mondovino: il mondo

I write you today acknowledging my self-indulgence. The gist of this is inspired by having just finished watching the documentary Mondovino and finished reading the opening sections of Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy as well as a recent book by a prominent libertarian economist (Tyler Cowen) at George Mason called Creative Destruction. It is these moments of synergy in ideas--probably like a rare mix of flavors and aromas in a bouquet--which excite me as a fledgling academic, but I am fully aware of how subjective this excitement is, hence my sharing this with you is, in many ways, quite self indulgent. So, being the busy person that you are, I would understand if you feigned interest and let me ramble on without reading this in full--I say this at the beginning of this letter, because I know full well the kind of rambling that may well ensue. In that case, please just consider this a personal greeting and a touching base after a long absence. I should, indeed, be saying hello after so long.

But I couldn't help but write to you because you are so close to an industry which I had never dreamed was a part of the processes I am working through in my projects. I also recall you asking me at some point to share my thoughts on my work, though this probably isn't what you had in mind. Still the film has exemplified in a mere two hours the awesome terror that capitalism promises right alongside its hope of something better. It is in this that I see what Immanuel Kant called the "sublime." To be perfectly frank, I know very little about Kant, and if you happened to take an Intro to Ethics class in college and paid attention, you are probably way ahead of me on that front. Still, the idea of the sublime has a lot of resonance for people who are watching the progress of global capitalism--and I say "progress" in the sense of a conquering army, trampling forward over everything in its path rather than in the Enlightenment sense that we often use it in the USA--though in truth they are both a part of the same concept and it is usually the case that you can't have one without the other.

The sublime is relevant to this process because Kant meant for it to relate a sense of both awe and horror as well as a feeling of totally overwhelming insignificance and impotence. This is, of course, the feeling that we are supposed to have when we look at capitalism, even as we stand on the threshold of striking out to make our fortune or wait on our rooftops for the help to arrive. Kant's idea was appropriated by Edmund Burke who discussed the sublime in terms of looking at a landscape that was bigger and more beautiful than one could ever imagine, of feeling it overpower you and suffocate you with its sheer bigness. It makes you feel you can do nothing but watch. To compare a social system to this, is far from the truth--especially in a democratic, consumer driven society where protests and boycotts have real implications; but both of these practices are shadows of what they used to be in the public consciousness, even if more people participate in them than ever before. The point is to feel there is nothing to do but get on with one's day.

A few years ago, I stood in my father-in-law's kitchen and he told me about a friend of his who was a furniture builder--redwood patio furniture. He had won a big contract to make this furniture from Wal-Mart and had expanded his enterprise, invested in a new factory and hired workers--all with the intention of making the money back through this lucrative contract. He filled his first order for them, packed it up, and sent it on a truck to their distribution warehouse. Soon after he got the manifest back from the shipment and noticed that just about every third item had been crossed off: the person at Wal-Mart's receiving center said those items simply weren't on the truck.

But they were on the truck. He knew that because he had watched them being loaded. He also knew the game that Wal-Mart was playing. He had invested in this enterprise and there was no way for him to make this enterprise profitable except through working with Wal-Mart (known as a monopsony--when the market is controlled by one large buyer.) Therefore his choice was to either take whatever they would give him--or, in this case, give them whatever they would take--or to make some noise about it and risk losing the contract. My father-in-law told this story with awe and amazement, ending it with the statement: "That's just the way capitalism works: it's ruthless." He was stating it in terms of the sublime: it is horrifying, and in its own, craven way, beautiful--and there is nothing anyone can do about it. It is just Ruthless.

Of course he's right: it is ruthless. But if you're a Black citizen of New Orleans, and you did anything remotely resembling what Wal-Mart did--that is, go in and take what you think is your share, muchless what you need to survive--then it is known as looting. The difference, of course, is who is sanctioned by the state to commit theft.

But I am digressing and sounding even more like a crazy Marxist than I ever do. This is capitalism at only its purely economic worst. Mondovino shows the fill spectrum of this system and makes one feel dirty with the ambivalence of its implications. I will assume that you have seen the film. Moreover, I assume you are familiar with this fascinating social, cultural, political and economic totality that is this globalized wine industry.

