Myth and the Market

Myth and the Market Edited by: Norah Campbell, John Desmond, James Fitchett, Donncha Kavanagh, Pierre McDonagh, Aidan OʼDriscol, Andrea Prothero

Proceedings of an interdisciplinary conference held in Carlingford, Ireland 19–21 June 2014

Myth and the Market

Edited by

Norah Campbell, John Desmond, James Fitchett Donncha Kavanagh, Pierre McDonagh Aidan OʼDriscoll, Andrea Prothero

Myth and the Market

Edited by

Norah Campbell John Desmond James Fitchett Donncha Kavanagh Pierre McDonagh Aidan O’Driscoll Andrea Prothero

! Myth and the Market Norah Campbell, John Desmond, James Fitchett, Donncha Kavanagh, Pierre McDonagh, Aidan O’Driscoll, Andrea Prothero (eds). ISBN: 9781905254859 (alk. paper) 1. Myth 2. Marketing 3. Philosophy 4. Economics

! ! ! Cover design and artwork by George Campbell

! ! ! First published in Ireland in 2014 by UCD Business School, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland.

! Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License and may not be reproduced for commercial purposes

! Proceedings of an interdisciplinary conference held in Carlingford, Ireland 19–21 June 2014.

Contents The Táin

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Myth and the market: An introduction John Desmond and Donncha Kavanagh

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The Ulster Cycle: an other world Neil Buttimer

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I Macgnímrada Introduction 33 John Desmond Birth-tales of Cú Chulainn: The birth and maintenance of economic structures in early Irish society 36 Marion Deane Fans on the threshold: Steve Jobs, the sacred in memorialisation and the hero within 51 Anu Harju and Johanna Moisander

II Ríastartha Introduction Donncha Kavanagh Money’s unholy trinity: Trickster, devil, fool Angus Cameron The centrally planned production of neo-liberal ideology: Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and the closed Mont Pelerin Society Stephen Dunne, Jo Grady and Chris Grocott Dr Pangloss and the best of all possible markets: evolutionary fantasies and justifications in contemporary economic discourse Philip Roscoe Fools and jesters: The role of corporate responsibility managers Anna Zueva-Owens

III Tórann Introduction James Fitchett Market myths and iconographic culture: Thoughts for a symbolic culture A. Fuat Firat Marketing and consumption or the permanency of the myth: Why and how an understanding of the mythical foundation of the market is more useful than marketing in times of crisis Dominique Bouchet Myth, management of the unknown Gianluca Miscione IV Echtra

Introduction Norah Campbell In iron light: Eeriness, problematics, and social movements Gareth Brown Understanding myth in consumer culture theory Jack Tillotson and Diane Martin 3

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69 83 96

111 123

125 132 143 169

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Contents

The myth of the responsible consumer: Interpreting consumers’ responsibility narratives in the tourism market Robert Caruana and Sarah Glozer Myth spinning in an ideological community: A Barthesian analysis Katherine Casey, Maria Lichrou and Lisa O’Malley Creating harmony in crisis periods: Exporting cultural values through Yin-Yang mythology Amee Kim

V Ére Introduction Aidan O’Driscoll Commercial mythmaking and the Gaelic Athletic Association: Exploring Irish men’s identity work within influential social networks Dee Duffy The austerity myth: Parenting and the new thrift culture in contemporary Ireland Fiona Murphy Modulating mythology in a post-traumatic era: Murals and re-imaging in Northern Ireland Hilary Downey and John F. Sherry Jr

VI Oc ól chorma Introduction Andrea Prothero Branding Narcissus: Marketing myths in contemporary celebrity Chris Hackley and Amy Rungpaka Hackley Reinventing the English industrial revolution as myth and heritage Christina Goulding and Mike Saren Mythical moments in Remington brand history Terrence Witkowski The ideologies of convenience in myths of domestic consumption Andrea Davies, James Fitchett and Per Ostergaard

VII Cless Introduction Pierre McDonagh Health, safety and myth-based policy Peter Armstrong Bacteria and the market Norah Campbell, Aidan O’Driscoll and Cormac Deane On the uses of fairy dust: Contagion, sorcery and the crafting of other worlds David Harvie and Keir Milburn Megamythomanicial Pierre McDonagh

In Dreams Robert Grafton-Small

Author Biographies

Acknowledgements

199 217 232 249 251

271 281 307

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321 329 347 363

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399 413

415 416 423

Táin Bó Cúailnge (the Cattle-Raid of Cooley)

The Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Cattle-Raid of Cooley, recounts the exploits of the Ulaidh, the people of the North of Ireland who gave Ulster its name. The story follows the route of a great army raised by Queen Medb (Mayev) and her husband Ailil (Al-il) who journey from their kingdom in Connacht in the west across the central plain of Ireland, then turn north into Ulster in search of the Donn Cúailnge, the brown bull of Cooley. On the modern map reproduced on the next page, Carlingford on the Cooley Peninsula is near the end of their trail, towards the top. The quest for the brown bull is provoked by an argument that arises between man and wife; when in bed Ailil taunts Medb that she is now much better off than she was when she married him. Medb hotly disputes this and the argument quickly centres around their respective possessions which are displayed and enumerated in turn. It transpires that they are the equal of each other in every class of property save for one thing; Alil has the Finnbennach, or white-horned bull, which had been a calf in Meb’s herd but which went over to Alil because it refused to be led by a woman. Medb, desperate to find the equal of the Finnbennach learns that an Ulsterman has its equal in the Donn Cúailnge, or brown bull. Initially the caretaker of the brown bull agrees to lend it to Medb, but when he learns by accident that she would have taken it by force, he changes his mind and sends her emissaries packing. Medb and Ailil then raise a great army to take the bull by force. Conchobar (Connor), king of Ulster and his men find themselves in considerable danger from Medb’s army because of a curse which is triggered whenever Ulster is in danger, which collectively lays them low with birth-pangs. It falls to the youthful Cú Chulainn to defend his land, as the only warrior exempt from the curse because he was born just outside of Ulster. A good deal of the Táin is taken up with graphic descriptions of his single combat with champions selected from Medb’s army. The tale rushes towards a climactic end as Cú Chulainn fights and kills his childhood friend and foster-brother Ferdia, whom he mourns; then the army of Ulster awakens and engages with the great army of Connacht; finally the two bulls themselves clash. The brown bull kills the white bull before making its way homeward to die. The above summary omits much of interest, such as the role of the Morrigan (Great Queen/ Crow of Battle); the descriptions of the characters and their dress; the vivid directness and immediacy of their expression and dare I say it, the humour. In modern times the story has provided fodder for a veritable herd of academics, being argued by some as providing a ‘window onto the Iron Age’ as the oldest vernacular tale in Europe, or alternatively, as a mainly political document shaped by medieval clerics to further the ruling interests of the time. The whole affair is complicated because the story comprises 80 interrelated tales strung together in different ways in each of the three editions, with the second edition written in the 12th century being the most complete. Academics focus too on different aspects of the tale, such as its misogynistic portrayal of women, or the role of the hero. There are many other perspectives, not least that which argues along Girardian lines that the Táin is a caution against the consequences of acquisitive mimesis.

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Táin Trail for touring and cycling around the Carlingford area

Myth and the market: An introduction John Desmond and Donncha Kavanagh

University of St Andrews; University College Dublin

Without mythology, our hopes and memories are homeless; we capitulate to the mindless conformity of fact. But if revered for its own abstract sake, if totally divorced from the challenge of reality, mythology becomes another kind of conformism, another kind of death. We must never cease to keep our mythological images in dialogue with history because once we do, we fossilise. (Kearney 1985, 22)

This warm invitation to the land of the tuatha and the sí is extended to all who know what it means to tread softly. The idea was born from our conversation held twenty or more years ago at one of Stephen Brown’s events when, with nothing apparently better to do, the two of us reflected on the Hellenocentrism of thought, whereby all of our mythic endeavours oscillate around the tales of ancient Greece (Derrida 1978; Girard 1987). ‘What’, we exclaimed indignantly, ‘is so wonderful about Greek myth, that we are mesmerised by it to the point of distraction and forget our own foundational myths; of Norse, Icelandic, Irish, American and Chinese origin!’ (And then of course we had our ‘What did the Greeks ever do for us … apart from Antigone, Creon, Odysseus, Zeus etc. moment!’). In the intervening years we each became preoccupied with the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley), argued by some to be the oldest vernacular myth in Western history. We were blissfully unaware at the time of Tristram’s argument that the Táin could only have been devised by those aware of Greek and Roman metanarratives (Tristram, 1994, 12). The idea of an event around myth and the market took shape over the succeeding years (passing through stages such as Marketing Mythopoeia – thanks Douglas!) to the title we have today. Having considered and rejected a number of locations, we took up Andy and Pierre’s enthusiastic endorsement of Ghan House in Carlingford. This is a fitting location because it is linked directly to the events of the Táin, as there is a cut into an escarpment on the modest hill below Slieve Foy that overlooks the village which is argued to be the place described in that epic tale where Medb and Ailil’s great army turned northwards towards Ulster and its doom. Having settled on a location we invited the help of Aidan, Norah and James alongside Andy and Pierre, who each generously agreed. Since then they have unstintingly given of their time and commitment, giving shape and substance to our nebulous idea, so that the final result is very much the product of our group effort. The idea that the events recounted in the Táin might actually have happened can raise the hackles on the back of your neck. But then in rural Ireland the landscape constantly speaks to those in the know. Irish children in the 1950s knew that the leprechauns had long ago marched into Hollywood, but knew too that fairy trees and mounds demanded vigilance. Stories about the warning cry or knock of the family bean sí would lead to sleepless nights worrying over the portentive possibilities inherent in every creak and groan of bedroom furniture. Seamus Heaney was once asked whether he felt a connection to the distant past and replied to say that this was never a foreign place he had to venture towards, but rather a place that came to him in the conjoined images of Hermes and his father. His father was an affectionate, if taciturn man, a cattle-dealer who went to the fairs, wearing a soft hat, carrying a stick in his hand and sporting a pair of yellow leather boots; a man who also took charge of funeral rites for family and neighbours. Hermes, the god of marketplaces, wore a hat, carried a stick, wore yellow 7

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John Desmond and Donncha Kavanagh

boots and led the souls of the dead to the underworld. When he read about Hermes, Heaney said, he felt safe, he came home. Celebrating myth

A persistent theme that runs through a number of the stories in the Táin relates to the poisoning of pacific exchange relations by boastfulness, corrupt leadership, duplicity and the situation where the threat of force results in that which was initially offered freely being withheld, with disastrous consequences, not only for humankind but for all of nature, which unravels before our eyes. Read in this light, the Táin consists of a series of parables about the corruption of exchange. Today, myths about exchange are celebrated for different reasons. Myth offers a place of respite or sanctuary for those oppressed by the barrenness of scientific positivism (Levy 1981, 49) or the market (Belk and Costa 1998); it enflames consumer desire (Belk 1997); it frames moral judgements; inspires romantic journeys of discovery (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989); it helps in explorations of liminality; it enables us to reflect on the secularisation of religion and the sacralisation of the secular (Curry 2012).

Denigrating myth

The naïve credulity of the rural Irish is greeted with embarrassed astonishment by the metropolitan elite, who regard with almost equal horror, the sacrificial myths of Sinn Féin and Yeats’ Celtic Dawn. We are surely beyond all that now, they cry! Where Heaney celebrates the everydayness of the otherworld and the enchantment of the quotidian and is horrified by the desecration of mythic sites (Heaney 2008), Samuel Beckett stands as exemplar of all of those who would do away the metaphysical trappings of myth. From a modernist and strictly positivist position, myth (and its cousins – dreams and fantasies) is at best flotsam and froth, or, at worst, dangerous and delusional. Within this tradition, myth’s proper place is as an object of research, and indeed it has long been studied by psychoanalysts (Freud 1913/1960; Jung 1964), anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss 1955), cultural theorists (McCracken 1986) and marketers (Hirschman 1985, 1987). While Freud thought myth to be instructive, Marx (1843/1970) sought to expose it as a dangerous illusion, while for Barthes (1972) it was inscribed into consumers’ everyday use of objects, nurturing invidious ideologies such as the marketing concept (Brownlie and Saren 1997), advertising (Williamson 1978; Goldman 1992) and ‘green’ marketing (Peattie and Crane 2005). Maybe we are all iconoclasts now, belonging to a less credulous age, believing ourselves to be outside or beyond the numinous and the magical (Glucklich 1997), observing the beliefs and practices of those who do with detached knowingness and perplexed amusement. This take on myths continues in recent critiques that seek to ‘expose the myth’ of the marketing concept, advertising, ‘sustainable’ marketing, GNP growth, etc. Myth, in this sense, is used as a pejorative label in what are best understood as political moves that seek to supplant one myth with (what will in time be seen as) another. Others argue that the greatest lie of all is for modernism to deny its own myth. What of the myths that enliven our own thoughts? Often ‘myth’ is used as a signifier in the academy to overturn one argument deemed false, so as to install another in its place; seeking for example to replace ‘goods-centred’ logic with one that is ‘service-centred’ (Vargo and Lusch 2004). Other studies address fundamental questions regarding the landscape we academics inhabit but only partially see; the founding myths of the USA, of individuality and freedom that inform the conceptions of the consumer framed by Vargo and Lusch (2004) as a personage who is free and unencumbered by social constraints (Carrier 1997; Schwarzkopf 2011). What then too of the prevailing myths that frame European and Asian thought on marketing and the market? Please skip the interlude below if you want to go direct to the seven themes identified for the conference.

Myth and the market: An introduction

A brief interlude: surely some myth-take?

