Of Neoliberal Realities, Cultural Studies and the Fashion World

Recently writing up my thoughts about how the rise and decline of the supermodel seemed to me very much bound up with the trajectory of globalization--the cultural standing of the supermodel, as an image epitomizing a life of pleasure and beauty, of freedom and mobility and luxury consumption in an integrating, booming, ever more cosmopolitan world brought to us via the hyper-mediation of life by a digital revolution--waxed great when globalization was on the upswing, but suffered as that economic vision ran into trouble. It wasn't the only thing at issue, I thought, the whole world of media and celebrity changing since in ways untoward to it, for example, but it did seem to me a very big part of the story--and an obvious one--and indeed I was surprised that I could not find anyone else thinking along very similar lines.

Instead they mostly repeated the story about a quip from Linda Evangelista that we are told rubbed some people the wrong way as somehow dooming it all (never mind that chronologically speaking this explanation is completely incoherent).

Still, that disparity did set me thinking--about the standard of rhetoric, and how it may have changed over time, but also the frame of mind so satisfied with such lame explanations, and specifically the disinterest of the commentariat in such a thing as globalization when it comes to these matters. After all, consider what we get when we read about "globalization," and especially the neoliberalism for which the term tends to be a synonym, or at least a proxy. Mostly we get hazy references to theories and policies--sufficiently hazy that centrist ideologues (a Jonathan Chait, for example, or a Bill Scher, or Nick Cohen), wanting to deny any substance to the theory, to pretend it was merely an epithet flung at upstanding liberals by Know-Nothing hippies, constantly got away with haziness of their own as they set about doing just that. Indeed, that haziness was what initially prompted me to write about the subject, trying to do better--to define the term "neoliberal" more rigorously, to consider all those things which it has stood for and the relations among them (not just a theory or policies, but a theory which led to the promotion of certain policies, etc.), scrutinize the policy record of major governments and administrations (Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton) to see whether they were indeed consistent with such policymaking, delineate a discernible, distinct neoliberal economic model that one can contrast usefully with the "Keynesian Fordism" that prevailed before neoliberalism, and test the claims for neoliberalism's ascent against the evidence for a restructuring of the U.S. economy along neoliberal lines on the basis of a comprehensive survey of the statistical data.

Still, so far as I can tell such efforts remain a rarity (and not particularly well-noticed rarities, either), haziness continuing to prevail unhelpfully, while if the situation in the economics literature is bad it is worse still where study of the manifestation of that political economic model in our cultural life is concerned. A significant part of this would seem to be the extent to which a postmodernist outlook profoundly inimical to rigorous thought about material realities has dominated this side of intellectual life, with those who get on in the academic-media complex dutifully accepting the postmodernist premise and working from there. However, the embrace of postmodernism can seem reflective of the tendency of those most oriented to the culture industries, specifically their proneness to the subjective and impressionistic, and, their insistence on self-expression, certain personal freedoms and inclination to a Bohemianism at which the bourgeois may look askance apart, their proneness to views many would find elitist, conservative, even reactionary, especially when there is little challenge to orthodoxy about. (Disappointing as it is for some of us, where ideas are concerned artists are more likely to follow than to lead.) As the subject was specifically modeling and the fashion world, it also seems likely that this corner of the cultural world, devoted as it is to luxury consumption by an elite, and which sets so much store by display and by imitation, is an especially unlikely place to find people engaging with a concept like neoliberalism--and still more, find themselves allowed to have a career as they do so.