The Nature of Capital

Marx after Foucault

Richard Marsden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9781138007260
• eBook ISBN: 9781134639557
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The synthesis of Marx and Foucault has traditionally been seen within the social sciences as deeply problematic. The author overturns this received wisdom by subjecting both thinkers to an original re-reading through the lens of the philosophy of critical realism.The result is an illuminating synthesis between Marx's social relations of production

Part I
Discovering what is real

Hypothetico-deductive accounts [of scientific discovery] begin with the hypothesis as given, as cooking recipes begin with the trout as given. In an occasional ripple of culinary humour, however, recipes sometimes begin with ‘First catch your trout.’

N.R.Hanson, ‘The Logic of Discovery’ (1958:1083)

1
Marketing postmodernity

‘Just like reality, only better’

somewhere, only not right here, not right now, perhaps just over there someplace, in another country, in another life-style, in another social class, perhaps, there is a genuine society.

(MacCannell, cited in Shields 1989:151)

Introduction

Postmodernity and reengineerng were the buzzwords of academia and business during the 1990s. How are they connected?

The postmodern market-place: the hyperreal mall

The city in which I live contains the largest shopping mall and indoor leisure centre in the world, West Edmonton Mall, in Alberta: Canada’s Texas. It comprises around 800 stores, a seven-acre Waterpark with year-round tropical climate and fauna, a fifteen-acre amusement park with twenty-five of the most technologically-advanced rides, a 2.5 acre indoor lake equipped with four ‘seaworthy’ submarines where dolphins play and perform, a 360-room Fantasyland Hotel containing ‘themed’ rooms, a National-Hockey-League-size ice arena, a Casino, nineteen movie theatres and an eighteen-hole miniature golf course. All this is arranged along a two-mile long, two-level concourse, covering the equivalent of forty-eight city blocks, with fifty-eight entrances and parking space for 20,000 vehicles. With eleven major department stores, over 150 restaurants, fifty-five shoe shops and thirty-five jewellery stores, it is a place where almost every conceivable good and service can be bought. You can eat, walk and shop all day here without running out of choice. Truly, it is ‘one of the definitive shopping events of our age’ (Shields 1989:159).

West Edmonton Mall is an interesting allegory for the postmodern condition; a world in which everything can be simulated and where the copy is increasingly preferred to the original. The Mall contains a collage of simulacra that disturb conventional understanding of time and space. Wander along its labyrinthine layout and you come across replicas of a nineteenth-century Parisian street (Europa Boulevard) and of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, where people sit out in ‘open air’ restaurants under artificial stars. Stroll to the end of the boulevard and look out over the lagoon in which stands an exact replica of the Santa Maria. Nearby is Fantasyland Hotel and its themed rooms, African, Arabian, Bridal, Hollywood, Igloo, Polynesian, Roman, Truck and Victorian, each of which ‘promise to fulfill your quest for the ultimate in travel adventure’. To enjoy a fantasy about the North, sleep in an igloo ‘surrounded by the tundra, your dogs awaiting their next journey’. Or travel to the Pacific in the Polynesian room, and rest before the ‘waterfall emptying into a rock pool’ before setting off on ‘a warrior catamaran under full sail’. If time-travel is your desire, be swept away to the time of Anthony and Cleopatra and sleep on ‘a round velvet covered bed with silk draperies’ surrounded by ‘white marble statues…and an authentic Roman bath’. In the Coach room ‘your very own’ home-drawn coach ‘will transport you back to the 1880s’. Next to the Fantasyland Hotel is ‘Waterworld’ where you can enjoy the only permanent indoor bungee-jumping site in the world, body surf artificial waves, lie out on make-believe sand beneath an imaginary sun and luxuriate in tropical heat and humidity. And people do. Millions of shopper-tourists come to Edmonton specifically to visit the mall. It regards itself as a tourist destination, a paradise to shoppers around the world, and indeed it draws more visitors than the nearby Rocky Mountains and is reported to pump over one billion dollars a year into the Alberta economy. At one point, it was ‘the third most popular leisure development after Walt Disney World and Disneyland’ (Shields 1989:151).