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What is our take on myth? Given that the Táin is a story about conflict between binaries, here’s another story about conflict between two groups, which we’ll call the Malthusians and the Cornucopians. We begin the story in 1798 when the first group’s founder, Thomas Malthus, warned of an impending apocalypse that would befall the world, reasoning that the world could not provide the required resources for an increasing population (Malthus 1798/1966). Others saw things differently, and this group, which we will call the Cornucopians, asserted that the resources of the world were practically infinite because of the almost limitless capacity of humans to solve problems through inventing new technology, aided by the power of the market through which new alternatives would be brought into being. The number of Malthusians grew in the 1960s and 1970s, as new disciples reworked Malthus’s original message. One disciple, Paul Ehrlich, wrote an influential book in 1968, called The Population Bomb, which, in its first paragraph, vividly described the coming apocalypse: The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. (Ehrlich 1968, 5)

Another group, led by Dana Meadows, developed a computer model of the world which showed that there were real and imminent ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972). But the Cornucopians were unconvinced, and one disciple from this group, Julian Simon, wrote a series of articles in which he argued that humans are the ‘ultimate resource’ because human ingenuity is effectively unlimited and will always find new solutions to problems of resource scarcity (Simon 1980; Simon 1981d, 1981b). A central plank of his thesis was that if a resource is limited then the law of supply and demand should mean that the price of a resource would inexorably increase over time as the resource is consumed. However, instead of rising, he showed that the price of a range of metals (copper etc.) relative to wages had consistently dropped between 1800 and 1980, demonstrating the fundamental untruth of the Malthusian thesis (Simon 1981c). The Malthusians were unconvinced, arguing that mineral prices don’t factor in supply levels until supplies reach very low levels, at which point prices increase due to the higher cost of extracting the resource, creating a trough-like curve of price over time (Cook 1976). They also argued that the pertinent limit was not the amount of available minerals, but rather the carrying capacity of the planet to deal with waste and emissions (Ehrlich 1981). Both camps continued to launch attacks on the other, penning articles justifying their point of view (the pen, of course, being mightier than the sword), missives that dripped with derogatory and inflammatory language. In one of these attacks, Simon made the following challenge: Ehrlich makes wild statements without being willing to take the consequences of being wrong. For example, he says, ‘If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000’ (Ehrlich 1970, quoted by Dixon, 1973). Well, why won’t he bet on that fact if he believes it? I’d be happy to bet with him. In fact, I’ll go further, and, as we say where I come from, I’ll put my money where my mouth is. This is a public offer to stake $10,000 in separate transactions of $1000 or $100 each, on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run. If you will pay me the current market price of $1000 or $100 worth of any standard mineral or other extractive product you name, and specify any date more than a year away, I will contract to pay you the then-current market price of the material. How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come, first served. (Simon 1981a, 39)

John Desmond and Donncha Kavanagh

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Along with some colleagues, Ehrlich accepted the bet and ‘offered, in a formal contract, to pay him on 29 September 1990, the 1990 equivalent of 10,000 1980 dollars (corrected by the CPI) for the quantity that $2,000 would buy of each of the following five metals on September 29, 1980: chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten’ (Ehrlich 1981, 46). By 1990, all five metals were below their inflation-adjusted 1980 price. Ehrlich, having lost the bet, sent Simon a cheque for $567.07. In 2009, Fitzpatrick and Spohn replicated the bet, comparing the price of the same basket of metals in 1980, 1990 and 2005. The basket, which was worth €1,000 in 1980, was worth just $618 and $736.84 in 2005, leading Fitzpatrick and Spohn to conclude that: The replication of the Erhlich and Simon wager demonstrates once again that human ingenuity and market forces respond to scarcity and higher prices through innovation and substitution. In spite of increased consumerism across the globe from rising middle class societies, the issue of the exhausting of natural resources appears to be no more accurate in 2005 than it was in 1980, when Erhlich and Simon made their original sustainability wager … [and our] study indicates that Simon’s view prevails again in the 21st century. (Fitzpatrick and Spohn 2009, 6).

Figure 1 updates this analysis, showing the price of the basket from 1900 to 2011, while Figure 2 shows the price of the five minerals over the same period. A number of conclusions can be drawn from these figures. First, the bet’s base year, 1980, coincided with a 100-year high in the price of the basket, almost certainly linked to the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, as well as the quite intense debate between the Malthusians and Cornucopians around that time, which, ironically, probably caused much of the price rise in that period. Second, Ehrlich would have won if the bet had been from 1985 to 2010, rather than 1980 to 1990. Indeed, the volatility of the price since 1900 is such that a winner in one period is $6,000

$5,000

$4,000

$3,000

$2,000

$1,000

$0 1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Figure 1 Price of basket 1900–2011 (1998 prices, 1980 mix)

Myth and the market: An introduction

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$80,000 $70,000 $60,000 $50,000 $40,000 $30,000 $20,000 $10,000 $0 1900 Copper

1920

1940

Chromium

1960

1980

Nickle

Tin

2000 Tungsten

Figure 2 Price of minerals (1998$ per metric tonne) 1900–2011 likely to lose in another period. Third, the price volatility over the century suggests that the market price does not appear to build in long-term considerations about supply levels, but instead only responds to relatively short-term issues. One of the more interesting features of the bet, especially for our purposes, is how it incorporates both mythic and market elements. For instance, we can see that the Malthusians rework a modern variant of ancient narratives of apocalypse that recur across mythological traditions, as in the Táin story which is very much about how petty jealousy can lead to wholesale social upheaval and apocalyptic conflict. Apocalypse is also a habitual feature of the ancient Greek view of the world – which they understood as cycling endlessly from origin (alpha) to apocalypse (omega) – as typified by Hesiod’s myth of the ages, an endless cycle of degeneration from an original, nearly divine existence to the current, tortured, painful world (Nisbet 1980, 13–18). Indeed a version of the apocalypse features in most cultural traditions, such as in the biblical description as recounted in the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. The Cornucopians also draw on mythology, the cornucopia representing the ‘horn of plenty’ that came into being when the infant god Zeus, who was playing with his nursemaid (a mythical goat named Amalthea), broke off one of her horns which then had the divine power to provide unending nourishment. Alternatively, its creation is part of another mythical story about a fight between Zeus’s son, Heracles, and the river god Achelous, during which Heracles wrenched off one of the river god’s horns. The bet between Simon and Ehrlich also has mythological resonances. Most obviously, it echoes the two wagers that play such a central part in Goethe’s Faust: the devil’s (Mephistopheles) bet with God that he can lure God’s favourite human (Faust) away from righteous pursuits, and his separate wager with Faust (into whose role Ehrlich perhaps succumbs) that he will do everything Faust wants while Faust lives, but that if Faust is so pleased with whatever the devil gives him that he wants to stay in that moment forever, then he will die and eternally serve the devil in hell.

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One can read many mythological stories as parables that warn us about what can happen if we become victims of vice. From this perspective, the notion that a bet might somehow be able to determine the resource capacity of the planet, and hence the future of humanity, is the type of hubris that mythological stories routinely warn us against. Indeed, this is why the ancient Greeks saw little point in thinking about or predicting the future the way we do. For them, life on earth was chaotic and unpredictable, reflecting the world of the gods which was dominated by fickle characters and chance (one of their earliest myths is that three brothers, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, rolled dice to divide the universe between them). Order was confined to the skies, which could be studied and mathematically modelled, and this they did with considerable aplomb. But notwithstanding their mathematical skills, the Greeks and Romans never developed even the basics of probability theory, which Bernstein (1996) attributes to their unwillingness to enter into a domain that was properly only the concern of the gods. Of course the market is central to the bet, which is all about the market price of a basket of metals. We find Lacan’s triad of three domains of experience – the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary (see Bailly 2009) – provides a powerful way of understanding how myth and the market are implicated in one another. The Symbolic is the domain of language and representation, as well as the network of rules and suppositions that constitute the symbolic order. Hence, the market price of an asset is partly of this realm, as indeed are the rules of the market through which the price becomes instantiated. The Real is not that which we normally understand as ‘reality’, but rather that which is always beyond representation, beyond the Symbolic, or, as Žižek puts it, it is ‘the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly’ (Žižek 2006, 26). If the market price is partly Symbolic, then the asset’s actual value might be properly understood as part of the Real. As Bjerg (2014) explains, inherent to the constitution of a market is a difference between value and price, insofar as the seller of an asset should, ideally, believe that the price they receive exceeds the asset’s value, while, conversely, the buyer should believe that the price is lower than the asset’s value. Indeed, ‘trading is only possible insofar as prices are not able to represent the value of an asset in any definite sense, i.e. insofar as it is impossible to confront value directly’ (Bjerg 2014, 24). Moreover, value cannot be confronted directly because not everyone who values the asset (including those who have not yet been born) have access to or participate in the market. Indeed the market price is always determined by a relatively small number of market actors who might agree a market price, which is part of the Symbolic realm, but can never ‘confront value directly’, because ‘value’ is properly located in the Real. The Imaginary dimension of myth relates to the totalising effects of seeking to construct a coherent narrative in an attempt (which always fails) to bridge the gap between the Symbolic and the Real. The Imaginary is the realm of identity linked to ideal images and destructive status games. In the Táin, the references to Cú Chulainn’s good looks and valour are part of the Imaginary, fuelling emulative and invidious emotions in relation to an ideal image. The heroic image of Cú Chulainn retains its power to seduce the young on both sides of the political and religious divide in Ireland to the present day. It was deployed in the early twentieth century by those associated with the Irish Literary Revival to help forge an inspirational foundation for the identity of the Irish Free State; Cú Chulainn’s statue is still displayed in the iconic GPO Building in O’Connell Street, Dublin, relaying its manifold associations to the Easter Rising. Images of the Ulster hero are deployed today to equal effect on the gable walls of loyalist Belfast. Žižek is a little clearer than Lacan when explaining how ideology and the Imaginary are like terms to describe the necessary fantasy-structure that supports our daily reality. ‘Ideology’, is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel [the Real] ... The function of

Myth and the market: An introduction

ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel. (Žižek 1989, 45)

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If the Imaginary refers to the prevailing tendency to close off indeterminacy then in relation to the market no one has bettered Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities whereby the commodity forecloses what it cannot contain. Bjerg (2014) discloses some of the myths or fantasies that underpin the social reality of financial markets: the fantasy of beating the market (2014: 39–45), the fantasy of joining the market (2014: 64–68), pricing fantasies (2014: 68–73), the fantasy of the efficient market (2014: 48–53), and the fantasy of the impossibility of speculation (2014: 53–55). Similarly, Jones (2013) has inquired into ‘the structure of the ideas and fantasies that come with the category of the market’ (2013: 7), noting how we attribute human attributes to the phenomenon that is the market: it has moods and desires, it speaks, it must be listened to, we should anticipate how it will respond to our actions, etc. The suprahuman entity that we call the market also has a ‘visible hand’, which Jones says has to be the ‘hand of Jupiter’ (2013: 45), because Jupiter is the god of gods. Much earlier, Marx routinely used monster metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism, a theme more recently explored by McNally (2011) in his book, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. When the Symbolic intrudes into the Imaginary in order to render it explicable, the result is the disenchantment of the world. The scientific projects of Marx, Bjerg and others described above are symbolic activities. Following in the wake of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969/1992) and Roland Barthes (1972), Varda Leymore (1975) and Judith Williamson (1978) each used structuralist techniques to dissect and classify the unconscious Imaginary identities constructed by advertisers for consumers. Leymore’s (1975) analysis of hidden myth startlingly suggests that marketers’ unwitting efforts were as much about dis-identification as its counterpart; where narratives sought to persuade consumers to avoid buying margarine by associating it with war, or to buy commercial babyfood so as not to poison their children. A good number of consumer researchers have since researched how consumers use commodity meanings constructed by marketers as resources for the construction of identity (see for example Arnould and Thompson 2005), or alternatively to reject these myths (Zeynep and Thompson 2011). What we take to be reality is actually apportioned among all three realms; the Symbolic relates to our cultural and scientific understandings; the Imaginary to the reality of our daily lives as fashioned by the stories we tell ourselves; and the Real is the negative ontological space around which the Imaginary and Symbolic oscillate. Returning to the quote at the beginning of this piece, the reality that Richard Kearney refers to is Symbolic. It is by means of the Symbolic, via the understandings given to us by science and history, that we can interrogate the Imaginary narratives by which we organise our daily experience into a coherent story. As Kearney notes, if revered for its own abstract sake, by being totally divorced from the challenge of (Symbolic) reality, Imaginary myth becomes another form of conformism. Importantly this applies equally to the hyper-valuation of the Symbolic realm. He could equally have said that to divorce the Symbolic from the Imaginary of myth is to invite another form of death in abstraction, which refuses us our dreams. End of interlude: myth and the market – seven themes

When we met to organise the papers for discussion, the question arose as to how to name each group. The papers fell into seven groups and so we asked Neil Buttimer if he might be able to devise some appropriate titles from the Táin to name each grouping. He responded splendidly, drawing on terms (and spelling) as found in the version of the Táin reproduced in O’Rahilly (1976) or as found in the Dictionary of the Irish Language (Royal Irish Academy 1913/1983, hereinafter DIL), the contemporary dictionary of medieval Irish. These titles give a sense of the wide territory covered by the papers, and pays due regard to the long tradition within which our own cogitations are situated.

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I

John Desmond and Donncha Kavanagh

The title of the first section, Macgnímrada (O’Rahilly 1976: 398) translates as ‘boyhood deeds’, which refers to the feats of Cú Chulainn, the heroic central character of the Táin story. More broadly, from Síle na Gig to the Green Giant, from Achilles and Heracles to Marlboro Man, hero worship and our need for heroes helps frame our understanding of time, history and consumption (Kavanagh and O’Leary 2004). The papers in this section explore, in various ways, this heroic theme.

II Ríastartha (O’Rahilly 1976: 428) means ‘contorted’; Cú Chulainn’s most notable attribute was riastradh – translated by Kinsella as ‘warp-spasm’ – which described his ability to twist or contort himself, a skill that the authors in this section find in paradigms and in some paradigm-builders. Two of the papers in this section explore the role of the Fool and the Trickster, liminal characters skilled in this art of shape-changing and dissimilitude.

III Tórann (DIL, to-tu, 255.65 ff.) means ‘delimiting, representing, denoting’, which is a theme explored in the papers in this section. As James Fitchett puts it in his commentary, ‘being in the world is sacrificed to an endless process of cutting up, dividing and separation – only to produce social life as dominated by domains, and separated into distinct spheres of conduct and operation’. Much of theorising is about constructing categories and boundaries and it is also fitting that the conference is set in Carlingford, close to a long-contested political border. IV Echtra (DIL, E, 35.64 ff.) means ‘expedition’ or ‘moving out’, though it also refers to a ‘story’. Expeditions feature in the Táin story, as they do in other mythical tales, such as Homer’s classic journey which involves encounters with giants, Hades, Sirens, gods, monsters and strange peoples. And Ulysses is still being remade for the modern world, whether through the genius of Joyce, or the consumer odyssey (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989), animated by the hope of understanding quotidian marketplace behaviour in new ways.

IV Ére (O’Rahilly 1976: 405) is an ancient name for ‘Ireland’, which we chose because the papers in this section are largely concerned with Irish cultural myths. More broadly, myths describe a different place or a fantasy world that sustains life when meaning is elusive, such as Levy’s (1981) application of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist approach to the analysis of consumer narratives, which he sees as a respite from the ‘barren and frustrating’ revelations of quantitative surveys (Levy 1981: 49), or in Belk and Costa’s (1998) study of the mountain man myth.

