The Economy of Icons: How Business Manufactures Meaning

The Economy of Icons

The Economy of Icons How Business Manufactures Meaning Ernest Sternberg

Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data Sternberg, Ernest, 1953– The economy of icons : how business manufactures meaning / Ernest Sternberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–96641–0 (alk. paper) 1. Economics—Psychological aspects. 2. Values—Psychological aspects. 3. Imagery (Psychology) 4. Symbolism in advertising. I. Title. HB74.P8S74 1999 330'.01'9—dc21 99–14852 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 䉷 1999 by Ernest Sternberg All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99–14852 ISBN: 0–275–96641–0 First published in 1999 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America TM

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Zohara

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction 2 Fabulous Food 3 Sanctuaries in the Landscape 4 The Labor of the Persona 5 The Fabulous Mode of Production 6 Staging a Natural Wonder 7 The Meaningful Restaurant Notes Selected Bibliography Index

ix 1 11 37 59 83 109 131 145 169 173

Acknowledgments

I might never have written this book had I not received from the Rollo May Center at the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco, a grant to examine the applications of the humanities to the study of business and the economy. I am very grateful for the Rollo May Board’s support for this kind of risky, crossdisciplinary study, and hope my results merit the trust they put in me. Publishers of four journals kindly gave permission to include in the book revised versions of my articles. I thank Carfax Publishing Limited, PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 3UE, United Kingdom, for permission to include ‘‘A Case of Iconographic Competition: The Building Industry and the Postmodern Landscape,’’ Journal of Urban Design, vol. 1, no. 2, June 1996, pp. 145–164. Reprinted from Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 24, No. 4, ‘‘The Iconography of the Tourism Experience,’’ pp. 951–969, Copyright 1991, with permission from Elsevier Science. Also, reprinted from Futures, Vol. 30, No. 1, ‘‘Phantasmagoric Labor: The New Economics of Self Presentation,’’ pp. 3–22, Copyright 1998, with permission from Elsevier Science. The Institute for Critical Thinking gave permission to reprint ‘‘The Meaningful Restaurant: Reality and Authenticity in Environmental Design,’’ Inquiry: Critical Thinking across the Disciplines, vol. 17, no. 2, Winter 1997, pp. 101–113.

x

Acknowledgments

Among the many who helped me with good counsel and criticism are Mitchel Y. Abolafia, Walter Truett Anderson, Sam Cole, Catherine Z. Elgin, Bruno B. Freschi, Hiroaki Hata, Thomas Hays, Elzbieta Kazmierczak, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Martin Krieger, Stanley Krippner, Dominick LaCapra, Seymour J. Mandelbaum, and David Perry. Magda Cordell McHale gets my special thanks for her kindness, wisdom, and good advice. Some helped with one chapter, some with more, but none necessarily agreed with the points I have made, which are my responsibility, for better or worse. Deborah Koshinsky has my thanks for bibliographic assistance. Not least, I appreciate Jeremy Geelan’s support and his usual exuberance. My warm thanks also go to John Forester, my long-time mentor, who sat with me over a lunch of vermicelli in Ithaca, and urged me to finish the work at a time when I was wavering. And Elie, Danny, Benny, and Rebecca get a special acknowledgment because they, as compared to this book, have grown faster, with less difficulty, and more beautifully.

The Economy of Icons

Chapter 1

Introduction

Even at the local mall, in a store selling wristwatches, there is a lesson in the iconic transformation of the economy. Hundreds of watches are on display in glass cases under gleaming lights. In a series that shares a brand name with a magazine of outdoor adventure, one watch shows miniature scenes of duck-hunting in a reed-filled swamp and another shows fly-fishing in a cascading stream. Their straps are thick and rough to suggest ruggedness, some colored in camouflage, perhaps to ensure that no passing ducks are alerted. In another series, which shows the hours as electronic digits on a black screen, the watchfaces are etched with silvery details reminiscent of advanced instruments and the straps seem to be made of futuristic alloys. These watches measure minute fractions of a second, tell the phases of the moon, maintain perpetual calendars, and in a few models provide tiny appended keyboards. Both groups stress accuracy in waters deep enough and peaks high enough that any passing scuba diver or mountain climber would be reassured. Of course all the watches are gendered, the genders separated by aisles and display cases. Women’s models express the daintiness of girlhood, chicness of high fashion, floweriness of natural beauty, frilliness of lingerie, or the white-and-gold bliss of the bridal veil and wedding ring. Some watches are overtly thematic, such as those of either gender that brandish reptile-skin bands and jeweled studs, in-

2

The Economy of Icons

dicators (however unreliably) of luxury and status, and mark the hour with Roman numerals, for a touch of gentility. Others, like the spare black watchface with the Swiss brand name and understated translucent studs as hour markers, seem at first glance to make no overt reference at all. It turns out, however, that for those who have seen the right movie or advertisement, this black watch, too, is exuding a theme. It does so not through any telling features I observe on the watch itself, but by reference to the meaningful scenes in which the watch has been represented outside the store—to the stories and events in which the watch has been situated. Having been worn by the helmsman as he guided the yacht through the splashing waves, or prominently exhibited on the dancer’s wrist, which has in itself been conspicuously placed over the back of the woman in evening dress as they glided along the dance floor, the watch acquired thematic content. Despite the spareness of the actual design, a medium of representation like a movie could endow the watch with heightened meaning, enabling it to express elite adventure or glamorous romance. Looking at the many watches, one is hard pressed to say which, if any, is simply, truly, literally, a watch and nothing more. To be sure, all have chronometric mechanisms, so they conform to our primary understanding of what a watch does, but are any sold merely as timemeasuring machines? Perhaps the unadorned models, the ones that indicate the hour with unassuming hands pointing to understated metallic juts, could be said to be just watches and nothing else. It is not at all clear, however, that these models more truly express chronometricity than, say, those wrapped in high-technology alloys or studded with jewels. The seemingly plain watch may in itself carry figurative meanings that are not initially obvious. Its sobriety conforms to the life of the office and the professions; its sleek, streamlined forms adhere to the conventions of modernist efficiency. And the plainest watch, the one with metal hands pointing to twelve ordinary Arabic numerals imprinted over a white background, suggests popular conceptions of what watches once looked liked, so that, for consumers who are nostalgically inclined, it thematizes the serious, no-nonsense timepieces of an earlier age. In a time when even consumers of moderate means have several watches ticking away uselessly in drawers and closets, when watchworks are cheap commodities produced in the world’s poorer coun-

Introduction

3

tries, and when the plastic watch that was yesterday’s purchase arrives in today’s garage sale and tomorrow’s trash, then the model that sells must appeal through more than its being a timepiece. Indeed, it is because of the store’s surfeit of watches, each quite indistinguishable from the other in its chronometric functioning, that every model must appeal to me through something more, through its carefully designed expressiveness. Each model now gains value on markets through the figurative meanings it presents. The watch is just one marker of our economic times. Inside and outside the store and the mall, this economic tendency is everywhere: products appeal through the figurative meanings they express. Enterprises seek market advantage by infusing products with heightened meaning. Wristwatches, foods, clothes, vacations, houses, and persons are thematized to evoke desire. The thematic features are carefully composed, since the product must touch my feelings in a busy cultural milieu, one that teems with competing products that also aspire to higher significance. In this new economy, the watch manufacturer’s horological sophistication counts for less than its ability to situate the watch in a world of prestige, efficiency, reliability, fun, youthfulness, seriousness, elegance, or adventure. The model enhanced to express adventurousness must then compete not only against other models and other brands, but also against the many products that refer to the same sentimental realm—against the bicycles, cars, and shoes that likewise seek to arouse the buyer’s hopes for outdoor adventure. These products, in turn, vie against products relying on different sentimental realms, so that, as the wristwatch draws on my longing for the primal outdoors, a car engages me in an exhilarating chase, soft drinks test my affinity for teenage pop culture, job applicants offer up youthful determination, business executives exude gravitas, children’s socks are embellished with animal pals, and tourism sites offer up journeys into history. Everywhere we look, goods and services are suffused with images. Capitalism is burgeoning from the calculated production of meanings. Having progressed this far, let me state a thesis: that enterprises make their way in the capitalist economy by transforming commodities into icons. They do so through a kind of production—let’s call it iconic production—that is comparable to the making of representational art, since commercial producers, like artists, are taking some-

4

The Economy of Icons

thing literal and routine and giving it transcendent meaning. Businesses engage in this kind of production because iconicity has market value. Originating in the Greek eikoˆn, meaning ‘‘image’’ or ‘‘reflection,’’ the word icon has traditionally been used for a sacred painting or an exceptionally meaningful work of secular art. In contemporary use, the word also means an object or person that leaves a powerful impression: a soft-drink turned into Coke, a shoe into a Nike, a car into a Cadillac, and a cinema performer into Madonna, each transformed from an object of ordinary significance into something to be deeply cherished or desired.1 (Nowadays it is sometimes a voguish substitute for a trademark, logo, emblem, or pictogram, but I avoid this usage here.) As we shall see, any sellable object can be made iconic, whether a consumer good, labor performance, or commercial experience (like a restaurant meal or tourist destination). Pending an extended definition, which comes in the next chapter, an ‘‘icon’’ as I use the word here is a thematized commodity: an object, person, or experience that has acquired added value through the commercial heightening of meaning.2 Enterprises that produce icons, markets that generate meanings— they make for a peculiar economics. After all, the common assumption in economic studies is that the desires motivating consumer taste are exogenous to the market and, hence, that the sources of desire must be sought somewhere outside the economy, perhaps in studies of culture.3 But now that economic activity generates the meaningful contents that animate desire, the boundary between economy and culture has long been breached. The old economic strictures are routinely violated by none other than a day-to-day business practice that uses cultural sources to heighten product meanings. The shift to this new economy parallels the economic transitions of earlier times. As the nineteenth-century agrarian economy gave way to the industrial capitalism of the locomotive and the factory, producing an unprecedented material bounty, and as the industrial economy made way for a new economy that immersed the world in oceans of information, so the information economy succumbs to a still newer capitalism, which is fecund in the production of meanings. Just as manufacturing was once thought to be derivative of agriculture, and the information economy was initially thought to depend on an underlayer of manufacturing, so in our time images in the economy are still widely held to be spurious, as if they were mere

Introduction

5

layers of illusion laid over the economy’s true, aniconic (literal) foundations. As usual our explanations trail behind our economic actions. It is still widely believed that we live in an information society in which the most valued raw material is data, production consists of its processing into information, efficiency depends on computing and scientific reasoning, knowledge and rational calculation underlie wealth, and society is dominated by an educated elite. These were revealing ideas when they were proposed almost thirty years ago,4 but as we begin the twenty-first century, the concept of the information economy has become a kind of collective wisdom, obscuring another economic transformation that has already overtaken us. The driving force in this newer economy is not information but image.5 Now the decisive material is meaning, production occurs through the insertion of commodities into stories and events, efficiency consists in the timely conveyance of meaning, celebrity underlies wealth, and economic influence emanates from the controllers of content. To begin understanding the new economy, we must absolve ourselves from the prejudice that images are merely attached to goods after production, through some variety of hucksterism, as if commercial images were parasites. The making of icons now has to be understood in itself as a kind of production, one that fulfills consumer longings. This is more than marketing. It is an iconographic art that creates (or ferrets out) fields of meaning, and inserts commodities in them, thereby thematizing the commodities for the market. We must also understand that this new economy is not just an offshoot of the media. To be sure, a culture sector dominated by conglomerates stands at the vanguard of economic change. However, the industrial heightening of meaning takes place even without movies, ads, or media as intervenors. As we see in the case of wristwatches, even the models that make no reference to a television ad, movie placement, or printed ad can readily display heightened meanings. The forces underlying the transition to the economy of icons cannot be dismissed as media manipulation, nor attributed merely to new communications technologies. The media are powerful participants in the new economy, but their competitive logic is driven, as is that of the merchandiser and labor performer, by a market dynamic in which firms seek advantage through product thematization. We can begin to understand the new capitalism when we transcend the common but naive assumption that the objects around us are

6

The Economy of Icons

unproblematically given. We must heighten our awareness of the multiple meanings that objects project. Though a number of books have tried to explain the social background to the meanings of consumer goods,6 I have found it especially rewarding to turn to a philosopher or art, Nelson Goodman, who finds symbolism in everyday objects without muddling the distinction between objects and signs. He explains that ordinary objects acquire extraordinary, figurative meanings because we, as beholders, share a fundamental human symbolizing capacity, the capacity to make one thing stand for—refer to—another. So, an ordinary rock, one that we could kick or toss away, can acquire heightened meaning, becoming a directional marker in the woods, a murder weapon, an exquisite gem, or an object of worshipful pilgrimage. The rock gains higher meaning by crossing from its routine condition as a mineral into alternative worlds of murder, luxury, or salvation. Objects around us have always had figurative meanings. What is different in our own time is that the most powerful productive organs of the economy capitalize on human symbolizing capacity. To heighten product meaning, they insert commodities into fabulae— proprietary scenes, stories, or situations—which are either appropriated from the world cultural stockpile or newly created through media, especially the movies. Having been placed in these stories and scenes, the products are thematized, making them more meaningful for the market. As this mode of production spreads through the economy, the result is a fabulous new capitalism that loads objects and persons with evocative meaning. Others have made observations similar to mine and I will have occasion over the course of this book to cite many of them. For now I will mention only the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, who has written that ‘‘what is finally distinctive of Western civilization is the mode of symbolic production.’’7 Like most other commentators, he had a critical intent: to reveal that in our society, as much as or more than in any preliterate or ancient culture, economy is permeated by magic and myth, despite the rationality that is routinely claimed for it. By now, however, we are no longer adequately served by cultural critique. Images have become so pervasive in consumption, imagemaking so common an occupation, and the new economy so much a force shaping our lives, that we cannot claim to stand apart from them. As consumers and producers, we are implicated in the economy of icons. We need a constructive economics of meaning, one that

Introduction

7

allows us to make sense of and contend with the new capitalism and perhaps, just perhaps, find authentic modes of expressiveness within it. The search for a meaningful economics is no small task. It would have to find a consistent way of treating ‘‘meaning,’’ which is all too often a meaningless term. And it would be an odd economics, since it would have to look for interpretive concepts through which to understand economic events, concepts that have been most well developed in the humanities. After the present introduction, the next chapter, chapter 2, borrows such an interpretive vocabulary from iconography, the interdisciplinary field pioneered by Erwin Panofsky in the 1930s, which investigates the meanings of images. I argue that iconography (and the closely related field of thematics) elucidates the levels of meaning—the motifs and themes—through which we can begin to interpret images in the economy. However, an iconography of food or any consumer product is problematic, because iconography has traditionally focused on the meanings of representations, especially in pictures. So I turn to Nelson Goodman, who makes clear that both representations (in pictures, texts, songs) and objects (rocks, cloth, tomatoes, hamburgers) work symbolically. We can understand how economic objects symbolize without reducing them to pictures or texts. Like each of the chapters that follow, chapter 2 makes its point through an extended example, in this case food, specifically tomatoes and meat. I would not want to give the impression that images in the economy are somehow characteristic only of our own time, as if our forebears somehow had a direct, unsymbolic grasp of the economic products of their times. Relying on the iconographic concept of ‘‘style,’’ chapter 2 traces the stylistic evolution of tomatoes and meat, from baroque forms preceding full-fledged capitalism, through nineteenth-century romantic food, twentieth-century modernist food, and our era’s fabulous foods, which are made meaningful either through producers’ selective appropriation of the world’s cultural stockpile or through their purchase of proprietary fields of meaning. Chapter 3 is about the meanings of buildings. Like food, buildings and other real estate developments have undergone a stylistic evolution from romantic, to modernist, to fabulous. Changes in both retail and residential buildings are driven by a competitive logic that exhausts one style through overuse and ennui, replacing it with new and more gripping modes of appeal. Styles succeed each other in waves

8

The Economy of Icons

of creative destruction, demolishing old landscapes and building new ones. The chapter observes that the themed malls and housing estates, which have been collectively labeled ‘‘postmodern,’’ cannot be adequately understood through architectural, geographic, or cultural analysis, since the changing landscape manifests a larger capitalist transformation. In one of the stranger turns of advanced capitalism, job seekers and work performers strive for success and profit by shaping their own personas. Managers and workers raise their value on markets through calculated self-presentation. The result is labor value dependent not on bits, bites, and expertise but on tidbits, sound bites, and notoriety. After sketching the evolution of labor performance through romantic and modernist styles, chapter 4 examines how contemporary labor performers present the self through methods initially developed for the fabrication of the celebrity. Self-presentation is becoming deliberate and strategic, preparing personas for sale through the iconographic techniques of personification, attribute, and allegory. As chapter 5 observes, merchandisers and service providers depend on ever newer stories, settings, characters, and situations through which to energize consumers. As these enterprises exploit the meanings found in the world’s cultural stockpile, their evocativeness is progressively depleted: common-property realms of meaning now decline in their marginal capacity to evoke desire. At the same time, the culture sector at the core of the economy generates new and proprietary scenes, events, and stories, which it then makes available, for a price, to downstream commercial users. Books, music, theater, radio, web media, and live events can all generate these proprietary fields of meaning, but movies are by far the most powerful, efficiently generating the fabulae into which downstream merchandisers can insert their commodities. Though many industries depend on media-generated images for product value, producers in some sectors have the wherewithal to make their own products iconic. As chapter 6 points out, this is true of the making of tourism destinations, since the tourism sector can in itself use on-site cultural resources to compose the meaningful experiences that tourists seek. Through an iconographic analysis of one interesting but somewhat desultory tourist locale, Niagara Falls, I inquire into the historical and natural motifs through which a more effective touristic experience could be designed. Having overstepped iconographic analysis into application, the chapter raises the dilem-

Introduction

9

mas of realism and authenticity that accompany production in the new economy. Indeed, perplexing questions of representation, reality, realism, and authenticity long recognized in the arts now arise in commerce. Seeking some clarity, I finally turn in chapter 7 to the two authors who have been my most important predecessors, namely Daniel Boorstin and Jean Baudrillard. Their works set up our intellectual dilemma: should we understand the new economy of icons as Boorstin suggests, by asserting a hard demarcation between reality and image, or as Baudrillard propounds, by surrendering to a collapse of reality into images? I turn once again to Nelson Goodman’s theory of artistic meaning to suggest that we can overcome the usual alternatives. By developing our capacities for critical discernment, we can find our way in the economy of icons, and perhaps even learn how to produce authentically within it. In all, the chapters propose a terminology from the arts for the understanding of the economy. This is, of course, peculiar. In a time when culture and economy are increasingly indistinguishable, the disciplines that were based on the assumption of their separation are in question. Economy and culture having become intimate, we need the vocabulary through which to comprehend the peculiarities of the offspring. This book adapts such a vocabulary from the multidisciplinary field of iconography. Though iconography has been appropriated here in ways that might have dismayed its originators, the book is true to their inspiration at least in this respect, that iconography remains a field of inquiry ‘‘which does not allow itself to be hemmed in by the restrictions of the border-police.’’8 Taking an iconographic perspective, the book takes a position at the driving edge of the present, an intellectual vantage point that can be both revealing and perilous. Prudence compels me, therefore, to acknowledge that this work is speculative scholarship, seeking to demonstrate plausibility, not proof. Yet I claim a method to my efforts. I try to eke out large observations about capitalist change through comparative studies of important sectors, such as the food sector, buildings and land development, labor performance, and tourism. Speculative as it is, my argument should gain in plausibility if unlike products, say vegetables and houses, or human labor and tourism destinations, have undergone similar stylistic transformations.

Chapter 2

Fabulous Food

THE MEANINGS OF A CONDIMENT Consider what would normally be an unremarkable advertisement on U.S. network television. A woman photographed in soft focus and dressed in a negligee sits in a room reminiscent of the United States of the late 1940s. A lace curtain shimmers behind her, ruffled by a breeze coming in through the open window. At the table in front of her is a prominently displayed bottle of brand-name tomato ketchup, which she fondles absently. Suddenly she thrills: a man in a soldier’s uniform has entered the room, apparently in a long-awaited return from military service. The scene ends with the couple’s passionate embrace, set off in the foreground by the upright bottle. This is of course a viewing event of a fairly ordinary kind, yet there is something curious about it. After all, aren’t advertisements about selling things, in this case a thing made in a food-processing plant and distributed and sold for public consumption at a price the market will bear? Perhaps the ad is merely a more or less manipulative attempt to dress up the tomato commodity to draw attention to it. But if that is the purpose, this is a dubious way to achieve it. The advertiser has invested elaborate compositional effort, not to mention substantial funds, to create a mise en sce`ne that does not even bother to tell me anything about the normally acknowledged features of

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The Economy of Icons

ketchup. Then again, the ad was telling me a great deal: I, too, could feel such nostalgic passion, the only condition being that I make ketchup part of my life. It is as if the advertiser were not selling ketchup at all, but rather a desireable world or attractive experience— a field of meaning—which I could enter, however, only through the intercession of ketchup. For the ketchup maker, this world-building task might well eclipse what would once have been considered the firm’s prior productive requirements, such matters as the biochemistry of tomato processing or the logistics of bottle distribution. Food products are easily made through established technological means, but gripping images are made through painstaking effort using uncertain methods, so that the compositional ability to produce a nostalgic scene now overtakes in value the technical ability to puree tomatoes. The food processing that might once have occupied the firm’s labors now becomes a minor technical operation, one that can be easily mechanized or subcontracted to routine operations abroad. The firm’s management and consultants focus instead on the culturally demanding work of producing desirable fields of meaning or, more likely, scanning the cultural world to select (often to purchase) the story line, celebrity character, or historical event through which the product will acquire its desirability. If we want to understand this kind of economy, in which production processes turn commodities into icons, we will need a vocabulary through which we can discuss the production of meaning. I propose in this chapter that we start with iconography, the interdisciplinary field of inquiry defined by The Encyclopedia of World Art as ‘‘the descriptive and classificatory study of images with the aim of understanding the direct or indirect meaning of the subject matter represented.’’1 My examples will be foods, particularly tomatoes and meat, which have more telling stories than we might initially expect. As developed by art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) in the 1930s, iconography was initially meant to study the meanings of the visual arts, especially the paintings of the Renaissance,2 but in the years since then, iconographic concepts have come to be ever more widely applied—to architecture, cinema, landscapes, and even music. Though iconographic analysis might seem to neglect written arts, like novels and short stories, it is in fact also used in the criticism of texts,

Fabulous Food

13

though under the name ‘‘thematics,’’ the field that investigates literary meaning and uses a vocabulary very similar to that of iconography.3 In our search for a mode of inquiry into product meanings, iconography already has, at the outset, the advantage that it avoids the privileging of one symbolic form over another. Its scope can include pictorial representations, musical images, literary images, and images brought into the reader’s or viewer’s or listener’s mind.4 Iconography cuts across all modes of representation, whether texts, pictures, music, theater, comic strips, or video, transcending the old divisions among the arts. As compared to the field of semiotics, which tends to interpret all signs through an analogy with the structure of language, iconography allows us to look at symbolic forms without reducing them to words or texts. Commercial producers, too, endow products with iconicity by representing them through text, pictures, music, performance, or combinations of them; and through multiple media, whether graphic reproduction, televisual broadcast, sound recordings, or computerbased multimedia. When firms represent objects, say through poster graphics or radio jingles, their purpose is not representation for its own sake. The producer’s aim, rather, is to increase the actual objects’ expressive meaningfulness on the store shelf. What we need is an iconographic vocabulary expanded to include the meanings of objects (not just representations), something we find in the work of another distinguished commentator on the meanings of art, Nelson Goodman, who in the 1960s took a considerable step beyond Panofsky in looking at how objects symbolize. By revising Panofsky’s iconographic vocabulary in light of Goodman’s work, I am able to argue that concepts meant to explain meanings of pictures, music, or novels can also elucidate the meaningfulness of consumer objects, whether wristwatches, labor performances, or condiments.5 Having applied iconographic concepts to actual objects, I will finally be able to define an icon, as compared to a commodity, and to go on to an essential point: that our fabulous economy of icons should not be contrasted with a putative economic predecessor that produced real, literal, aniconic things. The economy has always produced icons, but in styles that were different from those of today. Staying with the iconographic discipline, we will, therefore, examine styles of production in the economy, following the evolution of tomato styles and

14

The Economy of Icons

meat styles up to and including the fabulous style that characterizes our own time. THE LEVELS OF MEANING In searching for a vocabulary for assessing the commercial production of meaning, we face a task resembling Panofsky’s predicament in the early twentieth century when he introduced iconographic analysis in opposition to the formalist school of thought that then dominated art history. Associated with Heinrich Wo¨lfflin, the formalists sought to understand pictures through their surface patterns of line, volume, color, and light and shade, and by their relationships to other works of art. By constraining themselves to the endogenous artistic sphere, in which art works had to be related only to other art works, Wo¨lfflin and his colleagues sought to establish esthetic value through an empirically verifiable method of analysis. According to one commentator: For Wo¨lfflin to circumscribe form was not so much to deny a relationship between art and culture as to provide the means to reject the task of interpreting that relationship. To propose a history of form, and reject the questions of the relationships between form and other things, was to distinguish the scientific history of art from the evocative, judgmental, and interpretive literature.6

Since orthodox economists still hold—as art historians once did— that meaningful content is exogenous, we can turn to Panofsky’s work to help us rediscover meanings in commercial products. Through a series of essays culminating in 1939 in Studies in Iconology, Panofsky responded to Wo¨lfflin by systematizing ‘‘the inclination to regard works of art not simply as material objects but as bearers of complex meaning.’’7 Our source will be Panofsky’s own summary of his method in the book’s introductory essay, the seminal statement of twentieth-century iconography.8 We need Erwin Panofsky’s vocabulary for understanding the meanings of images because meaning itself has such indeterminate meanings. It may be supposed, for example, that the meaning of an image is the response it prompts in the beholder. However, if that were so, then what the ketchup bottle means may be just what it means to me, say an awkward doorstop. If the picture’s or object’s meaning depends

Fabulous Food

15

on what it means to me, then the producer’s effort—whether the producer is an artist or a commercial firm—is wasted. Indeed, this supposition (that meaning is in the beholder) disregards the work’s actual subject matter or content. If the work’s meaning were purely subjective and arbitrary, then iconographic effort would be irrelevant. Iconographic skill only has practical use if it can restrict an infinity of subjective responses—if some interpretations are more right or more effective than others. The Woman Weighing Gold and the Woman Fondling Ketchup To interpret the content of a work of art, Panosfky divides its meanings into three levels. At the first level of meaning, which he sometimes refers to as ‘‘formal,’’ we identify depicted objects like human beings, animals, houses, plants, and tools; the events in which they are involved like greetings or embraces; and their gestures and poses, which may indicate attitudes such as peacefulness or mournfulness. At this level, what we see in Jan Vermeer’s painting, A Lady Weighing Gold, is an apparently pregnant woman standing in a room alongside a table displaying jewelry cascading from an open box. Soft light enters through a curtained window, illuminating her face. Standing in a position in which she is partly blocking a painting on the wall behind her, she holds a balance at which she gazes intently. In saying all this, we have done nothing more than identify the painting’s motifs.9 Doing the same for the ketchup advertisement, we note the woman sitting by a table in a room, a man who enters the room, their joy at seeing each other, their embrace, and their bottle. This is what Panofsky refers to as ‘‘ ‘formal analysis’ in Wo¨lfflin’s sense,’’ which is ‘‘largely an analysis of motifs and combinations of motifs.’’10 A collection of formal motifs is hardly likely to evoke the viewer’s desire, so for the ketchup seller as for most producers, this formal level of meaning is of only rudimentary iconographic interest. The second level of interpretation is of much greater iconographic interest. Approaching Vermeer’s painting at this level, we must understand how combinations of motifs refer to stories, allegories, religious beliefs, or schools of thought that manifest the work’s themes. To do so, we need more than ordinary day-to-day knowledge: we must understand the meaningful realms to which Vermeer was refer-

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The Economy of Icons

ring. In the case of A Lady Weighing Gold, our correct interpretation depends on our knowing that the painting hanging behind her on the wall depicts the Last Judgment. Vermeer is warning us of the transitoriness of worldly riches in the face of divine justice.11 To come to this understanding, we must not only observe the painting’s formal motifs, but recognize a realm of meaning outside the painting to which the painting refers. (It is at this juncture that we can understand Panofsky’s definition of ‘‘image.’’ To him, it is a motif that carries secondary meaning—a motif endowed with a theme.12 Note, however, that ‘‘image’’ has such varied uses, and its value is in part in its ambiguity, that I use it more broadly, and will specify when I am adhering to Panofsky’s specialized sense.) Applying the second level of interpretation to our ketchup advertisement, we can discern several themes. The woman is in a room resembling the lower-middle-class apartment interior that many viewers would vaguely associate with the American television serial The Honeymooners, a program reminiscent of a simpler time, not long after the mid-twentieth-century wars, when men and women retained affections for each other despite day-to-day hardship. Her conduct— that of waiting with patient longing for her lover’s sudden return from a long and hazardous absence—can be readily understood to echo any of a number of familiar story lines. Embedded in this recognizable setting and familiar narrative, her and her lover’s embrace suggests a passion of the old sentimental kind that our parents may have felt. This nostalgic referent is all the more significant since the advertised brand of condiment has long been a fixture in American refrigerators. The nostalgic theme serves, furthermore, in a fight against salsa, the foreign tomato intruder that, since the early 1990s has been making large inroads in the ketchup market. Of course the woman is also beautiful and coy, the man handsome and eager, the lace curtain sensuous and suggestive, the ketchup bottle upright and phallic. Quite unperturbed by the transitoriness of mundane cares, the ad holds out a sensuous realm into which the requirement for entre´e is bottled ketchup. Whether in Vermeer’s painting or the ketchup ad, second-level meaning, which we may also call figurative meaning, is not readily apparent through the correct identification of motifs, like the woman, the jewelry box, the ketchup bottle, the act of quiet pondering, or the embrace. To grasp figurative meaning, the beholder must overstep the boundaries of formal meaning into realms of fantasy, religion,

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popular culture, popular science, or literary narrative. In affairs of the economy as well, figurative meaning is the kind of meaning that iconic production must generate. I will have more to say about figurative meaning later, but for now let us go on to the third level of interpretation, which Panofsky sometimes calls ‘‘symptomatic.’’ At this level the work of art is a document of the painter’s biography and personality, the economic and cultural conditions of the times, the traditions of which the painter was a part, and the philosophies circulating in the painter’s milieu. At this third level of interpretation, we set out to discover the principles underlying representation in a nation, period, or philosophical persuasion: ‘‘we deal with the work of art as a symptom of something else which expresses itself in a countless variety of other symptoms, and we interpret its compositional and iconographical features as more particularized evidence of this ‘something else.’ ’’13 Though literary and historical knowledge is needed already for the figurative level of interpretation, erudition is all the more necessary at this third level. An interpreter viewing A Lady Weighing Gold would have to know enough about the seventeenth-century Netherlands not only to understand the themes to which Vermeer referred in his painting, but also to discover the political, moral, and social conditions that led him to deal with his themes.14 Fortunately an understanding of the ketchup ad requires less historical erudition, but even an attempt to interpret it as a symptom of late-twentieth-century American civilization seems to me quite demanding. Perhaps the soldier’s role in the set suggests a reconciliation with veterans following the post-Vietnam era. Perhaps the apparent historical setting in the 1940s or early 1950s symptomatizes a nostalgia for a culturally more homogenous time, though the scene’s sexually charged aura suggests ambivalence about a return to such values. Moreover, the ad may be a symptom of a larger cultural transition—our very subject in this book—the fantastically elaborated and premeditated creation of meaning in the economy. Picture and Reality Whatever the merits of the third-level interpretations, they are of only passing interest for the industrial producers of meaning. Advertisers, product designers, packagers, and promoters certainly want to compose worlds that evoke desire, but like the composers of art

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The Economy of Icons

works, they have little interest in the confluence of events that makes a particular subject matter evocative at a particular time. The commercial producer’s foremost challenge is to present secondlevel meaning—figurative meaning—which links motifs to themes, selecting them from an enormous and ever-evolving cultural domain. For all the value of Panofsky’s distinction among levels of meaning, all he does is recognize distinctions. He does not explain this curious process in which figurative meaning is produced. Panofsky even obscures this process, since he sometimes calls the first-level depiction ‘‘natural,’’ as if it depended on unproblematic resemblance, and the second-level meaning ‘‘conventional,’’ as if it dealt with culture-specific invention. However, this way of posing the distinction fails to hold up. Vermeer’s lady may not be pregnant at all, but may rather be adhering to the fashion of wearing a cushion on her abdomen. And as European visitors to America will readily attest, our view of ketchup as an edible sauce and not a foul concoction is a matter of cultural convention. By identifying first-level reference as natural, instead of recognizing that it, too, depends on conventions, Panofsky’s categorization reduces the applicability of iconography to non-pictorial arts, like literature. Panofsky’s categorical division does not do enough to make clear that correct identification of motifs requires that they be situated in a conventionalized context.15 If, however, all motifs depend for their recognizability on conventions, how can we make sense of the distinct, second level of meaning that he calls ‘‘conventional’’? We can resolve this problem in Panofsky’s thought if we turn to another distinguished commentator on the meanings of art, namely the philosopher Nelson Goodman. Since their works are in principle quite complementary (they both build on the symbolic theories of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer16), I will look to Goodman for an explanation of how motifs are linked with themes, creating heightened meaning. To Goodman, all symbolic forms—writing, music, dance, drawings, photographs—denote objects through conventions that must be learned and are culturally relative. In his terms, the readily recognizable things that Panofsky classifies as ‘‘natural’’ first-level motifs are simply represented according to conventions of realism. What has been considered ‘‘realistic’’ has varied widely among cultures and periods in history. Realism in a work of art depends not on some kind of one-for-one correspondence between the art work and reality, but rather ‘‘upon how stereotyped the mode of representation

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is, upon how commonplace the labels and their uses have become. Realism is relative, determined by the system of representation standard for a given culture or person at a given time.’’17 To Goodman, observers are self-deceived if they ascribe realism to a motif on the basis of a purported correspondence between the picture and reality, since the observers are then simply unaware of the conventions through which they make their judgments of realism. This naturalistic confusion arises, Goodman argues, because the meanings of representations are often judged according to criteria of resemblance, as if pictures and texts were copies of reality. In response, Goodman contends that representation is independent of resemblance. ‘‘An object resembles itself to the maximum degree,’’ Goodman points out, ‘‘but rarely represents itself; resemblance, unlike representation, is reflexive.’’ Therefore, ‘‘while a painting may represent the Duke of Wellington, the Duke doesn’t represent the painting . . . Plainly, resemblance in any degree is no sufficient condition for representation.’’18 ‘‘Nor,’’ he continues, ‘‘is resemblance; necessary for reference; almost anything may stand for almost anything else. A picture that represents—like a passage that describes—an object refers to and, more particularly, denotes it. Denotation is the core of representation and is independent of resemblance.’’19 To Goodman, the meaning of a work is to be found not in resemblance but in ‘‘reference,’’ which is ‘‘a very general and primitive term, covering all sorts of symbolization, all cases of standing for.’’20 To accomplish this referencing, works adhere to one or another referential system.21 Denoting a cabbage, a picture designates it, or a writing describes it, or a song sings about it, each through a referential system, such as classical perspective, the English language, or the conventions of children’s rhyme. Each representational system can situate the cabbage motif in any of a number of realms (fields of meaning), such as the botanical realm, culinary realm, or fantasy realm, perhaps one that links cabbages and kings.22 The meaning of the motif depends on this connection between the motif and a realm—this is as true for those formal references that are conventionally thought to be realistic and natural as for those references to realms of myth or fantasy. Translated into Goodman’s terms, Panofsky’s formal (first-level) meaning does not differ from figurative (second-level) meaning in being natural as opposed to conventional. Rather, the first differs from the second in being dependent on literal, stereotyped, commonplace, and routinized conventions. The formal

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The Economy of Icons

(literal) motif is considered realistic because it fits with conventions, customs, and traditions that are thought to be reliable for representing what is real.23 In this light, Panofsky is still right to distinguish the formal from the figurative (the motif from the theme), but he is wrong to give the impression that the formal is somehow natural or universal. Both the formal and the figurative signs work by reference to conventionalized realms of meaning. Hence, Goodman supplies us with the answer to how a formal motif becomes thematized, taking on heightened meaning. The act of thematizing is much like the making of metaphor.24 Thematization is the creative act of placing a motif in a meaningful realm (a field of meaning) other than the routine realm in which it is normally situated. To accomplish this thematization, the maker of the heightened image must force the motif to cross the boundaries of routine and stereotyped reference, pointing to alternative realms of meaning, ones with which the referring motif is not usually linked. HOW OBJECTS BECOME EXPRESSIVE Since I am relying on iconographic theory to elucidate the meanings of commercial products, I may seem to have fallen into an intractable conceptual muddle. After all, ‘‘iconography’’ is usually seen in the humanities as a discipline for understanding representations. But when I set out to understand the ways in which commercial products are endowed with heightened meaning, I have in mind the actual objects that are sold. I need a vocabulary through which to examine not just how products like ketchup are represented, say in advertisements, but how the actual object—the bottle of ketchup—can come to express heightened meanings. Panofsky’s iconography is now an uncertain guide, since it has traditionally been devoted to the understanding of representations. We should not dismiss it too quickly, however, since there are brief points at which Panofsky addresses real objects as well. In his introduction to the three levels of meaning, he gives as an example his encounter with a gentleman, who greets him on the street with a gesture that could be interpreted at the first level of meaning as a mere waving of the hand, at the second level of meaning as a greeting comprehensible within his culture, and at the third level of meaning as a symptom of the man’s education and upbringing.25 We can reasonably presume that he meets a real gentleman and not the painting of a gentleman.

