The Market
Contents
Theatricality in the creation of a consuming subject
Mail-order
Semiotics in the Liberation of Function from Form
... ours is not the environment for heroic communication through pure architecture. Each medium has its day, and the rhetorical environmental statements of our time – civic, commercial, or residential – will come from media more purely symbolic, perhaps less static and more adaptable to the scale of our environment. The iconography and mixed media of roadside commercial architecture will point the way if we will look. Housing for the elderly on the Oak Street Connector, if it had to be a monument, would have been more economical, socially responsible and amenable as a conventional apartment building,lost by the side of the expressway, with a big sign on top blinking, I AM A MONUMENT. Decoration is cheaper.
- Robert Venturi,"Learning From Las Vegas," 1972
When Robert Venturi looked to the vernacular architecture on the Las Vegas strip in the late 1960's, he saw a resurrection of symbolism in the built environment that had seemed destined for extinction in the wake of architectural modernism. Whereas the Bauhaus' legacy in modernism had stripped buildings of ornament in an attempt to unify form with function, Venturi was amazed to find a Las Vegas strip dotted with generic buildings differentiated only by elaborate ornamental signs designating the unique functions and identities of otherwise identical spaces.
The Vegas strip not only violated a progression away from decoration (which led many to credit Venturi's text as the first postmodern architectural manifesto) but brought more clearly into focus the impact of the automobile upon architecture that needed to be identified from greater distances over shorter durations of time. Whereas the heroic communication of pure architecture had in the past led to forms and facades which - albeit imperfectly - communicated the activities contained within them, Venturi noted that in a land of highways and commercial strips the same system of (road) signs that enabled standardized navigation of an entire continent also enabled a faster recognition of the buildings and spaces one passed by. The vital necessity of introducing semiotic distinctions between buildings exemplified the spatial distortions that accompany accelerated movement and the distribution of communities across expanding territories.
Whereas the built environment brought countless aspects of human activity into existence by anchoring them in physical space, what Venturi exposed was the cultural appropriation of semiotic systems to designate spaces whose distinctive architecture had not yet been invented. In his iconic “Recommendation for a monument” his sarcastic suggestion that decoration upon generic form was the most ethical and economic method of design, exposed the complete lack of subtlety in designs that managed to serve specific functions in the absence of architectural innovation. Rather than create a home for new human activity, it was clear that one need only name a space in order for it to serve a specific function. Although modular, multipurpose, space had been realized long ago behind the glass curtain walls of modern skyscapers, after 1972, one could not escape the vulgar conclusion that the space itself was a nostalgic theatre enabling the suspension of disbelief which designated the offices of one box from the warehouse or monument of another.
In essence, symbolism had invaded space rendering residual communicative modalities in architectural form (the steeple, the column, the storefront) which directed activities within them unnecessary. In a traditional town one might recognize a church by a steeple, and civic institutions by classical architecture – but in Las Vegas one needed only to read a sign that read “CHAPEL” and a marriage could be performed. Resistance to the glass curtain and the modernist box need not be overcome by a radical re-education of a public in modernist aesthetics, but by the complete removal of ambiguity through the ultimate abstraction of the sign. Buildings had entered a realm of mediation, and the Las Vegas strip presented an intermediate phenomenon whereby one could could navigate a foreign landscape locate a desired place.
Venturi's Monument, like a Vegas chapel, anticipates the remediation of spatial phenomena in immaterial spaces and illustrates that function itself is not material, but something performed by actors engaged in a collective fiction. Once it was plainly clear that all the world was a stage, it followed that with the proper, scripting, semiotic device, the market no longer needed to be a specific locality in order to function as a market.
The Market as a Medium
To what extent can the market be characterized as a medium? And, insofar as it is a medium, to what extent can the market be characterized as a dead medium?
In order to answer these questions, one must consider different definitions and uses of the word, market. Fernand Braudel defines the market as that which mediates between material life and economic life. But the possibility of mediation requires a prior separation between the two entities--in this case material and economic life--being mediated. A Marxist reading of capitalism, especially as it was taken up by Michel Foucault in his concept of biopolitics, suggests that material and economic life are no longer separate, that the economy has become a condition of possibility for material life. The market as a medium in this regard is dead.
