present thoughts on the dissertation

This is my thinking on the topic of the dissertation. First off, I am sure it is either overly ambitious or redundant and contrived or both. But at this point, I think there are interesting questions to explore around the concept of culturally produced value or the question of what part does culture play in producing value.

Normally the question is considered from a more ideological inflection: what is the role that Culture plays in producing values. This is not an irrelevant question for my project, but it is a secondary one simply because it has been focused on for too long. And because it is actually probably secondary in the actual process I want to consider.

The idea of labor producing value is roundly discredited now--or at least the idea that all value is produced by labor. This is because free market notions of "circulatory" notions of value production have taken hold of even the most critical scholar's reflections on the question. Further, most cultural critics have, at least since the mid-1980s basically accepted neo-liberal explanations of material life and focused more on the possibilities of cultural forms of resistance or rearticulation. Hence the need to refocus the question, especially in light of the process of global sourcing and, as I will argue, with the emergence of intellectual property rights as a tool of the imperial elite.

Doug Henwood offers a sound skull thumping to people who propose the production of immaterial value in chapter one of After The New Economy. I heard something similar from Paul when I presented a portion of this argument at the MLG. But I should first start out by saying that I don't presume that the value is created by culture, but, as Henwood points out in his book,

"it is very expensive to create a brand [. . .] those expenses increase the urgency of cutting manufacturing costs to a minimum, which mainly means puching wages down to dime an hour. The vast gap between direct manufacturing costs of maybe a dollar or two a shoe [for Nikes] and the final selling price [of $100] goes to ad agencies and celebrity endorsers." This is basically the upshot of the account given by Jane Collins in her book Threads of Liz Claiborne--only they start their businiess roughly at the moment when this transition is taking place. The other thing, which Henwood doesn't mention here, but is implicit in his argument, is that the process of outsourcing also usually means that the company doesn't own many of its own factories. Thus if there are labor or political troubles, they can simply move on. On the other hand, the cultural side, which is where more of the investment is made, is claimed as property and defended. This, too, is the product of labor, obviously labor that is problematically overvalued. More on this in a moment. Henwood goes on to say that,

"from the point of view of the consumer, the $100 premium, say, over the price of a modest unbranded shoe is money that could have been spent on other goods or services. it seems like a massive waste of money, but any believer in freedom of religion wouldn't want to gainsay the spiritual experience of purchasing and wearing cleverly branded footwear"(19)

It goes without saying that the money spent on marketing and advertising is a premium that is spent on some labor at the expense of other and that, from the point of view of the worker, the real producers of the value (in so far as the shoe is used for walking, running and other forms of physical activity and this is, principally, where it's value resides) are not at all rewarded for the product they produce.

Here I would add an observation made about products like movies and other more traditionally "cultural" objects of media and the arts. Namely, that these objects are priced so that some small percentage of the total is able to allow the company to recoup the total investment because the market for the "blockbuster" is notoriously hard to predict. As more of the value for these products has been clouded by cultural and social productions, it has become a more precarious marketplace, such that the latest product isn't guaranteed to produce returns. I am sure that there is some way the overseeing corporation, in this case Nike, tries to also overprice the individual shoes in order to make up the bulk of its profits from a portion of the products. These overpriced items, like the price of a theatre box office tickets, can be explained in terms of cultural or social capital: the pressure to see the film now instead of waiting for the video is similar to the pressure to buy the shoes when they are first released rather than waiting for the sale or the clearance rack. Owning or possessing the knowledge about these products is said to pay off in some other way.

Nevertheless, this quasi-religious consumerism, an intriguing process for cultural critics, is only made possible by various forms of labor exploitation. And in both cases, the monopoly on the market which ensures their ability to exploit the truly productive labor (more in the case of the shoes than movies) and to restrict competition from other producers (in both) is now being buffered by the concept of intellectual property rights. Further, it is the very precariousness of the market which belies the very idea of intellectual property rights.

Most market research (at least from the effects school or Lazarsfeld) shows that advertising works best (for products not news) when the message of the advertiser is reinforced by someone in the community you trust. The whole idea of diffusion theory is based on this conception of the communication process. These theories are often critiqued for being ethnocentric or one sided, but the fact is that there is evidence to back it up. They work with this model and, for the most part it works. It doesn't work every time to deliver the message, but when the message is delivered, it often works this way. Celebrities, of course, have come to stand in for community leaders in some cases, but even then I think effects research would show that it is the work of the community in getting products accepted that really produces the desired effect.

In other words, the labor of producing commercial culture does not ensure that it will have the desired effect and the only way either the brand or the product are ever "bought" by consumers is through their integration into people's daily lives. Smythe would argue that this is a form of labor...