The Mall’s simulacra are offered not to stimulate local shoppers to visit more exotic destinations, but to dissuade them of the necessity of doing so and to seduce distant shopper-tourists with experiences of the world under one roof. These reproductions do not envy their originals: they aim to supplant them. ‘We are giving you the reproduction so you will no longer feel any need for the original’ (Eco, cited in Shields 1989:153). ‘Now people in this area never need go to New York or Paris or Miami. They can come here’ (Nader Ghermazian, one of the owners of West Edmonton Mall, cited in Shields 1989:150). Indeed, in a sense, the copies are superior to the original, for they are free of the unpredictable, troublesome and sometimes dangerous mixture of the social and the natural which helps to define human experiences as real. There are no beggars on the Bourbon Street of West Edmonton Mall; it is never too hot or too cold and it never, ever, rains or snows. The effect of this collage of simulacra of places remote in space and time—a Parisian boulevard here, a Spanish galleon there—is to create a ‘spatiotemporal haze’ (Shields 1989:152).

The external appearance of West Edmonton Mall is redolent of Coleridge’s ‘pleasure dome’, a figment of his opium-induced visionary epic poem Kubla Khan, written in 1797–8. Wealthy eccentrics have always created private pleasure domes. The Xanadu of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is modelled on William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon mansion, which was a repository of objects from around the world. West Edmonton Mall is a pleasure dome for the public, a fantasy world constructed of simulacra and offered for mass consumption. Millions of shopper-tourists, sovereign consumers exercising their right to shop, come for gratification, enjoyment, indulgence and play; to escape, forget and lose themselves. Amid all this falsehood it is the pleasure that is real, and the disturbing of spatial and temporal coordinates, which confuses our sense of who and where we are, is a precondition of entering this collective fantasy. The Mall is practically windowless. Once inside, there is little way of knowing whether it is night or day, the day of the week, the season or even the country you are in. The effect ‘is like living in a painting by Magritte where reality and representation merge, or like one of the impossible worlds of Escher’ (Shields 1989:154). In this fashion, the fantastic representations within West Edmonton Mall acquire a reality of their own, a hyperreality (Baudrillard 1988, 1994).

Hyperrealities abound in postmodernity. They are created in malls, restaurants, hotels, theme parks; in self-contained fictional cities such as Disneyland, in California, Tokyo and Paris, and Disney World, in Florida; and in real cities such as Los Angeles and Miami. All are facades woven out of collective fantasy. The original for these is Disneyland, built in the mid-1960s, with its replica of Main Street, USA. What is interesting about Disneyland is that it is modelled, not on a real American town, but on its depiction in the Disney movies, especially those peopled by real actors grafted onto imaginary landscapes, which tell the story of the American Dream. Disneyland expresses a curious reversal: the fiction is made into a movie which is made into reality.

Within hyperreality, fact and fiction, past and present, intermingle. The simulacra of Fantasyland Hotel do not copy the reality of Cleopatra’s Egypt or Queen ‘Victoria’s England, but their depiction in movies and TV dramas, in this case, Burton and Taylor’s Cleopatra and the Public Broadcasting Service’s Sherlock Holmes. Fact and fiction, past and present, come together nicely in the Mall’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ pub: a ‘real’ English pub. It is how North Americans imagine an English pub (complete with table service). Of course, most pubs in England, a country fast becoming a theme park of its own history, long since ceased to be authentic. But no matter, the intent of the simulacra is that you forget what they are substituting for.

