Postrel (and Fergie) on Egalitarian Glamour
posted by Frank Pasquale
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Virginia Postrel’s work–so perceptive an aesthetic theorist, yet so complacent about commercial culture! But those studying IP have to come to terms with it, if only because she wrestles with a topic central to our endeavor: what is the value of those cultural products protected by copyright and trademark law? In The Substance of Style, Postrel argued that we routinely and vastly underestimate the contribution of design and beauty to our well-being. From an upcoming book proposal on Glamour, it looks like she’s about to expand and refine that argument.
Focusing on a variety of glam entities, Postrel distills three common components which “are not aesthetic elements but imaginative qualities: grace, mystery, and transcendence.” She reverentially recites a litany of products and personages that ooze glamor: Oprah, art deco, and Pre-Raphaelites all get props. To her credit, she recognizes glamour can be used for evil as well as good–she notes how Leni Riefenstahl glamorized a horrific Nazi program. But that’s just a bump on the road for a treatment that clearly wants to elevate our appreciation of glamour:
[D]espite its dangers, we would be foolish simply to reject glamour. It is too powerful to be denied, and its power can inspire good as well as evil. Although glamour has been a tool for tyrants, it has also provided an imaginative refuge for the ostracized and oppressed. . . . True sophistication lies not in rejecting or eschewing glamour—a largely futile approach—but in understanding how it works.
Note the slipperiness of the terms of evaluation here; where once “good, evil, and danger” were our guideposts, by the end of the paragraph “sophistication” becomes the summum bonum. Her discussion also reminds me of the Nussbaum-Kahan exchange in Bandes’s The Passions of Law, where Nussbaum argues for purging public life of emotions like disgust, while Kahan argues for a progressive appropriation of the concept. I think Kahan got the better of that exchange, but I’m a bit skeptical of glamor…even in the wake of books like Dream, Stephen Duncombe’s argument for tapping into “America’s collective unconscious through spectacle.”
There’s always a democratic edge to Postrel’s work, a gnawing need to establish that a new age of design, aesthetics, and glamour is a tool of self-realization for the masses. She admits that “Glamour can erode our appreciation of quotidian pleasures, and our sympathy with human limitations, exacerbating our dissatisfaction with life as it actually exists. And glamour can exclude outsiders as surely as it can dignify them.” But she always finds some way of de-emphasizing these trends, noting, for instance, that “The 1930s made glamour a truly mass phenomenon, one no longer dependent on geography or class.” (Yep, the KMart blue light special offers up glam items just as frequently as Agnes B.) For Postrel, the answer is not to beat or ignore the glamorous, but to join them: “glamour can . . . provide an essential imaginative leap toward personal achievement or social and economic progress.”
Though I should probably wait for the whole book before I pass judgment, I have to say now that I’m not buying the masstige angle. Glamour is inevitably exclusionary, the classic example of a positional good: by her own terms, the glamorous have to transcend somebody, and that’s usually the rest of us. Rather serendipitously, hip-hop diva Fergie provides a great example of this process in her video “Glamorous.”
Fergie first recalls all the fun she had “back in the day,” and insists that she is still “Fergie from the block:”
I don’t care, I’m still real
No matter how many records I sell
After the show or after the Grammies
I like to go cool out with the family
Sippin’, reminiscing on days when I had a Mustang
But the video belies her egalitarian sentiments, eventually closing with her flying alone in a private jet. Her old pals are nowhere to be seen in her new life. And as we’re told at its beginning and end, “if you ain’t got no money”….well, you really aren’t invited to participate.
Which all brings me back to my first encounter with the word “glamour”: the renewal of baptismal promises all Roman Catholics are required to affirm at certain masses. One must affirm one will “reject the glamor of evil,” a provocative phrasing that turns on a theological commitment to the idea that all are drawn away from the good by an almost centrifugal force of original sin. It’s not the “attraction” of evil, or even “temptation,” but its “glamor” we are to be particularly wary of. Regardless of one’s religious commitments, the jamming together of evil and glamor in this formula is an intriguing reminder of the ways that weakness of will can lead anyone away from their ideals. Moreover, I think we can all hope that people find “grace, mystery, and transcendence” in something less ephemeral than a handbag.
So what’s the legal implication? Well, I’d be pretty cautious of any initiative that uncritically accepts the glamor industry’s account of its value to society…be it proposals to give IP protection to the fashion industry, or ever more initiatives to protect the business model of the movie or music cartels. Is the “cult of luxury brands” about rewarding fine design and craftsmanship, or preserving opportunities for conspicuous consumption? There’s no easy way to judge . . . but it’s a lot more interesting (and relevant) argument than dry quantifications of projected sales figures.
April 14, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Intellectual Property, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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Responses (9)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 14, 2007 at 7:10 pm
The Devil does wear Prada!
I can’t comment on the legal implications, but Postrel outdoes Bernard Mandeville here, and that’s no mean accomplishment: private vices (envy, avarice, etc.) not only bring ‘publick benefits’ but, through glamour, ‘an essential imaginative leap toward personal achievement.’ Wow!!! Just what we need for what ails us, an apologia for opulence and desire, an apologia for ‘keeping up with the Kennedys.’ I once was blind but now I see: Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous are our salvation. All this time I’ve been enjoying the articles in the The New Yorker, when I should have focused on the ads with full-page pictures of the glamorous people: their youth and beauty, their clothing, jewelry and cars, their restaurants and interior decorating, their parties and vacations. Now I know why my doctor and dentist have Architectural Digest, Art & Antiques, Vogue, ELLE, Vanity Fair, Santa Barbara…in the waiting room! They truly have my personal well-being and overall human flourishing in mind! Makes me want to holler, ‘Give me that old time religion:’ Let’s rehabilitate Victorian moral critics like John Ruskin or William Morris. Or Christian Socialists like R.H. Tawney.