VI Oc ól chorma translates as ‘drinking ale’ (O’Rahilly 1976: 404), which is a reference to a story in the Táin about Conchobar (Connor), king of Ulster, who spent one third of each day drinking ale, echoing the focus on consumption and brands in this section’s papers, among other things.

VII The crowning section is Cless, which translates as ‘feat’ (O’Rahilly 1976: 389) or ‘stratagem’ (DIL, C, 231.51 ff.). One of the primary characteristics of the warrior in Early Irish literature is his ability to perform heroic feats, known most commonly in Old Irish as cless (Miller 2012). This finds echo in the papers in this section, which are variously about myths of technological control. In any event it will be a feat if we get to this stage!

Each of the seven sections is prefaced by an introductory piece by one of the editors, each of whom was given leeway to organise this as they pleased. The selected titles do not always match sweetly with every paper in each session, which is in our view all to the good. There are many aspects of the mythical such as sacrifice, spirit and mythical objects that are left largely unexplored in this foray. We acknowledge and indeed rejoice in the real of myth, comprising that kernel which haunts our imaginings and is unyielding to our classificatory schemes. It is in this spirit that we include the two short pieces by Pierre McDonagh and Bob Grafton-Small. We hope that you find the papers collected in this volume present a rich analysis of how the mythological and the market are implicated and interwoven in one another.

The bull

Myth and the market: An introduction

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Finally a brief word on our logo, the ‘shilling bull’, for which we thank Norah’s brother George. Lady Gregory and the poet William Butler Yeats were pivotal figures in the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century who drew liberally on ancient myths such as the Táin as part of their project to re-invent modern Ireland. Yeats’ self-portrayal was of a man with his head in the clouds, who not only eschewed but actively despised the tawdry realm of commerce. However as Brown (aka Aherne 2000) notes, Yeats was greatly attentive to such matters in his daily life – when his Nobel Prize was announced, ‘Allegedly, the new Laureate’s reaction was pure Polloxfen. “How much Smyllie, how much is it?”’ (Foster 2003, 245). Yeats headed the government commission that designed the currency for the new Ireland. They chose a number of farm animals for the currency, including a bull for the shilling piece. We do not know if the Táin provided the model for their decision. Were they aware that in doing so they stamped their coinage with possibly the most potent symbol of entropy and dissolution ever devised? References

Aherne, Aedh. 2000. “Chronicles of the Celtic Marketing Circle, Part I: The Paradise Parchment.” Marketing Intelligence and Planning 18 (6/7): 400-13. Arnould, E. J., and C. J. Thompson. 2005. “Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (4): 868-82. Barthes, Roland, and Annette Lavers. 1972. Mythologies. London: Cape. Belk, Russell. 1997. “The goblin and the huckster: a story of consumer desire for sensual luxury.” In Proceedings of the Marketing Illuminations Spectacular, edited by Stephen Brown, 290-9. St. Clement’s, University of Ulster, Belfast. Belk, Russell W., and J. A. Costa. 1998. “The mountain man myth: A contemporary consuming fantasy.” Journal of Consumer Research 25 (3): 218-40. Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, and John F. Sherry. 1989. “The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behaviour: Theodicy on the Odyssey.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 16 (June): 1–37. Bernstein, Peter L. 1996. Against the gods: the remarkable story of risk. New York: Wiley. Bjerg, Ole. 2014. Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism. London: Verso. Bailly, Lionel. 2009. Lacan: a beginner’s guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brownlie, Douglas, and Michael Saren. 1997. “Beyond the one-dimensional marketing manager: the discourse of theory, practice and relevance.” International Journal of Research in Marketing 14 (2): 147-61. Carrier, James G. 1997. Meanings of the market: the free market in western culture, Explorations in anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Cook, Earl. 1976. “Limits to Exploitation of Nonrenewable Resources.” Science 191 (4228): 677-82. doi: 10.2307/1741483. Curry, Patrick. 2012. “Enchantment and Modernity.” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature 9: 76–89. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and difference. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ehrlich, Paul R. 1981. “An economist in wonderland.” Social Science Quarterly 62 (1): 44-9. Ehrlich, Paul R. 1968. The population bomb. New York: Ballantine Books. Fitzpatrick, Thomas M., and Karen Spohn. 2009. “A 25th Anniversary Redux of the Simon and Ehrlich Global Sustainability Wager.” Journal of International Business and Cultural Studies 1: 1-7. Foster, Roy F. 2003. W.B. Yeats : a life. Vol II: The Arch-poet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1913/1960. Totem and taboo. Translated by James Strachey. London: Routledge. Girard, René. 1987. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Glucklich, Ariel. 1997. The end of magic. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldman, Robert L. 1992. Reading ads socially. London: Routledge. Heaney, Seamus. 2008. “Heaney hits at ‘desecration’ of sacred Tara.” The Observer, Sunday, 2nd March. Hirschman, Elizabeth C. 1985. “Primitive aspects of consumption in modern American society.” Journal of Consumer Research 12 (2): 142-54.

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—. 1987. “Movies as myths: An interpretation of motion picture mythology.” In Marketing and Semiotics: New Directions in the Study of Signs for Sale, edited by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok, 335-74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jones, Campbell. 2013. Can the Market Speak? New Alresford: John Hunt Publishing. Jung, Carl G. 1964. Man and his symbols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Kavanagh, Donncha, and Majella O’Leary. 2004. “The Legend of Cú Chulainn: Exploring Organisation Theory’s Heroic Odyssey.” In Myths, Stories and Organizations: Premodern Narratives for Our Times, edited by Yiannis Gabriel, 116-30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kearney, Richard. 1985. “Myth and Motherland.” In Ireland’s Field Day, edited by Field Day Theatre Company. London: Hutchinson. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. “The structural study of myth.” Journal of American folklore 68 (270): 428–44. —. 1969/1992. The raw and the cooked. Introduction to a science of mythology : 1. London: Penguin. Levy, Sidney J. 1981. “Interpreting Consumer Mythology: A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior.” Journal of Marketing 45 (3): 49–61. Leymore, Varda Langholz. 1975. Hidden myth : structure & symbolism in advertising. London: Heinemann Educational. Malthus, Thomas Robert. 1798/1966. First essay on population, 1798. Vol. 14. New York: Macmillan. Marx, Karl. 1843/1970. Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCracken, Grant. 1986. “Culture and consumption: A theoretical account of the structure and movement of the cultural meaning of consumer goods.” Journal of Consumer Research 13 (1): 71-84. McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the market: zombies, vampires, and global capitalism. Leiden: Brill. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jergen Randers, and William W. Behrens. 1972. The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe Books. Miller, Jimmy P. 2012. “Neither Burned nor Bloody: The Learning and Legacy of Heroic Feats.” Studia Celtica Fennica 8: 40-50. Nisbet, Robert. 1980. History of the idea of progress. London: Heinemann. O’Rahilly, Cecile. 1976. Táin Bó Cúailinge: Recension 1. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Peattie, Ken, and Andrew Crane. 2005. “Green marketing: legend, myth, farce or prophesy?” Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 8 (4): 357-70. Royal Irish Academy. 1913/1983. Dictionary of the Irish language: based mainly on Old and Middle Irish materials. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy. Schwarzkopf, Stefan. 2011. “The consumer as ‘voter’,’judge’, and ‘jury’: historical origins and political consequences of a marketing myth.” Journal of Macromarketing 31 (1): 8–18. Simon, Julian L. 1980. “Resources, population, environment: an oversupply of false bad news.” Science 208 (4451): 1431-7. Simon, Julian L. 1981a. “Environmental disruption or environmental improvement?” Social Science Quarterly 62 (1): 30-43. —. 1981b. “The scarcity of raw materials: a challenge to the conventional wisdom.” Atlantic Monthly 247 (6): 33-41. —. 1981c. The ultimate resource. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. 1981d. “World population growth: an anti-doomsday view.” Atlantic Monthly 248 (2): 70-6. Tristram, Hildegaard L.C. 1994. “What is the purppose of the Táin Bó Cúailnge? In Ulidia: Prodeedings of the First International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales, edited by James P. Mallory and Gerard Stockman, 11–23 Belfast: December Publications. Vargo, Stephen L, and Robert F Lusch. 2004. “The four service marketing myths remnants of a goodsbased, manufacturing model.” Journal of service research 6 (4): 324-35. Williamson, Judith. 1978. Decoding advertisements : ideology and meaning in advertising. London: Boyars. Zeynep, Arsel, and Craig J. Thompson. 2011. “Demythologizing consumption practices: how consumers protect their field-dependent identity investments from devaluing marketplace myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37 (5): 791-806. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. —. 2006. The parallax view. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

The Ulster Cycle: an other world Neil Buttimer

University College Cork On reading the above, you might think the lecture concerns itself with a stage on the Giro d’Italia held in Northern Ireland during May 2014, the event’s advertising by a tourism board, or perhaps a contraption used to stay the course. The paper below will indicate what is actually intended. Because the subject-matter is probably unknown to most, basic facts are stated which, one hopes, may be sufficient to enable arguments grounded on them to be proposed or followed. During this process, relating the article’s contents to the conference’s principal interest will be attempted. One does so from the point of view that what seems unfamiliar can be instructive. Apart from the latter premise, the chapter’s other aspiration is Hippocratic in nature, primum non nocere, namely, if it cannot help, at least it ought not hurt. Preliminaries

I begin with the second operative term from the talk’s title. ‘Cycle’ is a synonym for a set of entries exhibiting shared properties, in this instance a suite of stories whose commonality the discussion to follow outlines. It is not the word’s sole occurrence within Irish tradition. Gaelic narrative is held to comprise various cyclical components. Among these are a mythology, centring on indigenous deities and their interactions; a segment known as the Finn Cycle, dealing with the affairs of a quasi-divine mercenary and his followers; a hagiography, where saints’ lives show the advent of a new belief system while not fully jetissoning the old; and a Cycle of the Kings, whose personœ are national and provincial rulers in post before Cambro-Normans seized Ireland during the twelfth century, generating circumstances which would lead gradually to the civilisation they encountered being obliterated (Ó Cathasaigh 2006). Implicit in ‘Cycle’ is a sense of its constituents’ enclosure within some hermetic circle, as though put to one side. This does not reflect conditions as they are to be found. Ulster Cycle tales intersect with their counterparts. Figures of a kind seen throughout mythological and martial lore are present in them. Its sagas occur cheek by jowl with all types in manuscript transmission, the principal mode whereby the material was conveyed to us. Although allocating texts to cycles provides a helpful overview, this step can mask a multivariate setting which needs to be borne in mind when interpretation is undertaken. A cyclical perspective is most likely the outcome of nineteenth-century scholarship, when efforts were made to establish content and parameter within large, story-related databases, and uncover their taxonomies. Years around 1900, approximately, became the era, par excellence, for classifying humanities corpora extending from the ancient (Monro 1901) to the Arthurian (Fletcher 1906), from ballads (Child 1906) to chansons de geste (Bédier 1908). On the other hand, medieval Irish commentators explored different tale typologies, listing stories under action-related headings (Mac Cana 1980). Those included focussing on where events were centred physically, like ‘journeys’ (singular echtra, the basis for eachtraíocht, a current descriptor for ‘storytelling’), or episodes happening in caves (sg. úam), but also accounts of such doings as ‘cattle-raiding’ (sg. táin). Narratives now assigned to alternative ‘Cycles’ were accomodated together beneath such rubrics. It is possible in fact to suggest the existence of additional similar formations like a putative ‘Leinster Cycle’. The latter might designate the not insubstantial cluster of extant tales from this eastern province, a region whose considerable role in the survival of Ulster matter is revisited 17

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shortly. Rather than dwell on those particulars from the outset, however, the issues just considered lead to a broader opening conclusion. That is the constraint inherent in acts of categorisation, not to mention the contingency of such an enterprise itself, or the dilemma at its core. The paradox in question is that description or guidance may be required in order to progress, but any such attempt is bound to have its limits, for want of adequacy. Thought has selected definition as a route towards awareness even in the face of shortcomings evinced from the start by Aristotle, its foremost practitioner. Categorisation’s limitations are small wonder when one reflects on the term’s background. At the root of ‘category’ lies the Greek term for ‘assembly’ (’agorá), wherein arises ‘counter-argumentation’ (kata + agoreuein) such as one witnesses in fora of that kind. Here, various hawkers, not least academic, trumpet wares, highlighting their goods’ features and supposed merits, with what credibility one can only assume. In this sense, the market is incontrovertibly a critical point of departure, a locus classicus, for the genesis of myth (together with its absorption and dissemination). Lest one deduce that finding to be of little moment, it should be noted nothing else is at stake in it than how far perception or cognition can reach. It raises, inter alia, the spectral gulf between science and art. Rather than break reality down, the latter seeks to embody it, as Plato did through his distinctive mythopoesis, and so with all stories. That enterprise itself is conventionally termed ‘fiction’, something which defies belief. Between both strategies, therefore, ultimate knowledge appears incapable of being attained, unless one seeks refuge in religion, which is substantially neither here nor there, but rather a deontological matter. The likelihood opens up accordingly that all imaginative creation, whatever its manifestations, possesses something to bring to the counter, or to take from it, a foundational principle of this section. When one realises humanity has not much to chose between stasis and movement at any rate, it seems appropriate to invoke the truism, ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ as we endeavour to advance. There are indeed salient characteristics which cause certain stories to be ascribed to the Ulster Cycle. In identifying same, we may take direction once again from early Irish narratology, according to which a story has four primary facets. One of these features is place (loc), but even here the risks associated with seeing the past through the present must be observed. The Ulster involved is not the contemporary nine-county entity of the same name. North-western districts like Donegal, Derry or even Tyrone hardly feature. Most of what happens is concentrated east of the River Bann in what we now designate Antrim, Armagh or Down. To demonstrate you were then in a different country, the county, Louth, in which our gathering happens, appears formerly quintesentially of Ulster, although currently attached to the province of Leinster. How far south the boundaries extended is moot, because many events occur on the banks of the River Boyne, in present-day Meath. Looking northwards, Ulster stories also encompass parts of Scotland, including its archipelagos. That region remains today, like before, a natural hinterland, being readily visible and accessible across a mere ten-mile sea channel. A second unifying feature is time (Old Irish aimser), although this trait is no more amenable to definitive determination than whereabouts. A possible temporal band is to indicate the tales are pre-Christian, as no figure, like clergy, ostensibly linked with that new dispensation, appears in the Ulster tales. That renders them potentially earlier than the mid-fifth century, the phase when Christianity arrived and spread here. This denomination is not amenable to removal from the equation, nevertheless, as the earliest extant written records of Ulster narrative come from well into the Christian era in the 1100s. Their recension at that juncture raises queries as to what the churchmen who recopied them saw in such sources? They could have viewed the sagas as fitting representatives of their own cultural heritage, or, conversely, as offering pagan practices one might acknowledge but avoid, or perhaps both. No reliable evidence from other documentation with a datable aspect, like annals, which ecclesiastics also compiled, exists to corroborate when exactly the Cycle is to be anchored in time. Archaeologists might attribute