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Elsewhere too, he interprets real events in iconographic terms, as when he describes a burning at the stake as a mannerist event, and a release from confinement as a baroque event.26 If objects like gentlemen and events like executions can be interpreted according to a scheme Panofsky otherwise applies to images, then perhaps everything can be understood as images. This is a result I associate with recent trends in postmodernist thought—something I contend with in the final chapter. If Panofsky does not intend to collapse reality into images, at least he begs the question of their relationship to each other. Such suggestions by Panofsky about gentlemen and executions may of course be only passing fancy in a large and profound body of work on the interpretation of art. Like many thinkers about art, Panofsky begs the question once again when he addresses architecture, the art that produces not representations but real objects. A television advertisement and a painting are both media of representation that may denote objects; they are quite distinct from the objects denoted. However, a building, no matter how noble its architecture, is an object and not the denotation of an object. Panofsky’s own work makes clear that the building can nonetheless benefit from iconographic elucidation.27 If a building can undergo such inquiry, then perhaps we can apply iconographic analysis to other objects, including everyday commercial objects like ketchup, not just to representations of them. To do so, we need more conceptual clarity than Panofsky offers. We can find some once again in Nelson Goodman’s esthetics, since he helps us see meaningfulness in both representations and objects. Goodman does so by distinguishing two kinds of reference: denotation and exemplification, which differ in their referential direction. Denotation (pictorial designation, verbal description, musical reference) is directed from the symbolic form (picture, text, lyric) to the referenced object. Exemplification reverses the referential direction: the object refers back to the speech or painting or motion picture that referred it. Goodman also makes an additional distinction that is critical for my purposes. He writes of expression, a kind of exemplification. Expression is nonliteral (figurative) exemplification: the object refers back to the images or texts that metaphorically denote it.28 Goodman’s stock example is the swatch of cloth—interestingly, his example is a commercial object, not a work of art—used by salesmen to show customers what the entire piece of cloth is like. The swatch does not depict or describe the larger cloth. Rather, the swatch ex-

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The Economy of Icons

emplifies the cloth’s thickness, color, and other properties. A fine plaid woollen swatch could also express Scottishness or genteel fashion. In Languages of Art, Goodman also uses a building as an example, stating that a building exemplifies that it is, say, a glue factory, but expresses other qualities, such as frivolity or fervor.29 In another volume, this one coauthored with Catherine Elgin, he expands on this idea in an essay entitled ‘‘How Buildings Mean.’’ Architectural works, Goodman writes, ‘‘are seldom descriptive or representational. With minor exceptions, such as buildings that have writing or sculpture on them, architectural works do not denote—that is do not describe, recount, depict, or portray.’’30 Instead they exemplify or express. The building exemplifies its commonplace classification, such as that of being a factory or office building, or exemplifies certain characteristics of its structure. It expresses nonliteral meanings, such as its prestigiousness, its aspiration to reach to the heavens, or its invitation to experience history while going shopping.31 In exemplification and expression, the object implicitly refers back to the signs, labels, pictures, or texts that were applied to it. When observing the building, beholders comprehend it in terms by which they have seen buildings denoted in speech, writing, and pictures. By denoting the building, representational systems have imbued it with meaning. The building in turn comes to exemplify and express the schema in which it is meaningfully embedded. As I understand Goodman and Elgin’s work, exemplification and expression are analogs of Panofsky’s formal and figurative levels of meaning. Exemplification is first-level reference from the object to the signs that literally designate it, while expression is second-level reference from objects to the signs that figuratively designate it. Hence, at the first level of interpretation, the configuration of lines and colors that Panofsky encounters on the street exemplifies a man’s tipping of his hat while, at the second level, it expresses a gentlemanly greeting. Goodman’s theory provides a vocabulary for explaining not just the sign’s denotation of the object but also the object’s exemplification or expression of meaning, the meaning having been acquired when the object was originally denoted in speech or text or some other symbolic form. (The beholder may also find purely personal and idiosyncratic meaning in the object, but I am excluding this arbitrary meaning from consideration.) We can now do something quite interesting: discuss not just what commercial representations denote but

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also what, as a result, commercial objects come to exemplify or express. Though Goodman and Elgin are concerned about problems of meaning in the arts, their theory provides a language for understanding that all kinds of objects exemplify and express, whether they are buildings or other things. So, the eerie advertisement I have described uses the televisual medium to situate the bottled condiment in a fantastic realm oozing in nostalgic and sexual allusions. When one happens upon the brandname bottle on store shelves, it is profoundly expressive, even though the bottle and its label are quite plain, showing little more than the brand name. Despite its simplicity, the bottle has become expressive, revealing the meanings with which the advertisement endowed it. As Goodman puts it, ‘‘The three elementary species of reference—denotation, exemplification, and expression—often interact.’’32 This interaction is what the iconic producer intends: not simply to represent the product on screen or in print but to sustain the attributed meanings in the store. The ketchup’s meanings emerge both from its televised denotation and its actual expressiveness, both shaped by a premeditated process of iconic production. The Commodity and the Icon I am now ready to define the icon as compared to the commodity. To be sure both are objects that can be bought and sold on the market; both need to have meaning for transactions to take place. Even a pure commodity should not be thought of as an object naturally ready-made for transactions—it too must have qualities that make it desirable. To the consumer, the commodity must come to exemplify qualities such as usability or practicality, as determined by common knowledge, well-accepted formulas, or customarily reliable technical expertise, these being qualities that have been denoted in speech, texts, and pictures. Take a raw tomato as a case in point. The tomato has reliable characteristics of feel, shape, dimensionality, and taste that we expect from our common knowledge. In American culture, it also has reliable standing as a salad vegetable (though it is botanically a fruit), which can obviously satisfy someone’s need for an edible side dish (though even in this century some Central Europeans have thought of it as no more edible than a raw potato33). The tomato is, therefore, common-sensically understood as something that may be wanted for consumption.

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The Economy of Icons

The tomato is also a commodity by dint of its being brought under a routinized technical scheme: a sample is botanically identifiable as Lycopersicon esculentum and susceptible to instrumental measurement by grading, weighing, or specialized measures of firmness. Note, however, that this scientific classification, too, is a conventionalized representer of reality, since the wonders of recombinant DNA technology, among them the transgenic potato-tomato, are undermining Linnaeus’s familiar taxonomy, and thereby threatening even the tomato’s formal identity. In the meantime, as long as local common sense and normally reliable classifications still work, the tomato can be treated as a commodity.34 In my use, then, a ‘‘commodity’’ is a product that is so commonsensically desirable and so amenable to formal definition according to its literal (nonfigurative) features that it becomes tradeable in the abstract. This commodity status still depends on culturally accepted conventions, as a trader in pork bellies would soon realize if he sought to exchange his wares in parts of Brooklyn or in Riyadh. When the object’s conventional standing can be taken for granted, the pork belly or the tomato (or the tin, wool, coffee, or bullion) becomes tradeable in the abstract by traders who do not need to have a particular image of it when they trade, and need not even be human—they could be computer programs. The commodity that comes closest to being fully aniconic is the one that is most computer tradeable, namely money, or rather the financial asset. This is a point best made with a historical comparison, since in medieval and ancient Europe coinage was still iconic. Coins were thought to gain their value in part through the referential power of their minted inscriptions. According to Marc Shell, ancient Greek coin-makers were poets who ‘‘considered the relationship between the writing on coins and that to which the writing refers’’35 when making the coins, while the bearers of the currency would assess the coins’ inscriptional power when using the coins in exchange. The sense that coins and treasure have significance beyond their value in exchange, or can be attributed with transcendent qualities because of this value, is also apparent in written accounts of medieval legend. In A Thousand and One Night’s Tales, for example, the protagonist’s delight at seeing the treasure (usually in a cave), and his sensuous pleasure at having it run through his hands, merits page upon page of obsessive description that is equaled in modern writing only in pornography. Now not even a vault full of bank statements and credit

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card receipts provides a comparable thrill. After centuries of the progressive rationalization of the market system, financial values are fully set through automated mechanisms, and money has become a pure commodity, stripped of iconicity. Ketchup, too, has characteristics of a commodity. Its content is identifiable as pureed tomatoes and conforms to users’ expectations about color, sugar content, and flow characteristics. In addition to complying with these formal expectations, ketchup can be made into an icon. Through iconic artisanship, the presenter transforms the object’s formal exemplificatory meaning into a figuratively expressive power, one that crosses referential boundaries, such that a tomato condiment encountered on a store shelf can come to express such things as phallic excitement and nostalgic sensuality, thereby gaining market value Hence, pure commodities and pure icons are ends of a continuum, with the vast majority of products having features of both. Computertradeable commodities define the formal extreme; they are aniconic. At the other extreme are iconically laden goods like fashions, perfumes, and adornments, the formally exemplified meanings of which are thoroughly overtaken by figuratively expressed ones. Though the perfume’s contents may include fragrances sold worldwide as bulk commodities, such content is trivial compared to the value added by the product’s iconicity. At last we have gotten to a definition: A product graduates from being a commodity into an icon when its expressiveness—the figurative power gained from its crossing of referential boundaries— comes to dominate its value. As capitalism has developed, firms have come to recognize what economic theory does not, that they gain competitive advantages by turning commodities into icons, a feat achieved through iconic production. THE STYLISTIC EVOLUTION OF FOOD Everywhere we turn, objects and performances are made expressive to heighten meaning and increase desirability; the world is replete with icons. Yet I should be as clear as I can that I am not contrasting a present, in which consumers are flooded by images, to a presumed past in which economic actors were supposedly concerned with real commodities conducive to material survival. All societies at all times have had to maintain a flow of goods and services to their populations

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The Economy of Icons

to satisfy practical needs,36 and these goods always had to be meaningful in order to be appealing. In pre-capitalist cultures, these meanings were embedded in inherited and traditional beliefs. With the rise of capitalism, as goods and labor became tradeable in forms abstracted from their traditional cultural associations and connotations, capitalist firms increasingly realized that to make their commodities desirable they had to re-infuse them with arousing meanings. The stylistic modes through which they have done so is now our concern. Since I have relied on Erwin Panofsky so far, let me also mention his point that images (which he defines as motifs linked to themes) cannot be understood in isolation but rather must be interpreted with respect to the styles of representation that characterize the culture and time in which the representation occurred. For example, in one of his essays, Panofsky undertakes an analysis of the image of Father Time through painstaking comparisons of paintings across the epochs in which it has recurred, from classical origins through the Renaissance to the baroque.37 To Panofsky, studies of images in specific works inform our understanding of the history of styles, while our understanding of style throws light on single works of art.38 Style should be understood here as a coherent mode of symbolization that characterizes a culture or historical era and reflects that era’s conception of the world and the human condition within it. In a remarkable essay, Panofsky traces the evolution of style from medieval paintings and sculptures through the Renaissance and mannerism, to the baroque, which he sees as the culminating phase of the Renaissance.39 Central to his analysis is the breakup of the ancient conception of the unity of the cosmos, a unity sometimes referred to as the great chain of being. Reaching its fullest expression during the medieval epoch, this cosmic totality ordered the classes of human beings in a hierarchy that included earthly creatures, angels, saints, the celestial bodies, and in some versions God himself. In Panofsky’s essay, Renaissance art reveals the tensions in postmedieval societies, as they contend with the progressive breakup of this totality. Renaissance paintings and sculptures reveal a world struggling with continued entanglement in the great chain of being, while the chain is progressively severed by the revival of classical pagan learning, the emergence of humanism and science, and discoveries from the New World. In Panofsky’s analysis, the baroque is the culmination of the Renais-

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sance, as it temporarily overcomes these tensions by finding exuberant life and hope in a new multidimensional reality. As the baroque era closes at the end of the eighteenth century, the great cosmic unity finally disintegrates, torn apart by the forces of capitalist modernity.40 What occurs afterward is of course a complex story, the consolidation of a new economic civilization. The part of this story that is most instructive for present purposes is the nineteenth century’s great disjuncture between the artistic and economic worlds.41 Released from the confines of church and patron, artists became free to find personal meaning through the exercise of personal genius, separated from routine cares and bourgeois values. Released from the constraints of guild restriction and court mandate, the entrepreneur, too, was free to make, innovate, sell, and produce, but in a realm that was distinct from that of the artist. The entrepreneur’s products would still have to have meaning, but they could no longer depend on a cosmic unity within which all things had their place. Thus—I contend—the economic realm increasingly underwent a stylistic evolution parallel to, but separate from, the stylistic changes in the art world proper. As always, products of the economy would have to have meaning to be consumable, but now their meaning was set in a stylistic realm driven by the logic of the market. As art underwent a stylistic evolution, so did commercial products, such as tomatoes and meat. The Tomato—Baroque, Romantic, and Modern When Europeans first encountered the tomato in the sixteenth century (it seems to have originated in South America), they faced the challenge of situating the new object in the inherited cosmic order. According to Andrew F. Smith, tomato historian, the Renaissance herbalists did so by fitting the new object into classical beliefs about various substances’ effects on the humors. Some classified the tomato with the mandrake, which was in turn classified with nightshades, leading to the conclusion, widely held for centuries, that the tomato was poisonous. Others consulted Greek herbal texts, from which they likened the tomato to a Syrian herb called ‘‘glaucium,’’ a term that may have prompted the once widespread belief that tomatoes in a potion were good in the treatment of eye inflamations. Since the early European varieties may have been yellow, still other

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herbalists saw it as the golden apple or love apple of Greek myth, a view that may have yielded the occasional mentions of the tomato having aphrodesiac powers. Through the sixteenth century, British gardeners grew it mainly for curiosity or for its amorous appearance.42 In America apprehension about the tomato persisted into the early nineteenth century. Smith’s book abounds with diner’s statements that tomatoes were unpalatable and good only for decoration, and were, as one writer put it, ‘‘odious and repulsive smelling berries.’’ They were accused of causing stomach ailments, bleeding gums, and loose teeth; the more cautious avoided handling them altogether. By the early nineteenth century, some Americans were eating the vegetable to no apparent ill effect and were starting to include them in recipe books (though sometimes with health warnings). Historical complications aside, the point for our purposes is that, even in times innocent of media events, men and women had no unmediated relationship to the tomato. Even for the early capitalist tomato, consumption was mediated by meanings. The tomato could fully come to market only when it could undergo a stylistic transformation, something that happened with the spread of romanticism in Europe and North America. Freed from the ancient cultural order, romantics looked in the secular world for the profundity that once had been the province of religion. They sought spiritual insight in the depths of the self, the untamed mysteries of nature, the recesses of history, and the spirit of race and nation. Though romanticism took varied forms, it was generally associated with the search for beauty, fascination with the primitive, worship of heroes, belief in national spirit, fondness for historic relics, and a tendency toward melancholy and reverie.44 Though often understood as a style of representation in poetry, painting, or music, romanticism became in the nineteenth century a commonplace view of the world, the view that informed the educated person’s daily life. For the tomato to become popular, it would have to find meaning in the romantic style. It is in the context of an emerging romanticism that we can make sense of what Smith calls the ‘‘great tomato mania’’ that swept North America in the mid-nineteenth century. Starting in the 1830s, writers in numerous local publications made increasingly extravagant claims about the benefits of the tomato. A reporter’s assertion in 1831 that tomatoes quickened the action of liver and bowels, cured headaches, and straightened the chest was widely reprinted, even though the reporter’s original piece was soon followed by his

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untimely death. Writers now called it a ‘‘delightful vegetable,’’ with ‘‘salutary and benign influences,’’ useful in curing diseases of the liver and lungs, and better than mercury for ‘‘diseases of an occult nature.’’ ‘‘For salubrity, none can surpass it,’’ wrote one journal about the tomato, while another held that ‘‘no person will be without the article after he becomes acquainted with its virtues,’’ and a third declared that there was ‘‘no vegetable that has been so grossly flattered.’’45 The tomato now benefited from its ancient, mysterious qualities. As the nineteenth century’s new bourgeois homes had revivalist styles to express some-time-ago nobility, so the tomato could express the curative powers of the old humor medicine. Pills really or purportedly made from tomatoes became best sellers, a result both of their newly found good press and of advertising extolling the vegetable’s antibilious and hepatic powers. At a time when vegetables were still mainly relegated to mushy stews, the revived tomato had the romantic appeal of raw nature and the color and shapeliness that attracted the lover of the picturesque (it was sometimes still called the love apple). Starting in the late 1830s, market gardeners reported large returns for their bushels of tomatoes, so that by mid-century the product was routinely abundant in urban markets.46 By the end of the nineteenth century, the tomato was well into the next—the modernist—phase of its stylistic evolution, though the modern tomato only reached its expressive peak in the middle of the twentieth century. Before going on, let me point out that the entire period since the Enlightenment is sometimes called ‘‘modern,’’ but so is just the part of the twentieth century characterized by modern art and design, so where context would not make clear which ‘‘modern’’ I mean, I will refer to the latter period as ‘‘modernist.’’ We must pause at still another feature of modernism: that it has rather contrasting meanings in the art world and in the commercial world, a distinction that is quite manifest in the differences between modern art and modern architecture. Both wings of modernism had in common a belief in experimental innovation; an intent to break with a tiresome past; and a proclivity to reject inherited bourgeois values. In the artistic sphere, the great modernist painters and literary figures questioned harmony, perspective, and narrative conventions, and rejected the inherited conception that art represented or mimicked reality47; they purposefully sought to undermine art’s denotative function, often rejecting both literal and figurative denotation. By contrast, the modernist architects and

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product designers retreated from the designed object’s figurative expressiveness to focus on its formal, exemplificatory effect. Or to put it differently, the modern designers sought meaningful depth in the object’s literal exemplifications, hoping to find in this literalness relief from the tiresome recurrence of the cultural detritus of a dead past.48 At one level, objects with clean, simple, unadorned forms were honestly exemplifying the object’s literal meanings. At another level, as modernist concept spread to the production of all kinds of products, modern forms also came to express newness, progress, science, and efficiency, all culminating in the phenomenon of streamlining.49 While artistic modernism remained an elite taste, modernism in product design came to infiltrate all parts of the economy. Even vegetables were not exempt, with tomatoes in the vanguard. Already by the 1890s, the tomato features that producers sought were consistency, conformity to a standard, and reproducibility. Only the tomato’s formal meanings were relevant, as these were exemplified by shape, color, and texture. Whether they were to go into the tens of millions of cans produced each year (easily outpacing contenders like corn and peas) or into the bottles of ketchup now proclaimed by the New York Tribune to be the national condiment of the United States, tomatoes were henceforth to be notable only for standardized, reproducible features. These products would tolerate no lingering meanings from the past. ‘‘Single-plant selection’’ became the dominant design criterion in tomato breeding, so that by the early twentieth century, only about thirteen varieties were in commercial production, leading to the loss of many early American varieties (and, incidentally, leaving unresolved the mystery of the tomato’s curative power).50 By the height of vegetable modernism in the mid-twentieth century, tomatoes had been so routinized that even the recipe experimentation of the earlier part of the century had waned.51 Its recipes standardized, appearance streamlined—no ungainly bumps or veins— and storage characteristics rationalized for the supermarket shelf, the modern tomato’s design would no longer be compromised for merely culinary considerations. Now at the peak of modernism, the tomato was ripe for a new productive style in the economy. The Stylistic Evolution of Meat Meat has a historical advantage over the tomato in that it was present on the medieval table.52 Meat then fit in a world in which humans

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had legitimate domain over beasts, meat-eating and vivisection were theologically justified, and—in England at least—the tormenting of animals through whipping and bleeding was thought to improve tenderness and taste.53 ‘‘In the upper class of medieval society,’’ writes Norbert Elias in his history of manners, ‘‘the dead animal or large parts of it are often brought whole to the table. Not only whole fish and whole birds (sometimes with their feathers), but also whole rabbits, lambs, and quarters of veal appear on the table, not to mention the larger venison or the pigs and oxen roasted on the pit.’’ The dominion over the beast was even expressed at the table, where the honor of carving the meat was usually reserved for the master or distinguished guest.54 From books of manners published in the subsequent centuries, Elias finds that animal carving is progressively moved to a sideboard and later the kitchen, and reminders of its animal origins are progressively removed by bringing it to the table without the head or feet or tail, and by increasingly disguising the animal in sauces and aspics.55 Meat’s meaning at the table came to reflect Renaissance humanism, particularly the rise of the new discipline of natural history,56 in which human beings now reconsidered their role in the natural world and could take an active interest in animals. In nineteenth-century America and Europe, the poorer classes and peasantry still retained some medieval proclivities, like the distrust of unstewed vegetables and nonchalance about the torture of animals. However, the more educated and sensitive classes were increasingly distressed by meat’s grossness and unrefinement; their sensibilities were frequently offended by slaughter. A minority, who included the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, now abhorred meat and sought personal purity, oneness with nature, and natural health through vegetarianism. Even meat eaters now disdained the killing of animals, so that, over the course of the century, slaughterhouses were gradually hidden from public view.57 What is more, there are hints of romanticism even in the appreciation of meat, since meat consumption was, for those who could afford it, remarkably gluttonous on both sides of the Atlantic. Affluent Englanders are said to have had a bad dinner when there were not five varieties of meat on the table, including game and poultry.58 Visiting America, Anthony Trollope found that Americans were eating meat two or three times daily.59 For most of the century America’s meat was pork, since pigs could be reared everywhere, but by the

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1870s and 1880s, as the Midwest opened up and railroads could rapidly ship beef back East, there was a massive and rapid switch to beef, no doubt because it was now cheaper and its taste was preferred. However, taste itself has to be explained, especially since Americans had long savored pork without complaint. Among the southern Chinese, pork has been preferable to beef even when beef is cheaper, and in many cultures cuts like the kidney, parts of the head, testicles, and tongue are thought to be delicacies. In America, steak has greater value than, say, tongue, despite the latter’s relative scarcity in the animal, perhaps because steak is, after all, the part of the animal that is richest in meaning, connoting old-Englishness, health, strength, wealth, virility, and biblical sanction.60 Since the late-nineteenthcentury’s up-and-coming classes wanted to display newly won status through French haute cuisine and formal dining, their additional reason to favor steak was that it outdid pork as an expression of elegance.61 Romantic meat consumption depended on the consumer’s relationship with the butcher, who would select meat from hanging carcasses and trim and dress it into cuts that inspired confidence. The rise of modern meat broke this relationship, relegating butchery to great packinghouses, which systematically subdivided the animal into salable components. Meat itself now played a rationalized role in the diet alongside other nutritional components such as grains and vegetables. Like the routinized tomato, systematized meat achieved its stylistic apex in the mid-twentieth-century supermarket, in the opentopped refrigerator case, where the animal’s standardized anatomical parts could be displayed in translucent wrapping, revealing pristine and gleaming exemplifications of meatiness.62 WHAT IS FABULOUS? Looking back on these phases in the stylistic evolution of food, we find that medieval goods reflected their role in a preordained universal totality, and Renaissance and baroque goods manifested the tenuous persistence of this totality alongside contending realms of meaning drawn from classical learning, Renaissance humanism, and natural history. By the time we get to the full-fledged capitalism of the nineteenth century, products become meaningful in the context of a new romantic sensibility. Manufacturers, promoters, advertisers, literary figures, and the popular press impute meaning to products by

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reference to a noble past, to inherent mysteries and natural essences. Then, in the twentieth century, producers turn to the modern style, which discards old product connotations, and seeks instead to make products reveal their formal, literal features, this trend reaching its apex in the practice of streamlining, which expresses the product’s efficiency, newness, up-to-dateness, and future-orientedness. Certainly, these styles do not fall into rigid chronological periods. Modernism, for example, emerges in the late nineteenth century alongside pre-existing styles, gains ascendence in the middle of the twentieth century, coexists with remnants of romanticism, and comingles with the new style of productive symbolization that has come to characterize our own time. What is clear is that capitalism proceeds in stylistic waves, such that a new style periodically overwhelms older ones and comes to dominate production. Now in our time we observe hamburgers that promise clownlike fun, fish nuggets connected to family togetherness, powdered gelatin sold by association with cinematic dinosaurs, spiced mustard imbued with the elegance of Venice, soft-drinks harking to the exciting lives of pro basketball players, spaghetti sauce brandishing a movie actor’s signature and photograph, and frozen chicken parts sold in boxes that depict gustatory glee acted out, improbably, by frolicking chickens. And of course we have sexually suggestive ketchup. They add up to a productive style with distinctive characteristics. Whereas romanticism was constrained in its thematizing options because meanings were still thought to reside in inherent essences, and modernism was constrained by its search for thematic expressiveness in the product’s literal exemplifications (thereby reinforcing the economistic predilection to reduce icons to commodities), the new style of production is thematically unconstrained. It is referentially exuberant: the producer’s thematic work is open to the entire cultural universe. In this new style, product meaning is assembled from all quarters, from domestic culture and foreign culture, staid mainstream culture and discontented subculture, fictional culture and news-event culture, music culture and cinematic culture, current events and fragments of history, outright myths and bits of science, and documentary celebrities and cartoon celebrities. The product’s referential reach may even extend back to realms expressive of a previous era—so an object can be designed to nostalgically reference the modernism or romanticism of the past. This occurs in the presentation of the raw tomato. Long bred into commercially expedient va-

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rieties, the tomato is now further shaped through genetic engineering to determine color, shape, and hardness, and for enzymatic features that determine ripening and shelf life; the tomato comes to be desirable by taking on the tomato-like qualities we associate with the romantic tomato of the past. The producer can now make objects evocative by drawing on the universe of meaningful realms—the entire cultural stock—likely to motivate consumers, including the nostalgia for products of the past. In this new style, producers generate an increasing preponderance of figurative meaning as compared to literal (aniconic) meaning. As commodities come to be ever more cheaply and efficiently produced, making (for the part of the world’s population that can afford it) the mere meat commodity and tomato commodity available in excess, the producer evokes consumer interest through intensified iconic innovation, until the product’s iconic value overtakes its commodity value. It is this competitive iconographic logic that forces the entrepreneurial producer to raid ever more remote cultural quarters for the meanings that will make the product stand out. The iconic making of meaning now takes its place at the center of capitalist production. As this new style of production takes hold, producers come to depend on creative input from the culture sector, especially the movies, which can spin out fully developed fields of meaning. This dependence increases as the stock of meanings accumulated in the public domain declines in its evocativeness, from overexploitation and tiresome repetition. Firms outside the culture sector must now purchase the proprietary story, scene, or event—the fabula, which is the subject of chapter 5—into which they can insert the commodity to be thematized. Makers of foods, automobiles, buildings, labor performances, and myriad other products come to depend on a culturalindustrial core from which fabulae pour out, supplying the themes through which products are enlivened for the market. These features add up to an economic and cultural period characterized by (1) referential exuberance, (2) value added through iconic loading, (3) progressive exhaustion of common-property meanings, and (4) dependence of most firms on the core culture’s capacity to generate ever newer, proprietary fields of meaning. The period in which this new style becomes dominant has sometimes been called ‘‘postmodern,’’ a word with many shortcomings. It refers to the passing of something old, without saying what the new thing is; it fails to make clear whether this new thing succeeds all of modernity—the

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entire civilization that grows out of the Enlightenment—or just twentieth-century modernism; it is often conflated with the technique of literary criticism known as deconstruction; it is confused with a passing architectural fashion known as postmodernism; and it is further aggravated through association with discontented epistemologists who think reality itself is undermined. Eschewing ‘‘postmodern,’’ I will call the new style fabulous. In this new period, our debt to Erwin Panofsky, a historian of Renaissance art, may not be so odd after all. Looking for a language by which to understand the new economic style, we cannot turn to a theory of modern art, which would be likely to slight art’s denotative and figurative functions. Looking instead to a theory of Renaissance art, we gain concepts that help us interpret art through an appreciation of the realms to which it refers, whether to classical learning, Christian theology, Enlightenment humanism, or natural history. The cultural universe this art referenced was indeed circumscribed, but the referential and interpretive language by which the Renaissance and the baroque could be understood can help make sense of the referential exuberance that characterizes our own time. Products have always had to be meaningful to be wanted—the twenty-first-century economy is by no means unique in imputing figurative meanings to objects. What is new is that the traded object’s iconicity is assembled from a shifting cultural stockpile, drawing on all the world’s cultures and histories and myths, as these are ongoingly redefined, remade, readjusted, and regurgitated by the media firms, especially the movie studios, which make up the fabulous core of the economy. Capitalism has always produced icons, but now it makes them in the fabulous style.

Chapter 3

Sanctuaries in the Landscape

In 1968, the vanguard architects Robert Venturi and his colleagues assigned their students to do an on-site study of Las Vegas. They did so because it was an archetype of ‘‘a new type of urban form emerging in America and Europe, radically different from that we have known.’’1 In the years since then, the urban efflorescence that Las Vegas epitomized has spread across the world, blooming as leisure villages in Florida, garden apartments in Houston, burger joints in Beijing, festival sites in France, and shopping malls anywhere. Even as this ‘‘postmodern landscape’’2 has become commonplace, its origins and meaning have remained a mystery, perhaps in part because of the confusions caused by the postmodernist label itself. The new urban form begins to make sense, however, when we look at the strategies pursued in the building industry (the property development industry), which includes land developers, mall developers, home builders, commercial property developers, megadevelopers, and related architectural, brokerage, and construction firms. The firms in this industry are the ones that make the buildings that compose the urban landscape. This chapter contends that these firms are engaged in an economic process that periodically transforms the built environment, generating a stylistic evolution. The present landscape has arisen, then, in a capitalist process ‘‘that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one,

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incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.’’3 Joseph Schumpeter, the mid-century economist who wrote these words, held that the capitalist economy periodically undergoes dramatic changes because business firms innovate—they search for decisive advantages through which to outdo rivals or stave off their own demise. In the capitalist world, built artifacts like houses and shopping malls are consumer products meant to bolster the fortunes of their builders. Through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, building enterprises have learned to make their fortunes with buildings that appeal to consumer desire through heightened meanings—they have learned that they gain decisive advantages from their capabilities in iconic competition. This chapter’s argument, in brief, is that the changing strategies of capitalist appeal have culminated at the end of the twentieth century in the shaping of a new landscape. The building industry serves, therefore, as another example through which we can explore the capitalist logic of stylistic evolution, including its contemporary manifestation, what I call the fabulous style. As we shall see, building firms now pursue competitive advantage through advanced thematic strategies of make-believe, pretended genuineness, and pastiche. The building industry offers an especially useful example because the objects it sells are entire environments, which present more complex combinations of motifs and themes than ordinary consumer goods do, forcing the industry to acquire sophisticated capabilities in iconic production.4 The industry produces more than privately consumable products. In the aggregate, its firms generate the meaning-laden built environment that all of us enjoy, or endure, whether we want to or not. We will examine the building industry’s modes of iconic production through episodes in the stylistic history of the store and the house. THE BUILDING AS COMMODITY AND ICON During the nineteenth century, the means of constructing buildings and the arrangements for buying and selling them underwent a profound transformation. Whereas in previous centuries buildings were crafted by master artisans working in small shops with apprentices and journeymen, by the mid-nineteenth century they were increasingly built by enterprises responding to surging market forces. Con-

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tractors increasingly controlled relationships with clients, architects asserted professional roles distinct from tradesmen, and artisans’ workshops were reorganized into firms distinctly composed of employers and employees.5 By the mid-nineteenth century, ‘‘gerry builders’’ on both sides of the Atlantic worked hand in hand with speculators to supply the burgeoning urban work force with cheap tenements and slapdash houses. In a sense, the very appearance of the ‘‘residence’’ accompanied the rise of market society, since now a house was to be a choice, not a fate. More than ever before, a residence would connote both a domicile and a sojourn: an object one could move into or out of, buy or sell.6 Retail buildings came later still. In London and Philadelphia in the 1850s, city dwellers still bought their goods in market squares and a few halls or galleries. Buyers strolled among open-air stalls and elbowed their way through street peddlers and hawkers.7 By the later part of the century, fixed stores, some of them quite elaborate, were beginning to dominate urban commerce. By now, the market mechanism was driving not only exchanges of ordinary goods, but also the allocation of land and the structures built on it. In Lewis Mumford’s words, a surging capitalism ‘‘treated the individual lot and the block, the street and the avenue, as abstract units for buying and selling.’’8 Decisions made through an autonomous economic mechanism now determined land uses, set the forms of buildings, arranged their juxtapositions, and thereby shaped the landscape. As understood at the time by economists struggling to uncover the mysteries of the market, real estate transactions were the outcomes of abstract forces such as parcel sizes, land costs, supply of available space, and interest rates. But the new building enterprises almost immediately recognized that their products could be understood not only as commodities but as icons—as objects replete with meanings that could be shaped to attract customers. Indeed consumers purchased a home or dallied in a store in large part because of the building’s ability to appeal. Builders realized that they would enhance their fortunes by actively shaping environments that appeal and arouse. RESIDENTIAL AND RETAIL ROMANTICISM Responding to the rising middle-class demand for private homes and apartments, enterprising nineteenth-century builders were natu-

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rally guided by the romantic ethos that both they and their customers shared. Sometimes the period’s architectural romanticism is taken to mean only the purposeful re-creation of ancient relics, but it can also be correctly understood much more broadly as nineteenth-century Europe’s and North America’s dominant architectural style, characterized by the search for profound meaning through varied, eclectic revivals of the ancient or antique. As often occurs in matters of taste, cultural elites and centers of urban culture like Paris and London served as the innovators of the new style. Already by the late eighteenth century and all the more by the early nineteenth century, affluent Europeans with elevated tastes wanted to experience in their gardens the sublime reverie that was exalted in the period’s paintings, books, and poems. Landowners commissioned gardens with artificial isles, rustic cottages, contrived tombs, and hermitages complete with hired hermits—all meant to induce a reverential melancholy. Since ancientness was now thought to be profound and awe inspiring, the urban high streets and main streets soon paraded banks, churches, and government buildings dressed up as antiquities, though from varied epochs, in accordance with schools of revivalism that variously promoted neo-classicism, neo-medievalism, or a Renaissance-renaissance.9 By the mid-nineteenth century, the romantic style had spread from mansions and official buildings to constructions meant for the rising bourgeois class. Lacking the elegant bearing and secure status once afforded by the manor or court, the new bourgeois households had a double reason to embrace revivalism. They wanted both to demonstrate the tastes that the romanticist literati had sanctioned and to express their pecuniary accomplishments through houses and furnishings befitting the higher cultural orders. Over the course of the century, therefore, English houses adopted semblances of foregone nobility, taking on the appearance of Elizabethan, Gothic, Egyptian, or rococo architecture. By the late nineteenth century, the interiors of many English revivalist homes exhibited the ‘‘Queen Anne’’ manner, which had little to do with any reigning queen, but was rather a mixing of furniture types of two centuries to create a posh, aristocratic effect. Across the Atlantic, American households came to favor the French Antique, which combined decorative motifs from three ‘‘Louis’’ courts. Late in the century, Americans turned to revivals of Colonial and Georgian architecture.10 Through the library, music

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room, and hanging paintings, as well as through exterior forms, American and English households displayed their interest in high culture.11 The building styles and bric-a-brac of defunct aristocracies expressed the family’s pecuniary well-being and bourgeois respectability. Therefore, already in this first century of thoroughly marketbased house construction, the house builder was not merely making a residential commodity, but also an icon that used historical allusion to express the owner’s prestige, rank, and aspirations. The nineteenth-century households that wanted to express their respectability through revivalist homes also sought to do so through the display of other belongings. The commercial establishment par excellence for obtaining such expressive goods was the department store.12 By the late nineteenth century, Paris commercial establishments sought out the highly trafficked corner, elegant neighborhood, and streetcar hub where the customers would gather. At the chosen corner, the bank would dress itself in Renaissance trappings to present an appearance of stolidity and the department store would be embellished in Beaux Arts manner to suggest copiousness and extravagance. The department store so sited and designed offered fixed prices and the opportunity to wander freely among the goods, allowing customers to come close to worlds of elegance and refinement. Historian Rosalind Williams describes this new Parisian world through the experiences of Emile Zola’s characters in his novel, Au Bonheur des Dames (1884), which he composed after filling several notebooks with observations about contemporary department stores. Arriving in Paris from the countryside, Zola’s characters—young women—are dazzled by the store’s elegant mannequins and cascades of silks, satins, and laces. They observe fantastic arrangements of umbrellas and awesome displays of exotic carpets and drapes.13 These Parisian stores became models for American department stores springing up in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. Late-nineteenth-century American retailers had begun to appreciate that ‘‘people do not buy the thing, they buy the effect.’’14 Merchants communicated the product’s meanings to the public increasingly through pictorial advertising (which expanded rapidly during this period) and through the interior settings in which customers could observe the goods. Instead of asking the merchant for dry goods piled on shelves behind the counter, the customer wandered through

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wide aisles, amid carefully designed display cases. Administration, shipping, receiving, and manufacturing (still carried out by some stores) were strictly segregated from the sales areas. By the beginning of the twentieth century, merchandizing became more sophisticated. Consciously borrowing ideas from theater, merchants used light effects, color, and glass to create stimulating shopping experiences. The shopping experience extended to the building’s exterior, where window trimmers carefully displayed goods on mannequins in lifelike poses, against backgrounds suggesting family life, status, or elegance.15 Builders and merchants already understood quite well that, in building the house or the store, the decisive skills lay not in sheltering occupants nor storing goods, but in presenting motifs and allusions that would attract the buyer. However, the shop windows and building decor were still rudimentary. They referenced a limited thematic stock, usually consisting of the elegant, the luxurious, the worthy, and the noble. RESIDENTIAL AND RETAIL MODERNISM The Residential Cell As the twentieth century progressed, revivalist styles became less effective in arousing consumer interest. Modern toilets and kitchen appliances blended incongruously with older period mannerisms. Small middle-class homes seemed increasingly ill-suited for styles originally meant for a palace or chateau. There was also popular ennui with the repetitive reappearance of the antique.16 In the modern industrial world, the meanings of things no longer resided in their links to the mysterious and ancient, but rather in their connection to a dynamic present. Living an urban and industrial life, consumers now found it natural to express their aspirations through possessions—including houses—that were themselves new and sleek. At the same time, the middle class expanded, mortgages became more readily available, government incentives to private home ownership increased, and urban population densities grew, so that the builders of homes and apartment buildings had every reason to adopt forms that were amenable to mass production. In addition, as Witold Rybczynski tells it, U.S. middle-class households of the early twentieth century could increasingly afford to buy homes, but still had to do without a traditional European amenity, the servant. Left to single-

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handedly care for the household, women were increasingly attracted to ‘‘household engineering,’’ a concept borrowed from the period’s fashionable interest in scientific management.17 It was in this context that middle-class buyers sought homes featuring tiled bathrooms, engineered plumbing, and sleek kitchens crammed with appliances. In the first half of the twentieth century, a few elite architects, most famously Le Corbusier and the leading lights of the Bauhaus school in Germany, came to articulate an esthetic that disdained the decorative detritus of history and the pretentious forms associated with bourgeois complacency.18 The Nazi embrace of classical symbolism only deepened this disgust. However, it was not until the mid-century that builders and investors were commercially disposed to heed the visionaries of modern design. Modernist architecture finally prospered when it came to suit the interests of building enterprises. In America, by the close of World War II, socialist architects from Europe, apartment builders in Manhattan, urban planners in local and federal governments, and suburban subdividers all over the United States found common cause in the modernist ethic. Urban apartment buildings and suburban housing tracts came to reflect some of the principles of architectural modernism. Decorative abstinence, standardized layouts, open interiors (few internal walls), and whitewashed surfaces fitted neatly with the needs of mass construction for the middle class.19 Mass builders of apartments and detached homes adopted the stark walls, geometric layout, and gadget-filled kitchens that expressed efficiency and up-to-dateness. The convenient geometries of modernism allowed builders to relegate design to a business afterthought, one that followed the more pressing problems of construction management, land assembly, and cost containment. The ability to motivate the customer became merely an ancillary business function in the larger enterprise.20 The geometric regularity, the stark interiors, and the seeming progressiveness of the modernist house were, however, insufficient appeals to popular desire. The mid-twentieth-century middle-class buying public only waveringly embraced such modernness. Hence, American suburban builders typically overlaid modernist forms with comforting figurative reminders. While layout, interior organization, and massing expressed modernist sensibilities, the exteriors could be surfaced more or less interchangeably with a Ranch, Cape Cod, or Colonial veneer, to suggest household autonomy, familial coziness, or homely tradition.21 Architecturally unprogressive as their outward