Even the very term "economic life" implies that economic activity is alive, or that it behaves like organic life. [External regulation v. internal/immanent]
Definitions:
The market as a site of buying and selling: To the extent that the market is understood to be a spatial entity, or object, containing/enclosing acts of economic exchange, the market is dead.
Market as a conceptual category referring to a specific type of commodity that can be bought and sold (i.e., the job market, the stock market). The stipulation is that there has to be more than one seller offering the commodity to at least one buyer. The sellers exist in a market competing for the buyers, who can choose between them. [Is competition alive or dead? Is there any such thing as a "free market"?]
The Economy as a Represented Object
Modes of Representation
A capitalist market needs to have what Timothy Mitchell calls an "apparatus of representation" in order to convert material into abstract capital. Mitchell, Markets, 9: Characterizing de Soto's argument: "The most important difference between successful capitalist economies and the rest of the world lies not in the wealth they possess... but in how that wealth is held." "Representations of material goods transform their value into abstract forms, which can live an 'invisible, parallel life' alongside their physical existnece. The West has invented procedures to create these invisible forms. Individuals in the West can unlock the assets accumulated in physical property, transforming material wealth into abstract capital" (Mitchell, 2006, 9).
Spatial Representation
The purpose of any space is determined by both the symbols used to designate where one is (ie an open for business sign), and the practices that take place there. In "Learning From Las Vegas," Robert Venturi takes a close look at how the Vegas Strip (in the late 60's) consisted of buildings that were differentiated primarily by flashy signs decorating unoriginal buildings (what he called the "decorated shed." He traced the phenomenon to the impact of speed on architecture - mainly that in a landscape where one drives past buildings, signs enable one to differentiate one space from another at a faster speed than differentiated architectures could (which is why signs matter so much for businesses on highways).
What makes this so interesting is that when semiotics are reintroduced into architecture, communicating the specific use of a generic space, buildings enter a mediated realm - And I think that's key here - that when people believe they're in a market when they see a "market" sign, it enables the use of a spatial semiotic to successfully mediate the entire space provided that the same activity occurs - which is really just to say that the Las Vegas strip is this intermediate phenomenon whereby we all can find what we want in foreign places, and that's precisely the mechanism by which we can create a market without the actual space of a market (a shopping cart icon does the trick!).
The Death of Equilibrium
Randy Martin looks at U.S.'s switch from creditor to debtor nation in the 1980s. Consumption without production. Risk becomes a sign of strength and power and security a sign of weakness (Martin, 28). Then debt gets repackaged as securities. Went off gold standard. "Now monetary movement was being freed to spread the wealth. Equilibrium-- key to Bretton Woods and early monetarist currency controls-- was no longer a condition of exchange. The dollar's spread, the expansion of debt and speculation, fostered disequilibrium and its attendant risks as a new horizon of opportunity. Fixing exchange to a physical standard perpetuated the image of the economy as a closed system. It could grow in proportion to the balance of inputs and outputs" (Martin, 29).
The organic model of the economy as a closed system: "An economy could become overheated and melt down or explode. The social sciences more generally were predicated on this image of a closed system. The system adapted to internal strains by growth and differentiation. It maintained boundaries, kept out threatening uncertainties, and externalized unintended consequences from its internal decisions" (Martin, 28-29).
"As financial reason overtook the system-based moral and political economy, as the investor who knows no country elbowed out the consumer-citizen of the nation-state, the organic closed system, result of the social sciences' unacknowledged metaphorizing of the social, was morphing into a different kind of beast" (Martin, 29).
Branding
Terranova. Clough.
Coding of Risk, Insecurity
How to understand market activity after the traditional market dies. Instead of coding commodities as valuable (Mitchell, 2007), Randy Martin argues that capitalism is following a financial logic, which extracts value from predicting future price fluctuations, interest rates, exchange rates, and packages this risk into new kinds of commodities, such as derivatives and securities.
Derivatives
Securities
References
Martin, Randy. 2007. And Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2005. Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, edited by George Steinmetz.
Mitchell, Timothy. [From an early version of the following paper.] 2007. The Properties of Markets. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