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the narratives to the wider horizon of the Iron Age according to their lights (Mallory 2013). However, given that one is dealing with anecdotes which have iterations across potentially varied temporal spans, reconciling the artefactual with the fictive for chronological purposes seems equally challenging. While the locational and dating elements seem fluid, it looks as though we are on slightly firmer foundations as regards the third traditional coordinate, the stories’ characters (sg. persa), even if in this instance also who they really are or may be perceived to be at any give point we shall find out later is a matter of debate. There are secondary benefits to listing the Ulster Cycle’s players apart from the need to learn about them. An initial advantage is to realise the actors appear to span four generations, which furnishes an internal time-frame in the absence of one from without. The Irish term for ‘generation’ is glún, ‘knee’, a word perhaps symbolising, appropriately, a ‘turning- point’ or ‘articulation’, and possibly also the deference of the young to their forebears. The latter nuance should not lead a reader to think intergenerational relations in Ulster were ones of unbroken harmony, because a more complex profile emerges on reviewing the relevant testimony. The situation on the ground may be felt initially in the case of Fergus. I take him to stand for the older cohort, as former king of the province. His name is thought to mean ‘manly strength’, an advantageous characteristic in a ruler. He serves often as an honest broker, a type of elder statesman. Fergus’s weakness, if one may call it that, is lack of guile. This led to his being tricked out of office by or on behalf of a successor, Conchobar, whom one might look upon as the next step down, although not in direct line of descent. This man, ‘dog-lover’ by totemic designation and undoubtedly assertive in his behaviour, remains Ulster’s pre-eminent monarch throughout the tales, even if his reign brings its own adversities. We shall see him take under his aegis another dogged individual, his sister’s son, and Fergus’s foster-son, Cú Chulainn, often described as Ulster’s Achilles, although also a warrior who can be brought to heel. While perhaps capable of it, Cú Chulainn never acceeds to the throne, and neither does his son, Conlae, presented as perhaps even more talented than his father. Cú Chulainn kills this young man, fruit of his union with Aífe, daughter of Scáthach, his martial arts instructor in Scotland, and eponym of the Isle of Skye, doing so in an onrush of heroic myopia. The infanticide is among the most celebrated instances of mistaken identity within Irish tradition, kin-slaying (fingal), albeit of the intentional variety, being regarded as a henious crime in illo tempore. The careers of persons mentioned above from the four generations at issue demonstrate a general principle: the promise in, but also the pitfalls of, leadership, indicating such a role has potential, but remains circumscribed. This recognition is itself, of course, can be no more informative than Leo Tolstoy’s (1828-1910) statement at the outset of Anna Karenina (187377) to the effect that discontented families, as opposed to those who continue to be harmonious, are so for specific reasons. It requires the Ulster Cycle’s narratives proper to relay the outworkings of the theory in practice. As in Russian novels, the province’s rulers’ foibles affect not only themselves but the wider community, with their society’s doings conversely impacting on sovereign conduct. Such a wider world is indeed forthcoming in the tales. Confining oneself to certain of the figures spoken of earlier, most or all of them have mothers, wives, paramours or offspring. Individual anecdotes concentrate on their mutual interaction. The inner group widens out to encompass a periphery of fringe beings who, even if marginal, can exercise an influence outweighing their seemingly inconsequential status. Ulster’s external relations with other parts of Ireland and further afield feature similarly in the accounts. This density of personnel is one of the factors offering the greatest justification for viewing the sagas in cyclic terms. Main characters do appear from story to story, with each narrative adding detail about them not present in the others. That interdependence bespeaks a meaningful rather than a fabricated coherence which, if not confirming the Cycle’s historicity, at least suggests some incontrovertible authenticity.

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We find out about Ulster people and their affairs from an amalgam of some sixty episodes. The standard modern account of these is by Rudolph Thurneysen (1857-1940). That Swissborn authority began his researches as a Romance philologist, switching gradually to Celtic Studies in a natural extenstion of enquiries about substrata underlying French and associated vernaculars. Thurneysen ended his career in Germany, where the appelation, Gehimrat, recognised his eminence as an historical linguist, specialising in older Irish. It was this scholar’s intention to prepare an overview of all forms of Gaelic saga literature from the earliest times to the Middle Ages, the most productive era for such compositions. He could have been mindful of the types of conspectus then being generated in other academic fields, as remarked earlier from the outset. The Swiss researcher had an all-encompassing ambition, to describe Irish saga literature fully, but managed to cover the Ulster Cycle only (Thurneysen 1921). In his overview, handwritten sources for the series were set out, editions and translations of them completed up to that point noted, together with summaries of the tales and commentary on their redactions. His publication is still an indispensable reference. For all its comprehensiveness, the work can be problematic both regarding specifics but also in its wider conception. With Teutonic purposefulness, its writer undertook to bring order to the chaos of Irish narrative testimony (‘ ... in das Chaos der irishchen Sagenwelt einige Ordnung zu bringen ...’; Thurneysen 1921, iii). The sequence in which he presented the evidence is nonetheless curious. His volume places an extensive consideration of the epic, Táin Bó Cúailnge, admittedly at the Ulster Cycle’s heart, towards its own beginning. However, despite its undoubted importance, that anecdote is in fact a by-product of prior incidents which pre-determine its occurrence. A later title would appear to offer a more logical layout (Ó Cadhlaigh 1956). Like the Thurneysen tome, its issuance was funded by the newly established Irish administration, which, on its creation, is likely to have supported the Swiss author’s project not only to exemplify the country’s autonomy but in recognition of the Germanic contribution to highlighting the resources of Gaelic civilisation, a measure which helped augment this island’s sense of selfworth in turn. The Irish Free State later promoted a grander scheme (An Gúm) for the printing of Gaelic textbooks. Cormac Ó Cadhlaigh’s (1884-1960) publication emerged from a government agency then wrapped in the flags of confessionalism and the emblems of Irish nationalism. Written by a Corkman while lecturing at University College, Dublin, presenting in its physical appearance the elegance of a Sovietic cast-off, it might not be reckoned a promising approach, a priori, to proto-northern Ireland. However, it does first things first, like introduce the Ulster tales’ personalities and background before proceeding to the thick of the action, even if offering uncritical précis of the legends. The only tweaking necessary in the present instance when adopting and modifying the Ó Cadhlaigh approach is to argue overtly that one follow a time-line with a precise developmental thrust. I propose that the Cycle’s stories take their listeners or readers from moments when the province’s community is comparatively successful onward towards a negative transformational phase, with the further possibility, apparently not fully realised, of subsequent recovery. The trajectory is used here merely as a Leitmotiv rather than argue this sequencing necessarily reflects reality as the society involved experienced it. One further comment about storytelling media before engaging directly with the narratives themselves. Prose and verse are the two principal modes in which Gaelic imaginative composition was expressed. Unlike other epic traditions, the Ulster sagas occur chiefly in the former. Metrical versions of tales or parts of them are not unknown, being especially valuable in certain respects, in that, as prosody inclines to fix language, it may often reveal that accounts in metre are earlier in time, thus indicating phases within the evolution of the material. Ireland’s traditional literature scarcely lacks a formal dramatic element, as autonomous texts based exclusively either on monologue or dialogue indicate. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that, as happened with other Celtic languages, performances like Breton or Cornish miracle plays could have evolved in Irish. Reasons such as its speakers’ failure to become integrated

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during later medieval and early modern times into a settler-dominated urban network may explain why a Gaelic theatre along normal European lines never developed organically within autochtonous culture during its heyday. Stagecraft drawing upon Ireland’s native written and oral lore did pour forth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, principally in English. Examples of this will be considered below, as they are impressive in their own right. However, when offering versions of the matter being re-presented, those derivative dramas do not necessarily replicate what one might view as either the essence or the aesthetics of the originals. Making this observation should not be construed as seeking to impugn freedom to deal with a cultural legacy as one sees fit. Nor is it a desire to limit creativity which will not abide such restriction in any case. The remark simply acknowledges that the compositions we shall examine must be considered on their own terms first insofar as is possible.

Tales and their themes

Five stories are selected here to illuminate the type of progression indicated above. I deal with all in a bipartite fashion. The first step involves a summary of their action (its well-spring, tucait, being the fourth early Irish narratological coordinate). It may be acceptable in the greater scheme of things to reduce plots to two overarching types, comedy, the movement from the negative to the positive, or tragedy, a contrary journey from advantage to despair, with whatever algorithms intervene between these polar ends to flesh them out. The set under review might conform baldly to those essential patterns, but it is still necessary to highlight their specifics to appraise their substance. The second procedure is to clarify what the import of any given anecdote might be. Affirmation

It is proposed that a cluster of compositions demonstrates comparative success in the Ulster community in the first instance, of which two in particular, are as follows. Fled Bricrenn

Bricriu, a member of the province’s elite, prepared the great banquet from which the tale is named, for his colleagues, as well as a separate apartment within his dwelling in order to observe the festivities to which Ulster’s nobles were invitees (Hollo 2005). Because a rather cantakerous, not to say malicious, individual, he quietly encouraged each guest to seek the best food offering according to their perceived status. The host spoke individually with such notables as Loegaire Buadach, Conall Cernach and Cú Chulainn, asking that they claim the champion’s portion. The carve-up duly began in the householder’s absence. This set the aforementioned trio at odds, until it was advised that adjudicating the winner be left to outside parties. Bricriu then arranged for contention among the warriors’ spouses, Fedelm, Lendabair, and Emer, respectively, to take place, talking up their qualities. The building shook so much from the women’s rivalry, that it had to be righted. Loegaire, Conall and Cú Chulainn duly left the hostel, going to an area further out where their prowess was tried by a mysterious giant, who succeeded in defeating all but the latter. The first pair sought another evaluation in Crúachu, headquarters of the western region, Connacht, to which all Ulster duly repaired, much to that province’s dismay. Its king, Ailill, failed to distinguish between the three, but his queen, Medb, was able again to highlight Cú Chulainn’s abilities. She then sent them off to the Ulstermen’s own capital at Emuin (currrently Navan Fort, County Armagh), where the same hero was victor once more. A final determination came from the overbearing southern ruler, Cú Roí, this Munsterman pronouncing equally in Cú Chulainn’s favour after trying him out with magic and enchantment. While that hero emerged supreme, Bricriu did not necessarily escape unscathed, being thrown for his troubles on a garbage heap, besmirched among dogs, as his disturbed residence was restored from chaos earlier on.

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The elaborateness of the tale’s testing sequences and its revelation of who takes precedence within the Ulster hierarchy are the features mostly highlighted when the story is explored. Of corresponding interest is the feeling of well-being which the narrative relays. Bricriu’s home was distinguished by beauty and decoration, pillars and facades, carvings and lintels. Its different interior quarters comprised couches, plaids, coverlets and quilts, together with gold ornamentation. The food prepared for the repast included a pig fed on meal and fresh milk, while the available beef had been fattened on herbs, meadow grass and corn. All the principals brought their own modes of transport, in addition to attendants. Even if idealised or schematised, this portrait speaks of noteworthy standards of taste and consumption, or the awareness of such desirable attractions in a land of luxury. Underlying the commodification must be the means of production, disposable income, a skilled workforce and organised effort. The portrait is not incompatible with what one learns from other sources concerning the vigour of such branches of the early Irish economy as agriculture (Kelly 1997), or its industrialisation via activities like metalurgy or water- and wind-powered milling (Rynne 2013). Scéla mucce Meic Dathó

Prosperity also dominates the ambiance of this next anecdote, even if here slightly different nuances enter the picture. The story concerns a Leinsterman, Mac Dathó, who has a fine hound, sought by both northeners from Ulster and the men of the west from Connacht (Thurneysen 1935). Representatives of each are invited into his hostel to relay their requests and state what they might pay. The Leinster host is perplexed as to whom to satisfy, but his wife advises offering the creature to each group, saying to let them fight over it. Visitors from both provinces return to claim the dog. While the outcome is awaited, a feast is prepared for all, whose centrepiece is the magnificent fatted pig also mentioned in the story’s title. Sharing this delicacy is itself disputed, with various guests claiming priority on the basis of their superior martial achievements. A Connachtman, Cet mac Mágach, appears to dominate, pointing out to a series of Ulster braves the types of defeat he inflicted on each of them. His deeds included piercing one Celtchar mac Utechair with a spear, which went through his thighs and testicles, leaving Celtchar barren. The Connacht hero was on the point of carving the animal when the imposing Ulster figure, Conall Cernach, threw Cet’s brother’s decapitated head at him as a token of Conall’s superiority. It fell to the Ulstermen thereafter to enjoy the greater share of the feast, but if so, not necessarily win the dog. Mac Dathó released his hound, and although Ailbe sided with the north, in the frantic dash from the Leinster residence, a Connacht driver, Fer Loga, struck the animal, impaling the latter’s head on a chariot pole. The same charioteer then ambushed the Ulster king, Conchobar, as he drove past, illustrating that even a ruler as watchful as this monarch could be caught unawares. In return for his safety, Conchobar was obliged to house Fer Loga for one year before he returned to Connacht, bringing horses and golden bridles. The narrative shares a number of features with Fled Bricrenn, not least lavish entertainment in plush surrounds. Its framework is also based on structured rivalry, with matching comic or ironic twists. However, there are clear divergences, principally the fact that the Ulster personnel seem not to get their own way, nor indeed do any of the particpants. There are losses and gains throughout. Mac Dathó is deprived of his valuable possession, but saves face by not disappointing either neighbour. Connacht’s prospects diminish, but at least they have the satisfaction of thwarting the northerners’ ambitions. The Ulstermen would appear to hold victory in their sights, only for the prize to be snatched from their grasp. The narrative thus appears to be one with its own moral: that excessive demands or expectations lead to futility (Buttimer 1982). Even if the saga’s ingredients are open to further analysis beyond this simple characterisation (Charles Edwards 2005), it would seem to claim that pushing appetites or desires to the limit might have an unexpected outcome. The storytelling can be held to have a didactic orientation, therefore. The Leinstermen among whose manuscript materials the anecdote survives

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could have been happy for it to act as a reminder of those pointers to others beyond their territory. Because of the eastern province’s substantial role in Scéla mucce Meic Dathó, the extent to which this episode is of Ulster or of Leinster origin should be debated further. Crisis

