Performing Consumers

Global Capital and its Theatrical Seductions

Maurya Wickstrom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134301034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Performing Consumers is an exploration of the way in which brands insinuate themselves into the lives of ordinary people who encounter them at branded superstores.

Looking at our performative desire to 'try on' otherness, Maurya Wickstrom employs five American brandscapes to serve as case studies: Ralph Lauren; Niketown; American Girl Place; Disney store and The Lion King; and The Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. In this post-product era, each builds for the performer/consumer an intensely pleasurable, somatic experience of merging into the brand and reappearing as the brand, or the brand's fictional meanings.

To understand this embodiment as the way that capital is producing subjectivity as an aspect of itself, Wickstrom casts a wide net, drawing on:

• the history of capital's relationship with theatre
• political developments in the United States
• recent work in political science, philosophy, and performance studies.

An adventurous study of theatrical indeterminancy and material culture, Performing Consumers brilliantly takes corporate culture to task.

Chapter 1
On the move at Niketown and Ralph Lauren

The flagship store, built around a single brand, is an innovation of the late 1980s and 1990s, a response, in part, to a crisis in consumer attitudes. Corporations found that the falsehoods of commodity culture were becoming transparent to consumers. People were getting savvy to the fact that the commodity wasn’t making good on its promises. The mere purchase of a piece of lingerie, a car, or a sports shoe wasn’t delivering a sexier self, a more chic self, or a more athletic self. Corporations were challenged to find a change of address to the consumer. Nike, for instance, developed ads characterized by an ironic attitude that would separate it, in consumer’s minds, from the vapid promises of prior advertising campaigns. It was to be a company with a conscience. In a Nike TV ad from this period, basketball star Charles Barkley says, referring to the shoes he wears: “They won’t make you rich like me. They won’t make you rebound like me. They definitely won’t make you handsome like me. It’ll only make you have shoes like me” (Goldman and Papson 1996:90). The approach worked. In the course of its phenomenal growth, Nike has shaped itself so that it seems not so much a merchandiser as a soul that we can share in, inspiring us to take leave of our limitations and climb to our own personal heights.

Other corporations were also developing an image of themselves as a mystique, an essence, a set of compelling life philosophies: in other words, they produced themselves in the form of a brand. Further, the flagship store, often called entertainment retail, was initiated as the ideal medium through which the brand essence could be felt and experienced. The stores were designed to communicate the inner architecture of the brand’s meanings, opening the brand to the senses (and embodiment) of consumers. Importantly, each store was “an immersing retail environment to tell a brand’s story” (Dorris 1997:103), over and above any attempt to actually move product. When the first Niketown opened in Portland, Oregon in 1991, only half of the space was devoted to merchandise display. People weren’t in these stores to buy products. They were there to experience the brand. They were there to experience the brand’s essence, inspiration and soul.

Since the early 1990s, entertainment retail has become a wildly successful form of experience, ubiquitous particularly in big cities and tourist destinations. Teams of marketing experts, brand gurus, architects, theatre designers, and corporate executives are continually honing the form and intention of this brand experience to suit the evolving requirements of corporate growth and consolidation. The focus of this chapter is on two of the earliest flagships, both in New York City: Niketown, on 57th Street, and Ralph Lauren on Madison Avenue.

Immaterial labor and the brandscape

Architectural journalist Otto Riewoldt uses the term “brandscape” (instead of entertainment retail) to describe stores intended to “get the customer to identify with the world of the brand, creating a brand awareness and providing it with a deep-set emotional anchor” (Riewoldt 2002:10). John Hoke, the Global Creative Director of Nike Brand Design, provides another, related angle on this emotional anchoring when he says that: “The Nike brand or brand experience is based on sowing the seed of a memory in your customer’s mind, so that you can draw on that memory again – ‘harvest’ it – weeks, months, years or even decades later” (Riewoldt 2002:103). For these men, the emotional life of the “customer” is targeted as a place of production, a deep field for the invention of memories, associations and affinities. Here the brand can be shaped, evolved, and manifested, its post-production value extracted or reaped by the corporation when the time is right.

This kind of productive labor by the performer/consumer in the brandscape corresponds to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “immaterial labor”. Immaterial labor, though it may be bodily, produces the immaterial products so increasingly indispensable to postmodern capitalism: information, communication, ideas, and emotional responses. A form of labor that can be and is conducted outside any of the traditional temporal or spatial organization of traditional labor, it corresponds to the spread of postmodern capitalism’s “global networks of production and control” (Hardt and Negri 2000:58).

