Pam and I went for a drive through Brooklyn over the weekend: the Heights, Bensonhurst, Carroll Gardens, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Sheepshead, that sort of thing. My conclusion: Brooklyn is very large. Coney Island is very small. (In person, the cyclone’s more like a tornado.)

We drove right past a store called American Apparel in downtown Brooklyn. This is what it said in the window.

Made in L.A.
Sweatshop Free
Brand-Free Clothes

As brand propositions go, this one is interesting.

Some of the brand meanings are being “sourced” from the way the clothes are made. One of the triumphs of capitalism, and the thing that the Marxists had trouble grasping, is that the meaning of a product only rarely comes its production. Generally, only “hand crafted” products take on meaning this way. Usually, meanings come from marketing, not making. (This is one of the things that Charles Revson had in mind when he said, “In the factory, we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.”)

Still, there was an opportunity here. The specter of sweat shops and the hits taken by Kathy Lee Gifford, Nike and Benetton, meant that someone was going to seize the marketing, as opposed to the moral, advantage of working state side. (Frankly, until someone factors in the social good that is extinguished when members of the Third World are denied access to employment in off shore factories, I am undecided. More simply: buying “Made in L.A.” costs someone in the Third World.) As the AA website puts it: “Our goal is to make garments that people love to wear without having to rely on cheap labor.”

But American apparel doesn’t stop there. Theirs is a “via media.”

American Apparel is a youth-directed company, founded without the assistance of institutional investors. Having no political ties, the company has rejected established norms on all sides; we’ve dismissed both the corporate right and the politically correct left in favor of something new.

Oh, so it’s not one of those “let’s pretend this isn’t a business” propositions. No, sir. At first, this casual flipping of the bird in the direction of the Thomas Franks of the world seems gratuitous, but then you notice the obvious: AA is not a union shop. This is a middle way: anti sweat shop and anti union. Tools down. All out.

But not a brand? Really? There’s a name, a product, provocative catalogue, a well designed website, lots of images of stunning, young models, a front story, a back story. Not least, this brand, constructed and positioned to take on very potent meanings at the moment, is not on equity the way an ancient Cape Dory takes on water. Wishing can’t make it so. If is walks like a brand, and it talks like a brand, chances are that’s exactly what it is.

The history of branding is filled with “x, not-x” strategies. The oppositional move says, “You know x? We’re not that.” (Coke-Pepsi, Avis-Hertz, CBS-Fox, IBM-Apple and so on.) But the brand strategy goes a step further. It says, “We are not J. Crew. In fact, we’re not even a brand.” We could call this the Escher strategy in brand building. And one of these days, American Apparel, the brand that isn’t a brand, is going to be worth a lot of money.

I think I see President Summers’ problem.  He has been speaking to his Harvard faculty when he should have been addressing the Yalies of the Yard. 

I don’t have a lot of ethnographic data on Yalies but I do recall one astonishing weekend I spend with 8 of them in Washington.  We were there for a Yale-Smithsonian conference and, as part of the proceedings, we, the participants, were driven around the nation’s capital in a small van.

What caught my attention (and there is nothing like forcible confinement to sharpen the senses) is that the Yalies kept up a line of self congratulatory humor and comment that said, roughly, ‘this may be Washington, but we are Yalies!’   It was as if they were trying to show they were not threatened by the nation’s capital.  In that great tradition of protesting too much, they managed to demonstrate just the opposite:  "This is Washington, we are terrified."

As I say, it is not a lot of data, but it makes a nice little puzzle.  Why would people from one of the nation’s great universities become defensive when obliged to tour the nation’s capital? 

One way to solve this puzzle is to embark in a long, reckless, thoroughly speculative, and utterly groundless discourse on Yale’s strategy of self presentation, and this is precisely what I intend now to do.  For roughly 304 years, Yale has fought a status game with Harvard and lost it almost every year.  (They’ve done somewhat better in the classic football contest, where the two schools are virtually tied.)  For all its greatness, Yale is poorer than Harvard in virtually every category.  For all its antiquity, it is a newcomer.  Yale sometimes wins "the game" (as they call the Harvard-Yale gridiron contest).  It almost never wins the comparison. 

This is tough on a college, even one as mighty as Yale, and a response is called for.  The classic cultural response is to doubt the grounds of the comparison, and here, I think, Yale may have been tempted by two options.  The first is to insist that Yale is other-worldly and to that extent a finer, more cerebral enterprise than Harvard.  This is one of the ways Oxford declares its difference from Cambridge and all those earnest, artless scientists on the fens.  The second, and this might be offered as a demonstration of the first, is to position Yale as a place that refuses power as enthusiastically as Harvard pursues it.  (Do universities "position" themselves in this manner?  Nations do.  At the end of the 19th century, France recognized that it would lose all future military contests to Germany and all economic ones to England.  Culture seemed the wisest course, the prudent thing to do.)