What is fascinating about this is that we are seeing a snapshot of it at a moment before it becomes totally dominant. In most other areas of culture, American supremacy (imperialism?) is a foregone conclusion. But here there is this little niche where traditional culture is still alive and we are almost certain to get to watch its destruction. In this the concept of creative destruction is apt. The terms are Joseph Schumpeter's. He was talking about it as a process that would effect capitalists themselves, facing competition from an innovative new producer which would make them obsolete. But this obsolescence of old businesses, this destruction was, in Schumpeter's opinion, necessary for the economy as a whole to continue its dynamic march. Tyler Cowen applies it to culture in a way that only a libertarian can, which is that he give no emotion or value to the fact that this means "while some sectors expand extremely rapidly, others shrink or whither away." That these "sectors" are often connected with people's livelihoods, communities and identities is brushed aside as a romantic notion that doesn't understand "progress."

Schumpeter wasn't the first to recognize this as a part of the process of Capitalism. In fact Marx saw it and Lenin even more--and all three saw it as one of the beneficial aspects of capitalist modernization: it destroyed the old, feudal ways of life and brought in modern ideas such as the elimination of patriarchy. It is the reason that Lenin led the Bolsheviks into power in Russia even though it had a very undeveloped system of capitalism and a weak middle class. He believed in the teleology of Marx's theory of history--which was, sorry to geek out, reminiscent of Hegel in its understanding of their being an end toward which history was striving. The idea inspired Lenin to force the country to modernize in order to bring about a proletarian class that would complete the revolution. Of course the idea was supposed to be that the advance of this socializing, modernizing force of capitalism would eventually lead to a type of society that would share equally in the amazing fruits of this productive engine. Needless to say that hasn't happened yet, though the destruction of cultures seems to have become a fairly popular sport in the meantime.

All of this is fairly banal and taken for granted in twentieth century history, but the point is that it is an essential element of capitalism that we see unfolding as we watch these people in France and Italy who are fighting for their traditional way of life against this ideology of "modernization" via the cultural and economic pressures of the international wine market. In this little drama that the early scenes of the movie capture, we see several important characters that act as metonyms for the social pressures capitalism places on people and for institutions that, especially in the last 60 years, have been given the authority to determine the paths of just about every post-colonial and developing country on the planet. They represent, in their seemingly innocuous imperialism, all the contradictions of the post-war US position in the world, all at once, and with only a single communist mayor and a few "backwards" villagers standing in their way.

The film first introduces us to this wine consultant Michel Rolland. Rolland has an idea about what a wine should taste like and imposes that idea on vineyards across the world, advising them to use certain scientific procedures to make their wines palatable for a "global taste." His comparison with the IMF and World Bank couldn't be more easy to make. They enter countries--sometimes for mere hours--and re-arrange entire economies in order to fit a pre-existing idea of what makes a good economy. Like the IMF and World Bank, he holds the promise of wealth and development, of becoming a player on the world stage: in the 50s, the program was to use expensive chemical fertilizers and high tech equipment, to industrialize national industries and substitute imported products with domestically produced goods. This was, of course, entirely reversed in the late 1970s when the clarion became the importance of free markets and reduced government intervention.

At the moment, Rolland says the only way to do it is to use new oak and to micro-oxygenate. Who knows for how long this will be the trend or how many of these vineyards will be left behind when the taste suddenly changes. Either way, someone like Rolland will be there to explain what needs to be done and expect full compliance.

And also like the IMF and World Bank, he has a seemingly independent accomplice in the Maryland based wine critic Robert Parker whose scores make or break a wine--and seem to be up for sale in a certain way. This is like credit rating agencies on a global scale--such as the S&P 500 and Moody's--who give countries a rating on how much they qualify to receive in private financing. This rating is supposedly separate from their ability to finance projects through the IMF or World Bank--just as Robert Parker's rating is supposedly based on some objective taste rather than a strict adherence to Rollins' or Mondovi's philosophy and methods. This is basically the same thing as a credit rating you or I have and determines how much credit a private financier would want--or even be allowed--to extend to us. In theory, this gives countries another option for raising funds if they don't meet the standards of the IMF/WB. But in practice there is no alternative: the credit rating agencies, like Robert Parker (and to a more ambiguous extent, the Wine Spectator), have a definition of what a country with good potential for investment is and it is basically the same thing that the IMF/WB claim is what makes a good country for investment--or, to complete the analogy, what Michel Rolland says is the final result of his recommendation, i.e. a high quality wine.