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figures were, the modern suburban homes had forms and layouts that conveyed a sense of newness, geometric regularity, household efficiency, and scientific precision. The Streamlined Store Just as the forms of modern housing responded to the rise of the mass market for housing, so the supermarket responded to mass purchasing power for food. An American innovation par excellence, the early supermarket of the 1930s sold dry groceries from open cartons arrayed in rows in a warehouse. Initially a response to the depression, the store stressed low prices, self-service, quick turnaround, and offstreet parking. The chain stores like A&P (which predated the supermarkets) caught on to the new trend, and soon established chains of food emporiums in the modern style.22 The supermarket did provide some efficiencies in distribution and display, but it is by no means clear that the supermarket offered the best way of achieving mere efficiency. Had retailers intended only to promote rapidity of purchase, then the supermarket might not have been a good model, since other building arrangements might well have provided better logistics. For example, retailers in mid-century considered many designs for efficiently supplying the goods across a central ordering counter, where customers would have goods rapidly brought to them along a complex of conveyor belts.23 Such store designs were actually tried on occasion, but the vast majority of retailers concluded that these logistically optimized stores just would not do. What was critical in modernist supermarket design was to borrow self-service concepts from the department store, while giving the impression of efficiency, sleekness, and automation that corresponded to the spirit of the times. The harried housewife should be given the opportunity to purchase household goods in the atmosphere of efficiency that corresponded to the needs of her engineered kitchen. Pushing a supply cart made available by the retailer, the customer could navigate a series of linear aisles to bring the goods to any of a file of cash registers. The vehicles fitted far more items than the customer needed, inviting impulse buying while giving the impression of an efficient supply expedition. Outside, the mandatory parking lot and featureless exterior reinforced the sense that this was no-nonsense purchasing. Only the large sign was decorative, and it served largely

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an attention-getting function to mark the locale on the driver’s visual horizon. The casual observer would conclude that the supermarket’s form is driven by logistical imperatives—number of parking spaces, processing rates for customer queues, numbers of items the shelves can carry, and adequacy of floor space. Yet these were the ancillary requisites of the more profoundly meaning-laden decisions that the retailer had already made. One was to eliminate the former one-on-one relationship between the customer and the store clerk in favor of the customer’s isolated encounter with the product—a move that would vastly increase the importance of packaging and advertising.24 The other was the decision to appeal to customers through a sleek and streamlined shopping environment. Building enterprises soon discovered, however, that modernist streamlining had only weak and passing appeal. After all, consumers consumed to assuage any of a panoply of fears and desires. Built spaces would have to convey a broader range of meanings than real estate analysts or modernist designers would have presumed or liked. So the coming generation of builders recognized that there was no universal mode of built expression. Firms would now have to become much more capable in iconically shaping built space to suit the vagaries of consumer desire. HOUSES AND STORES IN A FABULOUS STYLE In the 1920s, the Florida land developer George Edgar Merrick created a residential development that, in retrospect, can be said to have heralded the fabulous residence. He did so when he transformed a grapefruit plantation into Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami. The suburb began as a variation on nineteenth-century revivalism—a mock Mediterranean settlement drawing on thirteen European regional and national styles. These styles adorned conventional suburban dwellings, as well as hotels, country clubs, gates, and the settlement’s centerpiece, a Venetian-style pool built from coral. In 1925, Merrick made a significant adaptation, introducing Chinese, Norman, Dutch South African, and eighteenth-century French theme villages in the Florida suburbs.25 For several decades most developers would reject this kind of thematic fancy in favor of the more regularized layout of the urban housing complexes and suburban tracts; but by the 1970s, the mass market

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was largely saturated. Now, firms would seek advantages over their rivals by enhancing appeal. The successful developers would henceforth strive not to build houses, per se, but to shape environments that conveyed a desirable residential experience. For the builder, manager, and broker, the guiding question became: How can I shape products that best arouse desire? The arousing motifs on which the builders would draw varied far more than they did in the period of bourgeois romanticism a century before. In response to differences in prospective clientele, urban or suburban setting, and the features exhibited by competitors, the successful builder would arrange varied motifs into thematic or multithematic compositions. The builder’s products would now express small-town America, community life and neighborliness, luxury seclusion, bucolic nature, wilderness hideaway, healthful and sporty lifestyle, family togetherness, one-upon-a-time city living, luxury and leisure (nobility also recurred, but was no longer as convincing), security and refuge, and, repeating Merrick’s innovations in Florida, exotic locales. To effectively make such environments, the enterprise would have to heighten its iconic competence. Designing the Residential Experience Illustrations can be found in the Residential Development Handbook, published by the Urban Land Institute, an organization closely associated with the U.S. building and land development industry. Still reflecting a predominantly modernist conception of residential land development, the book is mostly devoted to the minutia of site selection, financing, and regulatory approvals, with marketing confined to its own chapter. However, a careful reading reveals that ‘‘marketing’’ has to be very broadly understood: it is the fundamental concern in the shaping of the project from the start. The handbook advises that at the very beginning of project design, the developer should try to discover consumers’ wishes through focus groups, interviews with buyers, and questionnaires.26 The outcome is housing design and landscaping closely attuned to consumer desires, something exemplified by Kettler and Scott Company’s Sully Station, a Fairfax, Virginia, residential community that the handbook cites approvingly as an exemplar of success. The company conducted extensive research on its potential customers before settling on a design theme. Using a market research method that segmented the clientele

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into lifestyle groups, the company found that most of their potential buyers were the ‘‘achievers’’ and the ‘‘socially conscious.’’ Additional market research revealed that their target market especially wanted ‘‘the beauty and friendly environment of an idealized neighborhood and ‘a good place to raise a family.’ ’’ Therefore, the handbook continues, ‘‘An image of good neighbors, pretty streets, happy children, and a successful community had to be sent out to prospective buyers.’’27 ‘‘But,’’ the handbook makes clear, ‘‘the marketing strategy could not sell houses unless the community really offered the lifestyle it claimed.’’28 Therefore, the land development’s buildings, landscape, and amenities had to be designed to provide the impression of such a lifestyle. To do so, the project developer took advantage of the site’s propinquity to a Civil War–era railroad station, which had once served as the visual gateway to the adjacent village. Kettler and Scott decided to make ‘‘this nostalgic theme’’ a centerpiece of the project. It designed its clubhouse and shopping center, both located at the project’s main entrance, with fac¸ades and interiors suggesting a historic train station. The company also wanted to present the project’s carefree leisurely character through the siting of swimming pools, tennis courts, and jogging trails, even if these were not especially consistent with the historic theme. ‘‘In short,’’ the handbook concludes, ‘‘the master plan was designed to reflect the tastes and lifestyles characteristic of its primary market, young suburban professionals.’’29 Another example is Miller and Smith Company’s Nottingham Court, also in Fairfax County. The handbook cites the company’s corporate director for marketing to explain its program: The marketing campaign was designed from the beginning to sell a concept of lifestyle rather than the specific product. The advertisements and marketing brochures, instead of showing pictures of the units, showed people relaxing in hammocks. . . . In general, we enhanced the product through the decorating and landscaping to sell the indoor/outdoor elegance and comfort of the concept.30

As harried Washington professionals would want, this suburban development offers practical maintenance-free convenience and upper-middle-class elegance. However, the constraints of the site forced the developer to build houses at a greater density per acre than

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it would have liked. The firm therefore hit upon the theme of ‘‘city homes’’ accommodating an ‘‘urban lifestyle’’31—a concept designed to appeal to those who are well disposed toward cities, but just do not want to live in them. Such thematic forethought extends beyond brochures and newspaper ads to include the actual design, especially those design elements that potential buyers would encounter on a visit. The model homes must be carefully furnished to suggest upper-class urbanity, although—again not quite consistently—front yards have to be properly landscaped to convey the notion that this place is also conducive to a relaxed, countrylike lifestyle. The advantages of such iconic premeditation are not lost on builders conducting business inside an actual city or selling to those with less disposable income. As one author finds in an exploration of garden apartments in Houston, residential developers have designed each apartment cluster to exhibit a clear identity, usually one drawing on a historical association, such as Old South Splendor. Interior garden courts, from which this housing type gets its name, form oases replete with thematic gardens, fountains, and swimming pools, all helping define a refuge from the hectic world outside. Since many apartments are for singles, advertising especially stresses pool-side romance and undemanding courtship. Through coordinated advertising and design, individual units are ‘‘subsumed within the ideal of a total environment.’’32 Urban settings can, however, impede such total design. The city is, after all, already built up, reducing space for totally enclosed projects and weighing down the project with the burden of surrounding urban motifs and themes. Working in this more restrictive setting, residential developers must use a more limited palette to compose apartment experiences that promise neighborliness or romance, waterfront townhouses that bring seafaring adventure within a stone’s throw of the inner city, and urban courtyard neighborhoods that convey a sense of safety through foot patrols and gateways.33 For all the furnished exuberance of the model house shown to potential buyers, the house that is finally sold is still likely to exhibit a commonplace interior and stereotyped portfolio of exterior forms, such as Old English and Modern Contemporary. After all, sellers of houses face restricted thematic options, since their product fulfills enduring emotional roles as shelter, stability, refuge, home, and

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hearth. When it comes to retail environments, however, builders are not as thematically handicapped. The Origins of the Mall Among retail buildings, the product that epitomizes the fabulous style is, of course, the mall. For an invention that has changed the world’s commercial landscape, the mall has a short history; the original enclosed mall only opened in 1956. Within thirty years, 78 percent of Americans would visit an enclosed shopping mall at least once a month, making it the fourth most frequented kind of indoor space after home, school, and place of work.34 The open strip plaza had preceded the mall by several decades, but it had still belonged to the modernist period in which the primary design considerations were visibility from the road, parking next to the store, and convenient entry and exit. Seattle’s Northgate Mall of 1947 served as a transitional form between the strip plaza and the mall by introducing the influential dumbbell layout in which a row of small shops formed a pedestrian passageway (only this corridor was originally termed the ‘‘mall’’) between two department stores located at the ends.35 The most momentous advance occurred in 1956, with the opening of architect Victor Gruen’s Southdale Mall, which contained features that would become mall standards. Whereas Northgate in Seattle was still open to the elements, Southdale was fully enclosed. Since the mall was in Minnesota, the enclosure was seen at first merely as a wintertime amenity. It did not take shopping center developers long to realize that this was more than a convenience; it was a revolution. No longer distracted by weather, traffic, or unseemly surroundings, denizens of this enclosed environment could be fully attuned to the retail experience that surrounded them. Southdale demonstrated that the retail experience could be brought under the designer’s total control through the careful spatial and visual composition of the environment. Southdale accomplished this by creating, as the mall’s centerpiece, an atrium called the ‘‘Garden Court of Perpetual Spring,’’ which was filled with palms, azaleas, orchids, and magnolias.36 In their first decades, while such malls only had to compete against strip plazas and declining city neighborhoods, they could prosper even if such thematic content was weak. As malls proliferated, and

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customers became choosier, developers increasingly sought to distinguish their products from those of others through ever more varied and inventive schemes to attract and keep the shoppers by immersing them in fabulous experiences. THEMATIC STRATEGIES During the final decades of the twentieth century, builders thematically endowed their shopping environments with references to an ever wider range of cultural realms. They featured historical scenes, foreign places, indigenous relics, and traditional folk tales, as well as settings purposefully invented by entertainment firms, especially the movie industry. Specific themes varied widely, but the developers made use of them through restricted types of thematic strategies. Though I will comment here only on retail mall environments,37 it should be understood that these strategies are also increasingly embraced by makers of all kinds of environments. The strategies fall into three types, which I will call make-believe, staged genuineness, and pastiche.38 These strategies should be distinguished from mere psychological manipulation, which mall proprietors also practice—that is, they daub the walls with bright colors to suggest cheeriness, add light effects to heighten mood, insert fountains and mobiles to suggest movement, and pipe in comforting music to promote languidness. Moreover, through the very enclosure of the place, and the presentation of a decorous interior that contrasts starkly with the forbidding parking lot outside, malls convey a sense of security. Through such techniques, mall proprietors mean to influence mood or attitude without calling up recognizable historical or cultural associations. Through make-believe, the first thematic strategy, mall developers create a world that explicitly references a different place, exotic locale, bygone time, or fantasy. In the simplest version, malls display marblesurfaced walls to connote luxury, allude to a real city through the streetlike arrangement of stores on both sides of a corridor, or give the sense of a park by sprinkling a hallway with shrubs and potted trees. A variety of North American malls have developed more encompassing themes: historic middle-American village, oriental souk or casbah, Mexican paseo, tropical vacationland, nautical waterfront, Victorian shopping arcade, traditional street market, pastoral countryside, Italian piazza, and so on.39 In the 1990s, numerous malls have

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adopted carousels, which convey an aura of old-fashioned childish fun,40 while having the advantage of adding revenue from ticket sales. It should be clear that even those malls that do simulate, say, a Parisian boulevard or a New England town, do not expect to dupe the shopper. The make-believe is gladly accepted as such by both those who design and those who experience it. In its more advanced version, the strategy of make-believe gives up on any attempt to resemble a different place, and presents an explicit fantasy, sometimes one that has been purchased from media firms that purposefully maintain an inventory of fabulae (we get to these in chapter 5) for just such licensing purposes. Even where the theme has a historical or geographic referent, such as a Disneyland-like Main Street, a pirate scene, or a tropical garden in Minnesota, the designers only intend, and consumers only expect, a version of Main Street or piracy or the tropics that is drawn from movies, legend, and stereotype. The strategy of staged genuineness41 differs from make-believe because it claims to reconstitute honestly or actually be, something truly original or indigenous. In retail commerce, the best examples come from the Rouse Company, which was a pioneer of the concept called the ‘‘festival marketplace.’’ With its first festival marketplace, Faneuil Hall (opened in 1976), Rouse brought well-tested suburban shopping formulas to the city, in this case Boston, by taking advantage of derelict properties of some architectural merit on a historic waterfront. Rouse renovated these facilities and made them available to a variety of restaurants, strolling entertainers, gift shops, and most notably, pushcarts, which harked back to old-time open-air markets.42 In effect, Rouse’s innovation reversed the strategy of make-believe, because it staged more or less genuine cultural and historic artifacts, on or near their original locations, so they fit into an entertaining shopping experience. Since suburbs tend to be quite homogenous and relatively new, festival marketplaces make sense in cities. Whereas newly built malls cannot make a claim to being anything genuine other than malls, festival marketplaces can take advantage of the inherited landscape to display heritage through aging leftovers, or allude to shipping activity in places that still have remnants of once active waterfronts. Having chosen to capitalize on the surrounding environment, the Rouse projects can violate the original Southdale principle that the mall be enclosed. However, they still use shrubbery, parking lots, and deco-

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rative paving, as well as hired street life composed of jugglers and street musicians, to mark off a distinct outdoor precint that is conducive to shopping. As the extreme version of the strategy of make-believe rejects any interest in an original referent in favor of explicit fantasy, so, in symmetrical contrast, the extreme version of staged genuineness claims to no longer be staging an original scene but to have actually become that scene. New York City’s South Street Seaport, also a Rouse project, provides an example. It places antique sailing ships next to shops and galleries in a renovated waterfront setting. To re-create the seafaring atmosphere, Rouse makes careful use of construction materials, like granite and red brick, that convey a ‘‘rough-and-tumble appearance,’’ and requires vendors to display outdoor decor, advertisements, and signs that are suggestive of a nineteenth-century seaport.43 Whether or not the historical artifacts are indigenous, contextually fitting, and historically contemporaneous, their presence deepens the shopping and entertainment event by making it seem like an experience of genuine history. The third strategy, pastiche, motivates the buyer by mixing and juxtaposing disparate themes and motifs (which may be various combinations of the make-believe, or the seemingly genuine, or both). Frederick Jameson, one of the foremost commentators on postmodernism, identifies pastiche as a characteristic feature of contemporary culture, and explains it through a contrast with parody, which juxtaposes themes for critical or ironic effect (while pastiche does so in order to stimulate, divert, and entice).44 However, the mere juxtaposition of incongruous themes should not be taken as pastiche, since the operations of land markets always create unlikely neighbors, as one property owner’s modernist car wash butts up against another’s stucco Italian restaurant. The design jumble we observe on streets and alongside highways arises from disparate design choices mediated by the market, while pastiche is one builder’s or property owner’s thematic strategy. While strategies of make-believe or staged genuineness—in their pure types—strive for thematic consistency, pastiche purposefully uses thematic mixture and contrast. Through pastiche, the enterprise can cater to clientele who vary by ethnicity, age, and interests; and it can divert and entertain a general clientele through contrast and incongruence. West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, said to be the world’s second largest, provides a fine example, freely combining

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fragments of make-believe with bits of the genuine article. As Margaret Crawford describes it: a replica of Columbus’s Santa Maria floats in an artificial lagoon, where real submarines move through an impossible seascape of imported coral and plastic seaweed inhabited by live penguins and electronically controlled rubber sharks; fiberglass columns crumble in simulated decay beneath a spanking new Victorian iron bridge; performing dolphins leap in front of Leather World and Kinney’s Shoes; fake waves, real Siberian tigers, Ching-dynasty vases, and mechanical jazz bands are juxtaposed in an endless sequence of skylit courts.45

Pastiche is leading-edge iconic production. It presumes that its clients have been educated enough by a lifetime of popular entertainment, television ads, and thematically simpler retail environments that this kind of labyrinthine cultural setting arouses in them even greater desire for shopping. Having had so much preparation, they do not merely enjoy but become connoisseurs of otherwise dizzying multithematic compositions. THE CREATIVE DESTRUCTION OF THE LANDSCAPE The foregoing historical episodes have shown that, ever since the early years of capitalist real estate markets, building enterprises have had to pay attention to the iconic work of making built products appeal to customers. However, I still have to explain why, after romantic houses and stores and modernist housing developments and supermarkets, we have undergone the further transition to our new, fabulous landscape. The explanation most commonly found in the published literature posits a morphological transmutation of capitalism into Global Capital46 or Late Capitalism.47 The result is seen as a transmogrified capitalism, more controlling and insidious than ever before. This shift is in turn attributed to the stresses and contradictions inherent to capitalism—the new landscape is capitalism’s response to a profound inner strain. It is rather unclear, however, what this strain is. The strain may have to do with the difficulties of coordinating global capital—but the connection between that and what is called postmodern built forms is not persuasively described. Perhaps what is at stake is class conflict: the systematic efforts of a powerful class

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to manipulate the bulk of society through the control of consumption. However, that, too, is a problematic explanation for the new landscape, since well-to-do areas have, if anything, bigger malls and more exclusive housing projects than do the places where the poor live. Perhaps we are seeing the result of a dominant professional and business elite shielding itself from the real or perceived crime, racial tension, family decline, and insurrection in the inner city.48 That explanation can only be partial, since the new landscape of enclosed places succeeds very well in placid suburbs and small cities where residents have little fear of muggings. I take the position, therefore, that the new landscape is not an outcome of global capital or late capitalist strains. Rather, it reflects a mode of market appeal that business enterprises have long dabbled in, but have only in recent decades made central to their competitive strategies and raised to the height of sophistication. Houses, stores, and malls are, after all, products of building enterprise. The effects of government regulation, tax incentives, and public works notwithstanding, it is the business firm, more than any other kind of organization, that drives the locations, forms, and themes of buildings. The landscape is shaped by capitalist enterprise. It makes sense, then, that incessant capitalist change would also alter the landscape. Schumpeter explains that the impulses that set this change in motion are ‘‘the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.’’49 These may be innovations that firms themselves generate or ones brought about by other social or political forces. Either way, business firms take advantage of these changes to radically alter the terms of competition, thereby enabling them to survive and overcome rivals. Innovative strategies for appealing to customers can offer firms exceptional competitive advantages. Hence, craft-based firms building ornate revivalist homes and decorous department stores were overpowered by a swarm of massmarket builders making modern mass housing, streamlined supermarkets, and shopping plazas. They in turn were vanquished by firms exerting even more powerful appeal through housing enclaves and shopping malls shaped through advanced thematic strategy. A progression of landscapes that first seems to be an arbitrary succession of styles turns out, upon a closer look, to be a consequence of iconic competition. It is in this process that old buildings and land uses are

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annihilated, and new ones are rapidly put in their place, continuously churning the built environment. In our time, the competition to make buildings iconic has resulted in a fabulous efflorescence of the landscape. I should be clear, however, that this new landscape should certainly not be thought of as a world of fantasy and illusion, in contrast to a foregone reality. Rather, the fabulous style reflects only an advanced phase of the capitalist enterprise’s attempt to refine its appeal; the firm necessarily appeals both to desires for fantastic diversion and desires for genuine experience. This iconic work requires a severe discipline: it requires a rhetorical realism—a dedication to presenting whatever moves the consumer. This new style, once again, is not about illusion as opposed to reality, but about the intensified capability to use both the makebelieve and the genuine to have an effect. This capability requires heightened iconographic awareness. The contemporary building firm undertakes systematic research to discover the wants of the client populations to which it intends to appeal. The innovative firm does not begin (as it might have in the nineteenth century) with a small selection of stereotyped stylistic options, but rather with an investigation of the potential clientele. Yet it would be a mistake to believe that the final design emerges in any linear way from market research. The firm’s iconic work is a riskladen creative act, requiring subtlety and insight. The work of shaping product appeal extends far beyond decoration and advertising—the search for iconicity drives product choice and design. In this sense, ‘‘marketing’’ is an outmoded term implying an accessory business function, something added on to the product to draw the public. In iconic competition what is at stake is the essence of the business enterprise, its very capability to make something that a buyer desires. It is for this reason that the suburban developer prefers a pristine site. For residential development, the firm gains design control over neighborhood, amenity, and landscape. For retail development, the firm builds a fully enclosed or otherwise bounded precinct. It gains competitive advantage through control of both the unit (retail or residential) and its surroundings. In designing the themes of this self-enclosed environment, the contemporary builder dips into a far larger cultural palette than did the romantic and modernist builders of the past. Whereas romantic and modernist buildings were the products of an iconically more restricted competitive expression, contemporary building enterprise

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draws on a vast range of historic, nostalgic, popular, and fantastic associations. The building firm now scours the cultural world for effective motifs and themes, and arranges them into appealing compositions, ones that can lure, retain, and engross the client. To do this well, the contemporary building firm must cultivate competencies that overlap those of entertainers, storytellers, movie directors, historians, and ethnologists. It makes sense, then, that property developers associated with leisure and entertainment have long been trendsetters for the rest of the industry. Merrick’s leisure community of Coral Gables anticipated the residential enclaves that became popular fifty years later; and Venturi and his colleagues were right: gambling halls pioneered many contemporary retail forms, since gambling has long epitomized fantasy capitalism. At the beginning of a new century, casinos are still stylistic trendsetters. At Las Vegas, the Mirage features a Bali Hai theme, the MGM-Grand has a yellow brick road, the Luxor carries tour boats on a Nile River in the lobby, the Treasure Island sports pirates, and the Bellagio flaunts high culture with displays of Picassos and Van Goghs. The gambling environment reinforces the gambler’s fantastic expectation of making a fortune instantly. Moreover, we are now seeing the emergence of a new vanguard in urban design. The new global conglomerates that dominate entertainment, sports, culture, media, and amusements are extending their reach to the realm traditionally occupied by property developers. By the 1990s, Walt Disney (through its Disney Design and Development division), Sony, and Sega, along with smaller firms like Iwerks Entertainment and Imaxx, were exerting increasing influence over American land development, and several other large entertainment firms were plausible followers, not only in amusement attractions but also in commercial and residential development.50 The media-culture conglomerates are taking advantage of the many opportunities in land development. The reason, I propose, is that the historical, traditional, and folk themes that conventional land developers find in the public cultural domain have increasingly exhausted their capacity to arouse, largely because of excessive use. Residential and commercial building firms then come to depend ever more on new characters, stories, and settings promulgated by the media and made available through commercial licensing. That is the lesson of Celebration, Florida, a small city designed and built in the 1990s by Disney’s land development division. Recognizing the cultural assets

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they hold, the conglomerates realize that they can capitalize on their creative talent and proprietary content in the building of iconically loaded environments. Increasingly, the producers of iconic spaces recognize that their products are not buildings but sanctuaries: residential or retail experiences that satisfy desire and assuage fear. Eventually, this trend leads to the collapse of the distinction between residential and retail, as more shoppers order products through the home-based cyberappliances, more home seekers rent condominiums at the mall, and (as at Celebration, Florida) more houses and stores are jointly thematized, since residents and shoppers are, after all, searching for meaning through consumption.

Chapter 4

The Labor of the Persona

Let’s begin our study of iconic labor by taking a look at health care, a field just emerging from the traditional routines of twentiethcentury medicine. Hospitals are only now becoming aware—says an article in Healthcare Forum—that ‘‘service is always performance.’’ Health care executives are starting to appreciate ‘‘what is perhaps the most important factor in the long-term success of a hospital: its face to the customer.’’ They can learn from successful retail establishments where ‘‘employees know that everything in the store, including themselves, is directed toward one end: creating a person-enhancing performance for the customer.’’ After all, the article continues, health is not just about feeling well but about ‘‘feeling good.’’ Most hospitals still release patients discombobulated by long waits and exotic procedures, but increasingly, ‘‘feeling good is one of those intangibles that we now recognize as important in healing and health.’’ Hospital workers themselves are essential in conveying this good feeling. Workers must be initially screened or later trained to help the hospital project a consistent image, so that, even in brief exchanges, they can ‘‘form a relationship’’ with the client.1 The authors, one of whom is a well-known management researcher, do not go into more detail, but if we supplement the article with many others on image-making in business, we can draw clear lessons. All levels of workers from orderlies to executives help shape

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the facility’s caring image, and should foster that image through their personal conduct. The organization’s face workers—those making direct face-to-face contact with patients—should especially personify the virtues associated with healing, such as those of caring, hygiene, and expertise. Executives have the double responsibility to direct their employees’ performances and to control their own demeanor in front of subordinates, colleagues, and the hospital’s external overseers and benefactors. This fabulous labor is now performed in industry after industry. At one Manhattan clothing retailer, where the interior expresses leisurely gentility, the employees confirm the theme through their colorful clothes, engaging banter, and a penchant for carefree hugging. At another store, this one purposefully minimalist and muted, the personnel are austere, tall, and somber suited.2 Recognizing that workers are part of the product, some restaurants are quite deliberate in their theatrical preparation. They train waiters for table-side performances, hire out-of-work actors when available, and hold auditions instead of interviews.3 On airlines, the flight attendant’s requisite attribute is the smile, which is part of the service itself; when professionally performed and nimbly adapted to changing situations on board, the smiling countenance conveys welcome upon boarding, confidence that the plane is airworthy, reassurance about timeliness, and an invitation to return.4 Performance having become essential, the job interview takes on added importance, conveying not only the aspirant’s formal skills, but also his or her ability to perform properly for colleagues and clients. Of course the applicant must make a good impression through attire, speech, manner, grooming, and posture, but what is critical is that these effectively portray the persona that is to be put forward. For a future in the corporation, she would do well to show competence, exude authority, and inspire trust, but also to suggest friendly colleaguality. The applicant who is anxious can turn to acting coaches and image consultants for good advice. To calm stage fright, summon the right emotion by remembering a past victory or joy. Uncertain of what persona to put forward, create a character as an actor does from a script, by imagining the role—the ideal executive or perfect candidate—and walking, talking, acting, and dressing as that person would. Rehearse in front of friends, make your entrance, project your voice, and maintain stage presence. After all, ‘‘a job interview is really an

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audition in which you’re being asked to improvise a role,’’ while guessing the expectations for the part.5 On the job, the self-presentational challenge varies by the performer’s status and ambition. One hoping only to provide a welldefined service, say retail service, need not convey a well-rounded persona, but only stereotyped bites of persona. Borrowing from iconography, I will call this kind of self-presentation a personification: a human figure whose gesture, body position, costume, and surrounding objects refer to a concept, usually a human virtue or failing, like Love, Faith, Truth, Veracity, Melancholy, Good Fortune, or Greed.6 Variously, according to business setting, contemporary work performers must accomplish the iconic task of personifying their virtues. Through physiognomy, costume, bearing, gesture, and word, they personify Initiative, Approachability, Submissiveness, Trustworthiness, or other qualities, as appropriate to the context. In this iconic labor market, the orderly, the nurse assistant, the waiter, and the flight attendant have bit parts, expressing the same virtue over and over again to a procession of anonymous customers. The executive, by contrast, must master the larger corporate drama, which she partly directs, but which she also acts in. Since many people are routinely befuddled, Confidence and Decisiveness are particular assets. At the business meeting, the executive (or the up-and-comer) must control the well-known business attributes of posture, eye contact, speech, and handshake to personify Selfconfidence above all.7 But the executive cannot rest there. Well aware of organizational intrigue, she must monitor the audience and tactically adapt her performance to promote herself, ingratiate, and intimidate, as the occasion may call for.8 The executive must also shift roles during the course of the day, now acting as a confidante, showing compassion to a valued colleague who is facing troubles; next as a disciplinarian, reprimanding a poorly performing employee; then as a tolerant superior, patiently unraveling employee problems in a meeting; and finally as the company’s eloquent promoter of new plans and new products. Each role requires attention to scene, timing, supporting cast, and audience.9 At every economic level, the ability to present oneself has become a critical economic asset. As mere skills and credentials have become pervasive, and the world’s pool of labor can claim to have ever more productive efficiency, mere workaday ability—what I have to offer through my commodified labor power—becomes an insufficient mar-

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ket asset. Aspiring for advancement and success, or merely for a job, I must still demonstrate formal capabilities like efficiency, credentials, or technical skills, but I must also figuratively express merit through the images I convey to my evaluators. I must seek to heighten my value on labor markets through work performance—through the expressive labor of the persona. Mere stage tricks like a power wardrobe and assertive gaze are, however, no longer enough for business success. Within any industry, corporation, or profession, the aspirant reaches the economic apex when she becomes a celebrity, a human icon. Now colleagues cite her name with awe or jealousy when she is not present; subordinates show deference as a matter of course; her ideas are respected by the very fact that they arose from her; even to meet her is an honor; and all long to hire her, work with her, and gain her counsel, were she only available. Now lifted above the usual competitive anonymity, the performer can use her hard-won iconicity to assert advantages over competitors and to command for her services a market premium. To explain what it takes to arrive at these heights of this fabulous labor market, run-of-the-mill success manuals will not do. So in this chapter I will look to the more profound work of composition that goes into the making of the media celebrity. But first we must make our way through some potentially confusing ideas. We must particularly steer clear of the truisms that firms are interested in the worker’s true skills, such that I am talking about little more than marginal enhancement, a kind of window dressing; and, contradictorily, that all human conduct is thoroughly theatrical, so that what I have to say is obviously true and nothing new. Making my way between these viewpoints, I will hold that labor has indeed always been performed, but performed in ways keeping with the stylistic possibilities of the time and culture. Having undergone a stylistic evolution, labor is now performed in a new and fabulous style. DRAMA AND THE RENAISSANCE OF THE SELF To speak of self-presentation as a kind of drama is already old hat in some circles. In the years since the publication in 1959 of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,10 the ‘‘dramaturgical approach’’ has turned into a small but lively genre of the social sciences, complete with studies of labor negotiators, imprisoned fel-

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ons, surgical room personnel, con artists, and numerous other common and uncommon social performers.11 Like the iconographic ideas I have proposed here, dramaturgy in the understanding of conduct is more than a metaphor: a person who rehearses and then acts out a role in a job interview is literally—not metaphorically—putting on a dramatic performance. Dramaturgy can even be defined as ‘‘the study of how human beings accomplish meaning in their lives,’’12 and Goffman’s work can be seen as the search for a language by which to make sense of the human capability to express meaning.13 Iconography differs from dramaturgy mainly in that it encompasses all the arts, not just theater, and provides a general language by which to examine objects as well as performances. Both kinds of inquiry look to the humanities for the language by which to comprehend the production of meaning. I also want to keep some distance between what I have to say here and the dramaturgical approach. First, writers in the dramaturgical genre seem to hold that human conduct is ahistorically and universally theatrical.14 Goffman’s book explains self-presentation through anecdotes about matters as diverse as Mandarin rituals in late imperial China, domestic banter in the Shetland Islands, and baseball umpires’ behaviors in America. The ahistorical mode fits the theory that there is nothing new under the sun. After all, in the years around 1600, the signboard over the entrance to the Globe Theater bore the Latin inscription meaning ‘‘All the World is a Theater,’’ and as one of the theater’s better known playwrights put it, ‘‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.’’15 If conduct is universally and ahistorically theatrical, then perhaps there is no particular merit to what is my claim—that there is something different about self-presentation now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Second, Goffman (and other writers I know who have been influenced by him) treats performances as social rituals, seemingly never tiring of the running joke that we are not as rational as we think. Self-presentation is treated as ritual even when it is practiced by shoe clerks or funeral home operators, who seem to be using dramaturgic tactics quite consciously for business purposes. I would say, however, that when the shoe clerk clearly has something to gain by attuning his behavior to the expectations of the audience, then he is not simply acting out a ritual but making expressive choices in response to economic constraints. He chooses his personification, say that of Cour-

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tesy, Solicitousness, or Friendship, specifically to move the customer. This is not ritual but thematic calculation, drawing on the sample of cultural referents at his disposal. Since I will argue that contemporary markets generate a much more determined shaping of the persona for business purposes, I have to show that human conduct is neither ritualized nor ahistorically given. Indeed, a quote from Shakespeare does not clinch the ahistorical argument. To reconstruct why this is so, we should recall that in Shakespeare’s time in Europe, men and women were still emerging from the medieval conceptions in which they were links in a chain of being, as fixed in their statuses as animals are in theirs, with their appearance and comportment reflecting the providential order.16 Though men and women of the Renaissance increasingly contend with alternative modes of thought drawn from ancient classics, natural history, and humanism, their lives are still preordained. Labor is still immersed in ties to family, trade, status, and religion. Through the sixteenth century, sumptuary laws in hundreds of European towns still require each man’s and woman’s dress to reflect ascribed rank and place. Renaissance Venice, Florence, and Milan set many precedents for modern commerce, but they are not free markets for the vast majority of their citizens. Leonardo da Vinci does not sell his talents on the market; he pursues his callings by declaring loyalty to successive patrons, who thereby gain the right not merely to employ him but to govern him. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, including the American colonies, labor is still a social as well as an economic commitment. The master has jurisdiction over the worker and exclusive rights to his energies, subject to shared moral constraints. The worker’s violation of the master’s will is almost universally punishable by imprisonment. Depending on jurisdiction, masters can recover runaway servants (the seventeenth-century English word ‘‘servant’’ covers a broader range of workers than it would in later centuries), subject them to additional servitude, administer corporal punishment, and prohibit their marriage without consent.17 The worker, servant, or tradesman may be well aware of the ironies and injustices of his fate, but is still caught between an emerging sense of freedom and a lingering servitude; he sees no choice but to adhere to his status and place. As the Renaissance progresses, there is increasing intellectual room for skepticism, humor, and ironic distance from one’s worldly lot,

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though little room to violate inherited constraints. It is for this reason that pretense and disguise are such common Renaissance motifs—but they are explicitly understood as violations. In Shakespearean drama, when a character takes on a role that is not properly his, he does so to escape danger, gain an inheritance, or engage in a romance, and this violation of the character’s ascribed place typically becomes an occasion for humor or tragedy.18 Apart from farce and tragedy, characters stick to ascribed roles. Travel narratives, personal reflections, and even pornography are still dim and unfocused, as if authors were merely vehicles for the expression of their rank, status, and nationality. It is only in the eighteenth century, as the Renaissance ends, that autobiography graduates from confessions, and defenses of one’s public character, to intimate self-reflection.19 Until then, ‘‘all the world’s a stage,’’ only because men and women must play their assigned roles in each of their seven different ages or suffer the dramatic consequences, and not because they can willfully compose their selfpresentations for personal advantage. ROMANTIC LABOR By the second part of the eighteenth century, a new sense of individual self-identity abounds in the autobiography, novel, and travel narrative and in individualistic philosophy and liberal political economy. Where individuals once understood their own soul as part of universal divinity, they now increasingly prize their autonomy. They see significance in the particularities of their own life course, want to explore their own feelings and depths of consciousness, and value the creative imagination.20 It is more than a coincidence that it was in this period, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as romantic concepts of the self spread through Europe and North America, that free labor also came on the scene. Indeed, the new romantic mode of selfpresentation spread from the elite to the general population during the same century that most of the work force had to explicitly sell its labors on the market. Romantic self-presentation and free labor converge revealingly in nineteenth-century America’s self-help manuals. In these days before formal business education, these books (along with newspaper articles and lectures) are the primary means by which business people acquire

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their concepts of business conduct. Irving Wylie writes that, by the second half of the century, these books have a common line. Repetitively and almost uniformly, they tout depth of character as the fount of success.21 Of the inner faculties that the manuals recommend, the most important is industry, since poverty is earned through idleness, whereas riches are amassed through very hard work. The upward climb also requires perseverance and frugality; all who strive for prominence must weather the winters of want. Drinking, smoking, fast company, and late nights at the theater make a man feeble and drag him down; sobriety and good morals make trusted employees and successful careers. If the young man shirks his duties, shaves minutes from allotted hours, follows the illusion of better jobs with new masters, or begrudges low pay and skimpy praise, he will be condemned to poverty’s torments, and have only himself to blame, so he would better be sustained by still more inner faculties, especially punctuality, reliability, loyalty, obedience, and humility.22 These moral requisites applied to the master as well as the worker. Prominent men frequently recalled in their own youth, and continued to express through their own conduct, the character traits they advocated to the young. William Astor put in more hours than his employees; Andrew Carnegie required his partners to prove their frugality through savings; New York merchant Arthur Tappan forbade his employees from going to the theater; Russell Sage never drank liquor; some disdained the habit of reclining in easy chairs.23 Masters and workers made their way in the market through the power of character. How does one obtain these faculties? It helps to submit to one’s God-given vocation, something one can discover and cultivate through personal effort. It also helps to have white race, male gender, Anglo descent, upright stature, and respectable physiognomy. It is especially good to have been a country boy, raised far from the city’s saloons and gambling dens, and made hale, strapping, and diligent by farm work and fresh air.24 However, these starting endowments will not take the man far. He must still slog up the ladder of success through the power of his inner faculties, and those faculties have to become manifest—have to be recognized—to gain market value. Therefore, the romantic era’s aspirant to success already performs a labor of the person, the hard labor of exhibiting the industry, per-

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severance, and sobriety that bring his strength of character to his evaluators’ attentions. MODERNIST LABOR To begin a look at twentieth-century modernist labor, let us consider ‘‘Schmidt,’’ Frederick W. Taylor’s pseudonym for a laborer he met at the Bethlehem Iron Company in Pennsylvania in 1899. In an anecdote in Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, Schmidt epitomizes the ‘‘first class’’ laborer. He is a determined and independent individual (he is unmoved by fellow workers’ opposition to the piecework methods that Taylor introduced) who has the vigor and stamina to load ever more pig iron onto railway cars, in response to the differential wage incentives that Taylor had designed for that very purpose—to increase Schmidt’s and his fellow workers’ output.25 Schmidt stands as the epitome of modern, commodified labor: atomized and individualistic, valued for the output he can generate, and responsive to quantitative incentives.26 In diametrical contrast to Schmidt is the scientific manager, someone whom Taylor conceived to be much like himself, someone with the brains, technical education, and scientific understanding to make the systems that lead Schmidt to increase his output. Though Taylor’s specific advice was rarely implemented in pure form, Taylorism as a set of assumptions about work and the workplace hung like a specter over twentieth-century labor and management, dominating academic education in business,27 and setting the prejudices of generations of business students. Let us consider some of the assumptions. Unlike the romantic laborer, who works to express inner diligence and persistence, the modern worker works because he knows he can increase his income by increasing output. The manager, who is himself an employee, is uninterested in his moral standing vis-a`-vis subordinates: his job is to design or maintain the system of incentives that makes the worker work efficiently. Inherited concepts of obligation and vocation must crumble in the face of the overarching significance of output. Work is a literal, unambiguous, and measurable activity taking place in a disenchanted setting, in which work roles are minutely subdivided, and all is coordinated by an impersonal hierarchy. Managers design and maintain the organizational system; workers function within it.

