Ok, thanks to the genius of Typepad, I am posting while cut open, in surgery, under sedation, and, yes, to be really melodramatic about it, clinging to life by a thread and prayer. Ok, just a thread. (The things you have to do to ditch your prison tattoos.)

Anyhow, here from a feature in the Wall Street Journal called the ‘Stat snapshot,” are the numbers for fragrance sales through 10/31/04, broken out by gender.

Total Women’s U.S. Fragrance Sales $475.0 –
Total Men’s U.S. Fragrance Sales       $372.4 –
(Sales Through 10/31/04, in millions)

Wait. Let’s look at those again.

Total Women’s U.S. Fragrance Sales $475.0 –
Total Men’s U.S. Fragrance Sales       $372.4 –
(Sales Through 10/31/04, in millions)

That’s what I thought, too. I don’t wear a fragrance. I know you don’t wear fragrance. I don’t know anyone who does wear a fragrance. WTF?

I happen to know that Brian Williams wears fragrance. (We tried on the same jacket at a New Canaan clothing store.) But that’s it.

So what gives? WSJ reporter, Rebecca Cascade, notes that fragrance sales are down 17% since 2001 despite the wild success of fragrances by Elizabeth Taylor (White Diamonds) and J. Lo (Glow). In fact, even Michael Jordan’s cologne is on the skids.

I am soliciting explanations here. I have one idea. Unilever must be selling Axe by the tanker trailer full. 

I have high regard for Owen Gleiberman.  As a film reviewer for Entertainment Weekly, his view of Hollywood and contemporary culture is observant and thoughtful, and not infrequently illuminating.  

Gleiberman (and his colleague Lisa Schwarzbaum) represent an interesting episode in the evolution of popular culture.  Until standards rose, there was no hope that a popular magazine could attract, or would hire, critics as good as this. And once these two were in place, standards would have to rise again. Hollywood was being held to a higher standard. 

That’s why it is really very irritating that Gleiberman should have reviewed The Century of the Self in such glowing terms.  The COTS is a four-hour BBC mini-series, make in 2002 by Adam Curtis.  The terms actually do glow:

It’s rare to see a documentary that bursts your mind right open, exploding your perceptions of the world we live in. […] The Century of the Self is rapt, heady, and startling: the most profound documentary I’ve seen this decade.

Here’s the sad part. This documentary is junk social science.  It persuades Gleiberman that he has glimpsed the origins of contemporary culture when in fact he has seen yet another recitation of ideas that are shop worn and wrong.

The writer-director, Adam Curtis, crafts a vast and searching essay-mosaic to explore how the consumer culture recoded the nature of who we are inside. His film takes us back to the primal seed of modern marketing: the creation of public relations in the 1920s by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who drew on his uncle’s theories to envision a new kind of human being – not a rational citizen but an irrational consumer, enslaved by unconscious desires. Curtis uncovers how the 1939 World’s Fair, with its famous ”futurama” visions, was in fact a propaganda stunt of American business; how Joseph Goebbels drew on Bernays’ techniques to inspire the masses of the Third Reich; how the psychiatric elite, led by Anna Freud, were co-opted in secret by the corporate boardroom to create a homogenized vision of suburban normalcy.

There is so much that is sloppy, silly and exuberantly mistaken here, it’s hard to know where to begin.  But let us note three conflations: 1) marketing with public relations, 2) public relations with one practitioner thereof, 3) the idea that the 1920s represents the beginnings of marketing.  These ideas are not just incorrect, they are egregiously wrong.  They are what English school boys call “howlers.” 

Let’s press on. “Curtis uncovers how the 1939 World’s Fair…was in fact a propaganda stunt of American business.”  It is hard to reckon how thuggish you have to be as a public communicator, how openly and utterly hostile to intellectual substance and finesse, to make this claim…or report it with approval. Only a hooligan would so declare himself.  (This is self promotional of me, but there is a chapter in Culture and Consumption II that takes up this very question with a little more, oh, I don’t know, thoughtfulness.)

And finally, Gleiberman claims Curtis shows, “how the psychiatric elite, led by Anna Freud, were co-opted in secret by the corporate boardroom to create a homogenized vision of suburban normalcy.”  Well, yes, this is precisely what intellectuals thought was true of contemporary culture in the 1950s.  But in the last 50 years, we have come to a somewhat more nuanced and intelligent view of these particulars.

Here’s the deal. There was a time when Curtis’ argument was an open and lively issue in intellectual circles.  But now we know it must be wrong. Scholarship aside, there is prima facie evidence that this is so. What evidence? Magazines like Entertainment Weekly and writers like Owen Gleiberman. If our culture truly were a wasteland, neither one would or could exist.  