Entering into this, of course, is the international corporation: Robert Mondavi. Here the analogy falters some and it is because we are dealing so centrally with questions of culture rather than pure economics. The force of change works in the same way, but with different initial intentions. Certainly the global sourcing of this company is analogous to the way that corporations work now--they are diversified and have divisions or subcontractors throughout the world. Though they appear to produce some products, what they really produce are dividends for their shareholders: the latter, despite the PR or naive beliefs of their managers are ultimately all that matters. On the other hand, Mondavi does have its image to protect

So the question of taste enters into the equation, which is a question of the sociology of culture and best left to someone like Pierre Bourdieu, who was a French sociologist who died just a few years ago. In short, Bourdieu looked at a variety of social processes, but one was to look at the world of art and the way that prestige and consecration was acquired in this system. He has a fairly economistic understanding of the players in a field, but in his description, the economic capital remains unsettled. Not only are people competing with each other for symbolic capital--which would be power of some sort in the field--they are also struggling with the ability to define what tht capital is. The coin of the realm is unsettled, which is precisely the reason for the struggle.

He has three concepts that are important here: field, capital and habitus. The field is somewhat defined by the context but is basically a social plane of different "positions and dispositions" that are defined in relation to each other and in relation to the source of authority in the field. (Hopefully this will make more sense in just a second.) The capital is, roughly, the coin of the realm and it is aquired by the people who do the thing that is valued by the field the most, who have the most authority in the field and are therefore able to define the source of capital within the field--typically the thing they make, think or do.

This may seem confusing, but basically, both the definition of what makes an authority and the authority themselves rise to promience as the result of some social struggle. So if a social player within the field is able to win the greatest authority in the field, they also win the ability to define what makes someone authoritative in the field. It is in relation to this authority that the different positions are given different values and powers; but it is also in relation to this field that individuals, occupying positions, take on certain "dispositions" or what Bourdieu calls the "habitus." In this Bourdieu is trying to describe how the social force of legitimation of power is able to instill in each of us an understanding of what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to act. We may not do it because we want to or we like to, but because, in order to be successful, that's what we have to do. But as we do those things, we end up further constituting and reinforcing the definition and the authorities who proffer it, as authoritative. That is, of course, unless we want to try our hand at challenging this authority and its constitutive definitions.

Importantly, the authority and success--called symbolic or cultural capital--in one field is often able to be exchanged for other forms of capital in another. Ironically for this context, Bourdieu referred to the cultural field of production as being one in which "the economic world was reversed." He was writing about French culture--mostly different forms of painting and literature--and noted that the closer a work seemed to an appeal to commercial success, the less able it was to gain cultural capital. In laymen's terms, the more it looked like a piece of art or artist "sold out," the less it was seen by the artistic community as being artistic. Instead, a good piece of art was one that was seen as shunning the market. However, the distributer of this product had a longer view, which is that it would aquire its cultural capital over time--being worth a lot of money at some point in the future based on its cultural value as an elite aesthetic production. This is, almost to a point, the way the traditional French and a few of the Italian winemakers discuss their wine--and the changes that they see happening.

Here, I hope, the relation to this film and the wine industry as a field has become clearer. The field has been caputured by a couple of people who are able to define what the authority--the capital--of the field is: Rolland and Parker agree here and have, through some mysterious historical, social, and political process the film doesn't really discuss, become the arbiters of taste. They are able to command this field and, for both the producers and consumers, to define what a good bottle of wine tastes like. And the power to define this--and to effectively reverse the value system of wine taste--is what they see as just a legitimate social role they've been given: Parker himself attributes this to the kind of hard work and perseverance in a way that only an American can with a straight face. He also discusses it in terms of a democratizing mission.

To bring this back round to economics, this is Robert Mondavi's stake in both the cultural and economic fields of wine production. Unlike other corporations--who benefit from the definition of their institutional partners like the IMF/WB and the credit rating agencies by getting countries forced into opening their markets to foreign goods, allowing the privitization of their water or oil or natural resources, and reducing the amount of government oversight and social safety nets, Robert Mondavi benefits more from the cultural capital that it gets from making--or owning the companies that make--the wine that get defined as the best in the world by its friends who help to define this.

The part played by the Italian state or by the local governments in France are more ambiguous, but they correspond roughly to the same positions of states and governments in developing countries are given. They are put in the position to reap some sort of windfall from these arrangements--often through an undemocratic or untransparent process--and thus are often corrupted in their decisions in one way or another. Likewise, the role of the consumers in perpetuating all of this is only a background, but in our day the people who buy the products of globalized corporations often have even more power than the producers to make or break the system--though unless we are to de-link ourselves completely, some form of complicity is almost inevitable and unavoidable. It is here that the horror is mixed with the awe.