While celebratory or largely successful aspects of life are evident in the Cycle, the series also opens out towards an adverse prospect. A set of sagas relates incidents resulting in turmoil among the Ulster people. I again concentrate on a pair from among them to illustrate how fragmentation is presented and what its causes are imagined to be. One means of rendering those features is to encapsulate difficulties within the complete life story of individuals who might be deemed minor in the scheme of things. Their apparent unimportance itself reveals manifolds within the community in question, and the mutual dependence of its various components, however ostensibly insignificant. The influence unforeseen circumstances exercises on the course of events, over and above the normal, also comes across. While hardly composed by the persons at issue in them, the tales seem nevertheless to confirm the tenet that all philosophy is autobiography, although the reverse is not necessarily the case. Longes mac nUislenn

One such narrative centres on a daughter of the province’s storyteller, Fedlimid, son of Dall, comprising five parts, beginning with her birth (Hull 1949). Fedelmid held a soiree for Ulster notables, who were catered for by his expectant wife. As this pregnant lady retired for the evening following her exertions, the child in her womb screamed, disturbing the whole household. When hearing the unborn’s exclamation, a druid predicted that trouble would result from her great beauty if she were to grow up. To avert same, those present wished to kill her on being born. The king intervened, deciding to take her for himself and rear her apart. To this birth section of the Derdriu (modern Deirdre) story succeeds the account of her espousal. She did not settle with the province’s leader, but eloped with a beautiful young fían (mercenary) warrior. Noísiu, his brothers and the girl then went on exile (that departure reflected in the tale’s rubric), being harassed throughout Ireland and the neighbouring Albion or Scotland. There, attempts were made to steal Derdriu from them, before they moved to an unidentified island. They were enabled to return to Ulster in the episode’s fourth section, but so also a former enemy of Concobar’s. His act of atonement was to kill Noísiu and his brothers on the king’s behalf. That deed itself led to civil war, as the execution violated Fergus’s guarantee of their safe passage. He departed for Connacht, from which he launched revenge attacks on his homeland nightly during sixteen years. Taking Derdriu captive, Conchobar failed to cheer her up, such was the force of her former partner’s memory. On hearing herself taunted in a chariot between the king and her lover’s killer as they travelled towards Emuin with the quip that she looked like a sheep between two rams, the woman jumped out, shattering her head on stones by the wayside. The saga according as it unfolds lays out a set of problems never fully resolved (Buttimer 1994-95). Their cumulative effect leads to breakdown in the social fabric. Among its opening issues are the guilt or innocence of the young, together with the balance between a ruler’s cupidity and accepting advice from those in his charge, or indeed solicitude for their general welfare. Part Two raises questions as to whether a female, on falling in love, should follow her own instincts or agree to marital arrangements made already on her behalf. An added twist here is whether a king’s servant (a soldier for hire) ought to yield to natural self-interest or loyalty to his master, Noísiu being attracted by this wondrous teenager but aware she is to be his overlord’s mate. Generalities seem less easy to discern in the exile component, but, throughout Irish narrative, a period away from home invariably confers beneficial, formative coping skills. Part Four causes reflection on the theme of forgiveness, whether it is possible to ignore perceived affronts

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to authority and perhaps face the likelihood of their recurrence. Fergus confronts the matter of appropriate reaction to having a solemn promise being broken, but does he overdo it? The concluding section brings up suicide as response when the propriety of a person’s behaviour appears impugned. The narrative thus queries the value system of a society wherein one of its members is driven to that ultimate option. Incompatibility within the range of choices is represented figuratively as well. Derdriu’s name means ‘the screamer’, incorporating a core emphasis on sound. The saga alternates between euphony, like that of the opening party scene, and cacophony, for instance, Noísiu’s disturbing groan when realising he will have to select between the maid or his ruler. Extremes cannot be reconciled, resulting in mysophony, collapse and suspicious silence. Noínden Ulad

The plot of a second story focussing on a society’s impairment can be rehearsed briefly also. It is the story of a widower, Crunnchu mac Agnomain, also a somewhat isolated figure living on mountains and wildernesses (Hull 1968). An unnamed lady comes to his home, ministering advantageously to him and his household, preparing food, cleaning and granting personal favours. A union forms between them, from which Crunnchu prospers greatly. When he proposed to attend the provincial assembly, his partner warned him not to mention her. All the Ulstermen were present, participating in horseraces and other communal activities. The king’s steeds won the prize, leading him to say there were no creatures in the world as swift as his, whereupon Crunnchu claimed his woman could run faster. Messengers came to collect her to answer for the boast, failing which her man would be killed. The lady sought an exemption, as she was pregnant. The delay was not allowed. She was set to race against the ruler’s mounts, but crossed the finishing line first. The woman was delivered of twins as she did so, screaming. The pain was such that she cursed the Ulster people with similar agony. When they were in their greatest difficulty, her injunction was that the community would find itself as weakened as a mother in childbirth (the sickness reported in the composition’s title). This tale carries powerful resonances. One key to its understanding is the sense it conveys that the private sphere should not be enmeshed in the public, as the narrative progresses from one of those two domains to the other (Buttimer and Kavanagh 1996). What causes the transgression in this instance is Crunnchu’s presence at the aforementioned assembly. The term for the gathering in Irish is oenach. A mix of happenings took place at these annual occasions, including law-making and exchange as much as the social. Nowadays, the word, aonach, denotes a fair or market-type environment. Implicit in the Ulster Cycle attestation is the feeling that such events have an in-built agonistic strand, best seen in the horse-racing element. His attendance there brings this orientation out in Crunnchu, despite the warning. Although it would be natural for him to join his people’s annual celebration, the capacity to show restraint in such a situation is clearly at issue, showing up a classic dilemma. The saga questions the leadership’s behaviour as much as Crunnchu’s conduct. His partner used a then current Irish legal term, taurbaid, when requesting that the race enjoined on her be postponed, as this word clearly envisages the deferral of litigation in straitened conditions. The community effectively transgresses its own codes when denying her what seems a valid entitlement. They are punished accordingly. Their coming apart is expressed figuratively. As the race ends, the twins the woman bears are one male, one female, representing life’s most fundamental divides. The Gaelic term for such a pair is emuin. That is the name for the Ulster headquarters mentioned previously here. The etymology and etiology may signal that such a location is the site of potential inbuilt tension. There are practical consquences to the occurrences also. When, due to this suite of internal difficulties, Ulster is exposed to invasion, its warriors are so debilitated they are unable to defend the province from attack, with one notable exception. This is the hero Cú Chulainn, who, although the archetypal Ulsterman, is not technically such, because his father, Lug, was divine, the god of arts and sciences.

Response

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The northern province is open to assault in light of the misfortunes the foregoing anecdotes relate. The incursion and reaction to it form the substance of the Ulster Cycle’s epic, which takes a distinctive approach to the hostility in question. Táin Bó Cúailnge

Although not formally sectioned off as such in the original, I would provisionally divide this raid into seven parts, in deference to heptadic patterning so commonly attested in early Irish tradition (cf. Dooley 2006). The causus belli occupies the first. It is missing, regrettably, from the oldest recension (O’Rahilly 1976) on which my summary is based. However, in the second major version, the stand-off is held, plausibly, to arise from the Ulstermen’s refusal to gift a bull to the queen of Connacht in her quest to ensure her worldly holdings equalled those of her husband, Ailill. Part Two sees the Connacht army assemble to encroach on Ulster, one of whose districts, Cúailnge (now approximating to the Cooley Peninsula) is at issue in the work’s title. In Part Three, one person alone stops the invaders at the frontier. This solitary figure’s achievement is so singular that his life story requires telling, being recounted in Part Four. As the Connacht army’s combined might is inadequate to overturn that obstacle, it is decided to send prominent individuals out singly to thwart him, the telling of which occupies the fifth divide. The most conspicuous of these is Cú Chulainn’s foster-brother, Fer Diad, who is duly defeated in Part Six. The burden of responsibility takes its toll on the lone defender, but at this figure’s moment of weakness, the Ulster people muster from their debility, rallying to their homeland’s defence. The Connacht army is finally routed in this seventh and final segment. It would require lengthy analysis, impossible here, to do justice to all strands within this sevenfold action. Suffice it to say the presentation revolves around exploiting two contrasting propositions. One is to highlight various forms of deficiency on the invaders’ part. The other involves underlining Ulster superiority. The duality alternates, sometimes autonomously, often contrapuntally, as the saga moves along. Part Two offers an instance of Connacht shortcomings. It centres on handling allies. The western province includes supporters from other parts of Ireland in its camp. One remarkable group, the Gailióin, come from Leinster. Their efficiency is shown by how quickly they prepare shelter, food and entertainment when resting, more so than all other parties. Fearing they may take credit for the expedition’s success, Medb proposes to kill them. Her spouse is dissatisfied, calling the suggestion ‘woman’s counsel’ (banchomairle). Fergus, ever even-handed, proposes dispersing the Gailióin among the remainder of the army. While they are thus spared, the decision has consequences. The most obvious is to impair their effectiveness as a cohesive force, in addition to their being sidelined from concerted effort. Disagreement about handling them also reveals distrust and dissent emerge in Connacht leadership cadres at a sensitive moment as the campaign begins. It had commenced during the most inauspicious time of year, the end of summer and onset of winter, on the interstitial November evening (Samuin), which exposes the brightness of this universe to the darkness of otherworld, prefiguring disaster. Separate incidents set Ulster’s advantages subsequently beside Connacht’s limitations. One of these recounts the positive characteristics of the northerners’ main protector. Fergus, in exile with the western army, knowing Cú Chulainn of old, tells what he has been like from childhood within the Táin’s fourth section. The first impression he conveys is of a young man of inquisitive mind, independent if not brash in outlook, fearless, accomplished, irascible to the point of madness if challenged, but possessed of energies capable of being accommodated or channelled purposefully when managed with understanding (implying a capacity for absorption and oversight unknown to the invading host). This is how one might assess the import of an episode set almost within earshot of this conference’s venue. In his south-east Ulster home of Murthemne, Cú Chulainn hears of the sport-

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ing prowess of slightly older youths at the province’s capital of Emuin, and seeks to interact with them. He dismisses his mother’s reluctance to allow him travel unaccompanied over difficult hilly terrain to reach the plains where this citadel is located. The young man shortens the journey by chasing after his ball according as he strikes it in forward motion from point to point. On arrival, at four years of age, he is already proficient enough to defeat the local lads who, following their being thwarted, refuse him admission to their team. Enraged, Cú Chulainn almost slaughters them until pacified by no less a personage than the king. The young upstart’s demand for desisting from assaulting his counterparts is, to all intents, a take-over rather than a merger, arranging to be made their protector or captain. The game is thus a theoretical rehearsal of the realities to follow in the Táin’s present real time, when Cú Chulainn will overturn the best warrior Connacht can put into the field, or in this case, to the ford, another boundary, against him. His prowess is seen most clearly in the singlecombat destruction of his foster-brother, the focus of Part Five. The Ulsterman was always likely to emerge victorious from that encounter, because he possessed one feat not in his assailant’s armoury: a barbed spear-shot which caused internal evisceration. What is of interest in the duel is not so much the outcome as the lead-up to the denouement. Western weakness and northern nous are juxtaposed within a three-part formation which also suggests the Ulster victory has moral as much as tactical aspects. The first section itself falls into two halves, the former showing how Fer Diad is motivated to fight, the latter what encouraged Cú Chulainn. Connacht behaviour seems negative again from the outset, albeit in different ways. Fer Diad appears reluctant to engage his friend in what would amount to gross violation of their earlier bonds. Medb brings various pressures to bear on him, including having him shamed or satirised, intoxicating him, causing her daughter, Findabair, to seduce him, bribing the soldier with promises of land, and finally dishonestly attributing to Cú Chulainn a statement that he would easily overcome Fer Diad. This falsehood piques the latter’s self-esteem, leading to his agreement to fight. Treachery and deceit are added thereby to incompetence in the roll-call of Connacht inferiority. Fergus, again an intermediary concerned with fairness, comes to tell Cú Chulainn what Medb is plotting against him. Various features reveal Cú Chulainn’s equitable state of mind as opposed to his opponents’ frantic scheming. It looks as though the Ulsterman is sitting with his back to the visitor, as if uncaring of danger. He nevertheless welcomes Fergus generously and without pretended sincerity. On hearing the news, Cú Chulainn indicates he would rather not confront his fosterbrother out of affection for him, but is immediately decisive rather than prevaricating in claiming he will take Fer Diad on in his capacity as Ulster’s defender. A sense of his relaxed disposition comes across when Cú Chulainn is brought home to be bathed and beautified by his wife, whereas the Connachtman’s night in his quarters is described as sad and dispirited. Anxieties prey on him, like fear of losing promised treasure, with any rest of his becoming ‘the sleep of a doomed one faced by stag and hounds’. Fer Diad’s chief resort in fighting Cú Chulainn is to ineffectual verbal insulting of the Ulsterman’s supposed physical blemishes. This recourse itself tells more about the Connachtman’s inadequacies, as his challenge melts away rapidly before his adversary’s greater dexterity. There is thus one clear winner in what comes across as a clash of corruption versus ethics. Because one is dealing with the Ulster Cycle, the narrative also underpins this sentiment symbolically with characteristic sardonic humour. Fer Diad paid a final call to the men of Ireland before his fight. Medb did not bid him farewell but remained inside urinating on the floor of her encampment. Her disregard comes across as flagrant preoccupation with self, in addition to indicating her true feelings towards her chosen representative. The incident continues a series of compromising situations, like when Cú Chulainn came upon her unawares earlier in the epic as she menstruated, with the flow of her bodily functions sufficient to create three great trenches in the landscape, showing the scale of the Ulster Cycle’s preoccupation with the scatological. Another virtue, manliness, prevented him from killing her in that vulnerable position.