Did Yale "manage" the Harvard comparison this way, by escaping it on the grounds of a higher calling?  I can’t say.  This is, I hasten to remind you, discourse both speculative and groundless.  But we judge ideas by the work they perform in the world, and this one helps explain a couple of things.  It would explain why those Yalies were so threatened by Washington.  It would also explain why Yales are so often liberal and/or lefty.  (If there is a single reason that keeps the Democrats out of the mainstream, it is their presumption of moral superiority.  Thus have they removed themselves from the mainstream.)  Finally, it would explain why we’ve heard of almost no one at Yale.  I bet with a little effort you could name ten to twenty people teaching at Harvard.  Take a moment.  Think of Yale.  Three?  Five?  Any?  No, Yale is too good for this world, too good in any case to be compared with the likes of worldly Harvard.  ("Whew!  You can not judge us, we are too fine.")

That’s the trouble with this status strategy.  Renounce the world often enough and, after awhile, otherworldliness becomes obscurity.  Those who are too good for the world are charged with ever fewer responsibilities and finally, the world begins to lose interest altogether. 

Back to President Summers (just ignore the sound of gears grinding heroically as I redirect the argument).  President Summers comes from the outer ring of his university, the economics department, a place so worldly and influential it supplies many people for Washington posts, including, of course, Summers himself, who was secretary of the treasury there.  Harvard has not been shy about power.  The business school, the law school, the medical school, these are the brilliant rings of the planet and carry the university’s influence out into the world and back again.  Ironically, only the Kennedy school manages to keep itself disengaged (managing to look a little Yale-like in the process). 

All of the professional schools know a thing or two about chain of command, the realities of power, the privileges of standing, and what it takes to make the world bend to Harvard’s, or anyone’s, influence.  The rule here, and it’s got to be in Machiavelli somewhere, you can’t be too particular or fastidious.  You must get on with it.  The chief executive officers of these schools are not quite CEOS in the corporate sense, but certainly they bear very little resemblance to the godly churchmen who were their predecessors.  They know the lessons, the realities, of power in a way that most academics do not. 

Here’s the rub.  President Summers comes from these outer rings.  He embraced its culture.  He constituted himself a creature of power, a man of standing.  He wore, we might say, his rings on his sleeve.  And then he made an anthropological error.  He assumed that his Harvard was everybody’s Harvard.  He failed to see the Yalies within. 

Mr. President!  The first rule of rhetoric is "know your audience."  Harvard has a little Yale, the scholars who occupy the liberal arts, the social sciences and the Yard.  These people are largely shut out of, or kept from, Harvard’s engagement with the world.  Not for them the government posts, the consulting gigs, the television interviews, the world’s eager consultation.  For most of them the "ambit of influence" is the table they commandeer each day at the Faculty Club, and, outside of academic circles, not much more.  (I am using here a rhetorical trope here called "exaggeration".)

I’m sure this rankles but it should not surprise.  After all, most scholars in the humanities and social sciences have made Yale’s bargain with the universe.  They have insisted that they are much too good, too noble, too moral to engage with the world.  They are now a little like ceremonial creatures of court removed from the world that they might commune with the gods.  Not for them the rough and ready pragmatism of the outer rings.  As keepers of the nobler view, they are, some of them, just a dubious hat and push cart away from wandering out of the Yard to shout imprecations at startled fellow Cantabrigians.  (That pesky trope again.)

This strategy of absenting yourself from the real world has many implications.  Some of them are tragic.  (The social sciences and humanities are now frightfully out of touch with some of the real compelling intellectual issues of our day.  Too bad.  They might have been useful.)  But here is the important implication for our purposes.  If you are surrounded by power but kept from it, if you are made a ceremonial creature, but only that, if you absent yourself from the world, and rewarded with obscurity, if all these things are true, you are in a very bad temper a good deal of the time.  The world has done you wrong.

Now, we know what happens to ceremonial creatures when they are wronged.  They become obsessed with form.  The world may not respond to their will, but they will have their due.  They will insist upon a precise acknowledgment of every detail of the ritual regime.  In President Summers’ case, this means no gratuitous references to the ROTC program, that sterling demonstration of the military-industrial-educational complex.  It means no reckless comments about women and science.  This too is, forgive me, a "motherhood" issue in the Yard.  And it means that the President may not evidence the arrogance of the CEO from the outer ring, nor the swash buckling style we might expect from a man who owes his Harvard position, in part at least, to the fact that he once had a corner office in the corridors of power. 