Most importantly, immaterial labor is “biopolitical” (Hardt and Negri 2004:109) in that it doesn’t just produce goods and services, but social life itself. Labor moves far outside of the constrictions of the industrial mode of production such that the power of capital is extended into political, cultural, and social areas of life, the boundaries between which are increasingly blurred. Immaterial laborers, who may be working at innumerable kinds of social sites, are freed from the linear and hierarchical model of the factory and assembly line. The capitalist no longer has to mandate and oversee how, when, and where labor is organized to ensure its cooperation, but rather value is “capture[d]”. (Hardt and Negri 2004:113) from the cooperative labor of workers who have organized their own creative energies. What this means is that, increasingly, the emergent form of biopolitical capitalism depends upon our cooperative, “productive capacity” (Hardt and Negri 2000:213),¹ which is exercised across the social terrain. Hardt and Negri say that:

Labor and value have become biopolitical in the sense that living and producing tend to be indistinguishable. In so far as life tends to be completely invested by acts of production and reproduction, social life itself becomes a productive machine.

(Hardt and Negri 2004:148)

Brandscapes like Niketown and Ralph Lauren are aspects of this “productive machine.” The Nike and Ralph Lauren companies are dependent upon our active, creative, productive capacity as the source of their power and revenue as they traverse the globe through virtual networks of what Tran Vinh calls the “money web” (Chung et al. 2001:434). This condition of our common social life raises for me a series of questions that are guideposts for this chapter. What characterizes our immaterial labor in brand-scapes? What do we do, or feel, as we work? What exactly does our work produce? What precisely is the value to corporations that is reaped from the seeds sown deep into our productive, creative capacity? And finally, how does our productive capacity, as it is nurtured in these stores, become a capacity that is productive across brands, across corporate cultures, a revenue shared in common by all of them?

Being hit and making it up: the productive capacity of the mimetic body

In what follows, I weave in and out of my experience at Niketown, moving from its heart-stopping rhythms to the theory that might help me understand what I am doing here, and what use Nike hopes to make of me.

When I walk through the front doors into the chrome and glass futurism of Niketown, I’m awed by the power of a circular atrium that heads straight up five stories high. It’s ringed by the floors of the store that open out on to it, floors boundaried by steel railings and cables, beautiful industrial engineering. It’s as if I’ve stepped into a kind of machine, like a spaceship to elsewhere, or a transformer that might whirl me into a centrifugally engineered otherness. There are steel and chrome girders, giant columns with openings for lights that look like X-ray machines. The whole place looks and feels, in fact, like something of a cross between a futuristic fantasy and a kind of medical environment in which inexplicable machinery of the highest technological caliber promises interpretations, regenerations, or transformations of the body.

I’m caught off guard when, with a sudden swoosh, so loud it seems to vibrate from inside me, the room darkens, and, like a giant automata, a two and a half story projection screen rolls itself relentlessly downward, spilling into the heart of the atrium to the beat of pulsing techno pop. On the screen there are montages of athletes in exertions that seem superhuman, other than human, grand, beautiful, and heroic. The screen event is clearly the techno-heart of the store, pumping its blood on a rhythmic schedule.

The effect of this filmic event is overwhelming, irresistible, immediately inside all my senses. Walter Benjamin speculated early in the twentieth century that the new motion picture camera was a mimetic machine that inaugurated a welcome resurgence of mimesis in a modern, post-Enlightenment world from which it had been eliminated. He compared the camera to the work of the surgeon, who dissolves the distance between himself and what he perceives as his hands move deeply into contact with the organs inside the patient’s body (see Benjamin 1968:233). Michael Taussig, developing Benjamin’s idea, says of this experience: “You don’t so much see as be hit” (Taussig 1993:30). This is my sensation as the screen pours down. My heart begins to pound, my blood begins to pump, my muscles to throb. I watch, but at the same time, I feel myself moving, and moving as if the rhythms of the screen were my own. I’m not moving like the athletes on the screen. I’m not an athlete and, after all, I’m standing in one place. But I feel beginning to explode in me a new potential to move as if I were them, as if I were coming unfixed, unstuck, moving from one state to another – moving as an athlete, and, maybe, moving from my place in life.

I wonder at the awesome corporeality at the heart of this store’s design. Nike wants my body sucked into this rhythm, even as global capital seems to rely increasingly on the incorporeal, on digital and electronic transmission and accumulation, on the disembodiment of cyberspace. I’m struck by what Riewoldt (2002) calls

the paradoxical phenomena that, by enabling and anchoring immediate brand experiences, the IT age has actually upgraded the physical location. We are not talking here about virtual non-experiences in the no-mans-land of the Internet, but about concrete encounters in real locations, where the world of the brand is staged and enacted.