Postmodernity is like a set of a movie about reality and here anything can be simulated, even sincerity. Consider the typical service encounter in which the salesperson adheres to a script, smiling on cue and giving rehearsed answers to customer inquiries. It is the sincerity of a performance. But, as Brown (1995) points out, hyper-realities can be more sincere in their inauthenticity than the real thing. West Edmonton Mall is located in a city that is a patchwork of anonymous designer landscapes, replete with artificial lakes and parks, in which every tree and flower is planted; neighborhoods doing their best to look as we think real communities ought to look. Further afield, what are thought to be genuine historical sites often lack authenticity. Santa Barbara, for example, is built in colonial Spanish style, but these quaint red-tiled homes were built after the earthquake in the 1930s. Ironically, given the Mall’s replica of a New Orleans street, the restorers of that cities’ historic Vieux Carré ‘were not averse to replacing dilapidated wrought iron balustrades with plastic versions of the same, leading Relph to describe it as a “Creole Disneyland”’ (Brown 1995:186). ¹

Just as sincerity can be simulated, so authenticity can be manufactured. Hyperrealities create an insatiable desire for the real—most basically, for real bread, butter and beer— and nearly always, the real is assumed to reside in the past. Hence its plundering by marketers, prompting the design and manufacture of ‘retro-products’ which combine nostalgic styling with the latest technology (Brown 1995:118). In Fantasyland Hotel, witness the ‘authentic trucks that have been remodelled into truly unique beds’ and the ‘antique gas pumps’ as decor in the Truck room, and the ‘authentic Roman bath’ in the Roman room.

Underneath the stardust, West Edmonton Mall is just a market for commodities, a place where buyers and sellers meet. Traditionally, markets occupied a definite place (often in front of churches) and occurred at particular times (on market days) and gave rhythm to the flux of daily life (Zukin 1991). West Edmonton Mall, however, is not a replica of a traditional, medieval market; it is a model of how public spaces are privatized, internalized and organized on the principles of Bentham’s panopticon. Former shop-lined streets, full of the rough and tumble of public life, become aisles of department stores and concourses of malls, full of docile people who must always look as if they have bought or are about to buy, whose every move and transaction is monitored (Shields 1989:160). Accompanying this privatization of public spaces is a subtle shift away from human rights and freedoms and towards the rights of private property: try picketing in a mall. In this fashion, these much frequented, privately owned and controlled social spaces where commodities are bought and sold come to resemble the places where they are produced.

It is tempting to laugh off all this as an amusing curiosity, but there are three reasons why this is not possible.

First, shopping malls are the most frequented urban social spaces in North America. If Baudrillard is to believed, the hypermarket is ‘the model of all future forms of controlled socialization’ (Baudrillard 1994:76). They now play a pivotal position in the lives of several hundred million consumers and are a new focus of communities (Shields 1989:149). There are a diminishing number of truly public urban social spaces and we are left with only islands of privatized social spaces between which one travels in one’s own portable private space, an automobile. It is for this reason, as Bill Bryson recounts, going for a walk in urban American is becoming a ‘ridiculous and impossible undertaking’:

I had to cross parking lots and gas station forecourts, and I kept coming up against little white-painted walls marking the boundaries between, say, Long John Silver’s Seafood Shoppe and Kentucky Fried Chicken. To get from one to the other, it was necessary to clamber over the wall, scramble up a grassy embankment and pick your way through a thicket of parked cars. That is, if you were on foot. But clearly from the looks people gave me as I lumbered breathlessly over the embankment, no one had ever tried to go from one of these places to another under his own motive power. What you were supposed to do was get in your car, drive twelve feet down the street to another parking lot, park the car and get out.

(Bryson 1990:46–7)

Nor can malls be dismissed as a North American phenomenon. This product of urban planning is one of North America’s most popular exports. Malls are postmodern phenomena and, if they have not yet arrived, they are coming to a neighborhood near you.

Second, the culture of the simulacrum, actively constructed via the marketing of commodities, is at the core of postmodern identity. The ‘new you’ is shaped not by work roles but, for those with money to spend, by patterns of consumption. As such, it is fluid, adaptable and ‘easily changed through the acquisition of new repertoires of products with the requisite marketing-implanted images’ (Brown 1995:138). In this way, a unified identity given coherence by a sense of time and place gives way to an ‘empty self’ which can be ‘refilled, decanted and replenished with whatever personae the occasion demands’ (Brown 1995:80).