Finally, the Yalies of the Yard have one metapragmatic directive: you may have power, you may have the task of bending the world to Harvard’s will, but.don’t.rub.our.noses.in.it!  Give us this illusion: what we think matters, what we do counts.  And by all means, observe the ceremony and ritual that is our balm, our succor, our consolation.  Mr. President, we have only one power, that of form, and unless you honor us by acknowledging it, we, sir, will make you pay. 

(Sorry that got a little CSI: Miami at the end there, didn’t it?)

Prefatory note: Wow, the “what should Meg Whitman know about contemporary culture post” proved to be quite a lot more time consuming that expected. Hope to post it next week.

On an emergency trip to the dentist yesterday, I learned that Americans have been whitening their teeth at such a furious pace that the makers of caps, crowns and in-fills cannot match the new American mouth. Their stuff just isn’t white enough.

According to the American Association of Cosmetic Dentistry, teeth whitening/bleaching has increased by over 300% in the past 5 years, direct bonding has increased by over 100% in the past 5 years, veneers have increased by over 250% in the past 5 years.

The trend to whiter teeth looks like a simple matter of vanity caught in an inflationary spiral. The moment any significant group of consumers whitens its teeth, all other consumers are obliged to follow suit. People who were once whitening for competitive advantage, now must whiten merely to sustain parity. It’s the cold war all over again.

So the question is not “why so much whitening.” Once this gets started, it will run its course. The question is “what was the ignition point” that got things going.

I haven’t done the research here so what follows is surmise. But plainly there is an inclination to transformation in our culture that grows ever more powerful.

In the 1980s, I knew a man in his 80s. He was a plain spoken, hard working, Protestant corn farmer, smart as the dickens, and utterly true to rural form. He was the kind of guy who liked to read his way through an encyclopedia and then think about things with a craftman’s care while out in the fields. I remember asking him a question about the rural economy. He hardly seemed to acknowledge the question, and, then, about 15 minutes later, he gave me an almost perfect recitation of the pertinent facts and figures. Just took him awhile to find the file. The thing about this guy is that for all his fierce and thorough intelligence, he looked like every other farmer in his neighborhood. I think of him as a kind of bench mark for the transformation culture. “Farm form,” let’s call this.

Mr. Woolcott’s farm house was utterly unadorned despite the fact that he had lived there with his wife all his married life, raising 4 kids in the process. His clothing was whatever he happened to find at the local clothing store. I believe the motto here was: “nothing flashy.” His idea of branding was wearing a baseball cap with a seed supplier’s logo. His view of the body was interesting. God gave you one. You used it till you used it up. The idea of any kind of intervention, surgical, fashionable, cosmetic was unthinkable. I would dearly love to see his wonderfully unforthcoming face struggle to maintain blankness in the face of an off hand question, “So, Mr. Woolcott, I’m thinking getting my teeth whitened. What do you think?”

We are moving away from “farm form” at something like light speed. In the place of the idea that “use your body up,” we are now treat the body as a rough first approximation, variously to be reworked by exercise, surgery, clothing, and design of every kind. This is not the place to wring hands and regret the new, intoxicated inauthenticities of our culture. From an anthropological point of view, it is enough to say, ‘this is what cultures do from time to time” and to wonder what it was the prompted our culture to do it now.

Some of it has to do with our admiration for celebrities. By this standard, all of us have teeth too dim. Joan Kron in her work on plastic surgery says that much of what we know about the medicine thereof comes out of Hollywood and the willingness of the stars of the early 20th century to submit themselves to experimental procedures. Celebrities became exemplars of transformation and they helped pioneer some of the techniques thereof.

But there must be a Goffmanian answer here, as well. Smiles are “dazzling,” we are blinded by the light. Really dazzling smiles have the effect of making the smiler seem glamorous and a little inaccessible…a little not of this world…at least not of my world. And this is a strange thing because a smile is an opening of the body, and this has always been a dismantling of defenses and a invitation to approach. New, brighter, whiter smiles seem to send a double message: I am fabulous, you may approach me. Or it may be that here too, we wish to have our cake and eat it too, to appear sensational and approachable, the two at once. And when you think about it, celebrities, the ones who climb to real greatness, do manage to square this circle with apparent ease.

It’s also true that there are moments when we wish to be light bearing. Someone once told me that when she was interviewing celebrities she noted that they were always the brightest, whitest person in the room…it was as if, she said, the light was flowing from them. Then she noticed that the celebrities were always drinking water and she wondered whether there was not some connection. Hydrated skin was more light bearing.