Contemporary culture has got better in almost all respects but the ideas with which we think about it have not.  These ideas, cultivated by the likes of David Riesman and John Kenneth Galbraith, have not caught up.  That these ideas are wrong does not discourage public critics like Bill Moyers and Bernard Barber from getting out the cardiac paddles in the hopes of animating the corpse for another 60 minutes or couple of hundred pages.  I thought critics were meant to kill bad ideas, not revive them. 

And this for me the real puzzler.  When people like Gleiberman recite this now antique, discredited and ludicrous concept of contemporary culture, they tend to do so as if it were brand new, as if it has just come to them as a wondrous revelation. They act, in sum, as if this argument has the power of an idea we have only just achieved.  But it is a long standing myth we have entertain about ourselves for at least have a century. Apparently this idea hangs out in Shangri La between airings.  Or there may be a better account for its perpetual youthfulness.  Thoughts?

That this myth, this meme, should have colonized even someone as smart and well informed as Owen Gleiberman, that’s just sad.  But there is good news: Gleiberman the critic is refutation of Gleiberman the argument.  

Post script:

It should be remembered that Adam Curtis is the documentarian who in 2004 accused British politicians of having constructed a “phantom enemy.”  Curtis called international terrorism, “a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media. … In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power." No apology for this position was forthcoming in July when “phantoms” killed more than 50 civilians in London.  

References

Anon.  2004.  The Making of the Terror Myth.  The Guardian. October 15, 2004. here.

Gleiberman, Owen. 2005. The Century of the Self: a magnetic doc about marketing’s powerful hold on us.  Entertainment Weekly. September 8, 2005, p. 60.

For citations of the academic literature at issue here, please see the bibliography in

McCracken, Grant. 2005. The culture wars continue.  This blogs sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  May 10, 2005.  here.

It is shamelessly self promotional of me, I know, but story-time today is an excerpt from my new book Culture and Consumption II.  This little essay was written some years ago while I was still living in Toronto.  I like it for a couple of reasons, but especially because it looks at the power of things. 

Uncle Meyer died in his sleep on August 4.  He was 82 and lived with his wife in a north Toronto high-rise.  He worked as a volunteer at an animal shelter.  He went for long walks.  He was a truly sweet guy, but not a very candid one.  He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve.  He didn’t regale you with the “Uncle Meyer” story.

    Except once.  One night after dinner, Uncle Meyer brought out his photographs.  I froze.  This is the relative’s great fear: caught without defenses when the photographs come out.

    Uncle Meyer did it perfectly.  He just materialized at the dinner table, photos in hand.  I felt myself struggling for an excuse.  Weren’t we double-parked in a fire zone on a traffic island?  Didn’t the sitter need a drive home to Rochester?  Uncle Meyer had us.  We bowed to the hard dictates of good form.

    And there is was.  Lying under the photographs was a wine-colored canvas wallet, about the size of a paperback.  It was stitched together boldly, and in place crudely with thick green thread.  “What’s this?” I asked, already in the object’s thrall.  Uncle Meyer looked up at me and then back at the wallet.  “Oh, that,” he said and stopped.

    I picked it up, the anthropologist suddenly on alert.  The wallet was what we might call, after Proust, a “Madeleine” object: an object charged with meaning and power.

    Madeleine objects have lots of different powers.  Sometimes they cut away the present time and place, and transport us – in Proust’s case to the exquisite embrace of a childhood bed and maternal attentions.  But sometimes they have a different influence altogether.  Sometimes they come at us like something airborne and night-flying.

    Uncle Meyer’s wallet was one of these.  It reached up and gave me a crack across the snout.  The last time I’d seen anything like this, I’d been peering into a museum display case, a Yale University art historian beside me.  We have been doing what academics tend to do, parading Ivy League manners, elegant theories, and artful phrases.

    We stopped to comment airily on something, and an Inuit mask came hurling up out of the case like a shark out of water.  The voracious energy of the thing!  It consumed our manners, our theories and our language.  Hah!  Our pretensions fled in terror, and we were suddenly bewildered little men blinking stupidly.  Uncle Meyer’s canvas wallet had something of this power.  It grabbed at the senses and made the world drain away.

    These Madeleine objects are still not much understood.  We have all seen them.  But they continue to make a mockery of even our grandest theory.  Once I thought this was because they had the power of an irreducible object, a sheer “thingness” before which ideas see empty, mere, abstract.  But Uncle Meyer’s wallet made me think again.  Madeleine objects overwhelm theories because they are more powerfully abstract than any theory could ever be.  Uncle Meyer’s wallet was an open cut on the surface of our reality, a hole through which culture came spilling into life.

    But there was a more tactile power to it, too.  Somehow it managed to be both personal and completely traditional.  Obviously, someone had made it, carefully placing each stitch.  But the wallet conformed to a pattern to which generations had contributed.  It let you see both the individual and the tradition from which it came.

    All this was nothing compared to its intimacy.  This little canvas envelope somehow transmitted the emotions that were present at its making.  You could sense the care taken to create something beautiful, and the comfort it gave its maker.