(Riewoldt 2002:8)

It’s clear that brandscape architects and designers find neither the privilege traditionally accorded to sight and vision in the Western world, or the seductions of the Internet, primarily useful in seeding the brand into customers. They’re working in a different medium: it’s a somatic epistemology, an embodied comprehension. They’re creating mimetic environments in which there is a “palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived” (Taussig 1993:21). Hoke, the Nike brand designer, says:

Our customers experience Niketown live – an immediacy that accounts for much of the success of this particular concept … The general public has a sense that they want more – they want a story, they want emotions, they want to react very strongly, both physically and emotionally … In the past, the tools we had at our disposal were largely non-emotive ones. With today’s technologies – encompassing lighting, smell, sound and vision – we are definitely able to pinpoint emotions in each customer … when we are designing a new store we make sure that the design takes all the senses into account. We try to create a design that is visually spectacular, and to seduce our customers with fragrances that conjure up particular emotions: we also design our products to be attractive in tactile terms, through the materials we use. To create a total experience you have to involve all the senses. In the culture we have grown up with, our understanding of the world is a highly visual one, increasingly restricted to two-dimensional forms of expression based on a computer or a television screen. Part of our work is to convey a real experience of the world, not a virtual one.

(Riewoldt 2002:107–9)

When the driving rhythm of the techno screen and the movement of the athletes slams into me, Nike becomes a percept: it is known to me through my senses. Hoke and other brandscape architects are counting on my mimetic faculty, which can be characterized as a compulsion or desire to take what I perceive into the physiology of my own body. When Hoke talks about sowing the seeds of Nike in customers this is why he needs the body to do it, this is why he needs the immediacy unavailable through Internet shopping. Virtual shopping remains a spectral activity, the distance or difference between myself and the merchandise or brand I see there intact. If, on the other hand, I take Nike in through the physiological responsiveness of my body, the distance is dissolved. Nike is the surgeon’s hands inside me, rearranging me.

There I stand, vibrating with the pulverizing, contagious experience of the swoosh, alive with a sense of how I might be changed. I begin to look around, and I notice then that I’m standing on a glass-covered opening in the floor. Looking through it, I see that about three feet below where I stand there’s an old gym floor and an abandoned, battered basketball – preserved relics. Gathered toward the future, I am standing on a window to the past. Looking up and to the right, I see that there is a break in the wall of the store that exposes, behind it, what must be the wall of the old gym whose floor I’ve just glimpsed. The wall is encrusted with the markers of an old game, poised to begin. There are the old kind of clocks, with bulbs that can be made to light up in the shape of any number to keep time, to keep score. From this perspective, I see that the walls of the Nike store are offset from old brick walls all around. They’re braced apart from them by black beams in a display of engineering which suddenly makes the store appear to me as a techno bubble suspended within an archaic athletic environment. I move toward the old wall but find that I can only get about eight feet away from it. The store floor across which I move abruptly ends at that point, revealing beneath me, again, that old gym floor.

I’m protected from the drop, the difference between my techno environment and this abandoned, aged site, by guardrails. This viewing position is touristic, archeological, like being on the brink of a dig. The excavation is without smell or flavor, without the seductions of memory that tempt us toward a movement of recovery, a journey backward toward the past (nostalgia) (see Seremetakis 1994: 4). The past I witness from the railings is only a checkpoint by which to mark my point of departure into Nike. I can’t smell the past, hear it, or touch it. Without these sensory cues, there is no danger of a return.

At the same time, though, this glimpse of the past suggests that memory is something that I can invent. I reach into the past before me for my memory of a sweated body belonging to me in a time long before this. The techno wrap that’s making my heart pound converges with a memory I am in the process of inventing. The convergence calls up in me the physical capacities of youth, the heart pounding, sweating, pain-mixed euphoria of being at a physical peak. The evocation of this physiologically experienced sensation – that I can in this moment believe belonged to myself when I was young (and therefore physically capable of such things) – helps me to feel as if I really could become, move, lose my constrictions like the athletes on that screen.

In feeling this moment of an invented past (and other moments yet to come), I am experiencing an aspect of the mimetic faculty; I am “sutur[ing] the real to the really made up” (Taussig 1993:86). Mimesis is a capacity that allows us to travel a spectrum ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 On the move at Niketown and Ralph Lauren
• Chapter 2 Robots, gods and greed
• Chapter 3 The Lion King, mimesis, and Disney’s magical capitalism
• Chapter 4 Making Americans
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index