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The Táin appears therefore to place much blame on a formidable but flawed female. Its depiction of Medb is such as to suggest the epic runs the risk of being perceived as relatively shallow, exhibiting a lopsided dependency on clever mysogyny (discussed, among others, by McCracken 2003, 24-6). That inference would seem to run up against the otherwise rich portraiture of women throughout the Ulster Cycle, where characters like Derdriu, or indeed Cú Chulainn’s wife, Emer, are shown to be gifted potent performers. That there is inbuilt regard for the opposite sex is seen from descent in the province appearing matrilinear as much as from the father’s side, whereas patriliny dominates the social construct of most other medieval Irish pedigree. With such considerations in mind, a deeper rationale might be detected in the Connacht queen’s presentation rather than the latter constituting a personalised onslaught on her. It is argued her name, Medb, ‘she who intoxicates’, having associations with the draught, mead, reveals her to be sovereignty incorporated: power of which one drinks. Medb is a divine figure whose multiforms are detectible elsewhere in Ireland, with the Táin’s euhemerisation in this instance thus simply that of one of her possible avatars (Ó Máille 1927). The message those who compiled the work may wish to communicate is their dislike for this particular display of leadership and its unacceptable principles (not the last time the north would reject overlordship from elsewhere in the country). Whose rule Medb symbolises then becomes an issue. She is shown as reigning in Connacht, a region equating in modern times to much of the west of Ireland, as noted earlier. However, a dynasty also claiming the ancestor, Conn, as its progenitor governed much of the midlands, together with western parts (Leth Chuinn), perhaps from the sixth century onwards. Whether the Táin is targetting that federation accordingly comes into view, as does the topic of at what time. It is those factors which render research on the epic’s topography and itineraries (such as the ‘Places in the Táin’ site, http://genehaleytbc.wordpress.com) of considerable interest, to the degree that enquiry may reveal which districts exactly Connacht or Ulster were thought to embrace, and when. On this reading, the oldest extensive copy of the Táin in its present state could be more of a reformulation than an unaltered reproduction of any of the composition’s potentially earlier attestations. If the Táin is regarded simply as propaganda, one must ask whether it and compositions associated with the epic reach the level of high art, and what the implications of this enquiry into its expressiveness could be. Aristotle might have held that a work could only qualify as first rank if balanced, rather than biased, and thus compelling. His writings may emphasise the presence of those desiderata within single products, whereas their occurrence could be envisaged across a series of entities rather than in a solitary piece. Greek literature itself possibly examplifies this distribution and flow, with the Iliad rendering the apogee of victory in conflict, while Euripides’ The Trojan Women shows its perils (with Thucydides’ The Peloponesian War discoursing on the opposite, defeat and its cost). In this connection, the Ulster Cycle appears to offer a similar continuum of poise, contretemps, and reprise, making its elements into a comprehensive, multifaceted compound. One feels a holistic integration underscoring the calibre of its distinct ingredients. In light of the Cycle’s conviction and reliability, the case for any subsequent argumentation grounded on its entries seems strengthened a fortiori.

Sequelæ

In looking at the Ulster Cycle in the round therefore, what its parts are and how they sum up may be reviewed before considering their implications. Táin Bó Cúailnge seems a watershed not only insofar as it gives voice to Ulster’s achievement, but by marking the end of an era possibly also. Thereafter, no other saga in the Cycle relates activities as consequential or extensive. Some stories do recount the affairs of the epic’s participants during a time one imagines post-dates its occurrence. Even then, their death-tales are emphasised. It is as though the Táin’s success was Pyrrhic. However, the community’s likely decline does not mean its anecdotes found no afterlife. They would survive long into the future, but with many taking on alterna-

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tive characteristics to those of their past. The Derdriu story, for instance, was reworked in a copy dating to about 1400 A.D., with melodrama to the fore, showing a girl’s anxieties, her lover’s heroism and the king’s treachery. W. B. Yeats’ (1865-1939) play, Deirdre (1907), explored jealousy within a love-triangle, a topic of personal interest. For John Millington Synge (18711909), her life provided a platform on which to rehearse women’s liberation: should Deirdre remain an outsider or come in and yield to matrimonial norms? His potent imagery, that of nature versus nurture, takes no lead from older acoustic symbolism but rather from a strand implicit only in its forerunner. A sense of the tale’s embeddedness in a particular social setting is notably absent from the Dubliner’s staging as well. Had Synge’s been the sole extant version, his Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910) might appear an incomplete witness to its antecedent. The Táin itself would be recast. Its second major surviving version looks strongly sentimental (O’Rahilly 1967). Recension II’s portrayal of Cú Chulainn stresses his childhood vulnerability, while focussing on his civility towards Fer Diad, even as they duelled. Both cared for each other’s physical and psychological needs in the course of an encounter which looks almost homoerotic when set against the viciousness of their engagement during Recension I. It is as though the later copy is an allegory, arguing for chivalry in the midst of mid-twelfthcentury Ireland’s civil-war-like discord. Reinterpretation continued down to the end of the second millennium, being visual as well as verbal. One sees as much from the artist, Louis le Brocquy’s (1916 -2012), illustrations in The Tain (1968), made to accompany an English-language rendition of the epic by Thomas Kinsella, a poet transfixed by violence. The brush drawings offer impressions rather than realism, suggesting aboriginal or elemental dimensions to the fray. The Ulster Cycle found a role equally in public discourse, when its hero exemplified selfsacrifice in the nationalist interest. For Ulster loyalists looking to uphold their British identity, Cú Chulainn was seen as the exemplary provincial defender. Such appropriation of the past, of course, is not confined to the island of Ireland, as the apotheosis of Italy’s Risorgimento, the interment of Vittorio Emanuele II (1820-78) in Rome’s Pantheon, indicates. Modernity’s deracinating effects required reconnecting people with their origins, unless, like Samuel Beckett (1906-89), one bowed to its ineluctable diminution of selfhood by creating new, fragmentary, quasi-mythic, figures. This Irish author thus became the last of the Romantics, who were first to recognise the dislocation contemporary life brings with it. Perhaps the most consistent revisiting of the Ulster material is seen in research rather than creative writing. Professional academics are responsible for the greater part of this effort, particularly in reconsidering the Cycle’s diplomatics or its onomastics, its language or topical content (Mallory and Stockman 1994; Ó Catháin and Ó Huiginn 2009). What is missing from all recent approaches is synthesis of a kind Rudolph Thurneysen undertook almost one hundred years ago, helping further to discern layers of priority within the material or its evaluation. While a full restatement about the Ulster Cycle and its identity cannot be realised within current confines, revisiting the colloquium’s main theme in light of all that has been stated above may be worth the attempt. The conference’s title raises the issue as to whether the market is a myth, or what type of exchange is inherent in the latter. The most I can say with respect to this dichotomy is that politics seems to be a field to proffer answers, while philosophy is reduced to asking questions. As neither civic activist nor sage, I am unable to follow either approach. It might be preferable instead to take one’s own tack, like Cú Chulainn, finding in certain chosen texts the means to capture consciousness when indicating objectively which comparanda could correlate. A number of seminal compositions already exist purporting to outline the mythic as well as its ties to the market. Two of these are attributed to the Greek author, Hesiod, whose Theogony relays the ways of gods to mere mortals. It speaks about unseen or imperceptible forces permeating the universe, regulating it, and in what combinations. Complementary to same, his Works and Days (West 1978) suggests, conversely, it is mankind’s lot to toil, a form of activity which is capable of being carried out advantageously

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if one yields to a certain kind of ‘Strife’ (Eris). This dynamic daughter of Night and Time (think ‘burning the midnight oil’) gets the lazy going, causes neighbour to vie with neighbour, craftsman with craftsman, minstrel with minstrel and potter with potter. Striving of that kind is deemed wholesome for men. One assumes it leads to the promotion of excellence within the occupations at issue, and, inferrentially, the acceptability, not to say, marketability, of a person’s output. Contention is thus a source of goodness in the quotidian. If, on the other hand, we move from Europe’s south-east to the continent’s north-west, Ulster, during its past, as it would do into the future, appears to say no, or not necessarily so, to the foregoing proposition. It adopts this perspective in compositions examined above to which, after due filtering, one might ascribe the Cycle’s greatest degree of primacy. We have seen the province’s saga, Noínden Ulad, indicate that the public assembly or oenach was a setting in which competitiveness was so far developed as to cause contrasting zones of existence, the internal and the external, to collide. Their being compromised led to unwelcome consequences for nominally beneficial circumstances of a kind prevailing in tales like Fled Bricrenn. According to this scenario, the marketplace has its disadvantages. Those negative characteristics do not function in isolation, because they gain urgency against the wider backdrop of what happens within linked narratives, like Longes mac nUislenn, or are potent enough to precipitate war, triggering the Táin’s resource deployment (think van Clausewitz). A greater context emerges thus into focus rather than any single societal phenomenon such as the commercial. It becomes one’s task, accordingly, to state what this totality might be and to characterise its elements, in addition to their interconnections. Myth clearly attempts explanation along dimensions of this scale, and with the requisite inclusivity, as it undertakes to express a matrix of relationships. That is so even if perfect categorisation or comprehension of its characteristics looks difficult, or perhaps impossible, absolutely to achieve. Furthermore, a solitary series of narratives may not be all-encompassing on its own. Stories’ multiple sides are to be sensed from contrasting the Ulster Cycle with its overseas analogues. None monopolises wisdom. The particular value of any suite of episodes, whether Irish or other, is, as a result, to remind one of the need to exploit the interplay between sameness and difference across a spectrum of broadly compatible material, if we seek to maximise understanding of what human experience in all its variety comprises. This investigation itself must be commensurate with the proportions in which such diversity is represented by demonstrably evocative data sets. Acknowledgement

I thank Professor John Desmond and Professor Donncha Kavanagh for their invitation to this symposium. Errors of fact or interpretation are my sole responsibility.

References

Bédier, Joseph. 1908. Les légendes epiques: recherches sur la formation des chansons de geste. I Le Cycle de Guillaume d’Orange. Paris: Librarie Honoré Chopin. Buttimer, Cornelius G. 1982. “Scela mucce Meic Dathó: a reappraisal.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 2: 61-73. —. 1994-95. “Longes mac nUislenn reconsidered.” Éigse: a journal of Irish studies 28: 1-41. Buttimer, Cornelius G., and Donncha Kavanagh. 1996. “Markets, exchange and the extreme.” In Marketing apocalypse: eschatology, escapology and the illusion of the end, edited by Stephen Browne, Jim Bell and David Carson, 145-70. London and New York: Routledge. Charles Edwards, T. M. 2005. “Historical context and literary meaning: another reading of Scéla muicce Meic Da Thó.” The Journal of Celtic Studies 5: 1-16. Child, Francis James. 1906. English and Scottish popular ballads ed. from the collection of Francis James Child by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company.

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Dooley, Ann. 2006. Playing the hero: reading the Irish saga Táin bó Cúailnge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fletcher, Robert Huntington. 1906. The Arthurian material in the chronicles especially those of Great Britain and France. Boston: Ginn & Company. Hollo, Kaarina. 2005. Fled Bricrenn ocus Loinges mac nDuíl Dermait: and its place in the Irish literary and oral narrative traditions: a critical edition with introduction, notes, translation, bibliography and vocabulary. Maynooth: Department of Old and Middle Irish, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Hull, Vernam. 1949. Longes mac n-Uislenn: the Exile of the Sons of Uisliu. Monograph Series (Modern Language Association of America) 16. New York: Modern Language Association of America. —. 1968. “Noínden Ulad: the Debility of the Ulidians”. Celtica 8: 1-42. Kelly, Fergus. 1997. Early Irish farming: a study based mainly on the texts of the 7th and 8th centuries AD. Early Irish Law Series IV. Dublin: School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Mac Cana, Proinsias. 1980. The learned tales of medieval Ireland. Dublin: Dubin Institute for Advanced Studies. Mallory, J. P. 2013. The origins of the Irish. London: Thames & Hudson. Mallory, J. P. and G. Stockman. 1994. Ulidia: proceedings of the First International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of tales. Belfast: December. McCracken, Peggy. 2003. The curse of Eve, the wound of the hero: blood, gender, and medieval literature. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Monro, D. B. 1901. Homer’s Odyssey. Books XIII-XXIV. Edited with English notes and appendices by D. B. Monro. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ó Cadhlaigh, Cormac. 1956. An Rúraíocht. Baile Átha Cliath: Oifig Díolta Foilseachán Rialtais. Ó Catháin, Brian, and Ruairí Ó Huiginn. 2009. Ulidia 2: proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of tales. Maigh Nuad: An Sagart. Ó Cathasaigh, Tomás. 2006. “The literature of medieval Ireland to c. 800: St Patrick to the Vikings.” In The Cambridge history of Irish literature Volume I: to 1890, edited by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 9-31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ó Máille, Tomás. 1927. “Medb Cruachna.” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 17: 129-46. O’Rahilly, Cecile. 1967. Táin Bó Cúailnge from the Book of Leinster. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. —. 1976. Táin Bó Cúailnge: Recension I. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Rynne, Colin. 2013. “Mills and milling in early medieval Ireland.” In The mill at Kilbegly: an archaeological investigation on the route of the M6 Ballinrobe to Athlone national road scheme, edited by Neil Jackman, Caitríona Moore and Colin Rynne, 115-47. NRA Scheme Monographs 12. National Roads Authority: Dublin. Thurneysen, Rudolf. 1921. Die irische Helden- und Königsage bis zum siebzehnten Jahrhundert, Teil I und II. Halle (Saale): Verlag von Max Niemeyer. —. 1935. Scéla mucce Meic Dathó. Medieval and Modern Irish Series VI. Dublin: The Stationery Office. West, M. L. 1978. Hesiod: Works & Days. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Macgnímrada

Macgnímrada – Introduction John Desmond

University of St Andrews

The paper by Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling is not included in the proceedings for copyright reasons as it is has just been published elsewhere – please see bibliography for details. Whilst there is much that I would like to mention in relation to each of these fine papers, I will try to restrict myself to the following themes. Heroic tales

As the title of this opening session relates to the boyhood feats of Cú Chulainn, it is fitting that the hero, past and present, is the first theme addressed here. The papers by Marion Deane and by Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling focus specifically on events surrounding the birth of Cú Chulainn and the Táin, respectively, in which the young Ulster hero plays a pivotal role. They focus on the symbolic role of Cú Chulainn, whose heroic agency is played down, to focus instead on aspects of a structural explanation within which the hero plays a key role in the reproduction or suturing of social exchange relations. Anu Harju and Johanna Moisander locate the persistence of the archetype of the hero in the figure of Stephen Jobs. In particular they discuss how after his death Jobs begins the process of transformation from celebrity to hero. This begs the question of the nature of the contemporary male hero in relation to Jungian archetypes (Campbell, 1949). If Steve Jobs provides one model then how does Cú Chulainn fit to this scheme? Does the image of this teenage hero lurk in World of Warcraft? On the other hand Kieran and Carmen detect his spirit in the campaign to stop the controversial construction of a gas pipeline in the West of Ireland, representing, ‘a lone minority amongst his weak and sleepy people’, conducting a guerrilla movement to harass the powers that be. Mythic exchange

Marion reads the Compert Con Chulainn (Birth tale Cú Chulainn) as a symbolic political parable which sheds light on exchange relations among the ancients in relation to the formation of royalty. In particular, she discusses how matrimony and the exchange of gifts emerge in synchronic interaction, as part of a process of recognition of the necessity to impose a taboo against incest that is underpinned by royal imprimatur, which otherwise threatens disorder to human relations and relations in nature which are taken to be homologous. The authority of the king is derived from his ability to re-organise and to re-order the rules of nature and by establishing contracts, as those between the brother of the bride and her husband, to make them work in the interests of the kin group. To what extent do such ancient stories have relevance today? All of the papers mention the role of the ruling elite. Anu and Johanna discuss how the qualities attributed to Steve Jobs by his fans construe him as deserving of our respect and even awe. Marion on the other hand focuses on a bad leader, discussing how the events surrounding the birth of Cú Chulainn suture exchange relations which had been poisoned by Conchobhor’s hubristic failure to recognise his people in failing to speak truth to them. One might thus reflect on the relative position of the ruling elite to the people today amid widespread disillusion with politics and the market. Kieran and Carmen use the Táin story as a means to reflect on the overweening ambition of the Irish 33

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elite during the reign of the Celtic Tiger, symptoms of which are resurgent today. They warn too that the Táin relays a darker message, that mimetic rivalry is a powerful, but dangerous formula for economic growth. The réamhscéala or foretales leading up to the Táin provide accounts of debased exchange and absurd bargains that act as premonitions of the consequence of mimetic rivalry for the unravelling that runs throughout the whole of nature, unfolding in the Táin, itself from The Pillow Talk onwards. In one of these foretales by forcing the pregnant Macha, or Brid as she was later known, to race against the king’s chariot, a mockery is made of the principle of fairness, inverting equity into iniquity and transforming the gift to theft. Crucially this occurs at a market fair where there is gaming, trade and competition. This put me in mind of a paper by Neil Buttimer and Donncha Kavanagh (1995) on relations between madness and the market.