    And there was anxiety.  The wallet had not been easy to make.  It told you that the maker was in the clutches of a terrible emotion that drove the stitches in one direction and then another.  In short, the wallet howled because it was charged with rich and difficult meanings that it somehow conveyed as a single sensation.  To see the object was to be invaded by its meanings. 

    Uncle Meyer was slow to tell the story, but eventually he did.  The wallet was stitched 65 years ago by his mother.  She made it to hold his passport and the Canadian visa that would see him safely out of a land of terror, pogroms, state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. 

    Meyer was then 17.  He could leave Russia.  His family could not.  His father died of natural causes, he told me.  “My mother, well, the Nazis…I don’t know what happened.”

    He arrived in Canada in 1925, going first to Montreal and then to Edmonton to work for a relative.  He spent the early years moving back and forth across the country, a member of a team of Jewish roughnecks who worked on the construction of large buildings from Victoria to Kingston. 

    There was, after all, nothing dreary or domestic about Uncle Meyer’s photographs.  They were taken from the dizzying heights of construction sites: the Banff Springs Hotel, the Vancouver Medical-Dental Building, grain elevators across the prairies.  He recalled painting those elevators.  He and his pals liked to ride the wooden platforms when they banged around in high winds. 

    Meyer’s canvas wallet brought him to another country and another life.  He lived, despite his roughneck heroics, safe from harm.  He escaped the holocaust that claimed his family.

    He had come away from his home and his family with a few clothes and not much more.  As his mother prepared him for his departure, as she prepared herself for the fact that she would likely never see him again, she took up threat and canvas.  She made a wallet for his passport, so that her reckless, bounding son would not lose the paper that would see him into safety.  She produced an envelope to see Meyer into the envelope of the new world.  Meyer made it.  The wallet worked.

The first question for the marketer, according to Theodore Levitt, is “what business are you in?” 

 In Google’s case, this question has become more difficult to answer. 

Certainly, we could say that they are in the information or the information access business. And this is true. But it does not describe how they create value in the world…so it does not tell us how to proceed as marketers: build the brand, define the product, address promotion questions, choose targets and so on. (Clearly, Google is a marketing oddity from the start, and adjustments must be made.)

I think of Google as engaged in two larger projects. (I am now reporting my own experience of the brand. Think of this as an act of auto-ethnography. I know this sounds painful, and believe me, it is.)

Project 1: Google intelligence

Google is now my connection to internet and to this extent it is part of the exoskeleton that amplifies my cognitive capacity. This is odd for someone born at the middle of the last century. I am inclined to suppose the boundaries of the body are the limits of my intellectual equipment. Clearly, the internet changes all that. 

At the very least, it is a better memory. I can now access a good deal of what we know about the world. I can access much of what we think about what we know. This sort of “recall” puts to shame even the most capacious memory.

Blogging allows me to put “idle thoughts” before a formidable audience.  They help me think these thoughts. Issues of origin and ownership blur. This is a collective cognitive event.  Now, I’m thinking outside the skull. 

Normally, I take this new endowment for granted. But then my internet connection fails. I am suddenly stupider than usual. The electronic enablement of my intellect is suddenly down. I am thinking inside the skull.

Project 2: Google sociality

Here too we are moving away from literal definitions to virtual ones. As an old fashioned model, I am inclined to think that of my friends as people I have met, spend time with, stay in touch with. The internet changes all that, too.

When I was in Korea a couple of years ago, I was interested to see teenagers using the internet to build and maintain quite different social networks.  They were sending lots of messages to large groups of people. They were, as I came to think of it, “pinging the hive” almost constantly. Their parents had gathered a small group of friends together as they passed through high school, college, university, and so on. Korean teens were keeping many more acquaintances from every association to which they belonged. 

My group of personal friends remains small. But certainly, the internet and this blog gives me a group of, what shall I call them? People I know quite well despite the fact we have never met. In fact, I sometimes think I can hear TBSA readers in my head as I write. I think this is called “introjection.” Normally, you introject the voice of a family member. I don’t know what kind of symptom it represents when it’s a blog reader. (You know who you are. And thanks a lot.) 

Google does really have a play here, but with things like Talk, it soon will. 

In sum

What business is Google in? If this reckoning has anything to recommend it, they are in the business of making us smarter and more social. They are helping blur the boundary between the person and the machine. This is a substantial redefinition of personhood. They are also insinuating the individual into new and larger social networks. 

From an anthropological point of view, this is interesting. It marks the reworking of cultural categories and relationships. From a marketing point of view, it’s interesting, too. It represents the creation of massive value that share price may or may not fully capture. 

Google isn’t about information everywhere.  It’s much more Gibsonian. It’s about selves that stretch out of bodies onto the net.  It’s about friendships (or whatever we call them) entirely or largely mediated by the net.  These are more substantial value adds with which to build the brand, especially when it’s time to "get serious" in this department.  

(filed from Manhasset, Long Island)