It would be easy to say that we always want to be light bearing but there are moments in the West when this is the last thing that people want. We have a community in our midst that wants never to be light bearing: goths and of course tortured poets (when these are not the same person).

Why light bearing? What is “light” here in the cultural code of the moment? What is the act of bearing light (in the cultural code of the moment)? What attributions do we make to those who are light bearing?

There is lots more to puzzle over here but I have to get out into the field. I turn the question over to gifted readers. The question: why did we start whitening? What difference does this difference make? What penalty in the economy of glances do you pay if your teeth are, like mine, too dim. What advantage comes to those who have turned up the wattage? Is there any penalty for teeth that are too white? Can teeth be too white?

Meg Whitman allowed her name briefly to stand for the CEO position at Disney last week.

“Oh, no,” I thought, “not another Disney executive who knows nothing about contemporary culture!” (Faithful readers of this blog will know that the cultural literacy of Disney leaders has been contemplated in these “pages” before.)

Is this true? Is Ms. Whitman on or off the Cluetrain when it comes to culture? It’s hard to tell. Biographical notes scattered over the net are not encouraging. Whitman sprinted through high school…and this is where most of us begin our study of contemporary culture, especially popular movies and films. (A Martian looking at things “objectively” would have to say, “yes, parents send their kids to high school for math and biology. The kids go for music and film.”)

Whitman then choose economics at Princeton, and, again, this probably took her away from a deep knowledge of her culture, not towards it. She was only 21 when she hit the Harvard Business School and I can tell you from my own experience there that this place is almost hermetically sealed against the possibility of cultural competence finding its way into the curriculum. To speak ill for a moment of an institution that is otherwise exemplary, HBS is high school all over again. Occasionally, in the classroom or my office I would raise some aspect of contemporary culture as a talking point and the student(s) would blink rapidly and I could hear a frenzy of search activity as they activated a base of knowledge and perspective that is never otherwise as part of their education. (Talk about Martian.)

So on balance there is a good chance that Meg Whitman is not a wunderkind when it comes to knowing the culture she would both ride and shape as Disney CEO.

Then I thought, “Who cares! Whitman has other qualities. This CEO gets responsiveness as few CEOS do.”

When we hire people, they often don’t understand what eBay is. It takes six months for people to actually understand. Often your instincts coming from more traditional companies are wrong. We have to enable the community, we can’t direct them. Our community is people, not wallets. The people who end up not being as effective as they otherwise might be are ones that try to control and direct as opposed to listen and enable.

Q: Do you still get direct feedback yourself from the community?
A: Yeah. First of all, the community has my e-mail address. It’s meg@ebay.com. I read all my own e-mail — anywhere from 100 to 500 e-mails a day — many of which are from the community. So I have a pretty good pulse of what’s happening out there. Also, at least a couple of times a week, I check the eBay discussion boards. I can get a real good pulse there. And I often sit in on Voice of the Customer groups.

Whitman says, “This company truly is built by the community of users.” So what would Disney look like if it were run by someone who actually published their email address. It is of course utterly inconceivable to think of Eisner doing such a thing. By the sound of things, Eisner took some pains to avoid consulting his own executives, let alone the movie-going public.

When Whitman took eBay over, it was tech driven. Now it’s consumer driven. Of eBay’s nearly 5,000 employees, 2,400 are in customer support and 1,000 in technology. What a fine idea: vast network of email and phone intelligence gathering with which Disney assiduously listens to the shifting tides of taste and preference. What did people think of the picture they saw last night? Tell me what you think of your visit to Disneyworld right now! Who are you, where are you, what’s happening right now? What, in short, would Disney look like if the CEO believed, “This company truly is built by the community of users”?

Clearly, the ability to listen is not enough by itself. The CEO still has to know something about the culture to which he or she is listening. Otherwise, they are in the famous Balinese figure of speech, as water buffalo listening to a symphony. Or, to use the language of a Cambridge don: unless you have concept, the world is all percept.

Tomorrow: what a CEO would have to know to possess cultural literacy.

References
Hof, Robert D. 2003. Meg Whitman on eBay’s Self-Regulation. BusinessWeek. August 18, 2003.
here

Lashinsky, Adam. 2003. Meg and the Machine. Fortune Magazine. August 11, 2003
here

Mangalindan, Mylene and Joann S. Lublin. 2005. After Disney Try, EBay’s Whitman Sees Star Rise. Wall Street Journal. March 14, 2005.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Disney: CEOs and the arcane art of predicting contemporary culture.
here