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Workers like Schmidt obey a management engineer like Taylor not out of archaic notions of loyalty but because of self-interest: their submission to orders and incentives increases output, enriches the company, and stabilizes society to workers’ and managers’ mutual benefit. As the modernist era progresses, however, the modernist assumptions never grasp the meaningfulness of the workplace. The modern workplace is, after all, constructed as such; it is meaningfully made into a world of streamlined calculation. Since learning is often faulty when abstracted from doing, credentials can come to serve as signifiers rather than substantiators of knowledge. Since products and production methods frequently change, output is often a poor or unworkable indicator of personal effort. Workers learn they would better signify efficiency through rapidity in body movement, and alacrity in speech, even if—out of sight of management—they subvert the production line or curse the manager. Managers themselves have to express in dress and demeanor the streamlined, replicable, unidimensional, emotionally detached, and no-nonsense character associated with modern efficiency. Invented by nineteenth-century English dandies, and adopted in that century as a mode of male self-expression in commercial exchange,28 the suit and necktie evolved by the twentieth century into regularized signs of personal adherence to the bureaucratic setting. Business modernism reaches its apex in the quantitative and algorithmic techniques developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Useful enough in delimited operations like truck scheduling and inventory keeping, they are hopelessly impractical in the management of the firm. Yet in those same two decades, operations research, quantitative models, and fiscal analyses acquire such high prestige that even the manager who recognizes their inadequacies has to speak the technocratic lingo, for fear that he would be faulted for lacking modern sensibilities.29 Ultimately the high modernist organization, and the labor of selfpresentation that goes with it, succumbs to the rise of new organizations in which decisions are dominated by charismatic judgment and work by dramatic performance. THE NEW WORKPLACE By the late twentieth century, the products of the modernist firm were available in surfeit. A plain commodity like Schmidt’s pig iron

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was producible in abundance, so there was little profit in making just a little more of it or making it just a little more efficiently. The modernist concept of the firm as a set of rationalized operations reached its apex in efforts at the cybernetic systematization of the firm—just when rationalist assumptions about the purposes of the firm were becoming less tenable. Consumers were already less swayed by the conventionalized practicalities of streamlined, replicable goods meant for the mass market. Rather they sought, and firms increasingly offered, goods distinguished by their capacity to deliver heightened meaning, like security, a good home life, sensuality, and exoticism. Product meanings would have to be produced, composed, presented, distributed, phased out, and redesigned, ever more quickly. Modernist commodity production now descended to capitalism’s lower tier, while the capitalist vanguard shifted to the new, fabulous style. Businesses would now focus their energies on product iconicity. Bereft of rational algorithms that had once guided them, businesses would both have to stage the dramatic reality on which an organization’s viability depended, and to engage in the uncertain and creative work of making products meaningful. As nineteenth-century romanticist masters were replaced by modern managers, these managers were themselves superseded by a fabulous new breed of executives, ones who could direct this creative work of product presentation. In this new day, the executive no longer relies on modernist assumptions about a systematic reality manageable through science. Rather he cultivates the flair and charisma needed to execute decisions even in the absence of rationalist managerial criteria that could justify them. At the height of the corporate firmament, the executive must exhibit the poise, persona, and reputation that lend credence to his decisiveness. Though the executive often favors the assertiveness vaguely associated with the prominent entrepreneurs of the romantic era, he does not really claim or want the inner characteristics that the romantics touted, but rather—consistently with the era’s fabulous values—puts on the pose of the ‘‘entrepreneur’’ as a facet of the executive persona. The capacity for calculated posing is now a routine requirement of the job. The executive has to master the arts of producing, directing, and acting in dramatic reality, thereby earning the celebrity salary that both verifies and reinforces his or her glittering status. The new firm must reward iconic capabilities in the work force.

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Whatever the firm sells, workers must have the ability to heighten product meanings. As the workplace in itself has become an arena for dramatic performances, workers must also act out their persona on the job. Aspirants to promotion and success must demonstrate their merit on labor markets and administrative hierarchies through the evocativeness of their self-presentations. Unlike Taylor’s engineered workplace, this new work setting provides no clear standards or quantitative indicators of labor performance—except for one. In a world of rapid change and shifting meanings, a world in which rational principles are confounded and requisite skills are unclear, notoriety (and recognition) serves as a proxy indicator of personal ability. An aspirant for promotion and success would best prove his or her image-making capability through his or her actual notoriety. Daniel Boorstin’s definition of a celebrity as ‘‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’’30 now gains a specific economic logic: since each person advances through the demonstrated effectiveness of the persona, each person must prove his or her good repute. Therefore, in every industry and line of business, each of us must learn from the celebrities, those human icons whose successes in presenting the persona are verified through their renown. Achieving celebrity status is no small task. Following the path that celebrities themselves have taken, we must engage in the hard labor of the persona. COMPOSING THE PERSONA Having learned from celebrities, we know that ordinary clothing, forgettable faces, hapless behavior, and indistinct personalities command little market interest. Performers gain market value by mobilizing demeanor and conduct so they reference a realm of figurative meaning that consumers find evocative. Iconography once again throws light on this production of meaning. In Renaissance iconography, a ‘‘personification’’ is a human figure that gains heightened meaning by referencing any of the well-known realms of Renaissance knowledge, like biblical stories, lives of the saints, Greek and Roman myths, and findings of natural history. An informed contemporary could guess that an image of a naked woman holding a mirror and compass and resting her left foot on a book held some figurative meaning (she may personify Prudence), and

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would know that a hovering Cupid was not to be taken literally as an avian infant. In the two centuries since the end of the Renaissance, romanticism and modernism have sought to fashion new and solid foundations for knowledge, while suppressing figurative meaning. But now market forces have exuberantly reasserted figurative meaning, with consequences for all products, including labor. Whereas—in our schematic review of modernism—the modernist worker merely had to perform a Schmidt or a Taylor, his successor in this new era must enter into a much more elaborate work of personal composition. To be sure, the labor performer can rarely afford the personality technicians that celebrities count on, such as agents, publicists, PR firms, personal managers, personal promoters, press secretaries, spin doctors, spokespersons, advance men, speech writers, image consultants, therapists, and personal groomers, including assorted costumers, cosmeticians, cosmetic surgeons, voice coaches, and hairstylists. Despite this practical handicap, the everyday work of selfthematization offers much latitude. There is plenty of room for creative and subtle composition. The aspirant should begin by positioning the personified concepts he or she wants to present, and then selecting the attributes and allegories through which he or she manifests them to the audience. Personification In the work of personification, choices are vast; but only a few will effectively serve the market. To correctly select her virtue, the performer has to position herself with respect to the audience.31 This is not a simple matter, since there are multiple audiences: the target audience of clients and superiors, prop audiences selected in order to impress the target audience, as well as a number of public audiences, which may be of lesser interest. Having selected the target audience, the aspirant should try to understand its desires, and present herself as the personified fulfillment of those desires, while keeping this incipient personification distinct from others that are already in circulation and serve the same target audience.32 The aspiring star should, therefore, purposefully scan and comprehend those fabulous realms—movies, news events, street cultures, religious traditions, histories—that provide the target audience evocative meaning. Not a matter of inscrutable instinct, this is work of deliberate cultural investigation. It is accomplished through strenuous

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regimens of TV watching, going to movies, keeping in touch with contacts, checking out web pages, attending parties, and testing ideas in front of people (‘‘focus groups’’)—all in the rigorous search to understand the personal qualities that move the audience. Once immersed in the cultural realms that situate personal meanings, the performer can begin to make an informed choice of personifications. In general, political aspirants can profit from Competence and Caring, along with qualities of being Hard-working, Sincere, and Confident. Aspiring business leaders also benefit from Assertiveness, Decisiveness, and Dynamism. A measure of Gravitas can only help,33 but excess Maturity may backfire, unless the person also exhibits Youthfulness and Vigor. Some occupations require Artistry, so they tolerate Spontaneousness. Others prefer Dependability and Responsibility, though they may frown on Submissiveness. Being Unassuming and Likeable have their place, but the ambitious should not carry them to excess. ‘‘Face workers’’ can often stress Considerateness and Solicitousness, spicing them up with some Sexiness for good measure. In some settings, as in retail face work, the performer need only exhibit one rote virtue, since the audience is never present long enough to think of the behavior as excessively stereotyped. Higherranking jobs often require more complex personas, so their assembly requires more compositional forethought. The effective persona should be distinct from competing personas; should be well rounded, with multiple traits; should maintain consistency over time, though some personal evolution is allowed; and—since romanticist concepts are still with us—should exhibit interiority, meaning that it should appear to reflect the person’s inner thoughts and feelings.34 Some charm, wit, and pertinent knowledge can be learned even by those with little previous track records. It may be possible to hide a bad trait, like a distant manner, short temper, or tendency to vacillate in a crisis,35 but it is usually unwise to invent personified virtues from scratch, especially the more demanding ones. Performers should avoid trying to express Honesty, if that is something for which they have demonstrated little previous competence, much less should they try to construct a full persona for which they have had no prior inclination. Some do try the ‘‘whole Pygmalion thing,’’ but it is not normally to be recommended.36 Performers are most persuasive play-

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ing a virtue they have come to master through its exercise and cultivation. Even if the performer does feel comfortable with, say, Honesty as a personal asset, her personifying task has only begun, since she still has to bring Honesty to its dramatic realization. Once a personified virtue (or set of virtues assembled into a persona) has been positioned for a target audience, the question is how to dramatize it. How, asks politician’s consultant Brendan Bruce, ‘‘can conviction, optimism, determination or honesty be communicated? Most difficult of all, how can caring and competence be brought alive?’’ Margaret Thatcher’s image-makers ‘‘accurately identified her strengths: courage, conviction, and vision, then single-mindedly underlined them.’’37 They had to bring such traits to dramatic realization through the careful selection of attributes and preparation of allegories. Attribute A technical term in the field of iconography, ‘‘attribute’’ refers to the objects, clothes, body positions, and accessories that reveal qualities of character, as a lily represents the bearer’s purity, a crown shows the wearer’s royal station, and a lion skin shows the possessor’s heroism.38 The presenter of the self faces the creative task of selecting, making, or modifying the attributes that will effectively signify the desired personification. Clothes and cosmetics are the easiest place to begin. Chosen with a little care, they express dignity or informality, intensity or casualness, rebellion or propriety, liberality or conservatism, fashionableness or insouciance. Dark suits with pinstripes are said to make the man more authoritative, light brown suits make him approachable, impeccably shined shoes make him punctilious.39 While bureaucratic performances are best kept fairly grave, retail face work is often profitably enhanced with a touch of the sensuous. Female workers can enliven the most routine commercial transaction with perfume, dress, and cosmetically flushed cheeks that can be taken subliminally as signals of arousal. In Hollywood, actresses have even been known to keep their nipples erect with little rubber bands over them.40 For men, however, overt signs of arousal are normally to be discouraged. Voice is another vital attribute, but is tough to manage. Wishing to express confidence, the speaker should control a rising inflection,

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since it is often taken as a sign of inner doubt. At moments when she mentions a problem, she should avoid a sudden lowering of pitch, since it could be taken as tentativeness. Excessive nasality, such as that caused by sinuses, makes the speaker inexpressive and indistinct. Those wishing to have a more authoritative tone should particularly lengthen their pauses and slow their breathing. The speaker may wish to confide to the audience, but this is especially difficult in broadcast media, not because confiding to a broadcast audience is seen as a contradiction in terms, but because slight mistakes in voice control can ruin the confidential tone and make the speaker sound strident or annoyed. For additional effect, the speaker may cultivate a foreign accent or regional dialect. Since deep voices still signify masculine authority and confidence, high-pitched speakers can be coached, as Margaret Thatcher was, to lower pitch through vocal exercises.41 Movement, gesture, body position, and eye contact can confirm or undermine the intended effect. Already upon her entrance, the performer’s brisk gait suggests vigor and determination. Since sunken chest and hunched shoulders signify defensiveness, the performer is advised to imagine that a string is lifting the head, straightening the vertebrae, or to imagine that she is showing off a medal or pendant on the chest. The performer should note, however, that even assertiveness can be overplayed; a jaw jutting too far forward can seem not just assertive but combative. Sitting down, the performer would seem stiff and nervous if she perches at the chair’s edge, so a basic but effective move is to center the pelvis on the chair. Now in the midst of the conversation, it is best to lean forward to the interlocutor to express intense interest,42 and avoid nervous movements like the touching of the mouth or nose, since they can be taken as signs of insecurity, or what is almost as bad, deception. Remembering that rapid eye fluctuations suggest shiftiness, while lack of eye contact may indicate insecurity, the good performer works on the direct gaze, which she can avoid turning into a stare by focusing on the bridge of the interlocutor’s nose. Caution is called for if the performance is televised, since the same gaze that looks Steadfast when performed in person may seem Hostile when it comes through the television screen directly at the viewer.43 Since the face itself does so much to convey personal attributes, the most thorough performers have profited from advances in facial modification. The most remarkable achievement came after World

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War I, when army physicians sought to treat soldiers with severe facial wounds. They found that when incisions were made in front of the ear and under the cheeks, the facial skin peeled back easily, after which it could be redraped over the skull to better effect.44 Giving renewed meaning to the word ‘‘persona,’’ their discovery—the face lift—demonstrated that the face is in itself a mask. Since then, the menu of cosmetic options has considerably expanded, so that it now includes eyelid surgery, ear surgery, cosmetic dentistry, breast augmentation, hair implantation, and rhinoplasty, better known as the nose job. For the rest of the body, liposuction is available to sculpt the fat in buttocks, thighs, tummy, and knees. Therefore, along with clothes, adornment, voice, and movement, the face and body themselves are the attributes through which personification is expressed. How do cosmetic surgeons know what is better? For all the technological progress, the iconography of the facelift is barely understood. For persons with apparent facial anomalies, the modernist standard appears to be a modal face roughly assembled from composites of the person’s ethnic background. For those with more or less standard faces, the cultural justification for a nose made less pointy or ear made less jutting is quite obscure. Perhaps the main cultural source is inherited popular stereotype, much of it formalized by nineteenth-century physiognomists. Their physiognomic manuals, which were in effect facial field guides, would explain that certain patterns of forehead wrinkles indicate intelligence, a downturned nose shows heartlessness or ill-humor, a pointed chin is a sign of craftiness, black eyes show intensity of passion, curly hair indicates a quick temper, and eyebrows are variously artistic, imaginative, shrewd, or practical.45 If these physiognomic ideas persist today, they do so probably not because of secret readings by cosmetic surgeons, but because of depictions of persons in novels, television, and movies that have perpetuated physiognomic ideas. Moreover, the media themselves have evolved. As they seek to move the audience, they test the new celebrities, new plots, new situations, and new personas through which personal attributes like face acquire meaning. Indeed, attributes like the face depend for their meaning on the movies, news events, and live performances in which they have recently been manifested. Perhaps the business performer wants to be brusque, or rugged, or cosmopolitan, or stylish, or commanding. He still needs to discover which attribute generates that effect. To make an effective choice (one that fulfills market demand),

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the performer must be aware of how recent celebrities have already used the attribute in support of their own personifications. The point is not to imitate, but to emulate: to use clothes, gait, voice, and facial features as effectively as celebrities do. As compared to the romantic physiognomy, or the modernist standardized face, the fabulous face is a shifting composite of recent celebrities. Allegory In the field of iconography, an allegory is an event or situation that illustrates an abstract concept.46 Though allegory has been in low repute in Western art and literature since the end of the Renaissance, it is in effect making a comeback in economic life, with celebrities leading the way. Sylvester Stallone displays his art collection to visiting reporters. The star performers and director of a movie are photographed bowling together after a day’s shooting. One politician of elite background concludes a meeting with a highly visible lunch in a low-class eatery, and later leaves his limousine to mingle with the crowd; another displays his wife and children near the podium and makes available photographs from his military service. Still another celebrity (it could be a politician or entertainer) conspicuously maintains a box seat at Los Angeles Lakers games. Margaret Thatcher is photographed walking a tiny dog on a beach.47 Now let us consider the meanings. The Rambo movies notwithstanding, Stallone is shown after all to be a person of refinement. The stars who go bowling reveal that they do get along with each other after work hours, enjoying a pastime every American can understand. The politician variously demonstrates that he is a man of the people, loves his family, and perhaps is even heroic. The celebrity attending the Lakers game shows an interest that ordinary people can identify with. Thatcher reveals that, besides being a severe executive, she appreciates small cuddly things. The celebrities do not literally say ‘‘we are sociable’’ or ‘‘we are ordinary like you’’; instead they go bowling. The bowling event is allegorical in the strict sense of the word: like the cheap-restaurant event and the dog-walking event, it figuratively refers to a personified virtue. Since pure fabrications are unnecessarily risky, each event dramatizes some real—no matter how tenuously real—event in the person’s life.48 Stallone does really have an art collection. The star members do go bowling together, though only for as long as the

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photographer is there. One or another presidential or primeministerial candidate does eat in a cheap restaurant and have records of his military service available. Thatcher did walk on the beach with the dog, which her advisors had borrowed for the occasion. Though such dramatization is often thought to occur through the media, it does not have to. One can allegorically express one’s virtues through real events, like real restaurants one eats in or real dogs one walks, whether one is photographed or not. Indeed, since reputation spreads through recounted incidents and snippets of gossip, dramatized events in life are not very different from the media news bites that are so often derided. In media drama and in living drama, the shared requirement is that one be observed and remembered. Note also that each event conveys fragments of the intended persona. Celebrity-watching scholar Joshua Gamson calls them ‘‘tidbits,’’ which come in two kinds, fluff and dirt, these being tidbits with respectively positive and negative valences. The celebrity and his retinue strive to generate fluff while suppressing or controlling dirt.49 If particular outcomes are wanted, like a job offer, the flow of fluff is itself organized into a coherent ‘‘pitch.’’ Otherwise, celebrity-makers try to manage the flow of tidbits to enhance and maintain a longterm persona. Lacking the entourage and media coverage, ordinary strivers are hampered in their ambition, but not excessively so. Workers, entrepreneurs, and aspiring business executives must all generate the impressions that sustain their credibility, and the examples in the beginning of this chapter do not exhaust the ways. An additional way is through the management of personal lifestyle with a view to target audiences.50 Properly displayed, children, status possessions, sports, musical avocations, and volunteer activity can express personified virtues like family commitment, exclusive taste, healthful vigor, personal refinement, and social conscience. Another way is through acquaintances, contacts, recommenders, and endorsers. When properly cultivated, they can more or less reliably generate the flow of tidbits that affirm one’s chosen personifications. There is still another way—to mobilize job experiences and professional accomplishments. As in the phenomenon of the resume, past jobs and past clients are displayed for their capacity to signify Competence, Mastery, Follow-through, Responsibility, and other virtues. Therefore, work experiences must be selectively chosen and work background carefully edited for their allegorical power. It is through

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such methods that performers raise their value on the market for fabulous labor. THE NEW ECONOMIC MAN As I have argued in the preceding pages, the labor of selfpresentation has undergone a market-driven evolution. Relying in part on Kenneth Gergen’s book, The Saturated Self, I have identified these as the romantic and modernist styles of self-presentation.51 Despite their differences, these styles have in common the notion of the essential self, the self that serves as a template against which demeanor and conduct can be judged. In the new period we are entering, which Gergen and a number of other writers call ‘‘postmodern,’’ the old certainties are in question. As we shape persona for advancement and profit, has the essential self—or the belief in the essential self—disappeared? There is much room for angst, since the premeditated composition of the persona contradicts cherished beliefs about the inner self. Those who write about image-making must inevitably grapple with the contradiction between these inherited beliefs and the new forces of personal modification. To many authors, prototypically Daniel Boorstin, the moral response is uncompromising: we must stick with the hard distinction between the reality and artifice, self and image, and substance and surface, and decry the incessant spread of inauthenticity and illusion.52 Even the success literature that teaches how to put on images for personal advantage cannot relieve the moral tensions. One advisor on impression management in organizations says on one page, ‘‘Carefully choose a desired image and present yourself accordingly,’’ but adds on the next page, ‘‘Be yourself’’ and ‘‘never try to be something you’re not’’ (not least because ‘‘people will see through the facade’’).53 In effect, this author takes the easiest course, which is to advocate premeditated image-making without admitting any threat to received notions of the self. A less facile alternative is the outright cynicism found in a recent wave of success books. Partly in reaction to the midcentury’s therapeutic get-along-and-make-friends success literature, these books sport such titles as Winning through Intimidation and Power! How to Get It, How to Use It. The books admit that image manipulation violates received values, but are eminently willing to violate them, on the practical grounds that being a nice guy does not

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work54 So, faced with the dilemmas of self-presentation, the writers either decry pretense and artifice, or try to slip out of the moral contradiction, or descend into an amoral cynicism. The very fact that authors must contend with the moral dilemma reveals that romantic and modernist conceptions of the self still persist. Most of us are still drawn to the image of the man of integrity: the rugged individual who says what he means, who puts on no pretenses, who is straight and uncompromising. In times when inward depth is in question, a deep and unhurried voice, upright stature, furrowed brow, gray-streaked hair, unhesitant manner, and firm opinions signify the inner essences for which audiences still yearn. In some circumstances, a record of military service and a biography that includes at least some personal struggle, along with occasional horseback-riding and outdoor barbecues, can enhance the effect. Yearn we might, but romantic essences cannot be revived. When horseback-riding and past work history are premeditatedly allegorical events, they compromise their claim to revealing inner character. The man’s deep tan, lumbering gait, towering stature, and unhurried voice might reflect tanning machines, acting classes, growth hormones, and vocal exercises; or if the roughened hands were really obtained through outdoor living, they were roughened during leisurely weekends from superfluous wood chopping. With genetic testing, prenatal intervention, hormone treatments, and lifelong cosmetic modifications, the last vestiges of the natural face may soon disappear. No matter how sincerely cultivated, the performer’s frontier demeanor necessarily reflects mediated (media-conveyed) notions of the rugged individual, and therefore necessarily violates the romantic ideal to which it aspires. Yet the rugged man is not an impersonator or a con man: he may well be projecting a self-image he very much longs for. Perhaps he can at most be faulted for over-performing a role that is only purportedly genuine, to the neglect of other forms of thematized conduct that are, however, in themselves strategic. Perhaps he should forego the exaggerated persona, and put more forethought to different acts on different occasions—what Gergen calls the ‘‘pastiche personality.’’55 He might do better to altogether avoid the implicit claim to genuineness, acknowledge that his persona requires performative forethought, lightheartedly mock his own performance, and perhaps even let the audiences know he wears a wig.56 This last option adds up to a strategy of explicit make-believe, which risks some breaks in

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the dramatic reality, but shows the performer’s confidence and helps diffuse suspicion. Whichever option he chooses, the performer necessarily pursues a thematic strategy. We cannot rescue enough of the romantic ideal even to call this deceit, since audiences themselves expect their stars to perform. The celebrity-viewing audience is often well prepared with the jaundiced attitude that Joshua Gamson calls ‘‘audience sneer.’’ Should the performer make the self-mocking admission that he is actually performing, viewers are likely to be left quite unshaken. However, the performer need not always go so far, since on most occasions the viewers will be disinclined to reflect on the performer’s deliberate calculation and prefer simply to enjoy the show. One of Gamson’s celebrity-making respondents compares the celebrity’s viewers to the consumers who eat the carefully packaged hamburger at the fast food outlet. They know the cow had to be killed and frozen and ground, but they do not necessarily want to be reminded of it.57 So, perhaps we have, as Kenneth Gergen and other writers believe, reached a time in which ‘‘the very concept of personal essences is thrown into doubt. Selves as possessors of real and identifiable characteristics—such as rationality, emotion, inspiration, and will—are dismantled.’’58 To Gergen, postmodern persons must contend with the construction of the self, leaving them in a condition of ‘‘multiphrenia,’’ a splitting of the self to form what he and others variously call the relational self, saturated self, mutable self, or protean self.59 If the self only arose for the first time in history in the Renaissance, perhaps it is waning once again, soon to disappear. Having gone this far with the postmodernist arguments, I will now step back, since we must distinguish the self on the one hand and style of self-presentation on the other. Throughout history, men and women have depended on their social world in constructing the self, constructing it with reference to themes characteristic of the times. During the nineteenth century the aspirant for business eminence expressed the self through the romantic notions of the time, just as much as today’s executive expresses the fabulous themes assembled from the movies; only the styles of self-expression differ. The self is a construct to be sure, but it is nonetheless each person’s inalienable and precious resource. The fabulous world we live in does not and cannot possibly eliminate the self. Rather, it spreads a new style of self-expression and self-denotation, style to be understood in the strong sense of the word,

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as the coherent set of referential realms—the stock of cultural referents—through which we make sense of the world. All styles through, whether romantic, modernist, or fabulous are imperfect and distorting, yet they provide the stylistic vocabulary through which each person can construct and present the self. The self remains a private resource; contemporary market actors just have newer and broader stylistic opportunities by which to exploit it for economic benefit. Even more than in the past, the economy rewards dynamic selfcommand: the executive capacity to downsize unwanted character, and nimbly adapt to changing markets. Indeed, the self persists. What comes to seem fallacious is the notion of the self as a genuine, innate, original, and unmediated fount of personality. While the selfpresentation can no longer be a genuine excrescence of an original self, it can be quite authentic. The persona can be esthetically appraised for its authenticity. How well do its constituent personifications relate to each other in terms of coherence, contrast, and complementarity? Does the person more or less honestly reveal to those who are interested the fact of its premeditated construction? Does the self-presentation lead to the beholders’ debasement and exploitation, or to their insight and personal growth? Is it plodding and crudely self-serving, or eloquent and inspiring, developing both the presenter and the beholder? Let us consider as an illustration the dilemmas faced by a gentle and caring delivery-room nurse, whom I will call Chuck. Chuck intently cares for his patients, but since caring is both a skilled and expressive performance, he must also dramatically enact the caring, though his six-foot-three height and red beard are in explicit nonconformity with attributes stereotypically associated with nursing. With some dedication, practice, and humor, Chuck manages an authentic health care performance, without making any claims that infant care is his innate calling. If authenticity is possible in Chuck’s performance of his job, perhaps it also is for other composers of the persona, despite the limits imposed by the market. Like the Renaissance painters who produced remarkably illuminating portraits, even though they were commissioned by egotistical and artless patrons, the fabulous nurse can have the stylistic wherewithal to produce an authentic performance, despite the economic constraints. Because he saves his creative effort for authenticity, Chuck might compromise his rise to stardom.

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To truly advance his value on the market, the ambitious performer must calculatingly adapt persona to the desires of the audience. Quite to the contrary of the theoreticians of a postmodern, fractured self, the aspirant to economic stardom must be far more realistic than the normal run of human beings. Like the marketers of politicians and entertainment celebrities, he cannot afford to be under any illusion about the images he constructs. He must have heightened iconic capability—a superior cultural insight into the motifs, personifications, attributes, allegories, and themes that move the audience. Ready to shape persona in consonance with market forces, he must have a hard and rigorous command of self. The romantic era’s rugged individual—the entrepreneurial inventor—expressed his calling through faculties of industry, perseverance, and sobriety, and through them, set a moral example for others’ betterment. The modernist period’s economic man—the corporate functionary—sacrificed family calm and emotional need for income and efficiency, thereby serving society through his productivity. Now in the fabulous era, the new economic man is epitomized by the celebrity cosmetic surgeon. Through self-presentations that build his own celebrity, he not only profits himself but prescribes the facelifts and antidepressants that also serve society, palliating fear, restoring confidence, and making patients feel good in their anxious rush to produce persona for the market.

Chapter 5

The Fabulous Mode of Production

JURASSIC GELATIN As we have seen, production has become an iconic process through which companies make goods and persons meaningful for the market. This business activity resembles artistic production: it shifts the object from its locale in a conventionalized realm into another, more evocative world. It transfers the wristwatch to a world of duck-huntingin-the-reeds, endows vegetables with sensuousness, wraps buildings in domesticity, makes over the business striver with a persona that is ruggedly sincere, and situates the car in a landscape in which a woman in bedclothes sees fit to spread herself supinely over the hood. This kind of production transforms raw goods and labor into icons—thematized commodities—increasing their value on markets. In this process, the producer takes the commodity out of its routine, literal setting and more or less felicitously inserts it in a story, situation, event, scene, myth, or place that the audience wants to be a part of. Or, if it lacks this creative ability to produce heightened meaning on its own, the maker of the commodity turns to specialized firms that compose the proprietary meaning-ensembles for the market. Economically central, but poorly understood and rarely even recognized, this kind of industrially generated meaning-composite, this

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mise en sce`ne, needs a name. Let us call it a fabula: a proprietary field of meaning with the power to thematize products. The fabula is the poetic, literary, dramatic, architectural, or cinematic world that the artwork creates. As compared to the plot, which refers to the often fragmented ordering of story elements, the fabula refers to the coherent amalgamation of motifs into a world into which the audience is to be immersed, a world in which cause, motivation, and chronology are comprehensible. Though the word is borrowed (rather loosely) from one author in the field of literary thematics,1 I expand its sense here to include nonliterary symbolic forms as well, like movies, pictures, performances, and built spaces. In times when evocative worlds of meaning are ever more valuable, fabulae have become business products held under proprietary control. By way of an example, let us consider a maker of powdered gelatin seeking a new way to endow its product with evocativeness. It may choose a patriotic theme, associating the product with the Uncle Sam, Yankee Doodle, and stars-and-stripes motifs. However, patriotism is a common-pool thematic resource, accessible to everyone at no cost, so it easily becomes overexploited, drastically reducing its evocative value in commerce. There are plenty of other themes in the public domain, but obscurity is not necessarily a wise choice, since a Tibetan or Aztec theme might not do much for gelatin sales. Choosing not to go out on a cultural limb, the gelatin firm may situate its product in settings of suburban home life, showing a happy family enjoying its quivering meal. Yet, this commonplace setting may well fail to distinguish the gelatin from the intense thematic competition, unless the family consists of leasable celebrity properties, an option for which the gelatin firm would have to pay dearly. It would be far better if the gelatin were made a part of a world of meaning in which consumers are already immersed, but not a world of meaning to which any commodity could freely gain access. Since the boiling down of animal parts into gelatin may still occupy some of its time, the company that makes the gelatin may lack the wherewithal to compose this meaningful world, much less to bring it to widespread public attention. It would be best for the company to turn to industries specializing in the creation of meaning. It follows logically, then, that General Foods would choose in 1994 to link its Jell-O brand to Jurassic Park, a movie that spins out an entire field

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of meaning, makes it a subject of current awareness for millions, and keeps out those who have not paid the licensing fees. For the thematic heightening of gelatin, movies are not the only option. The gelatin maker could have linked the dessert to a real dinosaur, say the celebrity dinosaur named Sue, made available for tie-in purposes by a Chicago museum of natural history.2 Museums, movie studios, music firms, publishers, and TV broadcasters who once saw themselves merely as makers of entertainment (or high culture) for sale have come to realize that their meaning-laden output has ever greater value as a cultural resource for other industries, like food processors. Though many kinds of media can generate these fabulae, the most powerful medium continues to be the movie, or rather the advanced movie, the kind that has been rationalized for the efficient production of meaning. Before we go on, however we should recall the older meaning-generating method that the advanced movie is supplanting, namely the advertisement. THE LIMITS OF THE ADVERTISEMENT Color, action, jingle, tag line, and testimonial—advertising was so pervasive in the twentieth-century cultural landscape that it was hard to step back and realize how crude it was as a generator of meaning. An advertisement may have aspired to situate its product, say soap, in a dramatic scene in which laundry dirt caused family disruption, soap came to the rescue, and family harmony was restored through cleanliness. However, the scene necessarily had a subordinate claim on the consumer’s attentive effort. Whether it appeared in broadcast, printed text, or roadside scene, this fragment of meaning was almost always subsidiary to, and often a diversion from, the TV show, magazine article, or scenic view to which the consumer’s attention was directed. In the usual terminology, the ‘‘ad’’ was in conflict with the ‘‘program.’’ Since viewers were primarily interested in the program, the ad was an intrusion, demanding from viewers an intellectually taxing attentive switch back and forth. More energetic viewers could even use the ad as an intermission in which to fetch some food or relieve themselves. As viewing channels and switching technologies multiplied, viewers became more adept at evading the ads through the nimble use of remote controls. In an economy increasingly depending

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on product meaning, the result was economically damaging. Whereas the program was just a form of final consumption, the ad had a productive role, adding meaningful value to commodities. The practice of ad evasion threatened to undermine one of the economy’s most productive processes. Constrained to a short print area and broadcast time, the ad also suffered from the limited opportunity for dramatic elaboration. The ad almost always had to borrow a pre-existing story, myth, or realm of popular culture with which the audience could rapidly identify— only rarely could the marketer succeed in generating an evocative field of meaning just through the ad’s own creative innovation. For all these reasons, the ads presented only primitive fabulae. Their power to engross depended on common-property realms of meaning, so that over the course of decades, the ads progressively exhausted these common-stock cultural resources, reducing their value in resolving consumers’ search for meaning. The economic resolution was logical and inevitable. In the new century, purveyors of cultural content would increasingly abandon the old division between program and ad, reinventing both in a new cultural amalgam. FABULAE ON FILM Consider the following outline of a fabula. Living with his uncle on a faraway planet, at a time when the galaxy is dominated by an omnipotent tyrant, a boy learns that his descent from a mysterious and absent father has given him a special destiny. If he can gain sufficient self-discipline and learn to trust in the universal force for good, he will attain a rare power to overcome evil foes. When his uncle and aunt are killed by the tyrant’s soldiers, the boy sets out with two robot sidekicks to acquire this mysterious power and to join the rebels fighting to restore the benign galactic empire that had once ruled. Hooking up with an ill-reputed but well-meaning interplanetary smuggler and his apelike assistant, the boy and his robots start on a perilous space voyage to the rebel base, where they discover that the planet’s princess has been kidnapped by the forces of evil. After a series of events leading to the rescue of the princess, they set out for the tyrant’s planet-sized space headquarters, on a valiant struggle to restore galactic justice.3 What I have described is a rough summary of the first Star Wars movie series (the first episode appeared in 1977), one of the most

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commercially successful ever made and an example of ‘‘highconcept,’’ now the dominant model for Hollywood productions. To make sense of this kind of movie, we should recall that to Erwin Panofsky a ‘‘concept’’ was just another word for a ‘‘theme.’’ The highconcept movie is engineered to efficiently thematize the products with which it is linked, turning them into icons. The thematizing techniques include placement, tie-ins, toyetic production, and endorsement, as we will see momentarily. According to a book by Justin Wyatt, the high-concept movie has a ‘‘simple, marketable theme,’’4 which is played out in an easily understood story line, as in this case, in which a boy acquires a mysterious spiritual force through which to fight an evil despot. The narrative is pieced together from stock tensions of love and withheld affection, danger and narrow escape, and self-interest and obligation (say between the smuggler’s love for the princess and the attractions of his wayward life). Dramatic twists avoid complete predictability as when the boy discovers that the tyrant’s henchman is his father. Usually the plot also conforms to the bounds of genre, though Star Wars is more complex, combining elements of the western, science fiction space adventure, medieval fantasy chronicle, and war movie. Generally (not in every case), the film takes advantage of the actor’s preestablished celebrity persona, so that the plot need not be excessively hindered by the need for characterization.5 The high-concept movie also features bold situations, like dramatic space flights, extraterrestial creatures, and foreign planetary landscapes. Even if it is not science fiction, the movie is composed of collections of simple, bold, but spare, images, each combining stylized personas, products, and lifestyles in readily identifiable situations, as if the movie were an interlacing of advertisements. Designed to be crisp and vivid, the movie comes to have a clear identity that can be ‘‘pre-sold’’ to executives and readily understood in the brief instants in which it is advertised to the public in previews, TV ads, or posters. Not least, the film sells products. Star Wars was especially successful in this last regard, generating more licensing revenue than any previous film in history, and reinforcing the proliferation of concept films.6 The result is the advanced movie, one that serves as a vehicle for the fabulae through which products are made meaningful. Now before we go on, we have to understand a ‘‘movie’’ not just as a motion picture projected on the big screen in a darkened theater, but as a

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dramatically elaborated cinematic experience, whether observed in a theater, on TV, or in one or another computer format. In this sense, some television shows and computer-game dramas qualify as movies. Whatever the medium through which it operates, the movie’s defining characteristic is its capacity to deliver a poetic world that responds to viewers’ desires. In effect, the high-concept movie solves the problems inherent in the ordinary ad. Being a full-length production, the movie has the scope for full dramatic realization of story and scene, so it can engross the audience in a field of meaning far more thoroughly than an ad could have. Though this kind of movie can be seen as an advanced form of the ad, the ad is no longer subordinate to the program—it is the program. Moreover, the high-concept movie (as compared to the ad) need not restrict itself to referencing the portions of the global cultural domain that the audience already finds meaningful. Indeed, this kind of movie does something that a traditional ad did only very rarely. The movie in itself creates the realms to which sellable objects refer: it sufficiently creates the field of experience within which products become meaningful. Moreover, this field of meaning has the advantage of being proprietary. A merchandiser that would otherwise have had to tap into the common cultural domain to heighten product meaning can now make its product meaningful by paying to have it situated in an original fabula. The Linked Ad An early step in this consolidation of ad and program was the linking of ads to movies, while each still retained its separate identity. Let us take as our example a sixty-second ad for a Nissan Maxima broadcast during the 1997 Superbowl. The ad depicts a flock of pigeons in airplane attack formation strafing the Nissan as it leaves a car wash. As described in a Washington Post article, the pigeons emerge from an orange sun, wearing flight goggles and helmets, flying to the theme from Top Gun (1986). Spotting the car, the pigeon wing leader orders the attack (‘‘He’s all yours, Sky Rat’’) with ‘‘a stubbled, Verdun foxhole kind of voice,’’ specifically that of actor John Ratzenberger of the television program Cheers. The article describes the creators’ response to the ad as they join with the reporter to watch it on a com-

