This post is about la perruque. Important French sociologist Michel De Certeau defined la perruque in his seminal 1974 work The Practice of Everyday Life as "the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer" -- a way for labor to reappropriate valorized capital from within the site of exploitation, wresting away from capital the control of time. Carles admits, confronted with the collapsing of hierarchies of social capital within the sector of branded retailers, that he is "having a huge crisis." The nature of this crisis can only be understood as a cry of concern over the way in which the site of everyday life for the consumer has become a contested battleground over la perruque, that is to say, the disciplinary locus upon which the full scrutiny of capital, in the form of brands and symbols and their discursive distribution, is brought to bear on the individual, guilty or not, forcing a fatal self-awareness of corporate intellectual property, up to and including not merely the trademarked language with which fashion our identities but those very identities themselves. By freely adapting the look and language of branded products to self-promote, we have been pirating in the semiological sea. We commit the crime of trying to tout our own personal brand at the expense of those from which we construct it.
Carles doubts this specious form of existential reasoning by which we can misrecognize our own motives and thereby realize a surplus -- not of capital but of meaning, which may, in Carles postmodern view, assume a greater significance in terms of who controls the drift of the socio-politico-economic sphere. Considering the perruque-like practice of buying discount goods and passing them off as authentically branded gods, he remarks: "I started to wonder if these knock-offs would enable me to achieve the same brand goals." This is not because the knockoffs are inauthentic, but the because the authentic goods are always already knockoffs. The perceived inferiority is internal to the system of signs and bears no material trace on the physical goods themselves, which is to say the "work" of improvement has been performed not by the manufacturers who seek to reap the profit from it but by the cabal of meaning-makers who enhance value through the certain circulation of ideas about what is socially relevant, popular, necessary.
Thus Carles recognizes that given the current interpenetration of signs and meanings, producers and consumers, we "just don’t know what belongs to who, and what type of ‘intellectual design property’ can really be owned." When we attempt to appropriate the meaning of a brand, are we annexing our own labor or someone else's, and is that attempt to steal itself another iteration of semiotic work, adding to the value of that which we seek to harness for ourselves? Is the gesture of piracy simply a moment in circulation, another instantiation of valorization for that lump of cultural capital? When the ledger of cultural meanings is drawn up, who's bottom line is assessed? Who signs the profit-and-loss statement, and is it signed with the blood of the consuming classes? The seeming struggle between corporate entities over specific design motifs merely masks the real battle between corporations and consumers. The perruque is inverted and turned against itself.
Those, who as Carles notes, "need'branded logos’ + scribbly shit [via Ed Hardy] on their t-shirts to make them look like they are rich/fit-in," may yet escape the crucible of sign production and valorization. The hope lies in manufacturing a deliberate plethora, of a surfeit of signs, of, in Carles's metaphor, "creat[ing] files that make it on to as many computers as possible." The near-costfree replication and dissemination of signs in "viral" online culture could produce precisely the disease necessary to stagger the corporate blood-sucking beast. Kill it with a cancer, an overproliferation of signs being produced from within its own factories. The perruque of the perruque -- disguising corporate work as personal to subdue to corporate and subsume it within the personal
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