Cool Capitalism

The principal thesis of Jim McGuigan in his Cool Capitalism (2009) is pretty straightforward:

“Capitalism is legitimized today through the extraordinary incorporation of dissent.” (xi)

Capitalism spectacularly incorporates the critique directed against it in order to reproduce itself, by transmogrifying it into something ‘cool’. As Boltanski and Chiapello note in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), more or less everybody today understands that capitalism is an ‘absurd system’ since “wage earners are obliged to surrender labour power to exploitation and accept a life of subordination to the rich and powerful”. The most obvious complain then would be: “Why people continue to accept it?” Capitalism should come with some cunning justifications for its raison d’être in order to keep people tranquil. According to McGuigan, the most effective justifications that capitalism can come up with are to be found in the terrain of its opponents, namely in the critique leveled against it:

“If capitalism can respond effectively to justifiable criticism, incorporate and neutralize the force of the counter argument and cool out disgruntled people, then it is in business, so to speak.”

Possibly there is no better sector that illustrates this point better than advertising, the capitalist activity par excellence. The “Gulliver” advertisement that plays lately in the cinema is a characteristic example.

“Gulliver” complains to the abstract (if not universal) figure of the corporate man that he will not tolerate to be befooled and exploited by his obscure machinations, crying out in a manner that eventually anyone with a minimum anti-capitalist sensibility would endorse:

“And you know what Mr Orange corporate man; I’m not your puppet!”

While one is consciously aware that this anti-corporate rant is a form of denial of advertisement’s “own effectiveness”, there is still a subtle reflexive game going on between the ad and its audience. This subtle game according to McGuigan is played particularly between the cool advertisements and their key focal groups, which are the youth and the so called ‘culturati’, the urban professionals. As Judith Williamson, the author of Decding Advertisements mentions:

“Advertising can incorporate its mythic status (as a lie) into itself with very little trouble. Advertisements will always recuperate by using criticisms of themselves as frames of reference which will finally enhance, rather than destroy their ‘real’ status”

Apart from putting forward this interesting idea, McGuigan’s book does a good job aggregating bibliographical resources that concern with the different stages of capital accumulation.

In the first chapter, the “Spirits of Capitalism”, he discusses Marx and the Marxist economist reading of capitalism with its scientific appeal. After that he summarizes the most important works of Schumpeter, Daniel Bell, Chiapello and Boltanksi and Jeremy Rifkin. In all these moments he delineates the process of “culturalization” of contemporary capitalistic economies and the ways that “the Protestant ethic of earlier capitalism has gradually superseded by a much more “hedonistic ethic”. In so doing he is particularly cautious not to reduce economic phenomena to cultural processes and vice versa. In a telling instance, he denounces as “utter nonsense” the claim that cultural production is more important than physical production in the world economy. In that sense he is also careful to keep a distance from the term post-Fordism, rather preferring the term neo-Fordism which in his opinion characterizes better the global economies today.

Chapter two discusses the idea of art as the “Great Refusal”, in Marcuze’s terms. What happened to this essentially Romantic idea of art? McGuigan states that the ideal of the Romantic artist is much more present in contemporary world than we thought it were. He goes on to trace the origins of artistic autonomy since the time of the separation of arts from the control of the church. This moment is institutionally located in the opening of Academie Francaise back in 1635. He discusses how this autonomy was performed and understood through the years, from Courbet-as the prototypical bohemian- and Baudleire-as the prototypical aesthete-, up to Jackson Pollock and the attitude-obsessed YBA’s. In between, he talks about the contradictions of the “politically committed” artist in modernity discussing in relative length the examples of Picasso, Rivera and Kahlo.

The three following chapters are devoted to the discussion of various aspects of market capitalism and its pervasive impact on contemporary culture. As McGuigan argues, following a discussion on Bourdieu and Harvey, neo-liberalism, particularly through the creative industries, has colonized culture and basically turned it into a discourse of economics. As the creative economy mantra has it anyway:

There is thus an economic aspect to creativity, observable in the way it contributes to entrepreneurship, fosters innovation, enhances productivity and promotes economic growth.(UN Creative Economy Report, 2008:3)

 An array of  intriguing concepts of cultural theory are also discussed in these three chapters, like Beck’s idea of individuation that McGuigan develops at relative length or Raymond Williams’ of “mobile privatization” which seems to be largely up to date nowadays, given the popularity of portable devices such as iPods and laptops.  McGuigan ties these concepts with the neo-liberal attempt for ideological and political legitimization.

He goes on to make the usual attack to the “precarious” working conditions. This attack can become rather clumsy at times sounding somewhat conservative if it is not followed with demands for more creative work (something that BIFO beautifully discusses here http://multitudes.samizdat.net/What-is-the-Meaning-of-Autonomy). The slogan “jobs for life” can not be the sole demand for the left since it appears as a rather clumsy regression to the safety net of job fixation. This can be connected to a general nostalgia to Keynesianism and social democracies that runs through McGuigan’s book.   

In the final chapter McGuigan revisits the anti-capitalist tendencies today, trying to discover ways that capitalism can be challenged. The usual suspects are discussed again here as Nomai Klein, Hardt and Negri and Petras and Veltmeyer.

Overall Cool Capitalism is quite a stimulating book with some up to date debates concerning the transition to a more culturally oriented capitalism. Moreover, it does a good job providing good bibliographical sources and explaining in an accesible language concepts and ideas of some leading social theorists. The only remark I would have is that it sometimes falls into the de facto binary rhetoric of bad capitalism/good socialism , but it generally keeps the balance fairly well.