Third, this empirical disturbance of spatial and temporal coordinates, typical of hyperrealities, is at the root of that genre ‘postmodernism’, evident in an aesthetic of the ‘here and now’ permeating television shows, movies, architecture, music, fashion, novels and academic discourse. As cartographers of the changing contours of the culture of the market, postmodernists map the loosened moorings between words and the ‘real world’, the disturbed syntax and grammar of things, caused by their reorganization in time and space. While we might want to consider that some postmodernists have elevated obscurantism into a rhetorical strategy (‘reality is difficult to understand, therefore, so too is my writing’), postmodernity abounds in paradox, illusion and double-meaning. Like the drawings of Escher, hyperrealities are visual non sequiturs which present us with an intellectual challenge.

These are grounds for concurring with Stephen Brown’s assessment that postmodernity is too important to be left to postmodernists (Brown 1995:22).

The postmodern workplace: the virtual university

The university at which I work is a prototypical postmodern organization. It is Canada’s open university and specialises in distance education. It is the workplace counterpart to the hyperreal marketplace of West Edmonton Mall. The university sits atop a wooded hill, overlooking the mighty Athabasca River as it flows north-east from the Rockies to the sub-Arctic, just outside the town of Athabasca, a small community serving the surrounding agricultural district, some ninety miles north of Edmonton, Alberta. Take the eastern fork in the road and you find yourself at Fort McMurray, a thriving city built almost exclusively to exploit the surrounding oil sands (the site of Alistair Maclean’s novel, Athabasca). Beyond that, down the Mackenzie River, and you reach the Arctic. Take the western fork, and you pass through the rich farmland of Peace River. Beyond lie the Yukon and Alaska.

But it matters little where the university is because its students and most of its academics are elsewhere. Its students are scattered across the time zones of Canada, the United States and, increasingly, the rest of the world. The academics who write, organize and tutor these courses work mostly at home, and, given today’s information technology, home can be almost anywhere. While the hyperreal West Edmonton Mall brings together in one place experiences of discrete spaces and times, making it unnecessary for tourist-shoppers to travel, this virtual university uses hypertexts, existing everywhere and nowhere, to facilitate instant communication among individuals remote in time and space, making it unnecessary for them to meet. There are no classrooms in this university building, only offices, a visual-design studio, print shop, warehouse and a sophisticated computer network. On most days, the only people in the building are the support and professional staff, secretaries, editors and visual designers, the glue holding together the university.

The university is unusually lean and student-centred. It serves more than 15,000 students a year with around seventy-five core academic staff, twice that number of part-time tutors, and three hundred or so support, professional and managerial staff. It closes only for public holidays. It has no terms or semesters. Students, who are promised individualized, personal tuition, can register at any time, and proceed, within limits, at their own pace. The administration professes commitment to providing excellent service to students, and, to this end, publishes and monitors performance standards for every facet of its operation.

Distance universities, the world over, embody the pressures and potential of postmodernity because its defining characteristic—the compression of space and time (Harvey 1989)—is their raison d’être. Teaching at a distance is not analogous to giving a lecture, it is more like the production of a commodity. This commodity is now produced and sold globally in an increasingly crowded and competitive market; distance education was one of the most rapidly developing sectors of higher education in the 1990s. As government cut university budgets, their administrations came to see the value of distance education in providing cost-effective, student-centred, life-long learning.

Connecting people discrete in space and time is the business of distance universities. For the last decade, or so, it has been the business of business, where this time-space compression has passed under the name of business process reengineering (Hammer and Champy 1994). Reengineering entails using information technology to redesign work around horizontal work processes rather than vertical, functional departments, in the interests of consumers. If we reengineer cross-departmental processes, advocates argue, we can get rid of the bureaucracy that holds together these fragmented pieces. Information technology is the means of compressing processes in time and space. It mediates between reengineered processes and reshaped organizations by linking and integrating the knowledge held by individuals remote in space and time within and across organizations.

Reengineering was evangelized by Michael Hammer and James Champy’s massively popular Reengineering the Corporation: ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Apologia
• Credits
• Part I: Discovering what is real
• Part II: Conclusions in search of a premise
• Part III: The unknown masterpiece
• Part IV: Capital
• Notes
• Bibliography