such so-called postmodern thinkers as “[Jean-François] Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida [who] were all from the far left ... [and who] wanted to destroy capitalism and bourgeois society.”

It seems to me, however, that the article makes more, for example, out of Foucault's suggestion that his followers read Hayek than is really there to be made. (I’d have to say, by the way, I know more people who started with Hayek and eventually got around to reading Foucault than vice versa.) Richard Branson, mentioned in the article, and other modern marketers may have been exposed to a bit of PoMo musings back in their school days and may even subsequently have co-opted some PoMo pet phrases, but I doubt that sort of thing is much different from the almost obligatory references to Wittgenstein, Einstein or Freud some thirty or forty years ago.

I wrote recently about the irrelevance of who gets to anchor the CBS Evening News, noting the proliferation of alternative news sources in contemporary society. This, too, is a sort of PoMo “fragmentation” example. However, we might just as easily say that new technology has simply facilitated an expanded market in response to a previously frustrated demand for alternatives. There may be counterexamples here and there, but the Leftist suspicion that producers create demand as opposed to merely (if they’re lucky) responding to it is itself suspicious. The problem isn’t that we don’t really want all the things producers would sell us but that producers don’t have nearly as many things to sell us as we want.

That is not to say there isn’t now or hasn’t always been a great deal of crap offered for sale, including not only material crap but aesthetic and intellectual crap, and it is as true of expensive crap as it is of cheap crap. That is, long before Rodeo Drive there were the shops at St. Mark’s Square in Venice and today's Dollar Store is simply this generation’s Five & Dime. Quick Quiz: Other than Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson (and without using the internet), name a few of Shakespeare’s fellow Elizabethan playwrights. Nope, I can’t either. Much of what was produced in every age or generation was quite properly soon discarded and forgotten. Why should our age be any different?

The contemporary enclosed mall is in many respects merely the climate controlled downtown of an earlier generation, itself the shop-by-shop enclosed equivalent of the agora. If anything, the most depressing thing about the contemporary mall is its lack of diversity. The same chain stores are to be found in every mall from coast to coast and the anchor department stores offer the same depressingly few currently popular designer goods also sold at the designers’ own boutique shops, often in the same malls. The internet holds the promise of being the ultimate mall, but even it is content starved by comparison to our desires, the virtual equivalent of Moscow's old Soviet-era GUM department store, vast beyond comprehension but with largely empty showcases and shelves.

Having lived through (and participated in) the counter-culture of the 1960’s, I have some visceral lingering sense of the frustration among some of those who never quite made it out of the ‘60’s over what they take to be the bourgeois capitalist co-opting of their anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois worldview. But that is to say only that I was once blissfully unaware that all those beads and tie-dyed shirts and bongs and black lights and “underground” records and such were even then just a market response to demand, no different from how PBS has now replaced most of its airing of symphonic music with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock or reunion tours of once skinny, long haired rockers who now stand paunchy and bald on stage to play their decades old greatest hits. Even “the French philosophers whose interest in accessories was limited to a Gauloise” needed not only the local tabac but also the huge commercial network that stocked its shelves. Should we go all PoMo and call that a Niche-sche market?