I’m reminded of Nicholas Xenos’ comment in Scarcity and Modernity (1989): ‘[Adam] Smith emphasized the second-order happiness the competition for social esteem brings and the material wealth it inadvertently generates, but as that competition intensifies, as the perspective of comparison narrows, it sows the seeds of perpetual frustration. Chasing an image of what we would like to be like, we are less likely to be satisfied with what we are at any moment. We resent those whom we cannot catch and those whom we perceive as trying to catch us. Consuming is the activity of a democracy of signs; resentment is its final judgment. [...] In such a social situation, individuals experience a world of insufficiency. Seeking to identify ourselves, we encounter myriad models for emulation, either on our travels through the public spaces of modernity–airports, avenues, stores–or through exposure to film, print, video, or audio representations, or both. Whole industries dealing in fashion, advertising, and entertainment are devoted to keeping these images continually before us. Where there is enjoyment to be had in the pursuit of the desires we adopt along with these models, it lies not so much in the enjoyment of the things we accumulate–though there is that, if time allows–as in imagining ourselves as what we want to be through the possession of these things. But because the models change or are continuously revised, there is no respite from the travail of our imaginings, we never quite get to where we want to be [when the Buddhist argues that there is 'no-self,' this is not quite what she had in mind!].’
In a discourse more congenial to Postrel, she might consider Jon Elster’s argument that ‘The pleasures of consumption tend to become jaded over time, while the withdrawal symptoms become increasingly more severe. The consumption activity remains attractive not because it provides pleasure, but because it offers release from the withdrawal symptoms. Conversely, the attractions of self-realisation increase over time, as the start-up costs diminish and the gratification from achievement becomes more profound. There are economies of scale in self-realisation, whereas consumption has the converse property.’ Please see: Jon Elster, ‘Self-realisation in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life,’ in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1989), pp. 127-158.
Matt - April 14, 2007 at 7:37 pm
I just wish that people would remember that glamour is a false beauty put in place to hide what is intrinsically not attractive (faries and the like use it to hide their true plain or ugly nature.) That actually still applies to a lot of what’s called glamourous today, though most are just as taking in by it as by fairy magic.)
Frank - April 15, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Matt: to her credit, Postrel does note the etymology of the word glamor, as a sort of “bewitchment” arising from occult practices. I think she’s trying to recover the concept from its suspect origins…but as you point out, perhaps there’s something to trusting the etymology here!
Patrick: I love the Elster point on consumption. I think that once one gets on the consumption “treadmill,” it can become very hard to stop. And of course whatever “distinguishes” oneself usually tends to just leave everyone else looking less appealing in comparison.
Your comment also makes me think about the dual purpose of a lot of the glam goods Postrel mentions: both to please the owner and to impress others. But as Xenos points out, building on the insights in Girard’s Desire, Deceit, and the Novel, so often the former depends intensely on the latter…it’s a triangulated desire, entirely dependent on the “hall of mirrors” of others’ perceptions.
Finally, Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety is a very nice narrative treatment of these ideas, focusing heavily on literature.
Perhaps we are in a cultural battle over the meaning and initial associations people have with glamor; i would like people to first think of Emma Bovary, conspicous consumption, and vapid fashion editors; Postrel would set up less objectionable products and personages as aspirational.
Law Student - April 15, 2007 at 4:52 pm
While glamor is positional, the position need not depend on one’s wealth. Because of commercial culture, the poor can become glamor relatively easily compared ages past. Furthermore, nothing in its definition suggests a necessary relationship between glamor and wealth.
Law Student - April 15, 2007 at 4:52 pm
While glamor is positional, the position need not depend on one’s wealth. Because of commercial culture, the poor can become glamor relatively easily compared ages past. Furthermore, nothing in its definition suggests a necessary relationship between glamor and wealth.
Patrick S. O'Donnell - April 15, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Dear Law Student,
I humbly suggest that you are utterly mistaken as regards the relation between wealth and glamour, as any perusal of the handful of books mentioned above will attest. Of course being wealthy doesn’t necessarily mean one is glamorous, but it is at least a necessary condition; and while being relatively or comparatively poor need not mean one can’t in some figurative, episodic or evanescent sense, appear ‘glamourous’ (after all, that’s the stuff of great tragi-comedic cinema), glamour in affluent societies is a prerogative of the rich and the near-rich, apart from those creative and envious few adept at pretending to possess the requisite accoutrements of such wealth. Where are those images of glamour in contemporary culture that suggest otherwise? Certainly the poor may desire to be glamourous, but by what criteria (or: who possesses an abundance of symbolic and cultural capital?) do others assess their success at such an endeavor? (And here we might re-read Pierre Bourdieu)
Frank - April 15, 2007 at 6:28 pm
I’m with Patrick here. Things may have gotten a little better since deMaupassant’s The Necklace.
[http://www.amlit.com/deMaupassant/SS/TheNecklace.html]
But overall, trying to “keep up with the Jones’s glamour” today is hard, and ever harder as income inequality increases. The price of a glamorous place in Brooklyn these days? About $2.5 million:
http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2007/04/30324/
Mr. Dumbhead - April 16, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Oh, that’s what you mean by glamorous. I don’t find those people glamorous. I just think they’re rich and envied by some.
Mr. Dumbhead - April 16, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Oh, that’s what you mean by glamorous. I don’t find those people glamorous. I just think they’re rich and envied by some.
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