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puter screen. ‘‘I like that coming-out-of-the-sun shot,’’ says the executive producer. ‘‘That’s like the shot in Tora! Tora! Tora! when they’re flying in over the valley.’’ ‘‘It’s a classic,’’ another editor comments. ‘‘It’s Apocalypse Now.’’7 The end result of their productive efforts is a little drama incorporating a Nissan car. The drama is engaging despite its miniaturization because the audience shares an awareness of movie conventions. Even if viewers cannot identify the three movies to which the ad alludes, they get the joke as long as they are familiar enough with the war-film genre. The ad’s work of creating meaning can break through the usual constraints by tapping into themes already developed in the movies. In this example, as in the ketchup ad’s veiled reference to the Honeymooner television series (chapter 2), the link between ad and movie is still allusive and distant. The ad merges somewhat more with the movie when the movie’s images, logos, and characters appear in the ad. All the more, if the ad did not merely reference a movie, but could become part of the movie, or even better, could in itself expand to become the movie, then its evocative power would be greater. That merger has been achieved through the meaning-producing technique known as placement. Placement When Clark Gable took off his shirt and revealed a bare chest in It Happened One Night (1934), sales of T-shirts were said to have plummeted.8 This was a mistake few present-day studios would make. The movie not only undermined a product’s sales, it failed to use Gable’s chest to display a brand-name undergarment. The opportunity the movie missed is ‘‘placement,’’ a technique that incorporates a commercial product in the mise en sce`ne, sometimes with featured roles in it. Though many early precedents can be found, the crucial case, the one that trade magazines now refer to as ‘‘legendary,’’ is the movie E.T. (1983), in which the young protagonist lures an extraterrestrial visitor by leaving him a trail of Reese’s Pieces, reputedly causing, within a month of the movie’s release, a 65 percent jump in the candy’s sales.9 According to the trade press, product placement has been booming ever since. Candy has been prominently placed in TV

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shows, too, as in the Seinfeld program, in which Junior Mints were the object of a series of comic capers through which they eventually wound up inside a patient on an operating table.10 Auto makers have been active users of the placement technique. Already in 1977, Pontiac spurred sales of its Trans-Am brand by prominently situating the car in Smokey and the Bandit.11 In 1995, BMW accomplished what is said to be the most successful placement of any product since E.T. The company persuaded the studio making the James Bond movie Goldeneye to accept the new Z3 model as Bond’s gadget-filled car. Then the company released the model in concert with the movie’s opening. Just as fast food restaurants tie in promotions with a movie release, BMW organized a series of events, such as private screenings for selected customers and a car unveiling in Central Park by the actor who played the ‘‘Q’’ character in the movie. The sales result—waiting lists for the new model—led BMW to try the deal again in the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies (though the firm may have erred this time in overly identifying an expensive brand with a movie that even appeals to the impecunious).12 Computer firms prefer high-tech, futuristic scenes. Silicon Graphics considered it a coup that its equipment was featured in the Jurassic Park (1993) control room, with camera shots sometimes lingering on the company’s logo. Intel’s logo was visible in The Nutty Professor (1996); Compaq appeared in the television program ER. Apple products helped the hero keep in contact with a hijacked train in Under Siege 2 (1993) and were prominent in the 1996 hits Independence Day and Mission: Impossible.13 If the high-concept film is well composed, it can insert dozens of products into the plot. In Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), characters use SkyTel pagers, wear Hamilton watches, eat Dunkin’ Donuts, and face action at a Unocal 76 gas station. Back to the Future Part II (1989) features Toyota cars, Nike shoes, and Miller beer, not to mention AT&T, USA Today, Havoline, JVC, and Black and Decker, among others. Companies placed within Batman Forever (1995) include Burger King, Sprint, Sears, Nestle´, and Choice Hotels. Armageddon (1998), a movie about an asteroid that is about to destroy earth, features Swiss Army products and displays the company logo on space helmets, sunglasses, and lunar landing vehicles. The American release of Demolition Man (1993) includes scenes of the future’s only restaurant chain, Taco Bell, which is replaced in the movie’s Japanese ver-

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sion by Pizza Hut, another Pepsi subsidiary. In the 1997 film Men in Black, Ray-Ban sunglasses appear in the theme song, as well as on the leading men’s faces.14 Just a decade ago, only major corporations with national brands had the connections to arrange placements. Now placements include obscure root beers, travel bureaus, ethnic shampoos, regional banks, diapers, and dating services variously placed in low-budget, ethnic, niche, and made-for-cable movies. It should be clear, then, that the high-concept movie—the kind of movie that offers opportunities for placement—should not be defined by its being, or even striving to be, a blockbuster. Its defining characteristic is not its hyped-up popularity, but rather its construction of fabulae conducive to product thematization. As placement (along with tie-in) revenues have come to rival box office receipts, studios have naturally realized they have in their hands a cultural asset in which many would vie to have a part. Speaking in 1996 about a big holiday release filled with placements and tie-ins, Time Warner’s chairman was quite straightforward about this trend, asserting that ‘‘Space Jam isn’t a movie. It’s a marketing event.’’15 So the studios have increasingly hired directors who are not averse to making the script a vehicle for the presentation of product. In the Seinfeld Junior Mints episode, the writers changed the script, so that the doctor who, in an earlier version, was to have refused the candy now takes it and says, ‘‘These can be very refreshing.’’16 However, this was still an afterthought; it is far better to properly design the program up front. As a marketing executive explains, ‘‘In the old days, before E.T.,’’ producers would ask about inserting a product when the movie was already being filmed and would consider linked promotional arrangements as it neared completion. ‘‘Now, movie studios might start thinking about potential partners when they have an idea for the script. Our involvement today is very early on the curve. It can be at concept.’’17 Placements have proliferated despite initial difficulties in contractually specifying and accounting for them. At first, some studios settled for in-kind compensation like automobiles to be used in filming, and inserted some placements simply as the director’s favor to a company. Even where the arrangements were explicitly contractual, directors often consigned the product placements to the cutting room

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floor. As the technique’s productivity came to be better understood, studios have standardized the arrangements, as by establishing vice presidential offices for placement. The arrangements can now include elaborate quids pro quo. For example, the rental car firm that is favored by having its counter and banner placed in the story line reciprocates by paying for licensing fees for movie banners displayed at the actual rental counter and by tying the movie into rental car advertisements.18 Whether for direct remuneration or joint promotion, the studios now have the administrative tools by which to ensure that products are properly inserted in the film. Merchandisers and other downstream producers make contact through placement brokers. To clinch an arrangement, direct payment helps. Prices for getting a brand used as a background prop can exceed $100,000.19 Escrow accounts are sometimes used to reassure the companies that they can observe the product in filmed context before they are committed to full payment.20 To help in the selection of the proper scene, films are divided into discrete marketing opportunities ‘‘We break a film down,’’ declares the head of one placement firm, ‘‘and tell the producers exactly where we want to see our clients’ brands’’21 Brandweek magazine describes the process as practiced by a vice president for product placement at one major studio. The vice president ‘‘begins working with the filmmakers as soon as the script has been greenlit and a budget approved’’ and then goes on to ‘‘appraise the production specifically with an eye toward creating roles for corporate partners.’’ In her words, ‘‘Our role is to integrate the product into the film and extend it to a back-end promotion.’’22 The placement technique naturally brings with it a blurring or, rather, elimination of boundaries between the program and the ad. The forces of iconic competition make this inevitable. In pursuit of product iconicity, merchandisers and service producers purchase access to scenes, events, and stories that can heighten product meanings. The movie industry now makes these settings available, for a price, through the premeditated production of cinematic fabulae. Tie-ins Though placement is a common way to ensconce a product in a fabula, the technique’s potential as a meaning producer is constrained by the requisites of filmed entertainment. A movie can thematically

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accommodate only a few products. So, instead of the cumbersome process of putting the commodity into the film, the ‘‘tie-in’’ technique extracts images from the fabula and appends them to the product. T-shirts, pencils, thermoses, mouse pads, hats, sandwich bags, chocolate bars, flashlights, drinking cups, underwear, and napkins depict Batmans, Bullwinkles, Barbies, and Barneys. The tie-ins have proliferated because they extend the movie’s thematizing power to the product, even if the product has no explicable connection with the movie’s contents. Incongruity is no obstacle. Licensing Flipper to appear on sleeping bags is not in the least hindered by the dearth of dolphins in the woods.23 Adults, too, can take part. They can purchase computer screen-savers tied in to Star Trek and makeup called Face of Evita, which is tied in to the movie Evita (1996). Though there were several precedents in merchandising Mickey Mouse and Shirley Temple even before World War II, such merchandise licensing finally proved itself after Star Wars and once again after Superman: The Movie (1979).24 By the time Jurassic Park was released in 1993, MCA would license nearly 1,000 product lines in the first year alone and garner licensing fees that eventually surpassed box office revenues.25 It is now also routine to tie movies to services, like restaurants. Posters with movie images hang on the wall, lifesized robot cutouts are displayed near the cash register, rocket ships dangle from the ceiling, hourly workers wear pictorially referential T-shirts, french-fry grease runs over boxes decorated with movie characters, and the meal assortments include figurines based on the film. The practice extends to hotels, car rental agencies, shoe stores, and convenience stores. These kinds of tied-in merchandise and services (along with toyetic production, to which we will get momentarily) add up to an enormous business, garnering some $70 billion in licensing fees in 1994.26 To arrange a tie-in, the merchandiser pays 5 to 15 percent of wholesale revenues, the higher price going for links to more desirable fabulae, like those of Disney or Dream Works.27 This is a mode of production especially characteristic of advanced capitalism, since the routine work of manufacturing the T-shirts and plastic cups typically takes place in the world’s poorer countries, while iconic value is produced in, and licensed from, the American capitals of fabulousness. Whether it makes iconic merchandise or iconic services, tie-in production depends on two simple requirements. First, the high-concept

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film to which the commodities refer must indeed—in iconographic terms—have readily identifiable and appealing themes. These must be played out through distinctive characters in memorable settings, like sleek spacecraft, passionate embraces, exotic costumes, high-tech weapons, and cool lifestyles. Second, since studios must have an incentive to incorporate these distinctive images in the movie, they must have proprietary control of the image. The legal instrument that provides this incentive is the trademark. It allows the producer of the fabula to secure images as private property and to license them to secondary users. In the United States, the enormous expansion of image-based industries has depended on trademark legislation, which relies on a conceptual scheme that is remarkably reminiscent of Panofsky’s iconographic vocabulary. Trademark law recognizes a distinction between the ‘‘primary meaning’’ of a motif and its ‘‘secondary meaning’’ in connection with a theme. The former is the motif’s literal, dictionary definition; the second is the figurative meaning with which a proprietor, like a movie studio or celebrity, has endowed it. As determined by the landmark case Wyatt Earp, Inc. v. Sackman, Inc (1958), anyone can use the name Wyatt Earp in the context of a historical discussion, since the reference is to the name’s primary, literal meaning. However, the owners of the television show The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp own the name’s secondary meanings, so the owners can require royalties for a clothing company’s use of the name on playsuits.28 Once the studio can legally shield the name or image, it can license it to second and third parties, who pay royalties in return. Tie-in production depends entirely on the proprietary control of secondary meaning.29 Toyetic Production In a productive technique described in the trade as ‘‘toyetic’’ (a word reliably reported to be in actual use), there is no pre-existing product. Instead of the normal process, in which the merchandiser has a product in hand and makes it iconic by inserting it into a fabula, the toyetic producer starts with an image that is a constituent part of a fabula and then has to generate the palpable form through which it can be put up for sale. The object to be sold is a byproduct of the movie. It is in conjunction with Star Wars’ release that Luke Skywalkers, Princess Leias, Darth Vaders, Star Destroyers, and miscel-

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laneous robots can troop off the screen, invading the toy stores. After the first Star Wars series, film-based toys, which had made up only 20 percent of toy sales in 1976, expanded to 60 percent of toy sales in the 1980s.30 The output of toyetic production need not be merchandise. An ever more important toyetic process turns scenes from the movie into a derivative cinematic experience, which is sold separately from the movie. Typically, this occurs at an amusement park, which uses multisensory technology to immerse customers in simulated participation in the story. Viewing a large screen three-dimensional cinematic projection, participants traverse the landscape in futuristic vehicles; brandish apparatuses meant to be hunting weapons; feel their seats rock, rotate, and coast in the search for prehistoric beasts; and, through controlled flows of air aimed at their faces, smell the breath of the dinosaur. Though the method is still specialized and restricted to a few amusement venues, it is increasing in productive sophistication. In contrast to the still rudimentary technique of extracting the characters and objects from the film and making them into sellable products, this method inserts the audience directly into the fabula. Much calculation goes into the toyeticity of the movie. Steven Spielberg has remarked that even before he began filming E.T. he had carefully considered the contents for eventual marketing and merchandising.31 Makers of Lost World (1997), the sequel to Jurassic Park, are reported to have needed a toy-maker’s instigation to include in the plot a dino-chasing truck that the company wanted to license into a nifty toy.32 In Dream Works’ Small Soldiers (1998) the outcome of mortal conflict between Commandos and Gorgonites was preordained long before they met in battle. ‘‘It was determined by the toy company,’’ explained Joe Dante, the director, ‘‘that the Commandos would be much more attractive heroes if they won, so they needed an enemy that always lost.’’33 Like tie-ins, toyetic products depend on the movie’s presentation of images that are crisp and distinctive, and on trademark laws that make images into licensable property. Moreover, the images should be truly toyetic, in that they should be conducive to being transformed into appealing icons and iconic experiences. More even than placements and tie-ins, toyetic production epitomizes the fabulous stage of capitalism. Recognizing that the consumer is drawn more by the theme than by the object, this technique starts with the fabula and generates the product out of it.

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What indeed makes an image toyetic? Industry insiders’ consistent explanation is that toyetic images respond to children’s fantasies. At a rudimentary level of explanation, ‘‘creatures do better than representations of people, because kids can project a broader fantasy into their play’’—or so says the president of licensing at Twentieth Century Fox.34 Indeed, humanoids, stuffed animals, extraterrestials, and animated dolls are the raw materials of toyetic production. Joe Dante, the director of Small Soldiers, suggests a further and more subtle explanation: ‘‘The nonhuman pals . . . appeal to kids who wish their dogs would talk to them.’’ Children love ‘‘toys that talk back’’ and ‘‘a stuffed animal that suddenly came to life.’’35 Therefore, children’s movies that want to be toyetic stress the theme of ‘‘imaginary friend,’’ the one who helps me through my troubles, ones that are sublimated as exotic and perilous escapades. In toyetic products for adults, a recent trend is the turning of set decor into home furnishings. There is more to this than the sale of star-enhanced studio originals, like the sofas that fetch considerable sums for having been graced by a celebrity’s bottom. The trend is to actually manufacture furnishings fashioned from sets shown in the film. As of this writing, furniture sets resembling Titanic (1997) staterooms are a particular vogue, as are beds like the one on which Jack Nicholson slept in As Good as It Gets (1997). Expectations are also high for lime-green chairs modeled after ones in Mod Squad (1999). Furniture makers have to keep their eyes on the movies and quickly adapt their catalogs to feature the latest movie-linked items. MetroGoldwyn-Mayer now has a consumer products division to license them.36 Furniture (and clothing, another important example) aside, toyetically produced products for adults might seem relatively rare. They are less common because the props that grown-ups use are by and large already on the market, so their producer must imbue them with iconic value through linked ads, placements, and tie-ins rather than toyetic production. However, their seeming rarity is deceptive, because some kinds of toyetic products are not commonly recognized as such. For the grown-up audience, the main toyetic producs tend to be the movie characters themselves, which are merchandised through the endorsement process.

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Endorsement Celebrity endorsement had a predecessor in the testimonial. Testimonial ads reflected the modernist belief that the commodity’s value rested on its routine meaning and that ads simply had to make consumers aware of, and make them have trust in, values that the commodity already exemplified. Testimonials were sought, therefore, from personalities known for expertness or trustworthiness, qualities that were thought to make their statements credible.37 Celebrity endorsement in our time differs from the testimonial because the celebrity’s role is to express a clear set of personal traits, which need not include any expertise in or even knowledge about the product to be sold. As Grant McCracken has insightfully explained, the endorser’s effectiveness rests on his ability to transfer meanings to the product. These meanings flow from the persona that the celebrity has acquired through performances in movies, television shows, and sports venues, along with public reaffirmations of that persona in live appearances, news reports, and celebrity interviews. Perhaps the celebrity personifies maturity and good humor; expresses stereotyped personality types, like the curmudgeon or impudent troublemaker; shows class features, like learned commentator or working-class male; or has traits suggesting wisdom, hipness, sensuality, or bland agreeableness.38 The celebrity’s appropriateness as a product endorser depends on this distinctly identifiable persona, which he has developed through the movies in which he has acted (or life events, say military command, in which he has gained fame). Having acquired elegance or aggressiveness through numerous performances, an Audrey Hepburn or a Sylvester Stallone can deliver it more efficiently (in the time available) than any mere model, no matter how elegantly or aggressively the model behaves. Actors should beware, however. If they express grief too grievingly in one movie and brim too lightheartedly with frivolity in another—if they play characters that are too varied—they can undermine their pre-sold persona. The prospective endorser must steer clear of the dramatic versatility that film critics normally admire. Typecasting is preferable. It allows the actor both to bring to each high-concept movie a pretested persona and to serve the merchandiser with personal meanings established across several performances.39 As a technique for the production of product meaning, endorsement overlaps the other techniques already discussed. So, when Eliz-

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abeth Taylor shows her Black Pearls line of fragrance on four different CBS network programs in one night,40 she is an endorser, since she brings her fabulous persona to the product, and also a placement, since she and her product are inserted in the fabula. Moreover, as an image turned into a real-life product advocate, she is a toyetic production. Having stepped out of the fabula, the endorser can bring her name or likeness to perfume bottles, signature to running shoes, voice and manner to TV ads, and full complement of iconic attributes to real-life book signings and car unveilings. The endorser is also toyetic in the further sense that he or she can thematically fulfill the grown-up kinds of fantastic longing. Grownups do not usually pine for animals that have come to life as pals. They are motivated instead by desires woven quietly into adult life— the usual preoccupations with sexual prowess, emotional security, public success, thrilling aggression, romantic love, and maybe a bit of all-around omnipotence.41 Having been a constituent of the cinematic mise en sce`ne, whether a scene of romance or heroism or fantastic wealth, the celebrity becomes thematically invested. Now appearing off-screen, he or she can through his or her presence tie commodities to this fabulous world, turning them into icons. That having been said, endorsement as a form of iconic production has disadvantages not found in regular placements and tie-ins. As compared to tied-in logos and cartoon characters, celebrities are plagued by the imperfections of human existence. The celebrity persona so assiduously assembled and sustained through numerous performances can disastrously collapse, bringing the endorsed product down with it. While divorce and sex scandal are handicaps from which a celebrity can recover, drug addiction, grisly murder, or disfiguring cancer can be hard to reconcile with the cinematic persona. Aging is another serious problem, causing even the best celebrity asset to depreciate. From the studio’s point of view, celebrities are also disadvantageous in that they are autonomous commercial entities. Studios that could once fully control the public lives of stars, and determine the commercial uses to which their personas were put, have had to capitulate to the stars’ independent negotiating power and allow them to capitalize on the celebrity-property they embody.42 Studios still garner benefits from this arrangement, however, because a star vying for a studio contract can moderate demands for compensation in view of the foreseen flow of endorsement contracts. As a fabulous technique of production, endorsement has the further

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drawback that celebrity behavior is freely copied. Her way of walking, how she blows cigarette smoke, the pouting lips, the twinkling smile, the casual style, the hair-do, the dimple, and the nose job cannot be privatized through trademarking, at least not yet. The development of concept-movies notwithstanding, movies are still subject to freeriding through emulation, reducing the studios’ incentive to make movies into vehicles for commercial fabulae. As compared to cartoons and puppets, living actors are a pecuniary handicap, but this is a property-rights failure that progress in computer technology may yet remedy. Advances in computer graphics will solve the problem, either by constructing simulated new actors who can be trademarked, or through the purchase of Bogart, Bacall, and other dead stars, who will come to life again as simulated actors in new movies. Fully trademarked, fully licensable, never aging, and never causing scandal unintended by publicists, they will be the most fabulous of properties. THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF REALITY The same economic forces that have decreased the efficacy of traditional advertising have spurred a growing interest in the thematic potential of reality. I do not mean that real products are being thematized; as we have already seen, commodities are routinely thematized in the economy (and movies provide an exceptionally effective cultural resource for doing so). What if the product could gain heightened meaning in real-life situations, overcoming the distance implicit in all representation? If the product’s expressive power could really be heightened through direct participation in evocative conversations and events, that would be the acme of fabulousness. Throughout most of the twentieth century, when marketers and advertisers did try to shape real events for their value in advertising, the result was a publicity stunt or media event. Coming into town, the circus would organize a lottery and give winners a ride on an elephant, an eminently visual event that was perfect for the next day’s front page or the evening’s newscast. When one publisher released a new dictionary and convinced librarians to run up and down the library steps waving the volume, the purpose once again was just to gain media attention. Such pranks were still representational: they still had their effect through the intervening role of the media. Marketers have long known that word-of-mouth is more powerful

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than any mass medium. Coming from third parties who appear to have no axe to grind, word-of-mouth seems more credible than information that is merely broadcast. If the word comes from a person whom we admire, or lives a way of life that we aspire to, the product itself comes to be linked with some of the meanings we ascribe to the recommender’s life.43 If we were not just listening to talk, but were instead engrossed in a personal experience with the recommender, the iconic effect would be all the stronger. It makes sense, therefore, that an ever larger number of firms have tried to heighten product meaning by inserting the products in real-life situations that express the product’s desirability. Seeding Some Buzz A spurt of excited conversation about a product is known as ‘‘buzz,’’ and ‘‘seeding’’ is the incitement and attempted harnessing of buzz. If it were possible to generate buzz, that would be far preferable to hype, which is merely contrived talk. Oldsmobile tried to seed some buzz in 1997 by sending a fleet of new models around the country with drivers on a special mission. While the cars were placed in clear view at popular gathering places, the drivers engaged in ‘‘random acts of kindness,’’ like paying for meals, parking, or car washes, while giving the crowd that assembled a chance to ‘‘interact’’ with the car.44 To market a brandy, an advertising firm hired actors to stage arguments in bars, resolve them amicably, and then loudly inform the bartender, ‘‘Hennessy martinis all around.’’45 Japanese firms have been known to pay teenagers to line up for a newly released product to serve as living demonstrations of the product’s popularity.46 Converse, a maker of athletic shoes, spurs ‘‘on-the-spot interaction’’ by supplying new sneakers to local sports heroes in church leagues and amateur groups. Audi lends preview models to business executives and celebrities, in order to—as a trade magazine explains— ‘‘grow the brand via generating oohs and aahs in key locales’’ in the target income group.47 A company in London introduced a line of mobile phones by inviting selected Londoners to ‘‘invitation-only underground parties,’’ parties made the more alluring through their exclusivity.48 Mercedes provides courtesy cars to supermodels, dropping them off conspicuously at fashion shows.49 In the case of health care, a complex product about which most people are perpetually uncertain, consumers yearn for real-life reas-

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surance. Informal conversation with those who have actually sampled the product is more comforting than reassurance provided through testimony mediated by a TV or radio spot. Real conversation provides living, breathing endorsement of the product’s efficacy. It follows then, that the hospital’s volunteers, employees, their spouses, and surviving patients ought to participate in community groups, where they can serve as delegates of product value. ‘‘When someone at the PTA asks Mrs. Smith where she or her husband works,’’ a marketing journal advises, ‘‘the right answer is not ‘the Elm Street Clinic,’ but ‘The Elm Street Clinic’—and we’re all so happy that the clinic has been able to . . .’’ The article proposes alternative ways to complete the sentence, such as ‘‘attract so many doctors’ wives as our patients,’’ or ‘‘hire a great new pediatrician.’’ When they answer properly, these delegates serve as living endorsers, though of course the health care organization has to ‘‘educate them on what to say when they get there.’’50 In the health care conversation, as in the mobile phone party, the Mercedes at the fashion show, or the argument amicably resolved by brandy, the object gains iconicity through its being situated in a desirable setting, a fabula woven into life. Staging a Staging As compared to a product endorsement worked into an exclusive party or an ad that pops up in a conversation, staged events are a few steps removed in immediacy. Yet these events still provide a sense of immediacy (of being unmediated) that the broadcast media are unable to match. That is one reason that event sponsorship has spread so rapidly in the past decade, growing from $850 million in expenditure in 1985 to an estimated $5.9 billion in 1997. The bulk is sponsorship of organized sport, making up 65 percent of all sponsorship in 1997, but we can skip this subject, since it is a combined form, having features of both the cinematic fabula and the staged event.51 Let us look instead at pure event sponsorships, which situate products primarily in on-site staged experiences. An event called ‘‘Workout in the Park’’ proves to be a good venue for manufacturers of sports equipment. A presidential inaugural, too, makes way for product placement—Nestle bought into the 1993 Clinton event, where it distributed thousands of cups of hot cocoa. Likewise, corporations pay hefty fees to sponsor parades, festivals, and

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other events. An insurance company softens its staid image by buying into a jazz festival; a phone company gives its imprimatur to photography exhibits; still other firms seek out target audiences: the elderly at Fifty Plus Expo, and parents dragging toddlers at Children’s Day.52 Introducing a new line of houses, real estate developers want to show community mindedness and family friendliness, so they invite target customers to ‘‘family barbecues,’’ ‘‘traditional Independence Day celebrations,’’ or fun events featuring fiddlers, cloggers, and clowns. Still other companies want to envelop themselves in high culture, good citizenship, and fine causes. A bank sponsors a Shakespearean company that plays to school children, an insurance company underwrites a gymnastic tour, and a cosmetics firm sponsors breast cancer screening. When advertising proves to have little benefit, a hospital opts for well-publicized wellness clinics instead. When companies first try these gambits, many do it crudely, by purchasing a stadium name or displaying a banner on the arena walls. The more sophisticated sponsorship is like movie placement: it integrates the product with the event. In the words of an editor of a sponsorship newsletter, ‘‘People flip past ads; with a sponsorship, a company’s message is really embedded into an event that people enjoy.’’53 In the 1990s, a common tactic was to insert products into youthculture events, which were initially labeled ‘‘extreme’’ events. Beer, candy, jeans, fast food, and long-distance calling cards tied themselves to beach volleyball, in-line skating, mountain biking, snowboarding, and windsurfing. Sponsors especially favored events in which music was part of the mix, in trendy varieties like ‘‘horn-based ska,’’ punk, and hiphop. The advantage was not audience size—these were not for the masses—but access to the hippest of ‘‘twenty-somethings,’’ the ones to whom others who were only aspiring to be cool would look for their models. One firm made a practice of unveiling new computer games at such events, since they gave ‘‘an opportunity to influence the influencers.’’54 An event is particularly successful if it in itself achieves the kind of life for which participants yearn. As a packager of extreme festivals explains, ‘‘These sports aren’t developed enough yet to draw thousands of people as spectators, so what we really put on is a lifestyle festival.’’55 When fully realized, the event is a fabula brought to life. Whereas the cinematic fabula still shares one of the weaknesses

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of traditional representational advertising, in that it works through denotation, the sponsored lifestyle event works through expression, heightening product value through participation in a real-life field of meaning.

The Limits of Real-Life Like the movies, everyday life, too, provides opportunities for placement and endorsement. An Israeli prime minister brandishes a Pilot pen, General Schwarzkopf gives a war briefing with a can of Diet Pepsi, the pope wears K-Swiss tennis shoes.56 In the wake of the O. J. Simpson murder trial, in which Bruno Magli shoes achieved brief fame for matching the shoeprints at the murder scene, the brand enjoyed a jump in sales.57 Having such possibilities, the staging of events would seem to be a most desirably fabulous technique. However, as a backdrop for the heightening of commodity value, real-life is far less promising than it would seem. Scenes are not easily trademarked, timing is unpredictable, the cast is hard to manage, and the endorsers might not sign a contract. When a brand-named grape drink gets mixed with poison for mass suicide, it is too late to renegotiate the scene. The practitioners of seeding may try to infiltrate everyday conversation, but the possibilities are limited, because the quality of being unprogrammed is widely taken as a marker of its being real, or at least authentic. The very practice of commercially intervening in talk undermines the intended effect, except in the rarest circumstances. Sponsors of lifestyle events may try to insinuate products in real events, but they, too, stumble as they strain toward authenticity. This was indeed the outcome in the sponsorship of youth events in the 1990s. As the events multiplied, the label ‘‘extreme’’ connected to an event or product fell almost immediately out of favor, so sponsors hurriedly switched to ‘‘X-games’’ instead,58 a term that would inevitably see only a short day. After all, cool thrives in its elusiveness, as buzz does in its spontaneousness, so that those who try to stage one or seed the other will always be a little too late, finding that cool evades them, just as they seem to be catching up to it. Among the ways of creating meaning through the iconic loading of reality, the making of destinations may be the most effective, but that is a subject for the next chapter.

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THE POWER OF THE MOVIES In view of the pitfalls of reality, most firms are still best served if they heighten products through mediated fields of meaning. Any symbolic form can serve. Pictures, texts, and words, transmitted electronically, in print, or through sound recordings, can all create the fields of meaning to which products refer. Movies are the medium of choice. Seen on television, the computer monitor, or the big screen, movies are still unmatched as generators of meaning. The reasons are not obvious. We cannot say the movie is inherently more affecting than, say, a book; there is no shortage of well-written texts that bring a dramatic narrative to the human imagination more affectingly than the analog signals on a movie screen. Nor can we attribute the movie’s power to its being, somehow, a close copy of reality. Indeed, the movie is so powerful in part because it is quite different from, often better than, the real. Whereas in real-life the narrative structure is diffuse, the plot is humdrum, the pace is erratic, events do not build to climax, and main points are difficult to discern, the movie can be cohesive and well timed. The movie surpasses the sensual limits of daily life. It zooms impossibly close or pans amazingly wide; it switches scenes with perfect instantaneity; it displays objects at angles unavailable to the uncinematic eye. So, it is not only the presumed mimicry of reality that makes the movie so powerful. Rather, two other factors are at play: the movie’s unnatural control over content and its dynamic representational density. Indeed, movies provide exceptional directorial control over content, more so even than theater. Theater direction, too, can certainly create subtle and powerful artifice in the positioning of actors in framed scenes. The stage director uses movement or stasis, positions eye-lines with respect to the audience, contrasts colors against dark or light fields, manipulates set design, and uses sound and illumination, all to build a world of meaning.59 However, movies provide even more directorial control, and they do so with economy (density of content per unit of time) that neither theater nor any other medium can yet match. Since human beings can understand pictures (those adhering to conventions of realism) very rapidly, pictures can provide far greater density of meaning than texts can for the attentive effort required.60 Moving pictures that subscribe to conventions of realism can provide still more meaningful density (relative to attentive effort) than still

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pictures. In part this result confirms the literary person’s usual prejudice that movie-watching requires less intellectual effort than reading does. More precisely, the movie provides more meaningful content per unit of attentive effort. As a generator of meaning, the movie is highly economical. The movie director can easily use camera movement and focus to determine what is included and what is excluded from the film’s frame. He or she can also fade, cut, and juxtapose to control the precise moment and order in which scenes are viewed. Film theoretician Noel Carroll specifically attributes the arresting power of movies to this capacity to focus and frame, and thereby construct ‘‘actions and events with an economy, legibility, and coherence’’ that surpasses the legibility of our everyday perceptions.61 That is why a movie novelization released as an audio recording inevitably takes much longer to play than the movie. The sound recording may be just as dramatic and affecting, but it takes a longer time to exert its effect. With these dramatic capabilities, the movie rapidly constructs the complete world of meaning to which commodities can refer. If placements, tie-ins, toyetic production, and endorsements are to be effective, the movie must generally construct a field of meaning that submits to the constraints of genre. Animal fantasies, lifestyles of the young and wealthy, gadget-filled action, and science fiction continue to be genres of choice because they do not restrict—indeed they facilitate—commercial linkages. They provide opportunities for the high-technology settings, toyetic figures, and desirable lifestyles with which sponsors want to be associated.62 Movies certainly assemble concepts, scenes, and dramatic tensions that have been frequently used before. However, each movie recombines such elements in a form that is original—original at least in the sense that it merits the all-essential copyright that makes its contents proprietary. Within the limits imposed by running time and genre, movies create original worlds of meaning that can serve as powerful referenda for products aspiring to iconicity. Much more fully than advertising, more reliably than real events and conversations, the movies create complete fields of reference.63 FABULAE IN THE ECONOMY Nineteenth-century foods, buildings, and personas acquired their value through the inner essences, national traditions, and ingrained

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faculties that they revealed. Twentieth-century modernist products obtained higher meaning through the expressive enhancement of their literal qualities, those of efficiency, replicability, and adherence to technical definition. The products supplemented these modernist meanings with reference to family well-being, status achievement, scientific expertise, childhood cuteness, and other common-property themes. Modern products arrived at this thematic enhancement through one productive technique above all, advertising. Now at the turn of the century, however, advertising is nearing exhaustion. Subordinated to program content, operating through intrusions, evadable by consumers, limited in dramatic scope, buried in enervating clutter, ads as producers of meaning are increasingly ineffectual. Though ads meant merely to be notice boards will certainly persist, ads meant to wrap the commodity in a field of meaning are already succumbing to newer productive methods that eliminate the separation between program and ad. While many kinds of enterprises are bringing about this new cultural consolidation, one branch of the culture sector, the movie studio, is responding with particular energy. It is reshaping the movie, a popular entertainment originally meant for final consumption on retail markets, into a newer, more advanced form, in which it is a factory for secondary meanings. This advanced movie provides to downstream firms powerful opportunities to take commodities out of their routinized setting and insert them in proprietary fields of meaning that solve consumers’ confusions. Despite this progress in the production of meaning, most histories, myths, legends, street cultures, stories, arts, and traditions are still accessible as part of the common cultural repository. Since the common culture has been freely available to all users, it is overexploited. It has undergone a kind of tragedy of the commons. As a result, one of the turn-of-the-century’s early realizations is that culture is a depletable resource. This is not because it cannot be used again and again—it certainly can; rather, it is depletable because, through repeated use, its marginal evocativeness declines. In a kind of twenty-first-century enclosures movement, the cultural sector is slowly overcoming the inefficiencies of common-pool culture. It is doing so through progress in the private appropriation of meaning. Indeed, fabulous production depends on the ever-expanding protections that trademarking provides for thematic property. Such proprietary controls not only prevent heedless thematic exploitation,

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but also provide firms with the incentive to generate an ever richer variety of privately held fabulae. This new capitalism has at its creative core a cultural sector composed of competitive, oligopolistic producers of meaning. Relying on the movie as the primary setting for meaning-production, they have the productive scope to distribute the fabula, and its constituent motifs and themes, across multiple media. They can resell the fabulous opportunity on wholesale meaning-markets to merchandisers and service providers that want to endow their products with iconicity. The downstream producer, say the manufacturer of gelatin, does have the alternative of freely using common-property themes, including uncopyrighted dinosaurs, but it takes the risk that these ordinary images will lack evocative currency. Common-property culture is likely to be trite and worn, and can be used by anyone at any time. But the proprietary dinosaur epic is actively managed, designed for crispness and distinctiveness, timed for maximum effect, and controlled to limit access. The gelatin maker buys into such fabulae because it lacks the cultural resources, productive capacity, or media links to create its own fields of meaning. Hoping to fix their perplexity and cure their anomie, consumers search for meaning. They bid for a product in view of the additional meaning it provides for the price. Whereas economists once thought that value was exogenous to the free market, and naive critics of commercial culture thought that corporations could monopolistically implant wants in consumers’ minds, we now know that both were wrong. Private enterprise now provides the meanings that animate the economy, and the cultural technology that underlies this production is the cinematic fabula. Cost effective and time efficient, it squeezes into its running-time a whole world of affecting meaning. Superseding the haphazard cultural arrangements of the past, the fabula has taken its place at the core of the economy, as the fabulous engine of capitalism.