Female sexuality

Two of the papers discuss exchange, women and symbolic prohibition, reflecting male concerns about unconstrained female sexuality, which is also present in Medea (Warner, 1994). One might suggest that a similar concern makes its appearance in Carmen and Kieran’s paper in the réamhscéala featuring Cruinnuc and Conchobor, with Macha in between. In the Compert Con Chulainn, to quote Marion’s paper: ‘it shows how unregulated female fertility is economically unsound, unless controlled by a husband who undertakes responsibility for it’. This led me to wonder, is Cú Chulainn’s mother blamed as happened to Medea? And what of today? Are these ancient fears about unconstrained female sexuality replayed today in concerns over the sexual display of female celebrities and single mothers? The exemplary role of myth

All three papers argue that myth can act as a warning; in Marion’s paper, against unregulated sexuality and the need for appropriate exchange relationships; in Kieran and Carmen’s paper, against boasting and envy that can act as forces of dissolution, leading to mimetic violence and culminating in poverty, slaughter and darkness. Discussing his transformation from celebrity to hero, Anu and Johanna explore how the idealised figure of Steve Jobs acts as an exemplar of the triumph of determined persistence in the face of adversity, to offer the model of a possible self for the fan. While heroes such as Cú Chulainn, or Jobs, form models for adulation, there is a symbolic distance between them and those subjects who admire them. Although Steve Jobs represents a possible self for his fans, Anu and Johanna argue that they also consider him to be beyond the reach of mere mortals. René Girard differentiates this situation, where there is a clear symbolic distance between subject and model, which he calls external mediation, from the more dangerous form of internal mediation, where subjects readily take others as models for emulation and rivalry. . This state of affairs, which bears close relation to Lacan’s Imaginary, lies at the heart of Kieran and Carmen’s discussion of the Táin, where equable exchange relations are undone by the excess of mimetic rivalry. Read in this way, while the Táin may superficially be considered as an appeal to the Imaginary by focusing on the heroic feats of Cú Chulainn and other champions, it communicates more vitally on the Symbolic level, to warn of the dangers of mimetic excess. Myth, spirit and religion

It would be interesting to follow through the discussion of Eliade in the paper by Anu and Johanna, to consider further the place of spirituality and religion in relation to myth. We could explore the “Girardian” reading of the Táin, by Kieran and Carmen, and Marion’s paper, which discusses issues relating to the spiritual authority of the king.

References

Introduction

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Buttimer, Cornelius G. and Kavanagh, Donncha (1995) ‘Markets and Madness’, in Stephen Brown, Jim Bell and David Carson (eds), Proceedings of the Marketing Eschatology Retreat, Belfast: University of Ulster. Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Collected Works, 3rd Ed. Bollingen Series XVII. Joseaph Campbell Foundation. New World Library, Novato California. Keohane, K. & C. Kuhling (2014) Recurrence of the Táin, foretold: Corruption of the Gift Relation. In, The Domestic, Political and Moral Economiesof Post Celtic Tiger Ireland: What Rough Beast? Manchester, ManchesterUniversity press. Warner, Marina (1994) ‘Monstrous Mothers: Women Over the Top’, in Managing Monsters, Six Myths of Our Time, The Reith Lectures 1994, London: Vintage.

Birth-tales of Cú Chulainn: The birth and maintenance of economic structures in early Irish society Marion Deane

Ranelagh, Dublin

This is an eighth century mythic account of Cú Chulainn’s birth and fosterage in which the provisions made to train the child who would become a great martial hero are spelt out. However, the tale is at pains to emphasise that military accomplishment is only one function of a well-rounded warrior. He, a member of the propertied class, must, along with martial expertise, exhibit intellectual acuity. Based on this model, the tale reveals how every member of society is expected to be equally endowed, albeit in varying degrees. It dramatises, by means of a debate, the drawing up of a contract between king and people that will ensure that individual and communal resources will be circulated for the common good. In the event, whether we are dealing with an individual child or with the people in general, it is revealed that the social and economic systems necessary for the maintenance of justice in society are based on reciprocity.

‘Beir duit a Finncoem in mac,’ ol Concobar. Imman faco Finncoem iarum in mac og Concobur. ‘Cartho mo cridi-si in mac-si,’ ol Finncoem, ‘ conid cummo lemm ocus bid Conall.’ ‘Is bec eim eturra duit-si,’ ol Briccriu, ‘mac Dectiri do derbsethur innsin. Is hi fil sunn caeca ingen don-estao a h-Emuin teora bliadna gusinniud.’

‘Ni fil brig tra’ ol Concobur. ‘Sochla brig becfoltach baithi indag Dectire domroet iarsin secht gcairptiu. sephaind huacht do eochraidib arrunutaing errethaib. don anicc set setanta. Gaib duit in mac a Finncoem’ ol Concobar fria fiair. ‘Ni ba si nodn-eblai eim,’ ol Sencha.

‘Is misi nodn-ebla, ar am tren, am an. Am athlum allus atharguib. Am ollam. Am gaeth. Ni dom dermatoch. Adgladathur rig ria rig. Amroichlimm a innscni.

‘Take the boy to you, Finncoem,’ said Concobar. Finncoem saw the boy with Concobar. She then said, ‘My heart loves this boy,’ said Finncoem, ‘as if he were Conall.’ ‘There is indeed little between them for you,’ said Briccriu. ‘That is the son of Dectire your sister. The fifty girls who have been missing from Emain for three years until today, it is they who are here.’ ‘That’s not important however,’ said Concobar. ‘Renowned and worthy (place) of little substance in which the good Dectire was, (she) who then gave shelter to me and seven chariots. She drove away cold from horses. She has refreshed us champions. And Setanta has come on a journey to us. Take the boy to you Finncoem,’ said Concobar to his sister. ‘Indeed, it will not be she who will rear him,’ said Sencha. ‘It is I who will rear him, for I am strong, I am fiery. I am nimble and ostentatious in arms. I am a learned man. I am a sage. I am not forgetful. I address a king before a king. I prepare his speeches beforehand. 36

The birth and maintenance of economic structures in early Irish society

Admaidher ferrig a cath ria Concobur. Concertuim bretha hUlad ocus nissn-innsurg.

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I judge the manly king in battle before Concobar. I decide the judgements of Ulster and I do not drive them away. Nim thoirccni aide aili inge Concobar.’ No other teacher surpasses me except Concobar.’ ‘Cid missi not gaba,’ ol Blai Briuguig, ‘ni epelai ‘If it were I who might take him,’ said Blai Briuguig, faill na esliss. ‘he will not die from heedlessness or neglect. Ro ferat mo thechta toscoi co Concobar. My envoys can supply the needs of Concobar. Congairim firiu hErinn. I assemble the men of Ireland. Nus biatham gu cenn dechmuidi. I feed them for a ten-day period. Fosuidiur a n-dano ocus a n-dibergai. I provide sustenance for men of craft and marauders. Forriuth a n-enech ocus a n-inechgreso amin.’ I support their honour and affronts to their honour as well.’ ‘Is anble sin,’ ol Fergus. ‘That is a shame,’ said Fergus. ‘Dorroegai tren occai. ‘He has chosen a champion (to be) by him. Is missi nomneblo. It is I who will rear him. Am tren –si. Am trebur. Am tectiri. Nimdotair ar I am strong. I am skilful. I am an envoy. I am not feb ocus innbas. mean with wealth and possessions. Am amus ar gail ocus gaiscced. I am a mercenary on account of valour and prowess in arms. Am gnia frimtair. I am a warrior against my shaming. Am tualuing mu dalta I am capable of my foster son. Am din gach dochruiti. I am a protection against every harm. Dogniu dochur gach triuin. I create trouble for every strong man. Dogniu sochur gach lobuir.’ I create advantage for every weak man.’ ‘Cia contuaisi frimp,’ ol Amorgen, ‘marthai Am ‘If you listen to me,’ said Amorgen, ‘he survives. I tualuing mu dalta altrammo do ríg. am capable of rearing my foster son for a king. Ro moltar ar gach feib as mo gail ocus as mo One can praise me for every distinction, for my gaisced, as mo gais, as mo thocud, ar mo es, ar mo valour and for my prowess in arms, for my wisdom, erlapra, ar aine ocus calmatus mo chlethi. for my prosperity, for my food, for my eloquence, for the splendour and courage of my warriors. Ce bo laith, am fili, fíu do rath rig. Though I am a champion, I am a poet, worthy of the surety of a king. Arurg gach n-eirrid. I slay every warrior. Ni tuillim buidi di nech acht do Concobar. I am not subservient to anyone but Concobar. Ni comul fri nech ingi fria rig namma.’ I simply don’t join with anyone except the king.’ ‘Ni ba (ba) tra inni sin,’ ol Sencha.’ Gaibith ‘That will not be important,’ said Sencha. ‘Finncoem Finncoem in mac gu rissim Emuin, ocus takes the boy until we reach Emain, and one will apfuigillfithur Morann uimi acht gu rissim.’ peal to the judge Morann, once we arrive.’ Lotar ass iarum do Emuin, ocus a mac la Then they went off to Emain, and her son with Finncoem. Finncoem. Fuigillsit Morann iarum iar riachtuin, ocus ispert They submitted a case to Morann then, after their arsidi; rival, and he said; ‘Atnoad Concobar eim,’ al Morann ‘ol is cetaicce ‘Let Concobar hand him over in this case,’ said Finncoimiu. Morann, ‘for he is the first fosterage for Finncoem. Atmenath Sencha setait sceu aurlapra. Let Sencha teach him speech and eloquence. Rom-biathad Blai Briuguig. Let Blai Briuigiug feed him Berur do glun Ferguso. Let him be placed on Fergus’s knee. Ba haidi do Amorgini. Let Amorgen be his tutor. Bad comaltai do Conall Cernach di chich a mathar Let Conall Cernach be his foster brother, by the Finncoime. breasts of his mother Finncoem.

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Ba cummo nondomaigetar huili etir au ocus eirrid etir rig ocus ollum, ol bid caro sochuidi in mac so.

Is cuma do fich uar n-inechgreso huili, ar fich for n-atho ocus for n-irgola uili in mac so.’

Ised dognith dee iarum. Berthi Amorgen ocus Finncoem, connalt i n-dun i m-Brith i m-Mag Murtemni.

In the same way let him be instructed by all, by nephew, by chariot-fighter, king and sage, for this boy will be a friend of a multitude. In the same way as this boy avenges all affronts to your honour, he fights on your fords and all your battles.’ This is what was done as a result of it then. Amorgen and Finncoem took him and he was reared in Dun Imbrith in Mag Muirthemne.

Introduction

In deference to the locus of this conference as heralded in its programme, my material will be drawn from two interrelated fore-tales to the great Irish prose epic Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle-raid of Cooley). These two versions of the Birth-tale of Cú Chulainn are commonly designated Version 1 and Version 2 and known as Compert Con Culainn. However, for reasons of clarity, as Version 2 bears an additional title Feis Tigi Becfholtaig (Overnight Stay in the House of Little Wealth), this latter will become my working title. Both tell of the conception and birth of a child Sétanta (later Cú Chulainn). Version 1 was written in the early eighth century and Version 2, a longer variation of the same tale, was written later in the same century. Version 1 now remains in seven manuscripts, the oldest of which is to be found in Lebor na h-Uidre (LU) which is in the possession of the Royal Irish Academy.1 Version 2 is preserved in two manuscripts.2 This paper is based on the copy of Feis Tigi Becfholtaig in British Library Egerton f.79 and on Compert Con Culainn in Lebor na h-Uidre. Both were published by Ernst Windisch in Irische Texte in 1880 (134–145). My purpose is to illustrate how each tale, climaxing in the birth of a boy, is primarily concerned, not with a human child as such, but with the economic effects that his birth had on his immediate kin or on the wider community, respectively. Feis Tigi Becfholtaig is the main focus of my paper. However, a logical chronology demands that the very institutions and social systems to which Feis Tigi Becfholtaig pays homage can be better understood after their putative origins as depicted in Compert Con Culainn are considered first.3 The theme of Compert Con Culainn is signalled by the pun in its title. Compert means both ‘birth’ and ‘legal decision’. The title, therefore, paves the way for the gradual realisation that this short narrative, in common with other early Irish narratives, acts as a political parable. Its particular intention is to deliver a concise and unambiguous message about the necessity to impose laws and restrictions on human reproduction. In a series of short vignettes, the sexual activity of humans and analogous processes in nature are depicted graphically.4 The case it makes is that human offspring resulting from unregulated sex are a financial liability for the 1 The other six manuscripts are Trinity College Dublin H.4.22, Royal Irish Academy 23 N 10, British Library Egerton 1782, British Library Egerton 88, Royal Irish Academy D 4.2 and National Library of Ireland G7. See also http://celt.ucc.ie/published/G301013.html (accessed 26 May 2014). 2 British Library Egerton 1782 and Dublin, Royal Irish Academy Stowe D.4.2. 3 Version 1 dramatises the birth of marriage, clientship and kingship as cultural institutions. Version 2 Feis Tigi Becfholtaig dramatises these institutions in operation. For further reading on Version 1 Compert Con Culainn, see Deane 2009: 52–79. 4 The following words are applied to earth and to woman simultaneously to communicate the parallel that as soil needs rain to inculcate growth, a woman needs sperm to instigate conception. Tothlaigestar it desired/she desired sexually; tatharla he had come/he engaged in illegal sexual intercourse; linn/linn [comperta] liquid/semen; dia belaib to openings/to her labia; [toirthecht]/torrach [tairr-recht] fruitful pregnant/illegitimate pregnancy; mac produce/son.