And actually, speaking of awe, unlike the global institutions I've mentioned above, the authorities in the wine industry have one thing going for them: they appear to be right. Their recommendations for how to make a wine more palatable and profitable seem to get gulped down by the expanding market for wine around the world. Your thoughts on this process--as a person who, unlike myself, understands the quality that wine can have--would certainly be interesting.

The contradiction emerges with the brief moments in the film where we see the people who are being helped by these processes--and by the sort of pro-democracy argument that Parker presents: he is bringing quality wine out of its elitism and helping to valorize the wines that "the people" will appreciate them, as barbaric as their palates may be. This is, in part, where the awe is created. Though we don't see much of it in the film, the meteoric rise of Mondavi as a brand--and of the branding movement in wines in general--is certainly something that must have upset the wine industry and to witness this kind of power is always something, regardless of what you think of it, that is hard not to respect--sort of like fascism (something the film makes a point of nudging the wine producers about.)

This recalls a variety of arguments, mentioned briefly above, about the relationship of culture to a commercial system and the way that the free market has the tendency to destroy the older, traditional ways and replace it with what is seen as progressive. When you hear these farmers and villagers talk with such deep passion about something so embedded in their social, cultural and environmental history, it is difficult not to feel their pain. It is also difficult not to long to taste something as beautiful, and to understand it so essentially; to wish you could rush over to Italy or France and to sip on this complex liquid that has been made for centuries but may be fundamentally altered or entirely destroyed within mere years.

But when the film ends in Argentina with the indigenous wine producer, forced to work at other things just to keep his land, you also wonder how much better his life could be if he could benefit from the touch of Parker and Rollins. This is, finally, where the feeling of complete insignificance and impotence in the face of this force. To modernize is to destroy everything that made one's culture unique; but to neglect to modernize in the face of these foreign authorities may be ultimately result in a more empirical destruction: that of the inability to feed one's people or one's family, to keep one's land or to stay alive at all. It is hard to remain steadfast in one's culture when the choices are to sell out or whither away. Given these choices, however, it is no wonder that the communist mayor gets elected, even if the success seems short lived. Just when you think you've won, in walks Gerard Depardeu. Here, perhaps, we see the outline of a challenge to the current cultural definition, something which might salvage some of these terroir focused wines, but ultimately, it will only complement the economic system that will always threaten it with destruction even as it promises the world.

If I knew more about it, and maybe you do, it would also be interesting to look to the latest struggle over intellectual property rights like trademarks and geographic indicators since the latter directly affect the wine industry. All I can say about these is that they are some of the more hypocritical kinds of measures that are being taken, especially since it seems like it is originating mostly in California. In this they are acting like most of the companies from here in the heart of Empire: they hopscotch around the globe, celebrating this new borderless world of fluid markets and mobile capital, claiming to be producing, on balance, producer wealth and consumer choice. This is ultimately what the upside to the creative destruction is supposed to be. If local villagers appeal for protection, they are called hicks or Luddites. But then when these global wine branders are threatened by these same forces, they cry foul and ask for the government to step in and protect them from the scary people who threaten their monopoly. Dutifully, the US government is doing just that.

I am sure you have a much more interesting take on this film and if you've read this far, I hope it has at least made sense, and maybe been somewhat interesting. The takeaway for me is that these forces do have real consequences and that our actions here cannot be severed from the interconnection we have around the world any more than we are able to have complete free will in choosing what those actions might be. In watching the film, I speculated that you would be someone who would appreciate these small vineyards, who would be able to understand the wines they produced and stand in solidarity in their cause on both political and cultural levels. But when double checking your e-mail address, I re-read your last e-mail about your new job, and realized that, as a buyer for a supermarket, you probably had to stock far more of the wines consecrated by people like Parker and the Wine Spectator, created by Rollins and owned by Mondovi. Even if you disagreed with it, you would be required, in order to keep your own job, to sully certain values you might have--or that, in this case, I have projected upon you--and to make these wines available to your customers. You would likely steer them away from these wines if they asked and try to introduce them to the more complex varietels, but at the end of the week you'd probably end up putting in another order with more of those vanilla (great description) new oak wines.

I have to do basically the same thing in my classes, having to tone down my messages because to get to radical will offend my student consumers, being responsible to their learning by presenting them with different points of view and insisting they think as critically about my own views as the ones they have been taught by their parents, churches, schools, the media, and the other laws of the land. And as I teach them more about the way that advertisers manipulate images or thoughts and prey upon our subconscious desires, I know that somewhere around half of them are advertising majors, which means I am basically training the next generation to be better than this one at that job. My hands are dirty, too.