Chapter 6

Staging a Natural Wonder

THE TOURISM PRODUCT Though it is the world’s first or second largest industry, tourism is not well understood, possibly because its product has been difficult to define.1 To be sure, tourism enterprises sell hotel rooms, meals, admission tickets, souvenirs, and tour bus rides, but tourists do not come just for them. Those are incidental purchases in the search for something more important, a special kind of experience. It is an experience that attracts by referencing myths, histories, fantasies or other realms that appeal to tourists’ fond desires and imaginative associations. What the tourism industry sells, in short, is an iconic experience—it promotes, packages, and delivers experiential content. In doing so, the industry provides still another illustration of iconic production. Tourism is also more than just another example, since it achieves what other industries are still striving to accomplish, a meaningfully heightened experience into which customers are fully immersed. As compared to other iconic products, the tourist destination is richer in its allusions and more elaborate in its composition. The tourism product is distinctive, furthermore, in that its producers have more creative options. Tourism enterprises can function like other makers of iconic products, freely extracting realms of meaning from the universal cultural domain or purchasing a meaning-

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franchise from corporate proprietors of culture. The industry also has the creative leeway to generate meaning from on-site features of the locality. In tourism more than in other economic sectors, enterprises often have the option to depend neither on stereotyped commonproperty culture nor on cinematic fabulae but rather to develop original, perhaps genuine, perhaps even authentic, touristic experiences. As compared to other commercial products, the touristic experience is additionally distinctive because it is, in most cases, not produced by individual businesses on their own. To the extent that various commercial attractions are part of the same experiential destination, the themes that one attraction exudes can infringe upon and conflict with those of its neighbors. Moreover, tourism businesses often depend for their product’s iconicity on thematic features of the locality, such as historicalness, urbanity, folkloric quaintness, and natural spectacle, which the individual businesses usually cannot produce on their own. Tourism, then, is special once again in that its operations are (with important exceptions) pervaded by thematic externalities. The touristic theme is a kind of collective resource, requiring design and planning by combinations of private businesses and collective entities, including industry groups and governments. This chapter investigates these complex economic and cultural features of the tourism product through one case study, Niagara Falls. Once North America’s premier tourist attraction, Niagara Falls still receives over ten million visitors a year. Yet the Niagara Falls tourism industry is not as healthy as one might expect. It has increasingly faced problems of market share. The competition now includes other natural spectacles (Grand Canyon), new historical attractions (Colonial Williamsburg), new centers for popular culture (Branson, Missouri, Graceland), and new fantasy environments (theme parks near and far). What is most worrying to the Niagara Falls business community is that, despite the large number of visitors, few stay long or spend much. Many simply drive there, park, look, and drive on. Only a small proportion visit the many commercial attractions or stay overnight.2 The reason, I propose, is that Niagara Falls is a poorly designed tourism product, the shortfall being in the composition of the touristic experience it offers. The attraction’s stark incongruities and thematic incompleteness lead visitors to find in it personal value of only short duration. This chapter sets out in search of some of the iconographic concepts through which tourism destinations can plan to improve the

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touristic experiences they offer. Niagara Falls reveals two phases of touristic composition: staging, which consists of setting up, arranging, and contextualizing an attractive motif; and thematizing, which meaningfully situates the attraction through themes such as picturesqueness, freakishness, technological wondrousness, and romance. When tourism planners and designers make use of such concepts in the actual making of the tourism experience, they have to—as we will see—confront difficult dilemmas of authenticity. FROM TOURISM CRITIQUE TO TOURISM ICONOGRAPHY The available texts that would tell Niagara Falls how to plan for tourism give limited help. One textbook on tourism planning covers the attraction’s physical environment, including transportation access and land-use conflicts, and enters into market segmentation, tourism workers’ hospitality, resident-visitor relations, and the impacts of tourism on the local economy, with brief remarks on the tourist attraction’s authenticity.3 The main text on tourism as a business is no more helpful, stressing airline travel patterns, travel agencies, and marketing.4 Though such texts do consider ‘‘destination development,’’ they focus on master planning, especially the planning of transportation, and lack a language for thinking about the content of the attraction. With some exceptions,5 the studies conducted for Niagara Falls reflect these limitations of conventional tourism planning. They examine visitor origins and spending, visitor demographics, the problem of seasonality, and the economic impact on the community. One study does offer to ‘‘deliver a high-quality tourism experience’’ for visitors, but suggests doing so through such initiatives as hospitality training for workers, improved airports, and tax reform.6 These kinds of data and recommendations can be quite useful, but they miss the point, just as a guide to movie direction would miss the point if it concerned itself with statistics about moviegoers, the courteousness of the ticket sellers, or the means of handling the queues at the popcorn stand. These writings about tourism development lose sight of the basic challenge: the effective composition of the touristic experience. But what ideas could guide the composition of touristic content? Provocative possibilities can be found in a literature that has rec-

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ognized that we gain insights into tourism through an examination of the touristic experience itself. An early milestone is Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, which laments the passing of the once-upon-a-time genuine art of travel, and its replacement with the tourist’s world of prepackaged spectacles and ‘‘pseudo-events.’’ Lacking genuine cultural content, Hawaiian hula dances are repeated endlessly as photo opportunities for droves of tourists; the Istanbul Hilton’s Turkish style comes to substitute for the tourist’s real encounter with Turkey; and the American tourist in Japan spurns what is Japanese—something foreign and difficult to understand—for what is Japanesey.7 Boorstin writes that ‘‘the tourist seldom likes the authentic (to him unintelligible) product of foreign culture; he prefers his own provincial expectations.’’ Since the tourist wants to experience scenes that conform to his preconceptions, enterprising suppliers are more than willing to oblige. They recognize the tourist’s implicit demand that ‘‘the whole world be made a stage for pseudo-events.’’8 Dean MacCannell responded with the influential book, The Tourist, which pursued some of Boorstin’s observations, while taking issue with his elitism. MacCannell argued that everyday life is in itself inauthentic and alienating, hence ‘‘tourists demand authenticity, just as Boorstin does.’’ Tourists are on a ‘‘quest for authenticity’’ on voyages akin to pilgrimages. To MacCannell, critics like Boorstin ‘‘point out only the tawdry side of tourism and the ways it can spoil the human community, while hiding from themselves the essentially touristic nature of their own cultural expeditions,’’ say to the fine art gallery or quaint flower market they favor.9 Rather than being content with mere superficialities, MacCannell’s tourists seek authenticity. The tourist establishment caters to this desire through what MacCannell terms ‘‘staged authenticity’’—the organizing of touristic settings that provide to paying visitors semblances of the authentic experience they seek. Museum art collections, foreign cultural festivals, historical monuments, and even natural spectacles are routinely staged to have that effect.10 Taking up this topic, Erik Cohen has introduced to this literature the tradition of phenomenological inquiry—he has shifted our attention to the structuring of the subject’s (the tourist’s) flow of experience. In articles pursued over twenty years, Cohen has observed that tourists are alienated from their cultural origins to different degrees, so they vary in the propensity to which they seek authenticity in exotic settings or distant places, and that audiences are drawn not only to purportedly authentic attractions but also to playful make-

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believe.11 Cohen and the other authors have, therefore, allowed us to see that tourists undertake a search for meaning. Hoping to compensate for their secular, disenchanted, mundane lives, they look for a temporary, safe, and possibly authentic exposure to the other—to the adventurous, foreign, ancient, or spectacular. Tourism establishments make it their business to shape, package, and sell such experiences. Recognizing these features of tourism, this literature provides an essential corrective to conventional tourism planning. It shifts our attention to the productive activity that is central to the tourism enterprise: the creation of the touristic experience. However, these writings, too, have practical limitations. First, the authors often assume that there is a thematically unproblematic heritage to be staged: that a community’s history, culture, and natural features are given, such that the only question is the authenticity, or lack of it, through which this indigenous theme is staged. The writings on staged authenticity neglect the selection, composition, and making of the dramatic content on which theatrical staging depends. Second, the writers often see themselves as cultural critics addressing others inclined toward criticism. They do not address the professional and ethical dilemmas of those who create meaning as their line of work—the marketers, planners, and designers who actually make tourism destinations. Taking a detached, critical attitude, the authors foreclose on an inquiry into how tourism destinations can actually be crafted to better and more authentic effect. To temper this attitude, I suggest that we can take lessons once again from iconography. Analogously to a work of representational art, the tourist attraction carries out iconic work. At the first level of meaning, it exemplifies literal objects and activities (motifs) and at the second level of meaning it expresses concepts (themes). Since theater is one kind of artistic representation, ‘‘staging’’ can indeed be an appropriate concept for an iconographic discussion of tourism, but we have to be clearer about the levels of meaning that are being staged. We have to more clearly understand the applied iconographic art of composing desirable experiences for the market. In pursuit of this compositional core of touristic production, we can now turn to Niagara Falls. THE GREAT CATARACT Readers may need to be reminded that Niagara Falls is located at the U.S.-Canadian national border between New York State and the

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Province of Ontario, where the Niagara River, carrying accumulated overflow from four Great Lakes, thunders over the Niagara Escarpment on its way to Lake Ontario. As the Niagara River flows northward, approaching the precipice, it becomes a ferocious rapids, which is split by Goat Island into two channels. The western channel, which is wider and carries much more water, forms what is known as the Horseshoe Falls or Canadian Falls. The eastern channel is in turn split by tiny Luna Island into two falls, the American Falls and the smaller Bridal Veil Falls. All three plunge into a foaming abyss that has become world famous. Since its first European observer, Father Louis Hennepin, described ‘‘this prodigious cadence of water,’’ ‘‘great and horrible cataract,’’ and ‘‘frightful abyss’’12 in the late seventeenth century, travelers have longed to see it. By the early nineteenth century, tens of thousands of visitors hazarded the overland trip each year. Literally thousands recorded their reactions in travel diaries, essays, poems, and paintings, which have served as the sources of fine historical studies of Niagara Falls.13 These visitors commonly—after a time, tritely—described the falls with reference to the nineteenth-century esthetic concept of the ‘‘sublime.’’ To the devotees of the sublime, Niagara was nature revealed in its most dramatic, morally uplifting the viewer by inspiring him with awe and reverence. After the Erie Canal made travel easier in 1825, and later when railroads connected the falls to eastern North American cities, Niagara became accessible to mass tourism. Coming from a broader class background, and having been prepared for the experience of the falls through travel writings and the new genre of travel guides, the visitors had a revised thematic predisposition, now seeing the falls not in terms of the esoteric concept of sublime but rather the milder notion of the ‘‘picturesque.’’14 Whether they would view the falls as sublime or merely picturesque, visitors came with a thematic predisposition. The early entrepreneurs—museum operators, hotel owners, stagecoach drivers, and hucksters—who congregated near the falls did not concern themselves with the thematic shaping of the attraction. After all, nature had put the thing there and millions already wanted to see it. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Niagara was undergoing a shift from romantic travel to modernist leisure tourism. The idea of the falls as nature’s gift quite separate from human volition was becoming less tenable, since Niagara Falls was ever more

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actively manipulated for industrial and touristic purposes. Moreover, the decline of romanticism left a conceptual opening for new ways of thematizing the falls. In keeping with the modernist style, twentiethcentury interventions sought to enhance the exemplificatory power of the central motif, namely the waterfall itself. STAGING THE FALLS Since Niagara Falls is a geophysical landscape feature that lends itself quite naturally to the waterfall motif, it has required less preparation than does a cultural attraction to be built from scratch. Nonetheless, the making of the natural feature into a touristically accessible attraction has been accomplished through painstaking, if haphazard, staging. The staging has consisted of setting up, arranging, and contextualizing (or decontextualizing) the waterfall motif. Setting Up Niagara has had to be staged for visitors in part because hydroelectric depredation would otherwise compromise the central motif. Since the United States and Canada each have constructed massive intake facilities, canals, and tunnels to divert the flow above the falls to reservoirs for use in electrical generating stations located downstream, both countries have been parties since 1950 to a treaty providing that impressive volumes of water would continue to flow over the falls in daylight during the tourist season. On summer nights and in off-season, the flow can be brought down to 50,000 cubic feet per second, which is less than one-quarter of ‘‘natural flow’’ (as measured in the early twentieth century), but is kept at least at 100,000 cubic feet per second, or half of natural flow, during tourist hours.15 To enhance the dramatic qualities of the diminished cataract, officials have given the Horseshoe (Canadian) Falls special cosmetic treatment. In 1954, to prevent its edges from becoming too shallow, ‘‘the flank areas were sculpted out to provide an even flow.’’16 By adjusting a control structure built upstream to back up water for the hydroelectric intakes, officials have shaped the crest of the Horseshoe Falls, ‘‘allowing water to spread out to an evener and more picturesque line than in the past.’’17 Engineers have also felt that to properly appreciate the display visitors would want to observe it from vantages that ordinary geological processes had not made available. Both coun-

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tries set to work on this problem in 1955. On the Ontario bank, just below the falls, the Canadians cleared the shore of rock debris to form a better viewing space. At Goat Island’s tip, adjacent to Horseshoe Falls, the Americans filled in a shallow part of the riverbed to create Terrapin Point, now a popular viewing spot.18 The most revealing engineering decision about the falls occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. By that time, successive rock slides at the American Falls had built up a pile of talus to halfway up the cliff face, a pile that the cataract’s flow was unable to wash away, perhaps impairing the spectacle. American officials were further distressed that earlier interventions, which had evened out the flow at the Horseshoe’s crest, had enhanced Canada’s side of Niagara Falls, while diminishing the flow over the two smaller U.S. falls. After a series of studies, which required the building of a dam that completely suspended flow over the American Falls, officials made final decisions in 1972. Now damming the channel leading only to Bridal Veil Falls, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drilled drain holes to allow groundwater to seep out (reducing pressure on the cliff and extending its life), installed sensors to monitor movements inside the cliff, and reinforced the cliff with rock bolts, steel pins, and cables.19 However, officials made rather different decisions about the American Falls. The American Falls International Board concluded in its 1972 report that ‘‘it is better to allow the process of natural change to continue uninterrupted,’’ hence the talus should be left intact. If this marked an incipient environmental awareness, it was a curious occasion for it, since an environmentalist could also have taken the contrary position that diversions had reduced water flow, thereby unnaturally delaying the washing away of the talus. Natural or not, the talus pile could remain an effective signifier of natural processes— or that was the position that the board took. It argued that ‘‘the visibility of the immense forces at work on the Falls . . . is an important part of the dramatic effect, and that any attempt to conceal and interrupt these forces might remove from the scene some element of aesthetic appreciation.’’20 Therefore, by the late twentieth century, Niagara was necessarily shaped for touristic effect, since even the decision not to reconstruct the falls was made with a view toward the waterfall’s continued staging.

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Arranging All touristic motifs—in this case the falls—are situated within a larger stage arrangement. Such arranging must be accomplished in two senses: spatially, with respect to surrounding props and motifs; and sequentially, with respect to a series of touristic activities. The Niagara tourism experience is a particularly revealing example of arranging because, while other tourist attractions may have a series of important motifs, Niagara has one spatially central and sequentially climactic motif, the falls itself. At Niagara, the tourist’s access to this central motif is spatially arranged through a number of prospect platforms, and sequentially arranged as the climactic event on a journey that usually begins and ends at the parking lot. While the falls as a stand-alone motif has been well established through careful engineering, its arrangement within the larger stage setting is much less successful, even though a large tourism complex arranges tourists’ access to the falls from every technologically feasible vantage point. Park agencies on each side of the border operate the parking lots, shrubbery, gardens, and pathways leading up to the famous outlooks. The Ontario Parks Commission also maintains a riverside promenade offering a linear succession of perspectives. For more views, nearby Rainbow Bridge, which crosses the gorge and links the two countries, has a pedestrian crossing lane, on which the bridge authority has considerately provided coin-operated binoculars. Heightening the spectacle, the binational Illumination Board operates spotlights that drench the foam in combinations of white, red, amber, green, and blue.21 For tourists not satisfied with a merely horizontal perspective toward the brink, there are other options: elevators to boardwalks at the base of the falls (the Cave of the Winds tour), tunnels extending behind the falls (Table Rock House), and rolling views on boats just below the cataract (the Maid of the Mist Corporation’s tours). Several private firms have also seized the opportunity to provide views from above, the tallest being Skylon Tower, while still other firms provide perspectives from helicopters or speedboats. This accumulation of easily accessible vantage platforms has had curious effects. The outlook towers dominate the Niagara Falls skyline, making these facilities vie in prominence with the falls itself, while the many vantage points have made for a touristic composition in which background features of the stage setting are inadequately developed. As a result, too much attention is drawn too quickly to a

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central motif that is too easily accessible.22 In the touristic sequence from parked car to falls and back again, the tourist reaches the experiential climax, the view of the falls, too quickly. This is a compositional flaw. The staged setting fails to integrate the falls with the smaller nearby attractions that are thematic offshoots. It is in part these reasons that explain what the Niagara Falls tourism industry now faces, a foreshortened visit. Contextualizing Niagara Falls as a tourism destination also reflects implicit design decisions on whether to put the staged scene into the surrounding context or to separate it from that context. The choice has clearly been made for decontextualization, turning tourists away from the most obvious context, two cities, each called Niagara Falls, which adjoin the sides of the gorge. Though all the vantage platforms turn the tourists toward the falls and away from the cities, tourists have not been successfully sheltered from this urban context. Visitors arriving from the south on the state parkway on the New York side must pass a long chemical-processing complex that an embankment and tree line have failed to hide. Niagara Falls, New York, long a city in decline, further exposes tourists to empty storefronts, vacant lots, and industrial relics. Yet the guidebooks, brochures, and tour itineraries pretend that these surroundings do not exist. The policy of removing tourism from its context is pursued even though the area has dramatic mementos to twentiethcentury industrialism, most notably Love Canal, the hazardous-waste emergency evacuation zone where one can observe the fenced-in mound that now covers the most contaminated site, as well as the suburban neighborhood that now stands hauntingly vacant. Even though visitors frequently call local groups requesting ‘‘toxics tours,’’23 no brochures or maps guide tourists toward Love Canal, only a five-minute drive from the falls. There is a price to be paid for such decontextualization—tourists must contend with the jarring incongruity between the spectacle at stage center and the urban decay located just off stage. THEMATIZING THE FALLS With varying success, Niagara Falls has been staged: the waterfall motif has been refined through concerted engineering, arranged

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within its stage setting, and contextualized (or rather, decontextualized) with respect to off-stage surroundings. However, tourists do not want to see merely falling water, no matter how well it is staged. Niagara Falls also has to be given higher meaning—it has to thematized. The earlier literature on touristic staging to the contrary, the theme through which the waterfall is appreciated is neither given nor obvious. After all, in the premodern era, strange geological scenery like mountains and cataracts were thought to be pockmarks on the face of the earth—frightening places frequented by ogres and witches.24 By the nineteenth century, landscape paintings and travel books had predisposed visitors to have a sense of such scenery as sublimely awe inspiring or delightfully picturesque. If nature’s sublimity once had a big market, it has a much smaller one now that nature has been scientifically explicated and re-engineered. There is still some touristic mileage in the picturesque, but very many parks now compete for that designation and, in any case, picturesqueness can be a weak thrill in these times of electronic entertainment. Hence, business enterprises, community leaders, state or provincial officials, and other promoters have to supply visitors with other thematizations of the falls, whether these are drawn from general cultural knowledge, from corporate owners of, say, a cartoon series, or from local history, geography, and tradition. Indeed, Niagara is amenable to several indigenous themes, including those of ecosystem, freak, terrifying adventure, technological wonder, and romance. The Falls in the Ecosystem Since in our times the preferred representation of nature is ecological, the falls could reasonably be presented to tourists as part of an ecosystem theme. New York State’s park, known as the Niagara Reservation, has historical reasons to fit such a role, since it was the first designated state park in American history and possibly the first preserve established through popular environmentalist lobbying.25 Already at the end of the nineteenth century, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s plan for the reservation sought to ‘‘guard the elements of natural scenery from injury and secure their healthy development.’’26 Even apart from this historical precedent, the falls could reasonably be presented to tourists in ecological terms, since it is certainly an important juncture in the Great Lakes’ ecosystem.

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But today’s Niagara Reservation does not live up to the environmental promise. Goat Island still retains some relatively undisturbed groves, but it is otherwise well built up with roads, picnic areas, outlook sites, parking lots, and a restaurant concession. The Ontario Niagara Parks Commission’s linear park, on the west side of the river, could come closer to putting forward an ecological theme, since it extends as a continuous narrow strip from the Niagara River’s source at Lake Erie, past the falls, almost to the river’s outlet at Lake Ontario. However, while the Parks Commission lands perform important conservation functions, the park strip’s landscaping emphasizes decorative gardens and roadside horticulture.27 Except for a small geological museum, present-day tourist enterprises neglect the ecological theme, stressing instead the freakish and terrifying. The Falls as Freak and Technological Wonder Historians of Niagara Falls have tended to overlook the touristic popularity of freakishness, possibly because visitors interested in freaks were less likely than those interested in sublimity to leave literary records. Historians do tell us, however, that from the early nineteenth century on, some local businesses sought to attract visitors on the theme of strangeness. The display now known as the Niagara Falls Museum—believed by some to be the oldest museum in North America—opened in 1829, when Thomas Barnett presented his collection of curiosities to the public.28 These have come to include oriental antiquities, Egyptian mummies, Indian arrowheads, whale skeletons, and various malformed animals, including Barnett’s own two-legged dog, now stuffed and displayed with the hind-wheels on which it got about. Since Niagara can be considered a freak of nature, local entrepreneurs can still count on visitors being attracted to peculiarity, whether it is related to waterfalls or not. The business logic is clear: through a thematization of the strange, visitors attracted to a freak of nature would also be attracted to other freakish things, for which admission could be charged. The Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum and the Guinness World of Records Museum now capitalize on the strangeness theme, but they present brand-named, trademarked, and franchised strangeness, unconnected to the locality. With the harnessing of electrical energy in the late nineteenth century, but before long-distance transmission of electricity was per-

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fected, Niagara entered the popular imagination once again, now as a potentially enormous source of power. Several authors described new utopian cities built on Niagara’s energy, and H. G. Wells and Jules Verne wrote futuristic tales that used Niagara’s power as crucial narrative elements.29 Local establishments have, however, neglected this early futurism as a touristic theme, and have also disregarded the area’s industrial heritage, even though its presence still hits every tourist’s eyes. Only hydroelectric technology gets touristic recognition, this at the Niagara Power Project, where visitors can view models, dioramas, and movies about the diversion system and electrical generators. The Falls as Terror and Adventure In an especially interesting book on how writers have imagined Niagara Falls, Patrick McGreevy devotes a chapter to another theme associated with Niagara, that of death. Especially in the nineteenth century, diarists and authors often presented the river as life’s course, the precipice as the brink over which life eventually plunges, the abyss as purgatory, and the rainbow as ascent to heaven.30 Clearly, such thinking about the falls requires a metaphorical imagination, but even tourists who are not disposed to being metaphorical can make the conceptual jump between the falls and the deadliness of going over it. For two centuries, Americans and Canadians contemplating suicide have readily recognized this practical feature of the falls, making the falls North America’s single most popular place for suicides,31 and— incidentally—creating for local industry a minor touristic niche market. Even for tourists who do not want to risk life and limb, various museum exhibits and guidebooks keep the terror theme alive. They retell old events, such as the one about the young father who playfully pretended to throw his child into the brink, only to have her slip out of his hands, the father then going after her to try to save her, with the predictable consequence for both; or the tragic story of the Woodward family, whose boat excursion ended over the falls in 1960, but left seven-year-old Roger miraculously alive in his life jacket, to be rescued by a Maid of the Mist boat.32 Wisely forgoing any attempt to re-create such experiences, local businesses have opted for make-believe. With a screen over six stories high, the Imax Theater promises in its advertisement that ‘‘you’ll

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thrill to the larger-than-life vista of raging waters as you take a heart pounding ride over the Falls and experience other death-defying stunts.’’ The theater also has a gallery displaying miscellaneous daredevil adventure memorabilia, including an ‘‘incredible video filmed by a daredevil from inside his barrel.’’ Ride Niagara uses virtual reality and a computerized motion simulator to give visitors the sensation of riding in a capsule over the falls. Getting closer to live action, life-jacketed visitors can take the Niagara Jetboat over whitewater, while visitors to the Great Gorge Adventure can spend their time strolling on a boardwalk by the edge of the Whirlpool Rapids. However, the House of Frankenstein, Criminal’s Hall of Fame, Castle of Dracula, Houdini House, wax museums, and a haunted house (these attractions come and go) ignore the meaningfulness of locality, choosing instead to portray terror through popular-culture images of the macabre, images unrelated to the place.

The Falls as Romance Niagara Falls has long been a honeymooners’ destination, but those who have sought to explain why have generally admitted to being at a loss. Seeking an explanation, historians point out that in Renaissance folklore the cascade was often a backdrop for passion. In the nineteenth century, some commentators on the falls described the water’s rushing as a ‘‘moan,’’ the falls as a ‘‘bosom,’’ and the whirlpool as passionate.33 In 1952 in the movie Niagara, the star, Marilyn Monroe, was described in posters as ‘‘a raging torrent of emotion.’’ Fortunate couples strolling near the falls’ mists can still observe ‘‘moonbows’’ (lunar rainbows) on well-lit nights. However, these would be far-fetched explanations for the popular connection between Niagara and honeymooning. A more likely explanation is that, when the honeymoon custom began in mid-nineteenth-century North America,34 Niagara Falls was the most famous and accessible attraction. Through the years, honeymooning simply became associated with the falls. The very fact of there being a popular association between honeymoons and the falls would be adequate for thematizing its romance and sensuousness, but, except for the hotels that feature waterbeds and heart-shaped bathtubs, local tourism ventures have neglected this thematic opportunity.

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Thematic Selection The binational Niagara region has more thematic opportunities of touristic interest than the ones that I have described here. It has historical battle sites, historically significant canals, and institutions known for theater and popular entertainment. Tourism designers have still further thematic choices because they do not have to restrict themselves to themes having an indigenous significance. As is true of the Movieland Wax Museum (‘‘life-size wax figures of movie, television and recording stars’’) and Adventure Dome (‘‘Ride a Wild Roller Coaster! Fly into the Grand Canyon!’’), enterprises may choose to altogether forgo the local and opt instead for selections from the remaining thematic universe. Tourism designers as compared to makers of other iconic products do, however, have the option of not taking from publicly avilable world culture, nor purchasing proprietary fabulae, such as those connected to a particular movie. They can, instead, develop fields of meaning that local geography or native culture make available. Indeed, there is much to be said for developing themes that emerge from distinctive features of the locality. Whereas anyone with the funds and imagination can develop an attraction based on a publicly available fairy tale or privately held movie, a local industry has the special opportunity to take advantage of thematic resources not readily available in other places. After all, Niagara does have the starting advantage that other places, if they wanted to replicate its main touristic asset, would first have to back up four rather large lakes above an escarpment. Whether a community selects from local environmental, cultural, historical, and mythological themes, or from a far larger set of imported ones, what is clear is that it chooses from multiple thematic options. In response to the scholarship on touristic staging, Niagara teaches the lesson that tourism design faces questions not just of staging but of thematic content: questions of what theme is to be staged and how staged themes are to be interrelated. COMPOSING THE TOURISM PRODUCT In Imagining Niagara, Patrick McGreevy compares Niagara’s role in the nineteenth-century literary imagination to that of Melville’s Moby Dick. Both Niagara and Moby Dick engage important

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nineteenth-century concerns: both ‘‘are pictured as singular, sublime natural objects’’ and both are freighted with meanings, those of death, remoteness, otherness, and the limits of human life.35 Nineteenthcentury travel consisted of this kind of romantic quest for an unfathomably mysterious other, whether for whales or waterfalls. For those of us who are present-day tourists, the quest for meaning in the other is just as dogged, but more paradoxical, since we are ever more implicated in the making of the other. Through the accumulated effects of twentieth-century modernity, as self and nature have lost their unfathomable essences and become confusing surfaces, Niagara Falls has had to acquire new meanings. Niagara Falls remains iconic, but now its iconicity has to be commercially premeditated. It must be consciously shaped for tourists who still search for meaning, but must now find it in a world in which an agent they knowingly pay, namely a giant, worldwide industry, composes the meaningful experiences they seek. To take Boorstin’s attitude, to dislike touristic pseudo-events, hardly helps improve them. As producers or as consumers, we have to face head-on the fact that touristic experiences are now composed for our benefit. We should be able to recognize the compositional principles that come into play in the tourist attraction, whether it features a waterfall or, for that matter, a whale. Let us consider the composition of a whale attraction. To begin, we have to stage our motif, by getting a whale, or making one, and we have to arrange the whale in its spatial and sequential setting. Then, we must thematize the whale, perhaps to reveal its sublime mysteriousness; its role in the oceanic ecosystem; its uses as oil and edible blubber; its cuteness and friendliness, as if it were a pet; its fearsomeness, when one is about to throw a harpoon at it; or its unpleasantness, when one has been swallowed by it. We must further decide whether to separate the whale from its context, say the nearby gas stations and strip malls, or alternatively to integrate it into its context, as we could, say, in an ocean-going theme park. Not least, we might have to consider the whale’s authenticity, even if it is quite real. Back at Niagara Falls, we have long passed the time when we could assume that there is such a thing as a natural attraction. We must produce the Niagara Falls experience and cannot do so just through advertising or publicity. Niagara Falls’ value to the consumer depends on the product itself—the touristic experience. As at other communities concerned about their tourism-based economies, the cities

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called Niagara Falls have to come to grips with the making of onsite touristic content. Already as I write, business and governmental forces are converging to reshape Niagara Falls, most likely into the fabulous environments of organized gambling. It is inevitable that Niagara Falls will be rethematized; the only questions are about the effectiveness and authenticity of the result. At Niagara Falls, this remaking of touristic content necessarily begins at the waterfall, a motif that must be sustained through hydrological engineering. As the primary motif, the falls must be arranged with respect to subsidiary motifs on the stage setting and contextualized with respect to the larger surroundings. Since a waterfall is not sufficiently evocative in itself, it must be imbued with one or more themes that give it heightened meaning. Niagara Falls has served as a useful example here in part because the touristic experience that it presently provides is compositionally flawed. Niagara Falls falls short in the use of indigenous thematic possibilities, since it neglects potential themes, such as those of ecosystem, industry, and—surprisingly—romance. What is more disappointing, it shows far too little care in the composed interrelationships among themes. The commercial attractions present a motley assortment of the strange, macabre, and adventurous, and mix up the thematically indigenous with the thematically imported. Indeed, the total effect illustrates one of the distinctive economic characteristics of tourism, that each competing private attraction cannot effectively develop a theme on its own, since the same tourist passes through several attractions, causing thematic interference, a kind of iconic market failure. If themes were purposefully juxtaposed to create a sense of the carnival or arcade, they might work, but at Niagara they are problematically interspersed with the picturesque and gardenlike. This is not to say that tourist attractions should necessarily strive for thematic consistency. Rather, if composers of touristic experiences do choose multiple themes, they should do so through careful iconographic assessment—they should select themes that are compatible, complementary, or purposefully contrasting. They should also pay careful attention to narrative coherence. On their journey from stage entrance to stage exit, tourists should undergo an experience that has narrative structure. A simple structure would consist of an ascendance of dramatic tension leading to the climax at the waterfall and then a sustained dramatic denouement on the journey away from it. The journey, or set of journeys, should lead through thematically inter-

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related subattractions, creating business opportunities and extending length of stay. Where Niagara now exhibits a haphazard collection of disconnected touristic fragments, planners should strive to design a coherent experiential whole. There also has to be careful attention to thematic transitions. According to the Disney organization’s ‘‘imagineering’’ group, one technique for marking transition is the ‘‘cross-dissolve,’’ borrowed from filmmaking. As one strolls from Main Street to adventureland, the imagineering group writes, ‘‘there is a gradual blending of themed foliage, color, sound, music and architecture,’’ and even a gradual transition in the paving. ‘‘[Y]ou may,’’ the group continues, ‘‘catch a whiff of sweet tropical flora and exotic spices as you enter adventureland.’’36 Nowhere in Niagara Falls is there comparable attention to thematic transitions. There is much to be learned from Disney, even though Niagara Falls is, and should remain, quite different from corporate theme parks. In Niagara Falls, as in most tourism-dependent communities, the lead attraction is not a business monopoly. Quite to the contrary of the Disney theme parks, Niagara’s tourism industry is made up of diverse small businesses. Being competitive firms, these businesses can determine the themes on their own premises, but cannot in themselves shape the experiential whole that attracts tourists. Niagara’s tourism attraction is a collective asset the disposition of which cannot be efficiently determined just by competitive markets.37 All the more because Niagara should not come under monolithic corporate control, the communities must coherently plan their attraction for local economic benefit. If ‘‘imagineering’’ is the combining of engineering and creative imagination to make attractions,38 then Niagara Falls has already been imagineered, just not very well. For Niagara Falls and communities like it, tourism businesses and their designers have to develop the iconographic skills of staging and thematization through which to develop better touristic content. THE DILEMMAS OF AUTHENTICITY To the authors of the main works on touristic staging, namely Boorstin, MacCannell, and Cohen, the foregoing discussion of the iconography of touristic design may well be a troubling one. Boorstin and MacCannell in particular view themselves as cultural critics, un-

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interested in—indeed, disparaging of—the practical making of touristic settings.39 Cohen’s phenomenology of tourism reinforces this attitude, since it takes perceptible phenomena as given, foreclosing an inquiry into how touristic settings can be purposefully crafted to better effect. This is a paradoxical result, since MacCannell’s theory would seem to call for the explicit recognition of touristic production. MacCannell insightfully identifies tourism as part of the broader capitalist trend to produce things in which value ‘‘is a function of the quality and quantity of experience they promise.’’40 At the same time, these are capitalist phenomena about which he and Boorstin are deeply suspicious (even if from respectively opposed political perspectives). They would likely be dismayed that their ideas would play a part in the formation of these very phenomena—the prepackaged pseudoevents and reconstituted authenticity of the tourist circuit. Indeed, a new generation of cultural critics has taken up this cause, warning of the ‘‘Disneyfication’’ of city and country alike.41 In this perspective, a search for principles of staging and thematization, and recourse to Disneyland examples, would seem all the more sinister, threatening to transform even more of the world into imagineered inauthenticity. For all the cultural hand-wringing, however, the very concept of authenticity has been in question. Indeed, one can identify two major strands of concern about authenticity. Let us pursue these strands by asking whether Niagara Falls can be made authentic. In the first strand, the distinction between the authentic and inauthentic is equated with that between the real and the false or between the original and the copy, raising questions of genuineness, fakery, verisimilitude, and delusion.42 These distinctions have little force at Niagara Falls. With the occasional exception, like a visitor in 1957 who reportedly thought he was God and tried to take a walk on the falls’ brink,43 tourists have no trouble appreciating that the falls are quite real. Even though Niagara Falls has undergone extensive intervention, it is not a copy or replica of Niagara Falls. Therefore, we should not, as the deconstructionist writings on tourism do,44 confuse practical iconographic questions with epistemological ones. Moreover, this first strand of concern about authenticity is undermined if some tourism is honestly understood to be about the makebelieve. For example, in Erik Cohen’s work, as he has increased his

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recognition of touristic playfulness and make-believe, the question of authenticity (in the sense of originality or genuineness) has become less salient.45 At Niagara, tourists who want simulated Niagaras can experience them quite near to the real thing, on a giant motion picture screen, full-surround cinema, or a virtual-reality ride, but unless they are inordinately stupid, they have no trouble understanding that they are make-believe. Passengers on Ride Niagara (the simulation that allows passengers to feel they are plunging over the falls), including my son who was five years old when taking the ride, understand perfectly well that it is just about pretending. Questions of authenticity, in the sense of originality or genuineness, do not arise. Unless critics can persuasively argue that make-believe must always be starkly separated from the real, elements of make-believe can play a part even in, say, historical reconstructions, as long as the tourists can, if they want to, find out what has verisimilitude and what does not.46 It is the second strand of thinking, in which authenticity is understood in an existential sense, that the tourism planners face more disturbing questions of authenticity. Does the tourist attraction serve to fool and confuse the visitors, making it more difficult for them to infuse meaning into their own lives? If touristic settings really manifest an icongraphic art, the question ought not be surprising. We need not reject the possibility that something touristically popular could be existentially authentic. Even in Niagara Falls, the tourism designer can stage and thematize a touristic motif, while creating opportunities for authentic discovery. Consider, for example, Niagara’s presently decontextualized urban and industrial surroundings, in which Love Canal is removed from the tourist’s attention. A designer concerned about touristic authenticity could respond by designing a set of interrelated journeys, among which there could be a Love Canal journey, which would be integrated with the central motif (the waterfall) by way of an industrial or environmental theme. Among the larger set of touristic journeys that Niagara Falls offers, the Love Canal journey would be one that fosters discovery about twentieth-century industrialism and its environmental effects. This is not to say that the responsible designer necessarily chooses contextualization over decontextualization. The example is Niagara Gorge, which has unique flora sustained by the falls’ microclimate. If opened to visitors (it is presently inaccessible on the American side),

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Niagara Gorge would present the usual ecotourism dilemma that the throngs who came to appreciate the ecosystem might well destroy it. In this case, it is just as well to keep the tourists out of the gorge, or expose them to it through simulations that are botanically educational and entertaining, despite being make-believe. It is indeed possible to consciously stage and thematize touristic scenes, while still striving for authenticity. By contrast, to take the cultural critics’ viewpoint on touristic staging is to take merely a touristic attitude toward touristic production. The cultural critic’s selfimposed separation from the economic world in which culture is made may well be a paradoxical form of modernist inauthenticity, a kind of intellectual tourism. As a fine architect can help produce a building that is transcendent, while still playing expected roles in commerce and popular culture, tourism designers, too, can strive to stimulate personal reflection while also serving to entertain. Like products of other arts, such as movies and painting, tourism products, too, can be made meaningfully multilayered, so that they divert at one level, but reveal, disturb, disorient, and intellectually stimulate on another. These products can be authentic even if the genre through which they communicate happens to be fantasy rather than, say, historical realism. Though necessarily susceptible to the constraints of business competition, the iconic experiences that the tourist industry sells are nonetheless the products of individual designers, ones who can make ethical choices to make their designs conducive to learning and insight.

Chapter 7

The Meaningful Restaurant

Consider a franchise eatery where the walls are done up in pastel colors and the hamburger wrappers show action figures from blockbuster children’s films. Next door at the Ranch, where lassos and wagon wheels are suspended from the ceiling, the waitresses wear American frontier dress, booths are surfaced in synthetic wood knots, and customers pick their steaks from menus decorated with a bull’s frontal silhouette. Just down the street, another restaurant has the semblance of a chateau. Food is served with great ceremony from silver food warmers and ornate vessels, wines are poured into tall goblets, walls are covered with gilt mirrors and embossed wallpaper, and waiters wear black ties and cummerbunds and put on the air of liveried retainers.1 As the waiters perform a labor of the persona while serving iconically loaded food in a fabulous building, creating a thematized consumption experience, the restaurant combines in one setting all that we have examined in this book: the economic proclivity to sell products made desirable through the calculated shaping of meaning. For that reason, the restaurant can, for our purposes, epitomize contemporary tendencies that cultural critics frequently deplore. They are anxious about the apparent tenousness of a heritage that has not previously seemed threatened, reality itself. In a book entitled The Unreality Industry, the authors Ian Mitroff

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and Warren Bennis warn that marketers, promoters, PR people, image-makers, designers, hypesters, and various other species of manipulators are making us the victims of the deliberate manufacture of falsehood.2 A number of works warn of the Disneyfication of America, debasing that which is original, genuine, or indigenous to American cities.3 Dean MacCannell writes that the very purpose of tourism, which he sees as the prototypical industry in contemporary capitalism, is the staging of authenticity.4 In an essay describing his travels through American historical attractions, wax museums, zoos, and themed hotels, Umberto Eco uses the word hyperreal for places where imitation, appearance, and image have become more compelling than reality.5 At least among such critics, the makers of commercial culture are in poor repute, but more than that, they are numerous. It takes many popular-culture producers, directors, designers and performers to generate hyperreality. Just in the restaurant, our running example, the manager, advertiser, architect, interior designer, waiter, maitre d’, and cook are all complicit in the production of the dining environment. Multiplied across all the other industries that similarly produce iconic products and consumer experiences, such professionals make up a considerable chunk of the work force. It would be a great pity if we had to hold them all in contempt for undermining reality—all the more so if our epistemological critique were flawed to start with. Indeed, one may well have doubts about the critique, because in its depictions of foregone reality it relies on muddled arguments and divergent definitions. Since many writers conflate several strands of these arguments, I will try to unravel them by looking only at two of the most prominent, Daniel Boorstin and the Jean Baudrillard. I will argue that each on his own, and the two in juxtaposition, manage to confound multiple versions of the distinctions between reality and ‘‘image’’ (or illusion or deception—the differences are often not made clear). Divergent conceptions of what is an object or a sign, what is literal or figurative, and what is an original or a copy, are themselves readily confused with questions of what is or is not authentic. My task in these final pages is to look for some way to unmuddle hyperreality. Turning once again to Nelson Goodman’s work, I look for concepts through which we may engage the iconic economy with critical discernment and may yet hope to achieve authenticity in the making, and insight in the consumption, of commercial culture.

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BEYOND BOORSTIN AND BAUDRILLARD Daniel Boorstin is the most prominent among a number of authors who have responded to the spread of hyperreality through a stalwart defense of the everyday distinction between reality and illusion, or truth and pretense, thereupon to deplore the increasing dominance of image and artifice in our lives. Boorstin’s The Image (1962) defines an illusion as ‘‘an image we have mistaken for reality,’’ and observes ruefully that ‘‘the making of illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America.’’6 This capacity to make illusions for profit first accelerated with the nineteenth century’s graphic revolution, which made possible the production of copies as good or better than originals, soon allowing the unlimited copying of every work of art, destroying the ‘‘priceless and ineffable uniqueness’’ that originals once had.7 As this capacity expanded with photography and television, we increasingly privileged images over the reality they were thought to depict. Photographing the Grand Canyon, the visitor is so concerned with capturing the effect that ‘‘he becomes less concerned with what is out there.’’8 The moment is soon overwhelmed by the clear, lasting image, which becomes more vivid than one’s fleeting presence out there in the real place. Determined to satisfy its audiences’ extravagant thrill-seeking, the news media create illusion by staging and reporting ‘‘pseudo-events,’’ which are ‘‘more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.’’9 Advertisers further confound us not by lying but by blurring the distinctions between truth and illusion and loosening our grip on reality. As our lives are immersed in images purveyed by the media, real places like the real Hong Kong and the real Italy are now judged by the movie images through which they have been represented. Tourism operators in such places contrive decor and stage performances so as to conform to visitors’ preconceptions, changing a former indigenous reality into artifice. Attention to image even invades our very behaviors, such that ‘‘each of us hopes for a pleasing ‘personality’—and our personality is the attention-getting image of ourselves, our image of our behavior.’’10 This tendency culminates in the fabricated persona of the celebrity, the ‘‘human pseudo-event,’’ whose sole accomplishment is that he has put forward a successful public image. The result, Boorstin says in the forward to his first edition is that ‘‘we hide reality from ourselves.’’ For all the assertiveness by which

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he holds out for foregone reality, Boorstin is himself uncertain how to find it or recover it again. ‘‘I do not know what ‘reality’ really is,’’ he admits, ‘‘but somehow I do know an illusion when I see one’’ (an admission by which, in his words, he has made himself ‘‘a sitting duck for my more profound philosopher-colleagues’’).11 He holds out the glum hope that with enough will and enough awareness of our condition, we can break through our illusions and find reality once again. Holding out no such hopes, Jean Baudrillard has achieved renown in postmodernist circles for the contention that capitalism has enmeshed us in a world of hyperreality, which he sees as an interplay of ‘‘simulacra’’ in which the real has disappeared or (depending on how Baudrillard is read) in which the simulacra have become our reality. Since Baudrillard’s position has evolved considerably, we would best try to pin him down by using Simulations, the book in which he is most obstreperous in describing ‘‘neo-capitalist’’ hyperreality.12 Having learned to exploit the image-making once associated with the arts, this capitalism has estheticized all production, such that now ‘‘artifice is at the heart of reality.’’ As banal reality comes to incorporate simulations of the real, ‘‘the contradiction between the real and the imaginary is effaced.’’ ‘‘We live everywhere,’’ Baudrillard says, ‘‘already in an ‘esthetic’ hallucination of reality.’’13 Where Boorstin traces the dominance of images to the graphic revolution, Baudrillard attributes it to technology-driven capitalism. What now passes for the real ‘‘is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.’’ This is what Andy Warhol’s work demonstrates: ‘‘the multiple replicas of Marilyn’s face are there to show at the same time the death of the original and the end of representation.’’ Now, ‘‘the very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.’’14 Artistic reproducibility now pervades and defines capitalist production. ‘‘We know,’’ he writes, ‘‘that now it is on the level of reproduction (fashion, media, publicity, information and communication networks) . . . that the global process of capital is founded.’’ The media’s influence is so pervasive that it is no longer distinctly identifiable as media: ‘‘it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it.’’ Through anticipation, simulation, and programming of that which is

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consumed, ‘‘the schemes of control have become fantastically perfected.’’ We have undergone a transition, therefore, ‘‘from a capitalist-productivist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic order that aims at total control.’’15 In this new capitalism, the other production, that of goods and commodities . . . no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary ‘‘material’’ production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction.16

One of Baudrillard’s examples is Disneyland, which is not to be dismissed simply as a comic-strip panegyric to American values. A more profound and paradoxical reversal lurks there: ‘‘Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America . . . Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and America surrounding it is no longer real, but on the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.’’17 The result is a new age of simulations that ‘‘begins with the liquidation of referentials,’’ taking us into a ‘‘nonreferential world,’’ where ‘‘referential reason disappears.’’18 No doubt, Boorstin and Baudrillard would find fault in each other’s analysis. As Boorstin strives through moral exhortation to recover the preeminence of the real, and flails against the spread of hyperreality, he exposes himself to Baudrillard’s likely accusation that he is pursuing another illusion. However, Baudrillard’s text, too, fails to sustain the epistemological collapse that he posits. In assuming that capitalist producers of simulacra know what arouses and motivates the consumer, Baudrillard implicitly assigns to them an un-hyperreal insight, as if advertisers and designers had an epistemological privilege that others did not. In a nonreferential world, Baudrillard would have to surrender his ability to reflect on commercial culture, and thereby would have to succumb to Boorstin’s likely rejoinder that Baudrillard is merely accelerating our descent into hyperreality. These reciprocal contradictions are only the milder flaws. The more serious problems arise where both authors agree—and their agreements are substantial. Both share the observation that technology-driven capitalism has estheticized ordinary life, engrossing us in hyperreality. Both pine for reality foregone. Both disdain

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those purveyors of illusion whose contrivances have brought us to this pass. For each, the dismaying new world consists in the collapse of binary distinctions—between reality and image—on which we could once safely rely. It is, it would seem, when we tear down this reliable barrier that we fall into worlds of illusion, simulation, and simulacra. Yet upon a closer reading, their texts are more muddled than they let on. For one thing, they hold multiple conceptions of this foregone reality (we will get back to these). For another, it turns out that the symptoms the authors most passionately decry have little to do with the collapse of the distinction between reality and image. Though both attribute the symptoms to this alleged collapse, both seem upon closer inspection to be more concerned about what would be better understood as questions of authenticity. Consider Boorstin’s discussions of tourism and celebrities. Boorstin points out that touristic pseudo-events touted as ‘‘adventure’’ have worn out that word, which once meant ‘‘an unusual, stirring experience, often of romantic nature.’’ Such adventurous travel once roused people’s souls and broadened their minds: ‘‘Throughout history by going to far places and seeing strange sights men have prodded their imagination. . . . Travel has been the universal catalyst. It has made men think faster, imagine larger, want more passionately.’’ Sadly, tourism destinations are now contrived for safe, prepackaged enjoyment. ‘‘Many Americans now ‘travel,’ but few are travelers in the old sense of the word.’’19 Boorstin feels the same loss for the heroes of the past, the men once admired for great virtue, nobility, or exploits. He quotes the nineteenth-century author Sydney Smith: ‘‘Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.’’ These were men whose actions were, one presumes, not performances for public consumption but expressions of an inner integrity. In the twentieth century, ‘‘though we have desperately held on to our belief in human greatness,’’ heroes have dissolved, to be replaced by synthetic celebrities. It would seem that adventurous travel and heroic men represent reality, as compared to the illusions made by the tourism and celebrity industries. But already, when Boorstin was writing, Erving Goffman had published a book that described how all of us—not just celebrities—interact through acts of self-presentation,20 acts that inevitably require some dramatic artifice. Even Boorstin does not seem sure at points, admitting, for example, that heroes themselves are ‘‘folklore.’’21 It sometimes seems as if Boorstin were less concerned about the

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blurring of the real into its copy than about the loss of life’s onetime poignancy: a life lived through struggle, driven by mysteries, and experienced with awe. ‘‘Perhaps we can never recapture,’’ he writes, ‘‘the poignancy which medieval man felt in a warm fire on a winter day, in the sound of the leper’s bell, in the dark of night, in the splendor of a nobleman’s brocade.’’22 The reader begins to wonder whether Boorstin, despite his protestations, is not contrasting reality to illusion, but rather is favoring the romantic modes of expressiveness of a previous century with the more dispiriting forms of expressiveness that characterize his own time. More diffusely in Baudrillard’s work, we can find a similar longing. His expressions of loss, too, are often quite unjustified by the overt epistemology. Our world has become a ‘‘desert’’ full of ‘‘banalities.’’ He pines for pleasurably ‘‘diabolical’’ objects, like works of art, through which the vagaries of the real life were once revealed. What marked reality as reality, not as its banal simulation, was that it was full of vicissitudes, secrets, perversions, and thrills—the very experiences we now want to recapture through simulations.23 At points throughout his book, Baudrillard, too, seems to be less concerned about the collapse of the real than in reclaiming a foregone mode of expressiveness. Indeed, Baudrillard differs from Boorstin more in the kind of expressiveness he longs for: not for the poignancy of the lived and suffering life, but for those diabolical, provocative, shocking, confrontational objects and works of art that the vanguard of a previous generation had thought would strip away bourgeois complacency. RECOVERING REFERENTIALITY Part of the muddle derives from Boorstin’s and Baudrillard’s inconsistent uses of ‘‘reality’’ as opposed to ‘‘image.’’ Upon some careful reading, both authors’ texts reveal (though not in the same measure) reality that diverges from image along three axes: (1) the object as opposed to the sign; (2) the literal as opposed to the figurative; and (3) the original as opposed to the copy. Though these are the three distinctions their texts implicitly acknowledge, the texts appear at several moments to be actually more concerned about still another distinction, that between authenticity and inauthenticity. Sometimes the texts mistakenly treat dilemmas of authenticity as if they were problems of reality versus image (according to any combination of these three axes). In a time when we, as producers and consumers, meet culture-

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bound capitalism each day, when commercial products have come to be as meaning laden as artworks, we would want to engage these epistemological distinctions with more critical discernment. But which theoretical vocabulary can provide such discernment? The merger of the esthetic and the economic, something that both authors recognize, offers a clue. It might be possible to make sense of esthetically suffused economic objects through a vocabulary for examining how art conveys meaning. It is for this vocabulary that we now return to Nelson Goodman’s theory of artistic reference. After Goodman’s Languages of Art appeared in 1968,24 he achieved notoriety in the fields of esthetics and the philosophy of art especially for his apparent relativism, a characteristic that would seem to ally him more with Baudrillard. The charge that Goodman, too, is a radical relativist initially seems well founded, since his work is in part a polemic against unspecified ‘‘absolutists,’’ ‘‘empiricists,’’ and ‘‘monopolistic materialists’’—these are not compliments—who hold to the copy theory of representation. These copy theorists believe that artworks and other kinds of images work by resembling a separately existing reality, as if reality were conceivable independently of the conventions through which it is represented. In Goodman’s terms, Boorstin’s insistence on timeless certainties by which to distinguish image from reality would have placed him squarely among the absolutists (Goodman was indeed just the kind of philosopher for whom Boorstin was a sitting duck). By the time Goodman published Ways of Worldmaking in 1978, he had redirected his scorn at the ‘‘current trend toward mystical obscurantism, anti-intellectual intuitionism, or anti-scientific humanism.’’25 He would have been no more sympathetic to Baudrillard than to Boorstin. Indeed, Goodman makes it quite clear that he is not advocating radical relativism: ‘‘Willingness to accept countless alternative true or right world-versions does not mean that everything goes, that tall stories are as good as short ones, that truths are no longer distinguished from falsehoods, but only that truth must be otherwise conceived than as correspondence with a ready-made world.’’26 He maintains at several points that one can judge the artwork’s rightness and fit to the realm that it references, and he compares and contrasts the very schema by which realms are ordered. By 1988, he and coauthor Catherine Elgin explicitly hold that theirs is ‘‘a third view that might be called constructive relativism,’’ which ‘‘insists on recognition that among the many construals of a work

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some—even some that conflict with one another—are right while others are wrong.’’27 For the most part, Goodman’s theory indeed does the seemingly impossible: it overcomes absolutism without descending into intellectual obscurantism, providing some bearings in hyperreality. He does so through his theory of referentiality, the very concept that Baudrillard rejects. First, what is most important in this theory is that, without retreating to a copy theory of reality, Goodman retains a distinction between the referring work (the picture, text, movie, song, speech) and the referenced object. Thereby he spurns the common relativist alternative, that associated with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the forerunners of modern semiotics, who avoids copy theory by positing that linguistic ‘‘signifiers’’ merely point to ‘‘signifieds’’ that are themselves a part of language—a move that cuts off all escape from linguisticity into any nonlinguistic reality.28 Throughout Baudrillard’s work, it is this collapse of the world into language that has nudged him over the edge into the depressing belief that all signs merely signify other signs. By contrast, Goodman’s work retains divisions between the referential system and the objects being referred to— between sign and object. As we saw in chapter 2, Goodman also introduces the distinction between two kinds of referencing: denotation, in which a sign stands for or points to a realm of meaning; and exemplification, in which an object gains meaning by pointing back to the signs that denoted it. In exemplification, the object implicitly refers back to the signs, labels, pictures, or texts that were applied to it. When observing the object, the beholder comprehends it in terms by which he or she has seen it denoted through representational systems, such as speech, writing, and pictures. By denoting the object, representational systems had imbued it with meaning. The object came to exemplify the schema in which it had been meaningfully embedded. Hence, a picture, text, or song can respectively depict, describe, or sing about an object, say a steak. In turn, the steak refers back to books or texts that have denoted it as having been extracted from a cow, as containing protein, or as carrying mad cow disease. The steak cannot be said to have been absorbed into the hyperworld of mediainduced illusions and significations. The steak continues to engage in exemplification, which is a fundamentally different referential work

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than that performed by the books, movies, or advertisements that denoted it. Second, Goodman distinguishes literal exemplification from figurative exemplification; he calls the latter expression. When an object expresses, it refers back to the texts or pictures that metaphorically denote it.29 So, while the steak exemplifies a slice from a cow’s rump, it also expresses nonliteral qualities, like virility, cartoon-time fun, biblical sanction, French refinement, or American frontier ruggedness. Hyperreality notwithstanding, the competent observer is likely to be well enough versed in conventional distinctions to tell apart the meat’s literal meanings from its figurative ones. Third, Goodman considers the esthetic merits of original works of art as compared to copies by distinguishing autographic from allographic works. Autographic arts, like paintings, are those in which the distinction between the original and the copy is significant. By contrast, music, theater, and photography are allographic arts: there is no greater genuineness to the first performance of a score or script or to the first print of a negative than to any other accurate performances or prints. Only an autographic work can be assessed according to its genuineness.30 In The Languages of Art the two kinds of art divide according to their being amenable to notation: allographic art is amenable to notation through which it can be identically reproduced, while autographic art is not.31 (Goodman later muddied the waters by stating that notation is not a necessary or sufficient condition for distinguishing between the two kinds of art.32) Goodman goes on to make—but does not adequately elaborate on—the point that ‘‘initially, perhaps, all arts are autographic.’’33 Being confined to one instance, the autographic art is transitory and limiting. So, practitioners formulate notation that helps transcend the limitations of time and the individual, allowing for artistic reproduction. In our time, as everything has become reproducible with increasing accuracy, and copies are becoming indistinguishable from originals at molecular levels of accuracy, even paintings, a last stronghold of autographic art, might become as completely reproducible as a concerto, turning painting, too, into an allographic art. As all arts become allographic, tests of genuineness become irrelevant. In particular, critics cannot take recourse to Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ which argued that mass reproduction destroyed the work’s aura of uniqueness, since Benjamin’s critique makes sense only with respect

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to an autographic work.34 It would not make sense to apply such a concept to iconically loaded economic products, like foods, since they are outcomes of allographic production. Food historian Stephen Mennell makes this very point when he writes that ‘‘dishes, being constantly eaten, have always had to be constantly reproduced.’’35 Whether foods, buildings, automobiles, service performances, or tourism destinations, commercial products are inevitably allographic. In our commercial culture, everything that is produced is reproducible: there are no originals and no fakes, and ‘‘copies’’ are merely additional instances of the same work. Whatever else may be said of these allographic arts, it is clear that they cannot be judged according to their essential uniqueness or irreproducible originality. It is quite immaterial to blame an allographic work for not being genuine— though we may yet be able to judge whether it is authentic. In search of a measure of authenticity, we can turn to another of Goodman and coauthor Elgin’s concepts, what they call ‘‘rightness.’’ They prefer this word to ‘‘truth,’’ because truth is often thought to depend on some correspondence between representations and a ready-made world, and because concepts of truth are usually restricted to verbal statements, to the neglect of other forms of representation.36 As Goodman puts it in one of his summaries, ‘‘the rightness of descriptions, representations, exemplifications, expressions—of design, drawing, diction, rhythm—is primarily a matter of fit: fit to what is referred to in one way or another, or to other renderings, or to modes and manners of organization.’’37 The same goes for judgments of objects like buildings. We judge the architectural rightness of a building, for example, by goodness of fit: how the parts fit each other, fit their context, or fit the realms to which they figuratively (expressively) refer. Such criteria are of course not fixed; as conventions change, our judgments of the building evolve. Whether we are considering buildings or other works, we judge rightness according to categories and kinds of argument that are themselves ongoing contrivances of human cognitive activity.38 In particular, we can assess an important kind of rightness: whether—in Goodman’s phrasing—the ‘‘work works.’’ He writes that a ‘‘work works, in my view, to the extent that it is understood, to the extent that what and how it symbolizes (whether by description or depiction or exemplification or expression . . . ) is discerned and affects the way we organize and perceive a world.’’39 He is particularly concerned that the artwork should work in ‘‘achiev-

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ing a firmer and more comprehensive grasp, removing anomalies, making significant discriminations and connections, gaining new insights.’’40 Indeed, he is describing a work that works—in my terms— authentically: a work that is conducive to the beholder’s growth and understanding. A truly authentic work awakens the viewer’s critical faculties, by prompting a self-awareness of the very denotational and expressive strategies through which the presented product is being imbued with meaning. IN THE RESTAURANT To conclude, let us return to the restaurant, a place where cooking goes on, tables are arranged, and food is eaten. The restaurant is not an undecorated shed, though you could eat in it, nor does it serve up ungarnished earthworms, though they are nutritious. Rather, it draws its customers through carefully composed expressiveness, referencing any of a vast range of meaningful realms. More intensely than other kinds of capitalist establishments, the restaurant is a site for the production and consumption of meaning. As Boorstin (a distinguished University of Chicago historian, and a former Librarian of Congress) and Baudrillard (a French postMarxist radical sociologist) sit in one to consume their steaks, questions of realism initially make for contentious conversation. When Boorstin pines for the days when dining was not merely a pseudoevent, Baudrillard immediately objects that the Chicagoan is lost in the play of simulacra—that he is unknowingly participating in just the kind of nostalgia for original food that the restaurant is tapping. However, when Baudrillard counterposes to a foregone reality the new world of the simulacrum, Boorstin retorts that the Frenchman’s very capacity to make an observation about the restaurant’s pretensions begs the question of his epistemological stance. Since—Boorstin continues—Baudrillard can clearly see through the restaurant as a pseudo-event, but writes books that reject readers’ capacity to do so, he is abandoning the scholar’s historic calling, that of leading the reader toward truth, and is instead contributing to the miasma of illusionistic confusion. Having reprimanded each other, they can conclude their meal on a more conciliatory note, taking satisfaction in the observation they share: the increasing ineffability of the real. However, it is this very agreement that reveals their misdiagnosis. As their and other diners’

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behavior makes clear, the restaurant generates no confusion between image and reality along any of three epistemological axes. To be sure, a Greek restaurant in Chicago may conform to mediaconveyed images of Greekness, but diners do not exit expecting to see the Parthenon: there is no confusion between the media’s work of denoting and the restaurant’s work of exemplifying. The eating establishment next door may literally exemplify that it is a pricey restaurant, while figuratively expressing a mountain chateau—but the diners are quite unconfused about this too. Even if the building had been brought over stone by stone from the Continent, and not just done up from plaster and wallpaper, its flush toilets and modern kitchens, and its zeal to seem more like a chateau than most chateaux do, would make it an unlikely candidate in any curatorial test of autographic originality. As diners can readily discern, the restaurant cannot be judged according to standards reserved for a unique original. Therefore, as producers and consumers, we need not be confounded: we can recognize distinctions between signs and objects, between exemplification (which is literal) and expression (which is figurative), and between autographic works and allographic works. The problems that hyperreality confronts us with are—Boorstin, Baudrillard, and other authors to the contrary—not ones of reality versus illusion. These authors have simply interpreted in epistemological terms what are better understood as problems of authenticity. Boorstin himself reveals this as he longs for the sustenance that once arose from real human struggle and for a repast once recognized as a divine gift, just as Baudrillard does when he yearns for a meal that is a provocative encounter. Indeed, our very desire to eat at restaurants reflects our forlorn search for, and the restaurants’ calculated intent to provide, a seemingly authentic expressiveness. So we can invite back from the pale those architects, cooks, mall designers, marketers, theme park makers, celebrity consultants, and miscellaneous other cultural operators who were wrongfully exiled on epistemological grounds. After all, the problem is not that they hoodwink their customers. Consumers can make the conventionalized distinctions that allow them to discern what is or is not real. However, the culture producers are not off the hook. No longer in exile, they can and should be engaged in discussions on the making of environments conductive to authentic insight. To be sure, authenticity in commercial production may seem like

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a quixotic aspiration. To take an architectural example, a well-crafted building—and a building is indeed a commercial product—can be conducive to the inhabitant’s critical insight. Architecture is the very epitome of a craft that has, in its finest examples, brought a critical esthetic to an economic product. As iconicity spreads in the marketplace, and as the boundaries between art and artifice increasingly disappear, what the fine arts lose in authenticity commercial products could potentially gain. Could there be food that does not hide its relationship to gluttony? service work that conveys a fresh, not stale, metaphor? decor that prompts the beholder to reflect on calculated thematization? dishes that question cultural and historical stereotypes? restaurants that raise the consumer’s awareness of the kinds of expressive work the restaurant performs? The products that beguile us with manifold appeals could, perhaps, be made to reveal the referential strategies through which they have been imbued with expressiveness. We may yet be able to look forward to restaurants and other environments that critically reawaken our ability to see.

Notes

CHAPTER 1 1. See James R. Beniger’s ‘‘What to Make of the New Icons,’’ Communications Research, vol. 20, no. 6, Dec. 1993, pp. 841–865. Also see William Safire, ‘‘I Like Icon,’’ New York Times Sunday Magazine, Feb. 4, 1990, pp. 12–14. For an interesting precedent, see John McHale, The Expendable Ikon: Works by John McHale (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Gallery, 1984). 2. This may be the point at which to make clear that ‘‘icon’’ as used here should not be understood according to Charles Sanders Peirce’s tripartite distinction between icon, a sign that operates by resemblance or analogy; index, which makes a causal connection; and symbol, which refers through an arbitrary convention. (The original reference is Charles S. Peirce, ‘‘The Icon, Index, and Symbol,’’ in Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., Collected Works, vol. 2 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58]). My reasons for avoiding this use follow that in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), pp. 1–6, where Goodman rejects resemblance as a criterion of denotation. 3. The economist Frank Knight suggested that the universe of meanings that motivates preference should be understood especially through ‘‘culture history.’’ See his ‘‘Ethics and Economic Interpretation,’’ in The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), p. 36. 4. Classic works include Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1976); and John

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McHale, The Changing Information Environment (London: Paul Elek, 1976). More recent works include K. Robins, ed., Understanding Information: Business, Technology and Geography (London: Belhaven, 1992). 5. In a companion essay, I presented the new age of images alongside a selection of other concepts of contemporary change. See Ernest Sternberg, ‘‘Transformations: The Forces of Capitalist Change,’’ in William E. Halal and Kenneth B. Taylor, eds., 21st Century Capitalism (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 6. The books proposing concepts for understanding the meanings of commercial objects include Mary Douglas, The World of Goods (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meanings of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Stephen Harold Riggins, ed., The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994); and Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions, and Commercial Spaces (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997). I will be citing Nelson Goodman’s work in chapter 2. 7. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 220. 8. Said Aby Warburg, art historian and founder of the Warburg Institute, where much of the early work on iconography (or ‘‘iconology’’) took place, in a lecture in 1912. He is quoted in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

CHAPTER 2 1. Jan Bialostocki, ‘‘Iconography and Iconology,’’ The Encyclopedia of World Art, vol. 7 (London: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 770. 2. Panofsky is generally known as an art historian, but ‘‘in many ways,’’ as the author of his intellectual biography puts it, ‘‘he was a cultural historian who merely discovered a new field [history of Renaissance art] for the application of his theories’’—so writes Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 27. 3. The essays in Werner Sollors, ed., The Return of Thematic Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel, eds., Thematics: New Approaches (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), discuss issues of motif, theme,

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and meaning that are remarkably similar to those in Panofsky’s iconography, though references to Panofsky’s work are infrequent. 4. See W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. chap. 1, and also W.J.T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 5. One who has pointed out the importance of Goodman’s work to the study of consumer goods is Mary Douglas in ‘‘The Genuine Article,’’ in Stephen Harold Riggins, ed., The Socialness of Things: Essays on the SocioSemiotics of Objects (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 9–22. 6. Christine McCorkel, ‘‘Sense and Sensibility: An Epistemological Approach to the Philosophy of Art History,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 34, Fall 1975, pp 35–50, 39–40. Quoted in Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, p. 56. 7. Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, p. 44. 8. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 9. The example is from Roelof van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography, tr. Patricia de Man, rev. ed. (Yverdon, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach, 1994), p. 4. 10. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 6. Panofsky acutally refers to this first level of analysis as ‘‘pre-iconographic,’’ but this distinction seems unnecessary for my argument. 11. van Straten, Introduction to Iconology, pp. 4–12. Note that van Straten modifies Panofsky by further subdividing the second level of iconographic interpretation. I am omitting this part of van Straten’s explanation. 12. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 6. 13. The quoted passages in this paragraph are from Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 8. 14. In a revision of his essay in 1955, Panofsky even made this advanced level of interpretation the domain of a separate analytical discipline, ‘‘iconology,’’ as distinct from the ‘‘iconography’’—see Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955, reprint, Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1974), pp. 31–32. He is said to have later regretted the shift and to have concluded that ‘‘iconography’’ was sufficient—see Irving Lavin, ‘‘Iconography as a Humanistic Discipline,’’ in Brendan Cassidy, ed., Iconography at the Crossroads (Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 1993), pp. 33– 41. 15. In his work as an interpreter of art, as compared to his explicit statements about the iconographic method, Panofsky makes clear at numerous points in his essays that motifs can only be understood with respect to the historical styles of which they are a part. In his essay on human proportion in medieval and Renaissance paintings, he does not view the representation

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of human proportion as technically given, but rather explains such representation in terms of the history of styles. See Erwin Panofsky, ‘‘The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles,’’ in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 26–54. Also see Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 11, including note on the same page. 16. See Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, chap. 5; Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), p. 1. 17. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). 18. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 4. My understanding of Goodman’s assault on copy theory relies heavily on W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology, chap. 2. 19. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 5. Italics in the original. 20. Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 55. This is part of chapter 3, his most thorough discussion of referencing. 21. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 31–32, 40–42. 22. There is some slippage in Goodman’s vocabulary, so sometimes the ‘‘realm’’ is simply a set of objects referred to, while the additional word ‘‘schema’’ is necessary to explain how the realm is organized. In the wording I use here, objects are organized within a realm, or equally ‘‘field,’’ of meaning. I am trying to stay consistent with the spirit of Goodman’s argument, even if I may not at every point remain faithful to his terminology. 23. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 38; Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, pp. 14–19. 24. Here I am following Nelson Goodman’s definition of ‘‘metaphor’’ in Languages of Art, pp. 71–72. He in turn parallels Max Black’s Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 25–47, where Black views metaphor as the intersection of two realms of meaning. 25. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 4–5. 26. Erwin Panofsky, ‘‘What Is Baroque?’’ in Irving Lavin, ed., Three Essays on Style (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 67. 27. For example, Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951; reprint, New York: Meridian, 1985). 28. Goodman discusses denotation versus exemplification at several places in his work, including Of Mind and Other Matters, pp. 54–71, idem, Languages of Art, pp. 85–95. 29. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 91. 30. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, p. 32. 31. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, p. 41. 32. Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, p. 70. 33. My father tells me that when he grew up in rural Romania raw tomatoes were considered inedible.

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34. My usage of ‘‘commodity’’ follows that of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944; reprint, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957) to mean an object that is so defined and made as to be abstractly tradeable on the market. In Polanyi’s use, as in mine, commodities can only exist in market systems— commodities are exchangeable by definition. Precapitalist economies, too, had to maintain a flow of goods and services to households, but the meanings of these goods were embedded in tradition and culture; in the sense I use the word here, these goods were not commodities. It is in the market economy that goods become regularized enough to be abstractly tradeable—it is only in this system that they are commodities. Therefore, this usage of commodity should not be confused with that in the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital, with its untenable distinction between ‘‘exchange value’’ and ‘‘use value.’’ Several authors have dealt with this apparent naturalism in Marx’s distinction, as for example Marshall Sahlins in Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), chapter 3. The author who has gone furthest in trying to make Marx’s distinction meaningful in the contemporary capitalism of advertised and promoted meanings is Wolfgang Fritz Haug, whose work is available in English as Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, tr. Robert Bock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 35. Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 63. He discusses this unusual subject in chapters 1 and 2. 36. Here I am echoing some of the ideas in Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. 37. Panofsky, ‘‘Father Time,’’ in Studies in Iconology, pp. 69–94. 38. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 11 n. 3. 39. Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on Style. The essay entitled ‘‘What Is Baroque’’ is on pages 17–89. 40. It is at this point that Panofsky concludes ‘‘What Is Baroque,’’ writing of the dawn of modernity in words strikingly similar to authors of his time, like Karl Polanyi and Lewis Mumford, who sought to explain the rise of capitalism in terms of a transition from a previous organic whole to a new mechanical era. The former totality of human being and nature is doomed, overcome by ‘‘those antihuman and antinatural forces that seem to determine our own period—the forces of masses and machines. . . .’’ This is ‘‘the beginning of our own epoch of history,’’ Panofsky continues, ‘‘an epoch that is still struggling for an expression both in life and in art, and that will be named and judged by the generations to come. . . .’’ Three Essays on Style, p. 88. 41. Many have written about this. I am relying on Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), chap. 2.

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42. Andrew F. Smith, The Tomato in America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), pp. 11–14, 17. 43. Smith, Tomato in America, pp. 32–33, 40–43; quote from p. 42. 44. This may be the appropriate time at which to distinguish my point from that of Colin Campbell in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). In a complex argument (I cannot possibly do it justice), he contends that romanticism gave rise to a new hedonism that valued feelings, spurring the desire for ever-changing new consumer goods. I make no claim that romanticism gave rise to modern consumerism. Rather, I am depicting romanticism as capitalism’s first coherent style, the style that would guide nineteenth-century producers and consumers in attributing meanings to goods. As a wave of stylistic expression that would be superseded by other waves, romanticism is a product of capitalism. I pursue this point further in the upcoming chapter on the stylistic evolution of buildings. 45. Smith, Tomato in America, pp. 132, 133, 135, 143. 46. Smith, Tomato in America, pp. 135–137, 141. 47. I am influenced in this description by Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe: 1900–1916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), Introduction and chap. 1. 48. Some references will be forthcoming in the next chapter. 49. Since I have chosen to focus this chapter only on food products, I am not elaborating on the endless kinds of products, from coffee containers to automobiles, that were made modern through streamlining. 50. Smith, Tomato in America, pp. 149–150, 152. 51. Smith, Tomato in America, p. 153. 52. One of my guides is now Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London: Routledge, 1991); his text has the excerpts that I quote below from Norbert Elias. Another valuable source is Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 53. Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp. 304–305. 54. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, The History of Manners (1939; reprint, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 118–119. 55. Fiddes, Meat, p. 100; Elias, Civilizing Process, vol. 1, p. 120. 56. Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 305, he cites Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983). 57. Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp. 307–308; also Fiddes, Meat, discusses vegetarianism at several points. 58. Fiddes, Meat, p. 24. 59. Richard J. Hooker, Food and Drink in America: A History (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), p. 220.

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60. On beef symbolism, see Fiddes, Meat, p. 42; Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 311. 61. Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 2, 13–18, 20–21. 62. Thomas Hine, The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), pp. 127–128.

CHAPTER 3 1. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas rev. ed. (1972; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), p. xi. 2. The use is found, for example, in Edward W. Soja’s articles, including ‘‘Taking Los Angeles Apart: Towards a Postmodern Geography,’’ in Charles Jencks, ed., The Post-Modern Reader (London: Academy Editions, 1992), pp. 277–295. Besides having the problems I describe in the previous chapter, the word has taken on extra breadth in studies of urban design, far exceeding the restricted architectural uses of the 1970s. See Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 3. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1950), p. 83. In the original, Schumpeter italicizes ‘‘from within,’’ and has a footnote that elaborates on the assertion that change is ‘‘incessant.’’ 4. Contrast my study of the iconicity of landscape with that in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), which makes more traditional use of the iconographic discipline, without entering into iconicity as a calculated business concern in the production of buildings. 5. Catherine W. Bishir et al., Architects and Builders in North Carolina: A History of the Practice of Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 1–3, is a good source of further readings on the history of the building trades. 6. The residence came to fully exhibit its market-generated meanings in the nineteenth century. Of course the market’s role did not spring up overnight, but rather over the course of the 400 years during which the market system arose during the Renaissance. See Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, tr. Miriam Kochan (1967; reprint, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 192–219. 7. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), pp. 61–62. He cites W.

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Hamish Frazer, The Coming of the Mass Market, 1850–1914 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1981), pp. 94–109. 8. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1961), p. 412. 9. For these thoughts on architectural romanticism I am heavily depending on Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929, reprint, New York: Hacker Art Books, 1970), chaps. 1–5. 10. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), pp. 101–102, 174ff. 11. Rybczynski, Home, pp. 173–179. 12. Besides the department store, another kind of commercial built form also illustrates the pathbreaking iconographic accomplishments of turn-ofthe-century retail enterprise: the Midway Plaisance, or amusement zone, located at the outskirts of giant exposition like the Chicago Exposition of 1893. See Barbara Rubin, ‘‘Aesthetic Ideology and Urban Design,’’ in Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), pp. 482–508. 13. Rosalind H Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 1– 3, 66–70. Another fine work on the Parisian department store is Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869– 1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 14. According to one 1912 essayist on store decoration, cited in Leach, Land of Desire, p. 83. On the Parisian influence on the U.S. department store, see Leach, Land of Desire, p. 74. 15. I am relying here on Leach, Land of Desire, chaps. 2 and 3. 16. Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899, reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994), though written from an intellectual’s perspective, presaged a more widespread disenchantment with the regurgitation of old, pretentious styles. 17. Rybczynski, Home, chap. 7. 18. Rybczynski, Home, chap. 9. 19. The correspondence between modernism and mass production was already clear in Le Corbusier’s manifesto, Towards a New Architecture, tr. Frederick Etchells (1931; reprint, Mineola, NY: Dover, 1986), pp. 229–265. Also see Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 241ff. 20. For revealing comments on mid-century house marketing, see Ned Eichler, The Merchant Builders (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 21. For the importance of the formal-figurative distinction in mid-century

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suburban American housing, see Peter G. Rowe, Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 95–102. 22. James M. Mayo, The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an Architectural Space (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), and William I. Walsh, The Rise and Decline of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1986), pp. 45–50. 23. See an early illustration of such a proposed store in Pietro Belluschi, ‘‘Shopping Centers,’’ in Talbot Hamlin, ed., Forms and Functions of Twentieth-Century Architecture vol. 4 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 137. 24. See Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 114–115. 25. Marco Frascari, ‘‘A Wonder of the City Beautiful Suburbia: The Mirabilis Suburbis of Coral Gables, Miami,’’ in Malcolm Quantrill and Bruce Webb, eds., Urban Forms, Suburban Dreams (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), pp. 91–101, esp. pp. 96–98. 26. Residential Development Handbook, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 1990), p 256; see also the flowchart’s emphasis on marketing on page 8. 27. Residential Development Handbook, p. 283. 28. Residential Development Handbook, p. 283. 29. Residential Development Handbook, p. 283. 30. Residential Development Handbook, pp. 264–265. 31. Residential Development Handbook, p. 264. 32. Peter C. Papademetriou, ‘‘Magnificent Fountains, Beautiful Courtyards: Garden Apartment Housing in Houston,’’ in Mark A. Hewitt, ed., Culture and Social Vision (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), pp. 127–145, 136. 33. Mike Davis, ‘‘Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,’’ in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), pp. 154–180. 34. This is according to survey results mentioned in William Severini Kowinski, ‘‘Endless Summer at the World’s Biggest Shopping Wonderland,’’ Smithsonian, vol. 17, no. 9, Dec. 1986, pp. 34–43. 35. Margaret Crawford, ‘‘The World in a Shopping Mall,’’ in Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park, pp. 3–30, 20. 36. Crawford, ‘‘The World in a Shopping Mall,’’ p. 22. 37. In addition to works already cited, a particularly useful source is Jan Goss, ‘‘The ‘Magic of the Mall’: An Analysis of the Form, Function, and Meaning of the Contemporary Retail Environment,’’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 83, no. 1, 1993, pp. 18–47. 38. I should note that these should be considered pure types, in the We-

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berian sense. Actual examples are rarely so pure; they are likely to exhibit features of two or all three of the types. 39. I take many of the examples from Goss, ‘‘The ‘Magic of the Mall.’ ’’ 40. Goss, ‘‘The ‘Magic of the Mall,’ ’’ p. 37. 41. This is adapted from Dean MacCanell’s ‘‘staged authenticity’’ in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; reprint, New York: Schocken, 1989), chap. 5. Even though ‘‘staged genuineness’’ does not roll well off the tongue, I make the change because I want to preserve a distinction between the genuine and the authentic. An assertion of a work’s genuineness implies a claim to being a curatorially verifiable original or an honest copy, or to being characterized by historical verisimilitude. Authenticity should be reserved for works that can bring about insight and selfunderstanding. A scene of make-believe could be authentically conducive to insight, while a curatorially genuine historic re-creation could, in my terms, be inauthentic. 42. There is a large literature on festival marketplaces, especially in the general press. Articles I consulted include Howard Gillette, Jr., ‘‘The Evolution of the Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association, Autumn 1985, pp. 449–460; and ‘‘James Wilson Rouse, Urban Visionary,’’ National Building Museum Blueprints, Spring 1988, pp. 1–5. 43. M. Christine Boyer, ‘‘Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Seaport,’’ in Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park, pp. 181–204; 201– 202. 44. See Frederic Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’’ New Left Review, no. 146, 1984, pp. 52–92, 64–65. 45. Crawford, ‘‘The World in a Shopping Mall,’’ pp. 3–4. 46. The view is often taken in Sorkin’s collection, Variations on a Theme Park. 47. Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.’’ Of the many geographical works that have used concepts of class to explain the postmodern landscape, ones that come close to my arguments are the works of Paul L. Knox, as in ‘‘The Packaged Landscapes of Post-Suburban America,’’ in J.W.R. Whitehand and P. J. Larkham, eds., Urban Landscapes: International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 207–226. 48. See Mike Davis, ‘‘Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space,’’ in Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park. 49. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 83. 50. See Michael S. Rubin, ‘‘Revitalization through EntertainmentEnhanced Development,’’ in ULI on the Future: Reinventing Real Estate (Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 1995), pp. 26–35; and Michael S. Rubin, Robert J. Gorman, and Michael H. Lawry, ‘‘Entertainment Returns to Gotham,’’ Urban Land, August 1994, pp. 59–65.

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CHAPTER 4 1. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Katharine Esty, ‘‘Face to the Customer: What Customers Can Learn from the World’s Greatest Department Store,’’ Healthcare Forum, Sept./Oct. 1985, pp. 26–28. Quotations are taken from each of the article’s three pages. For more in the same vein, see Joby John, ‘‘A Dramaturgical View of the Health Care Encounter,’’ European Journal of Marketing, vol. 30, no. 9, 1996, pp. 60–74. 2. Malcolm Gladwell, ‘‘The Science of Shopping,’’ New Yorker, Nov. 4, 1996, pp. 66–75, especially p. 74. 3. Kevin Gardner and Roy C. Wood, ‘‘Theatricality in Food Service,’’ International Journal of Hospitality Management, vol. 10, no. 3, 1991, pp. 267– 278. 4. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 4–5. Hochschild calls such practices ‘‘emotional labor.’’ 5. See Jane Furse, ‘‘Playing the Part,’’ Executive Female, May/June 1989, pp. 25–27; the quote is from p. 27. Also, Anne Russell, ‘‘Fine Tuning Your Corporate Image,’’ Black Enterprise, May 1992, pp. 72–28; this article says there are nearly 1,000 image-consulting firms in the United States. 6. Roelof van Straten, An Introduction to Iconography, tr. Patricia de Man, rev. ed. (Yverdon, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach, 1993), chap. 2. 7. Personal image manuals, like Susan Bixler’s Professional Presence (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991), generally stress control and confidence. 8. William L. Gardner III, ‘‘Lessons in Organizational Dramaturgy: The Art of Impression Management,’’ Organizational Dynamics, Summer 1992, pp. 33–46. 9. Robert D. Freeburn, ‘‘The Actor Manager,’’ Executive Development, vol. 7, no. 2, 1994, pp. 22–23. See also Joe Kelly, ‘‘The Corporate Theater of Action,’’ Business Horizons, Jan.–Feb. 1996, pp. 67–74. 10. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1959). 11. For a useful compilation of major writings, see Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgeley, eds., Life as Theater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook, 2nd ed. (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990). 12. Dennis Brissett and Charles Edgeley, ‘‘The Dramaturgical Perspective,’’ in Brissett and Edgeley, eds., Life as Theater, p. 2. 13. The levels of expressive meaning he recognizes in human conduct parallel those that Panofsky identified for artistic representations. In interpreting an individual’s expressiveness, Goffman observes ‘‘two radically different kinds of sign activity: the expression that he gives, and the expression that he gives off,’’ the distinction being that the first is intentional, while the second is ‘‘symptomatic of the actor,’’ allowing observers to reach judgments

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that exceed the actor’s intent (Goffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 2). The front he intentionally gives consists on the one hand of ‘‘appearance,’’ composed of bodily features and social statuses over which the actor has little immediate control (I would also add skills, credentials, and other formal physical and mental capabilities, though the word ‘‘appearance’’ does not do for this extension), and on the other hand of ‘‘manner,’’ which the actor can adapt in situations to seek an effect (Goffman, The Presentation of Self, p. 24). The appearance through which the actor gives (exemplifies) his statuses and skills; the manner through which he gives (expresses) his virtues; and the symptoms through which he gives off unintended features of his self, culture, and historical period parallel Panofsky’s three levels of iconographic understanding—the formal, the figurative, and the symptomatic. 14. The extreme position is found in Nicholas Evreinoff, ‘‘The Never Ending Show,’’ tr. and ed. Alexander I. Nazroff, in The Theater in Life (New York: Brentano’s, 1927), reprinted in Brissett and Edgeley, eds., Life as Theater, pp. 419–423. 15. As You Like It, II. vii. 149–150. 16. Some writers have gone as far as to say that medieval Europe was a world without self or without individuality, but I agree with Anthony Giddens’s assessment that that view is an exaggeration: that we should not look for the historical origins of the self, per se, but for the emergence of modern elements of the self. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 74–80. 17. Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), chap. 1, pp. 3–14. 18. John O. Lyons, The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). He discusses meanings of disguise in Renaissance and early romantic literature on pages 13, 15, 83, 214, and elsewhere. 19. Lyons, The Invention of the Self. 20. I am relying here particularly on Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), especially Part IV. 21. Irving G. Wylie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New York: Free Press, 1954). 22. Wylie, Self-Made Man in America, chap 3. 23. Wylie, Self-Made Man in America, pp. 42–48. 24. Wylie, Self-Made Man in America, chap. 2. 25. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), pp. 94, 171–172. 26. Taylor’s anecdote appears in his book The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911), p. 59.

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27. Daniel Nelson, ‘‘Scientific Management and the Workplace, 1920– 1935,’’ in Sanford M. Jacoby, ed., Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 74–89. 28. Joanne Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), chap. 4. 29. See Theodore Levitt, ‘‘A Heretical View of Management Science,’’ Fortune, Dec. 18, 1978, pp. 50–52; Russell L. Ackoff, ‘‘The Future of Operational Research Is Past,’’ Journal of the Operational Research Society, vol. 30, 1979, pp. 93–104; Ernest Sternberg, ‘‘Incremental vs. Methodological Policy Making in the Liberal State,’’ Administration and Society, vol. 21, no. 1, May 1989, pp. 54–77, esp. pp. 68–72. 30. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962; reprint, New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1987), p. 57. Italics in the original. 31. Brendan Bruce, Images of Power: How the Image Makers Shape Our Leaders (London: Kogan Page, 1992), puts positioning at the center of image-making (p. 87). He defines it as a statement of what the brand or person is for (in my language, what it means), what audience it is for, and why they are interested in it. 32. See Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 111–113, 66ff. 33. On gravitas in leaders, see Bruce, Images of Power, p. 174. See remarks on ‘‘type casting’’ in Irving J. Rein, Philip Kotler, and Martin R. Stoller, High Visibility (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987), pp. 206ff. 34. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute Educational Advisory Service, 1979), pp. 104–108, cited in Rein, Kotler, and Stoller, High Visibility, p. 206. 35. Bruce, Images of Power, pp. 73–74. 36. Gamson, Claims to Fame, p. 74. 37. Bruce, Images of Power, pp. 73, 76. 38. van Straten, Introduction to Iconography, pp. 48–51. 39. Rein, Kotler, and Stoller, High Visibility, pp. 218–223; Bruce, Images of Power, pp. 52–58. 40. Gamson, Claims to Fame, p. 73. 41. Bruce, Images of Power, pp. 58–62. 42. Furse, ‘‘Playing the Part,’’ pp. 26–27. 43. Bruce, Images of Power, p. 50. 44. See Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self, chap. 3. 45. Finkelstein, The Fashioned Self, especially pp. 26–39, 92–95. 46. See van Straten, Introduction to Iconography, p. 37. 47. The anecdotes are from Gamson, Claims to Fame, pp. 74–78; Bruce, Images of Power, pp. 62–73.

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48. In Images of Power, p. 40, Bruce writes that ‘‘lies are unnecessary (one can always say nothing) and are invariably found out.’’ The other commentators on celebrity-making largely agree. Rein, Kotler, and Stoller, in High Visibility, pp. 146–152, use the term ‘‘dramatic reality’’ to describe these kinds of stories. 49. Gamson, Claims to Fame, pp. 88–91, and 75–78. 50. In Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 81, Anthony Giddens defines lifestyle as ‘‘a more or less integrated set of practices that the individual embraces . . . because they give material form to a particular narrative identity.’’ 51. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 52. These are underlying assumptions in Boorstin, The Image, and Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1989), as on p. 271; and many other works. 53. Gardner, ‘‘Lessons in Organizational Dramaturgy,’’ pp. 44, 45. This is in effect Brendan Bruce’s position in Images of Power. 54. Biggart, ‘‘Rationality, Meaning, and Self-management,’’ p. 304. The cited books are Michael Korda, Power! How to Get It, How to Use It (New York: Random House, 1975) and Robert J. Ringer, Winning through Intimidation (New York: Fawcett, 1973). 55. Gergen, Saturated Self, pp. 150ff. 56. Gamson, Claims to Fame, pp. 52–54. 57. Gamson, Claims to Fame, pp. 49–54, 123. 58. Gergen, Saturated Self, p. 7. 59. Gergen, Saturated Self, pp. 73ff.; also Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

CHAPTER 5 The magazine and newspaper articles cited in this chapter were accessed through electronic databases. For many of them, complete page citations were not available. 1. See Cesare Segre, ‘‘From Motif to Function and Back Again,’’ in Claude Bremond, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel, eds., Thematics: New Approaches (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 21–32. 2. Debbie Howlett, ‘‘Dinosaur Sue Makes Her (or His) Debut,’’ USA Today, June 11, 1998, p. 3A. 3. My consultant on this outline is Eliezer J. Sternberg. 4. Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 9. 5. Wyatt, High Concept, chap. 1, passim. 6. See Wyatt, High Concept, pp. 152–153; Dan Steinbock, Triumph and Erosion in the American Media and Entertainment Industries (Westport, CT:

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Quorum, 1995), pp. 119–131; Thomas Schatz, ‘‘The Return of the Hollywood Studio System,’’ in Patricia Aufderheide et al, Conglomerates and the Media (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 73–106. 7. Frank Ahrens, ‘‘It Ads Up to Genius,’’ The Washington Post, Jan. 26, 1997, p. F01. 8. Damon Darlin, ‘‘Junior Mints, I’m Gonna Make You a Star,’’ Forbes, vol. 156, no. 11, Nov. 6, 1995, p. 90. 9. Sheri Thompson Carder, ‘‘Viewers’ Recognition of Brands Placed within a Film,’’ International Journal of Advertising, vol. 16, no. 2, May 1996, p. 140, citing D. M. Rosen, ‘‘Big Time Plugs on Small-Company Budgets,’’ Sales and Marketing Management, vol. 142, Dec. 1990, pp. 48–55. 10. Darlin, ‘‘Junior Mints.’’ 11. Bruce Handy, ‘‘101 Movie Tie-Ins . . . ,’’ Time, Dec. 2, 1996, p. 78; Vista Group home page, http://207.217.105.41/articles.htm, March 1998— the site includes an article by George-Ann Rosenberg from Automotive Age, Feb. 1982. 12. Brandweek, vol. 39, no. 4, Jan. 26, 1998, p. 38; Brandweek, vol. 37, no. 36, Sept. 16, 1996, p. S3; ‘‘Reputation Management’’ home page, http: //www.prcentral.com/rmjf97product.htm, consulted Aug. 1998. 13. ‘‘Reputation Management’’ home page. 14. T. L. Stanley covers this phenomenon in several articles, including ‘‘ ‘Place’ Based Media,’’ Brandweek, vol. 39, no. 9, May 11, 1998, pp. 34–35; ‘‘More Hype to Come,’’ Brandweek April 3, 1995, p. 26; and ‘‘Unusual Suspects,’’ Brandweek, vol. 39, no. 10, May 11, 1998, pp. 28–32. Other sources are the ‘‘Reputation Management’’ home page; and ‘‘Alt.Culture’’ page, www.pathfinder.com/altculture/consulted Mar. 1998. 15. Handy, ‘‘101 Movie Tie-Ins,’’ citing a quotation in an unspecified article in the New York Times. 16. Darlin, ‘‘Junior Mints.’’ 17. Quoted in ‘‘Reputation Management.’’ 18. Stanley, ‘‘ ‘Place’ Based Media.’’ 19. Specific dollar quotes are rarely available in print. As of the late 1980s, the $100,000 figure was an upper limit, as reported in Ronald Alsop, ‘‘Consumer Products Become Movie Stars,’’ Wall Street Journal, Feb. 29, 1998. 20. Alsop, ‘‘Consumer Products Become Movie Stars.’’ 21. Alsop, ‘‘Consumer Products Become Movie Stars.’’ 22. Stanley, ‘‘ ‘Place’ Based Media.’’ 23. Handy, ‘‘101 Movie Tie-Ins.’’ 24. Jane M. Gaines, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 158, 214. 25. Handy, ‘‘101 Movie Tie-Ins’’; Schatz, ‘‘Return of the Hollywood Studio System,’’ p. 74. 26. Dale D. Buss, ‘‘Hot Names, Top Dollars,’’ Nation’s Business, Aug.

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1995, p. 16. The author cites the Licensing Letter, a trade periodical, for the data. There is no shortage of articles in the business press about these relationships. Among the other articles I consulted were Stanley, ‘‘More Hype to Come.’’ 27. Buss, ‘‘Hot Names, Top Dollars.’’ 28. Gaines, Contested Culture, p. 213. 29. See Gaines, Contested Culture, esp. pp. 110, 214, and chap. 7. 30. Steinbock, Triumph and Erosion, p. 129. 31. Wyatt, High Concept, p. 153. 32. Handy, ‘‘101 Movie Tie-Ins.’’ 33. Quoted in David Chute, ‘‘Movies: When Size Doesn’t Matter,’’ Los Angeles Times, Home Edition, July 5, 1998, p. 3. 34. Quoted in Handy, ‘‘101 Movie Tie-Ins.’’ 35. Quoted in Chute, ‘‘When Size Doesn’t Matter.’’ The idea of ‘‘imaginary friend’’ as a theme is Chute’s. 36. Eileen Daspin, ‘‘Really Deep Impact: Furniture from Films,’’ Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1998, p. W1. 37. Grant McCracken, ‘‘Who Is the Celebrity Endorser? Cultural Foundations of the Endorsement Process,’’ Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 16, no. 3, Dec. 1989, pp. 310–321, refers to these as the ‘‘Source Credibility’’ and ‘‘Source Attractiveness’’ models of the endorsement process. 38. I have taken most of the terms from McCracken, ‘‘Who Is the Celebrity Endorser?’’ 39. I once again am depending on McCracken, ‘‘Who Is the Celebrity Endorser?’’ 40. Leslie Savan, ‘‘Your Show of Shills,’’ Time, vol. 147, no. 14, April 1, 1996, p. 70. 41. Ethel S. Person, By Force of Fantasy (New York: Basic Books, 1995), writes (pp. 7ff.) that adult fantasies come in relatively few thematic varieties. The fantasies revealed by her patients tend to have many similarities, even though each thinks of them as private and secret. 42. See Gaines, Contested Culture, pp. 161–164. 43. See Betsy Gelb and Madeline Johnson, ‘‘Word-of-mouth Communication: Causes and Consequences,’’ Journal of Health Care Marketing, vol. 15, no. 3, Fall 1995, pp. 54–58; George Silverman, ‘‘How to Harness the Awesome Power of Word of Mouth,’’ Direct Marketing, vol. 60, no. 7, Nov. 1997, pp. 32–38. 44. David Kiley, ‘‘Oldsmobile: Frankel & Co. Stir Word of Mouth for Intrigue Sedan,’’ Brandweek, vol. 39, no. 10, Mar. 9, 1998, p. R9. 45. Chip Walker, ‘‘Word of Mouth,’’ American Demographics, vol. 17, no. 7, July 1995, p. 38. 46. Quentin Bell, ‘‘Money Where Your Mouth Is,’’ Marketing, Oct. 9, 1997, p. 35.

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47. Steve Gelsi and Matthew Grimm, ‘‘Marketing by Seed,’’ Brandweek, vol. 37, no. 39, Oct. 7, 1996, p. 20. 48. Bell, ‘‘Money Where Your Mouth Is.’’ 49. Teri Agins, ‘‘Auto Makers’ Top Models Cruise Down FashionDesigner Runways,’’ Wall Street Journal, Oct. 24, 1995, p. B12. 50. Gelb and Johnson, ‘‘Word-of-Mouth Communication.’’ 51. The data are from Tony Meenaghan, ‘‘Current Developments and Future Directions in Sponsorship,’’ International Journal of Advertising, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 1998, p. 3. 52. I collected these examples and the ones in the next paragraph from articles on staged events in business magazines and newspapers. 53. Quoted in Marla Matzer, ‘‘Sponsors on Parade,’’ Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 1998, p. D4. 54. Bell, ‘‘Money Where Your Mouth Is.’’ 55. Terry Lefton and Bernhard Warner, ‘‘Surf’s Up,’’ Brandweek, vol. 38, no. 4, Jan. 27, 1997, p. 24. 56. Keith Hammonds, ‘‘Talk about Product Placement . . . ,’’ Business Week, no. 3339, Oct. 4, 1993, p. 40. 57. Margaret Webb Pressler, ‘‘On the Heels of Notoriety,’’ Washington Post, Jan. 28, 1997, p. C1. 58. Lefton and Warner, ‘‘Surf’s Up.’’ 59. Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 200. 60. Here I am partly following Nelson Goodman’s concept that pictures are ‘‘denser’’ than language; see his Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), while adding the concept of an economy of attentive effort. 61. Carroll, Mystifying Movies, p. 205. Though in other work Carroll repudiates the theories of representation associated with Nelson Goodman, whom I have found so valuable here, I do think their ideas are reconcilable, though of course this is not the place for such an argument. 62. Comments to this effect can be found in Reputation Management, cited above; and in T. L. Stanley, ‘‘Unusual Suspects,’’ Brandweek, vol. 39, no. 19, May 11, 1998, pp. 28–32. 63. To film theoretician Robert Warshow, a film links to conventions established in its genre to ‘‘create its own field of reference.’’ See Warshow’s The Immediate Experience (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. 130.

CHAPTER 6 1. Strictly speaking, tourism is not an industry but an economic sector composed of multiple industries, including businesses, like restaurants, that serve tourists as well as others, making careful assessment of size difficult.

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Representatives of agriculture and food processing also claim the mantle of the world’s largest industry. Suffice it to say that tourism is quite large in the world economy. On the matter of the definition of the product, see Stephen Smith, ‘‘The Tourism Product,’’ Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 21, 1994, pp. 582–595. 2. Visitor data on Niagara Falls are changing rapidly since a temporary casino was opened in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1997. Sources that I have used for statistical descriptions of visitors include Advisory Committee on a Tourism Strategy for the Province of Ontario, Ontario’s Tourism Industry: Opportunity—Progress—Innovation (Toronto: Ministry of Tourism Culture and Recreation, 1994); S. W. Hermans, Tourism in Niagara: A Profile (Fonthill, Ont.: Vision Niagara, 1995); Niagara County Tourism Conversion Study (Lockport, NY: Schutte and Company, 1990); Tourism Economic Impact Study: Niagara Falls, vol. 2, Main Report (Ottawa: Tourism Canada, 1988). 3. Peter E. Murphy, Tourism: A Community Approach (New York: Methuen, 1985). 4. Donald E. Lundberg, The Tourist Business, 6th ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990). 5. Two important studies of Niagara Falls and its vicinity go against the grain of tourism studies. Moriyama and Teshiba Planners, Ontario’s Niagara Park: Planning the Second Century (Toronto: Niagara Parks Commission, 1988), envisions several new or improved attractions for Ontario’s Niagara Park, reflecting the creative traditions of urban design, which is rooted in the discipline of architecture. However, the plan’s architectural inspiration is in itself limiting, since it necessarily emphasizes buildings and landscape features. On the New York side, Sandra Hillman’s Report on Regional Tourism for Western New York State (Baltimore, MD: Trahan, Burden and Charles, 1987), comments acerbically on the inadequacies of Niagara Falls tourism as it is perceived by someone who puts herself in the position of a tourist. By contrast to Moriyama and Teshiba, she proposes mainly programmed activities—a potpourri of festivals, strolling musicians, and puppet shows. These two tourism studies demonstrate that it is feasible to take into account matters of composition in tourism planning, but also suggest the need for better conceptual foundations for such planning. 6. Advisory Committee on a Tourism Strategy, Ontario’s Tourism Industry, pp. 41ff. 7. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962; reprint, New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 99, 106, and 108. The book was originally published in 1961 as The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. 8. Boorstin, The Image, quoted respectively from pp. 106 and 80. 9. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; reprint, New York: Schocken, 1986), quotations from pp. 104 and

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164. He makes the point about a pilgrimage-like quest in a few places, including p. 105. The concept of tourism as pilgrimage has been tried on Niagara Falls, in John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 10. MacCannell, The Tourist, pp. 91–108, 77–89. 11. Among Erik Cohen’s many articles on this topic, the ones I have in mind here are ‘‘A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,’’ Sociology, vol. 13, pp. 179–201; ‘‘Tourism as Play,’’ Religion, vol. 15, pp. 291–304; and ‘‘Contemporary Tourism—Trends and Challenges: Sustainable Authenticity or Contrived Post-Modernity?’’ in Richard Butler and Douglas Pearce, eds., Change in Tourism: People, Places, Processes (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 12–29. 12. These are extracts from Hennepin’s Description de la Louisiane revised in 1679, quoted in Pierre Berton, Niagara: A History of the Falls (Toronto: McLelland and Steward, 1992), p. 30. 13. William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology, and the Landscape of Niagara Falls, 1776–1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Patrick V. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); and Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 14. Patricia Jasen, ‘‘Romanticism, Modernity, and the Evolution of Tourism on the Niagara Frontier, 1790–1850,’’ Canadian Historical Review, vol. 72, 1991, pp. 283–318, especially pp. 284–288. 15. Michael N. Vogel, Echoes in the Mist: An Illustrated History of the Niagara Falls Area (Chatsworth, CA: Windsor Publications, 1991), pp. 62, 76– 77, 79; and David L. Nass, Public Policy and Public Works: Niagara Falls Redevelopment as a Case Study (Chicago: Public Works Historical Society, 1979). 16. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara, p. 152. 17. Berton, Niagara, p. 407. 18. Berton, Niagara, pp. 16–21, 407. 19. Vogel, Echoes in the Mist, p. 56. 20. Berton, Niagara, pp. 412–413. 21. George A. Seibel, Ontario’s Niagara Parks: A History (Niagara Falls, Ontario: Niagara Parks Commission, 1985), p. 125. 22. This observation and design proposals for improvement are found in First-Year Graduate Planning Studio, Niagara Park, North America: A Binational Strategy for Attracting the World (Buffalo: School of Architecture and Planning, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1995). 23. I am indebted to Michael Heiman for this. As of the late 1990s, the

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Love Canal reconstruction agency had a small, infrequently visited public display near the site. 24. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Esthetics of the Infinite (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959). 25. Vogel, Echoes in the Mist, p. 52. 26. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, General Plan for the Improvement of the Niagara Reservation (Niagara Falls, NY: Gazette Book and Job Office, 1887), p. 3. 27. See Moriyama and Teshiba Planners, Ontario’s Niagara Park. 28. Berton, Niagara, pp. 166–168. 29. Irwin, New Niagara; McGreevy, Imagining Niagara, chap. 5. 30. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara, chap. 3. 31. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara, pp. 46–49; Berton, Niagara, pp. 258– 261. 32. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara, pp. 42–43; Berton, Niagara, pp. 390– 395. 33. McKinsey, Niagara Falls, pp. 182–188; Karen Dubinsky, ‘‘The Pleasure Is Exquisite but Violent: The Imaginary Geography of Niagara Falls in the Nineteenth Century,’’ Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 29, pp. 64–88. 34. Dubinsky, ‘‘The Pleasure is Exquisite,’’; Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 139–141. 35. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara, pp. 14, 74. 36. The Imagineers, Walt Disney Imagineering: A Behind the Dreams Look at Making the Magic Real (New York: Hyperion, 1996), p. 90. 37. The larger argument (not about tourism) is in Ernest Sternberg, ‘‘Justifying Public Intervention without Market Externalities: Karl Polanyi’s Theory of Planning in Capitalism,’’ Public Administration Review, vol. 53, 1993, pp. 100–109; and idem, ‘‘Recuperating from Market Failure: Planning for Biodiversity and Technological Competitiveness,’’ Public Administration Review, vol. 56, 1996, pp. 21–29. 38. The Imagineers, Walt Disney Imagineering. 39. In the preface to the 1989 edition of his book, The Tourist, MacCannell, on p. xx, takes pride in not having taken consultation fees on matters of tourism. Compare this to the unlikely event of an architect writing architectural criticism and taking pride in not taking commissions. 40. MacCannell, The Tourist, p. 23, his italics. 41. For examples of this suspicious attitude toward the capitalist production of culture, see the essays in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 42. Besides Boorstin’s The Image, other writings that raise this matter include Erik Cohen, ‘‘Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism,’’ Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 15, 1988, pp. 371–386; Mike Crang, ‘‘Magic

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Kingdom or a Quixotic Quest for Authenticity?’’ Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 23, 1996, pp. 415–431; Shields, Places on the Margin, chap. 3; and Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, tr. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1986), especially the title essay. 43. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara, p. 159. 44. Shields’ Places on the Margin takes what I consider to be a posmodernist approach to tourism destinations, including Niagara Falls. 45. Cohen, ‘‘Tourism as Play’’; Cohen, ‘‘Contemporary Tourism— Trends and Challenges.’’ 46. For a related discussion, see Crang, ‘‘Magic Kingdom.’’

CHAPTER 7 1. I have adapted the description of the French restaurant from Joanne Finkelstein, Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 75, 81. 2. Ian I. Mitroff and Warren Bennis, The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 3. For example, Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 4. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (1976; reprint, New York: Schocken, 1989). 5. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, tr. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1986). 6. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962; reprint, New York: Random House, 1992, respectively from pp. 239, 5. Originally published in 1961 as The Image or What Happened to the American Dream. 7. Boorstin, The Image, p. 119. 8. Boorstin, The Image, p. 170. 9. Boorstin, The Image, p. 36. 10. Boorstin, The Image, p. 202. 11. Boorstin, The Image, pp. ix–x. 12. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, tr. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Italics in quoted passages follow Baudrillard’s original. 13. Baudrillard, Simulations, quotations respectively from pp. 151, 142, and 147–148. 14. Baudrillard, Simulations, quotations respectively from pp. 3, 136, 146. Part of the last quotation was italicized in the original. 15. Baudrillard, Simulations, quotations respectively from pp. 99, 54, 111, and 111.

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16. Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 44. 17. Baudrillard, Simulations, p. 25. 18. Baudrillard, Simulations, respectively from pp. 4, 42, 102. 19. Boorstin, The Image, quotations from pp. 78 and 79. 20. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1959). 21. Boorstin, The Image, pp. 47, 48. 22. Boorstin, The Image, p. 229. 23. Baudrillard, Simulations, pp. 149–150, 4, 50. 24. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). 25. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), p. 1. 26. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p. 94. 27. Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1978), p. 45. 28. The source in English is Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehave, tr. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). 29. Goodman discusses denotation versus exemplification at several places in his work, including Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 54–71, idem, Languages of Art, pp. 85–95. 30. In Languages of Art, chap. 3, Goodman actually uses the word ‘‘authenticity,’’ but I reserve this word for a separate sense. What he means would better be called ‘‘genuineness’’—that the artwork is indeed the original and incorporates in itself the history of its own making. For what it is worth, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 2nd ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press) recommends ‘‘genuine’’ for the sense that the work’s reputed author is the real one. Goodman’s authenticity (what I call ‘‘genuineness’’) construes a work by its literal fit with curatorial conventions of originality. My use of ‘‘authenticity’’ is reserved for work that develops the viewer’s discernment. 31. Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 112 ff. 32. In Of Mind and Other Matters, p. 139, Goodman wrote that the necessary condition is that an instance of the allographic work be identifiable independently of its history of production. To be consistent with the larger body of Goodman’s work, this should mean that even works amenable to notation may be originals if there are conventions—like curatorial conventions for chemically analyzing paintings—by which it can be identified with the history of its production. Without making this clear, Goodman comes perilously close to holding that originality of authographic works is con-

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ceivable in the absence of conventions through which originality is represented. 33. Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 121. 34. Benjamin’s essay appears in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217–252. 35. Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 319, italics in the original. 36. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, p. 154. 37. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p. 138. 38. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, p. 52. 39. Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, p. 143. 40. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, p. 158.

Selected Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981. ———. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. ———. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotex(e), 1983. Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1976. ———. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. 1962. Reprint. New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1987. Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Kochan. 1967. Reprint. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Bremond, Claude, Joshua Landy, and Thomas Pavel, eds. Thematics: New Approaches. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Brisett, Dennis, and Charles Edgeley, eds. Life as Theater: A Dramaturgical Sourcebook. 2nd ed. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990. Butler, Richard, and Douglas Pearce, eds. Change in Tourism: People, Places, Processes. London: Routledge, 1995.

170

Selected Bibliography

Campbell, Colin. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. The Meanings of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Douglas, Mary. The World of Goods. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. Translated by William Weaver. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1986. Featherstone, Mike. Consumer Culture and Postmodernity. London: Sage, 1991. Fiddes, Nick. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge, 1991. Finkelstein, Joanne. Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners. Oxford: Polity Press, 1989. ———. The Fashioned Self. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Gaines, Jane M. Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1959. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. ———. Of Mind and Other Matters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1978. Goodman, Nelson, and Catherine Z. Elgin. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1988. Gottdiener, Mark. Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ———. The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions, and Commercial Spaces. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997. Halal, William E., and Kenneth B. Taylor, eds. 21st Century Capitalism. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality

Selected Bibliography

171

and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Translated by Robert Bock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Jr. Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration. 1929. Reprint. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1970. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. Translated by Frederick Etchells. 1931. Reprint. Mineoloa, NY: Dover, 1986. Lyons, John O. The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. 1976. Reprint. New York: Schocken, 1989. McCracken, Grant. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. McGreevy, Patrick V. Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. McHale, John. The Changing Information Environment. London: Paul Elek, 1976. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Mitroff, Ian I., and Warren Bennis. The Unreality Industry: The Deliberate Manufacturing of Falsehood and What It Is Doing to Our Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Panofsky, Erwin. Meaning in the Visual Arts. 1955. Reprint. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1974. ———. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. 1939. Reprint. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. ———. Three Essays on Style. Edited by Irving Lavin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Rein, Irving J., Philip Kotler, and Martin R. Stoller. High Visibility. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987. Riggins, Stephen Harold, ed. The Socialness of Things: Essays on the SocioSemiotics of Objects. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.

172

Selected Bibliography

Sahlins, Marshall. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. 1942. Reprint. New York: Harper and Row, 1950. Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1994. Sollors, Werner, ed. The Return of Thematic Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Sorkin, Michael, ed. Variations on a Theme Park. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Twitchell, James B. Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. van Straten, Roelof. An Introduction to Iconography. Translated by Patricia de Man. Revised ed. Yverdon, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach, 1994. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Revised ed. 1972. Reprint. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. Williams, Rosalind H. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Wylie, Irving. The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches. New York: Free Press, 1954.

Index

Acting, 60–62 Advertising, 23, 85–86, 88–89, 105–6 Allegory, 71, 76–78 Allographic works, 140, 143, 166 n.32 Aniconic meaning, 5, 34 Architecture, 22, 129, 144 Attribute, 71, 73–76 Authenticity, 81, 126–29, 137, 141– 44, 154 n.41, 166 n.30 Autographic works, 140, 143, 166 n.32 Baroque, 26–27 Baudrillard, Jean, 134–37, 142–43 Benjamin, Walter, 140–41 Bennis, Warren, 132 Boorstin, Daniel, 70, 78, 112, 125, 126–27, 133–37, 142–43 Building industry, 37, 54–56, 102 Buildings, 37–57 Buzz, 100–101, 103

Cabbages (and symbolization), 19 Campbell, Colin, 150 n.44 Candies, 89–90 Capitalism, 27, 34, 38, 53–54, 107 Cars, 90, 92, 100 Cassirer, Ernst, 18 Celebration, Florida, 56, 57 Celebrities, 70–71, 76–78, 81–82, 87, 98–99, 133, 137 Celebrity endorsement, 97–99 Clothes, 68 Cohen, Erik, 112–13, 126–27 Commodities, 23–25, 38–39, 149 n.34 Common-pool culture, 106 Common-property themes, 106–7 Composition: of the persona, 70–73; of a tourism attraction, 123–26 Coral Gables, Florida, 45 Core culture sector, 105–7 Cosmetic surgery, 75, 82 Creative destruction, 53–57 Cultural criticism, 126–29, 131–32

174

Dante, Joe, 95–96 Denotation, 19, 21, 139 Desire, 98–99 Discernment, 138, 143–44 ‘‘Disneyfication,’’ 127, 132 Dramaturgy, 63 E.T., 89, 91 Eco, Umberto, 132 Economic change, 4–5 Economics of meaning, 6–7 Economy and culture, 9, 105–7 Ecosystem theme, 119–20 Elgin, Catherine, 22–23, 138, 141 Elias, Norbert, 31 Entrepreneurs, 65–67, 69 Executives, 61, 69 Exemplification, 21–23, 33, 139, 143 Expression, 21–23, 140, 143, 155 n.13 Fabulae, 6, 34, 51, 83–88, 92–93, 94, 95, 98–99, 101, 105–7, 110, 123; definition, 84 Fabulous (style, or mode of production), 32–35, 45–50, 83–85 Face workers, 60, 72 Fields of meaning, 19–20, 84, 88, 148 n.22; generated by movies, 105; at Niagara Falls, 123 Figurative meaning, 15–17, 20 First-level (primary) meaning, 15, 94 Foods, 25–32, 139–40, 141, 142 Formal meaning, 15 Freakishness, as theme, 120 Furniture, 96 Gamson, Joshua, 77, 80 Gelatin, 83–85 Genuineness, 51, 81, 127, 166 n.30.

Index

See also Authenticity; Staged genuineness Gergen, Kenneth, 78–80 Goffman, Erving, 62–63, 155 n.13 Goodman, Nelson, 6, 13, 18–20, 21– 23, 138–142 Gruen, Victor, 49 Health care, 59–60, 81–82, 100–101 Hepburn, Audrey, 97 Houses, 39–49 Hyperreality, 132, 135 Icon: definition, 4, 23–25; etymology, 4; examples, 3, 33, 39; Pierce’s usage, 145 n.2 Iconic competition, 54–55, 110 Iconic experience, 50–57, 109–10, 113, 127, 129 Iconography, 7, 12, 70–71 Image, 5, 13, 26, 133–34 Imagineering, 126 Information economy, 5 Jameson, Frederick, 52 Job interviews, 60–61, 77 Jurassic Park, 84, 90, 93, 95 Ketchup, 11–12, 15–17, 23 Knight, Frank, 145 n.3 Labor performance, 59–82, 155 n.13 A Lady Weighing Gold, 15–17 Le Corbusier, 43 Licensing (of images), 93–94 Love Canal, 118, 128 MacCanell, Dean, 112, 126–27, 132 Make-believe, 50–51, 127–28 McCracken, Grant, 97 Meaning, 14–15; conventionality of,

Index

18; of goods, 6; levels of, 14–20, 94; multilayered, 127; produced in movies, 105–7; trademark protection of, 94 Meat, 30–32 Media: mass, 5, 85, 107; of representation, 13, 140 Mennell, Stephen, 141 Merrick, George Edgar, 45, 56 Mitroff, Ian, 131 Modernism, 29–30, 35, 42–45, 67– 68, 124 Monroe, Marilyn, 122 Motifs, 15, 19–20, 113, 125; arranging, 117–18; contextualizing, 118; setting up, 115–16 Movies, 86–99; high-concept, 86– 88, 91; power of, 104–5; promotional arrangements, 91–92; studios, 98–99, 106 Mumford, Lewis, 39, 149 n.40 Naturalness: of commodities, 149 n.34; of meanings, 18; of Niagara Falls, 124–25 Niagara Falls, 110–29 Objects (compared to signs), 20–21, 137–40 Panofsky, Erwin, 7, 12–13, 14–18, 20–21, 26 Pastiche, 52, 79 Persona, 60–62, 75 Personification, 61, 63–64, 70–73, 77 Physiognomy, 75–76 Placement (in movies), 89–92 Polanyi, Karl, 149 n.32; 149 n.40 Postmodernism, 35, 37, 78–82, 134– 37, 142–43

175

Production, 5–6, 83–107; of meaning, 105–7 Property rights, 99, 105–7 Realism, 18–19; in movies, 104–5 Reality, 99–104, 137–42; compared to movies, 104–5; of Niagara Falls, 127–28 Realms of meaning. See Fields of meaning Reference, 20–23, 137–42 Renaissance, 26, 31, 63–64 Representation, 7, 141 Reproduction, 140–41 Restaurants, 131–32, 141–42 Romance, as theme, 122 Romanticism, 28, 31–32, 33, 39–42, 65–67, 79, 113, 136 Rouse (real estate development company), 51–52 Rybczynski, Witold, 42 Sahlins, Marshall, 6 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 139 Schmidt (pseudonym), 67–68 Schumpeter, Joseph, 38, 53–55 Second-level meaning, 15–17, 94, 106 Seeding, 100–101 Self-presentation, 61–65, 80–81 Shakespeare, William, 63–64 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 31 Shopping malls, 49–53 Signs, 6, 137–40 Simulacra, 134–35 Small Soldiers, 95–96 Smith, Andrew F., 27–28 Staged genuineness, 51, 154 n.41 Staging, 101–3, 111; of Niagara Falls, 115–23 Stallone, Sylvester, 76, 97 Star Wars, 86–88, 94, 95

176

Index

Stores, 41–45 Styles, 25–27, 32–35, 78, 80–81 Stylistic evolution, 33–35; of buildings, 39–57; of foods, 25–32; of labor, 64–70 Symbolization, 6–19 Symptomatic meaning, 17

Tidbits, 77 Tie-ins, 92–94, 105 Tomatoes, 23–30 Tourism, 109–29, 133, 136 Toyetic production, 94–99

Tastes, 4 Taylor, Frederick W., 67–68 Terror, as theme, 121 Thatcher, Margaret, 74, 76 Thematic consistency, 125 Thematic strategies, 50–53 Thematics, 13 Thematization, 20, 111; of Niagara Falls, 118–23 Themes, 15–16, 84–85, 87, 113 Third-level meaning, 17 A Thousand and One Night’s Tales, 24

Walt Disney Corp., 51, 56, 126–27 Watches, 1–3 West Edmonton Mall (Alberta, Canada), 52–53 Williams, Rosalind, 41 Wo¨lff lin, Heinrich, 14, 15 Workplaces, 68, 70 Wyatt, Justin, 87 Wylie, Irving, 66

Venturi, Robert, 37, 56 Vermeer, Jan, 15–17

Youth culture, 102–3 Zola, Emile, 41

About the Author ERNEST STERNBERG is Associate Professor of Planning at the School of Architecture and Planning, SUNY at Buffalo. Among his earlier publications is Photonic Technology and Industrial Policy: U.S. Responses to Technological Change and a variety of scholarly articles on regional economic development, public-private partnerships in the economy, the theory of market failure, the roles of culture in the economy, and the trends shaping the future of capitalism.