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woman’s kin. The crux of the tale is reached when the king, her brother, brings her incestuous relationship with him to an end and contracts her in marriage to a member of an exogamous kin. The tale has more to say however. It illustrates how this man-to-man exchange of a woman in marriage simultaneously involved the formation of a commercial contract between her brother and her new husband. Furthermore, as the legitimacy or otherwise of marital unions was viewed from an economic perspective, the inextricable nature of the problems that affected the kin is indicated by a single sentence: ná con fes céle for a seilb, ‘they did not know her [the woman Dechtire] to be in possession of a “husband” [céle]’, and, simultaneously, ‘they did not know it [the good land deg-thír] to be in possession of a “client” [céle]’. These contracts negotiated by the king ensured security and profit for him. He stood personally to gain from the network of alliances which arose from the partnership between his sister and her spouse. This parallel discourse is maintained throughout. By means of an extended homology between the human body and the landscape, the symbiotic link between the laws governing marriage and those governing agriculture come into play. In other words, the contracting of land to a client for the purpose of safeguarding it and its produce mirrors the contracting of a woman to a husband for the purpose of safeguarding her and her child.5 The simultaneity of these transactions conforms to Geertz’s observation that different levels of social reality such as matrimony and the exchange of gifts in trade emerged together in complete synchronic interaction with one another (Geertz 1975: 68). This is the tale’s central theme. Marriage and clientship as institutions converge also with the institution of kingship.6 This synchronicity can be understood to denote the symbolic moment when, figured here as the birth of a boy, the birth of culture took place. This account is symbolic, not historical, for the structures of the society that emerges are manifestations of the structure of human consciousness itself. They are expressions of an original and ‘spontaneous response to the human being’s co-existence with others’ (see Clarke 1981: 60). This becomes evident in the person of the king. His elevation in stature as a human being is derived from his ability to re-organise and to re-order the rules of nature, and, by the establishment of contracts, to make them responsive to his own needs and to the interests of the kin. By establishing a taboo against incest, Compert Conculainn presents a code for human behaviour. The ideals it advocates are also replicated in the ideology that formed the basis of traditional law whose maxims were formulated upon the principle that forms of appropriate relationship between people should be moulded in accordance with the laws that bound the physical world (Mc Leod 1982: 364). However, the prevailing conditions from which the narrative unfolds pertain to the unfavourable economic situation which has arisen from unregulated fertility on two fronts – first, that which results in the human sphere from illicit, and, in particular from, incestuous sexual intercourse; second, that which results through neglect of the procedures or maintenance necessary to ensure healthy crops. To illustrate how ownership of property and inheritance of land affected the kinship system, both through ordinary commercial transactions and through marriage, the tale offers an analogy between the eclipse and return of fertility in nature and the conception gestation and birth of a child. However, its main emphasis is the fact that without proper management there is no guaranteeing that the crop will 5 Arnenaisc iarom Conchobar a fiair do Súaltaim mac Róig. Conchobar betrothed his sister to Súaltaim [céle husband]. Arnenaisc iarom Conchobar a [fúr] do Súaltaim mac Róig. Conchobar contracted his soil to Súaltaim [céle client]. 6 ‘The idea of kingship was initially that of an individual self. Its development as a political concept required that this unitary self be dispersed among various functions, which were then assigned to clients. In effect, the political idea of kingship not only denies the possibility of complete autonomy but confirms the necessity of coexistence with others. Consequently, a particular king’s relationship to his people is critical. He is a good or a bad ruler, depending on the degree to which the reciprocal interaction between him and his people is acknowledged and acted upon. Reciprocity, therefore, is the organizing principle that pre-dates and defines society’. See Deane (2011: 17).

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survive or that its survival will contribute to communal welfare. Similarly, by means of analogous representations, it shows how unregulated female fertility is economically unsound, unless controlled by a husband who undertakes responsibility for it. The innovative action which the tale attributed to the king for establishing institutions to solve these problems denotes the hypothetical moment when kingship itself as a cultural institution also came into being (Deane 2011: 1–21). In assigning these contracts to the king, a scenario is created whereby systems such as marriage and clientship are shown to have merely institutionalised already existing principles of reciprocity. Reciprocity is shown to be a relational or structural principle which is prior to the social organisations in which it is manifest (Clarke 1981: 48). The political economy of Feis Tigi Becfholtaig

The political and economic systems as they are revealed in Feis Tigi Becfholtaig (Deane 2013) are the main subject of my discussion, for, as legal and historical evidence prove, they provided the infrastructure of society in early Ireland. This tale takes its departure from a situation where kingship is already a formally sanctioned clientship contract as consolidated at inauguration. A king was merely one among equals. It was the sacrality of office that conferred on him an elevation and an influence that distinguished him from other nobles of equal status (Binchy 1970: 20). The matching benefit, which he conferred on the people who elected him, was a contract (Jaski 2000: 48). In this contract, he undertook to begin and to maintain a process in which the obligations and the rights of all participants were in on-going exchange. He promised to maintain them as they maintained him. The main principles of this contract are reflected in a debate which provides material for the second half of Feis Tigi Becfholtaig. It takes place among the élite of Ulster, who, in a society where fosterage was the norm, vie with each other for the privilege of rearing the new-born child. The debate provides a forum for subjects to remind the king of the particular ways in which they have co-operated with him in the past. Their intention is to convince him of the excellence of their credentials so that he will appoint them to the new and prestigious role of providing fosterage for his son. However, this is a literary trope. The importance of the debate resides in its simultaneous portrayal of the interdependent economic and social transactions between king and subjects in general and also those between the subjects themselves. It dramatises arrangements being made to ensure that all parties benefit from the vital circulation of resources within the community. It reveals how the co-ordination of functions among the king’s subjects under his auspices reflects an ideal social organisation. In this paper, the minute and individual details of the personal and professional assets of each contender will be shown to reveal the extent and particularity of each contribution made to the reciprocal flow of resources within the community. So too, these fictional representatives of the warrior, the intellectual and the propertied classes7 will be seen to share with the king responsibility for the security and prosperity of the community. In addition, the tale explicates how the various classes, by exercising not only their own specific functions but, to a lesser extent, those of the other classes as well, exemplified the necessary co-operation between the co-ordinates of society as a body and the co-ordinates of the individual psyche. LéviStrauss, in his seminal work on reciprocity (1969), discusses the evolution of the paradigm identified here. He illustrates how society comes into being and maintains existence, by virtue of the principles of reciprocity which the structure of the human mind imposes and projects onto institutions, in which these principles are manifest. 7 The three Indo-European categories that, together, comprise royal leadership, as analysed by Georges Dumézil, can be applied to the society depicted here. See McCone 2000: 117ff.; Ó Cathasaigh 1977: 66. For criticism of this approach, see Ó Corrain 1986: 141–158.

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The tale Feis Tige Becfholtaig is divided in two. It begins when King Conchobar, in the hope of wooing back his spouse, the goddess Deichtire, who has eloped, sets out in search of her. His journey brings him to the Otherworld where he undergoes a test, and comes to realise how she has been eternally present, though not always given credit by him, in the course of his life. Despite this realisation, he remains unwilling to give public acknowledgement of his dependence on her. Eventually, through the strenuous endeavours of both partners, peace is achieved and they are reunited in marriage, from which the child Sétanta is born. The king immediately asks Deichtire’s sister Finncóem to look after him. He then turns his attention suddenly towards Deichtire and acknowledges her merits. He delivers an effusive epithalamium in praise of her. He pays public tribute to the essential contribution she has made to his success. The tale ends with a debate in which the Ulstermen compete to foster the child.

Marriage and sacred marriage in Feis Tige Becfholtaig

This tale about marriage also provides an analogy for the sacred marriage between king and goddess as celebrated at the inaugural rite. The superimposition of one marriage theme upon the other was consonant with the practice of certain origin myths in which sun and earth were represented as the initial division of primary substance, and often figured as the first couple, male and female (Rees and Rees 1995: 233). Thus, as the king’s election, like the return of the sun, generated a new era of fertility and prosperity, his inauguration took the mimetic form of a marriage in which he wed the earth goddess (James 1961: 95–97). The custom gradually declined. First, it began to be appreciated how human labour, in conjunction with the periodic appearance of the sun, was radical to the improvement of the soil’s fertility. Second, it was recognised that the king depended on the co-operation of others to optimise that fertility. Eventually, the roles of the sun and of the king were modified, whereby they were understood to operate, not as impregnators, but as regulators. By the early eighth century, more or less contemporaneous with the writing of these two tales, the sacred marriage rite had become obsolete. Nevertheless, although it had evolved into a clientship contract (Charles-Edwards 1994: 107–119), the whole structure of society, as manifested in its legal system, remained deeply indebted to the mythical hierarchies (which are essentially dramatic representations of cosmic and natural phenomena). Hereafter, the system of corresponding rights and duties within marriage and within clientship are homologous with each other (Geertz 1975: 355). They also maintain correspondence with the natural order of things. Furthermore, clientship’s provenance in the sacred marriage granted it a distinctive ethical and juridical quality. That is to say, the contracts made in the here and now were understood to maintain a parallel with their counterparts in a supernal world which was eternal and immutable. From this perspective, the fertility which king and clients promised to sustain was understood to belong to a current phase of an eternal cycle of fertility, which had been generated by the primordial mating of sun and earth. Such representation of the real in terms of the ideal is a fundamental characteristic of this myth and of myth in general. It presents human life in this world as standing in an elaborate relationship of correspondence to another world (Gaster 1984: 112). It operates by bringing a sacred past to bear pre-emptively on the present and inferentially on the future. The goddess, who had traditionally been figured as solar consort, was now also a figure for political sovereignty and for the people of the kingdom in general. Hence at inauguration, the king ‘married’ his subjects (Scowcroft 1995: 131). A contract between lord and client followed the same pattern as that for husband and wife, for all deals and agreements were grounded in common social or economic interests. Intertwining rights and obligations of any pair (CharlesEdwards 1993: 39) had repercussions for their kindred and for the wider community. In drawing up rules governing the mutual rights and duties of partners to a contract, the law took into consideration services as well as goods. The notion of matching and equivalence in service or

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possessions was reinforced by the dual terms folad and frithfolad, used to denote the correct discharge of mutual obligations.8 The obligation accepted by a contracting party was to render folad to the other. Acceptance of this obligation in turn created entitlement to the counter consideration frithfolad, promised by the other party. The main concern of the law was whether the folad of one party matched the folad of another, and whether one or both parties had performed or delivered the folad in full. It is this concept of fair play and reciprocal exchange that is adapted in genitive adjectival form foltaig (nominative foltach) into the title and whose principles are exploited in the debate. However, the debate, as noted, is a literary device where principles governing the welfare of an individual child represent the rights and obligations that determine the welfare of society as a whole. This fictionalised competition among the most eminent nobles – traditionally identified in Irish sources as constituents of a warrior class, a landed class and a learned class – creates an arena for the reciprocal exchange between king and people to be enacted. It can be imagined as taking place at the inauguration ceremony when the nobles are congregated before the king and where the judge, having considered the professional quality and integrity of the applicants, allocates each to the specific office for which he is most suitable. The subjects involved constitute a collective entity, one contracting party in a relationship in which both king and people were equal (Charles-Edwards 1994: 117). The overlapping themes with which the tale deals are synchronic, but for the sake of clarity, I will refer to them in sequence. The surface tale, therefore, could be said to concern a marital dispute which was resolved by the active intervention of both parties. Hence, an agreed contract (marriage) was reached by means of a two-way reciprocal process. To make this point, the tale exploits two old-Irish literary genres – aithed elopement and tochmarc wooing.9 By drawing on the deliberate agency of both protagonists in reconciliation, the message is clear. Justice requires consensus preferably, consensus bound by contract. The circumstances leading to this desired state of affairs can now be examined from the perspective of the king’s relation with his subjects. Fír Flaithemon: the ruler’s truth10

In early Irish kingship theory, the ‘ruler’s truth’ fír flaithemon was the essential quality of the just king. Its chief feature was the utterance of truth. That is to say, truth had to be expressed verbally to ensure society’s welfare and protection. The tale opens on the assumption that the king has failed in office.11 The land is barren. He is ignorant of the whereabouts of his subjects. Bad weather and the infiltration of enemy forces hamper his progress to find them. In the course of his expedition, his spiritual or moral stature is also put to the test. The test,12 which takes the form of a dialogue between the king and supernatural forces, can be understood as an interior self-questioning. He comes to recognise that his past successes were not solely a result of his own endeavours but rather were dependent upon the part played by his subjects, who unknown and often unrecognised by him, had developed strategies to keep things on track. Yet, 8 Folud: Binchy 1976: 23–31 and Charles-Edwards et al. 1986: 346–347. 9 For further elaboration on these genres as exploited in this narrative, see Deane 2013: 156–159. 10 For fuller information on this concept see Watkins 1979: 181–198. 11 According to the concept of fír flaithemon, the king as sacral figure could generate good or harm for his people by his own personal conduct. The exacting conditions prevailing at the beginning of the birth narratives alerts us to Concobar’s misrule. His realm was thus depicted as reacting in its very substance to his own moral traits (cf. Draak 1959: 653). 12 A test is one of the chief characteristic of kingship literature. It is not a martial confrontation but an act of truth. See Ó Cathasaigh 1977: 83.

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even after he recognises this fact, hubris leaves him temporarily unwilling to acknowledge the truth in public. But there is a moral imperative that he does so. However, he continues to give sole attention to eliminating the practical difficulties of material and military loss that affect his people (Deane 2011–12: 169–174). Yet, although successful on both fronts, his eligibility for kingship remains in abeyance, for in addition to economic and military attainments, truth must be circulated within the kingdom. His meeting these requirements is expressed in the form of a eulogy addressed to Deichtire (his subjects). It takes place at the inauguration ceremony where it has the force of a Speculum Principium or advice on kingly conduct.13 The tale makes clear that a general thanks to his subjects is insufficient. As an indication that he is not simply paying lip service to them but is intimately aware of how precisely his survival necessitated their support, he openly proclaims the manifold ways in which their co-operation had been necessary for the military and material welfare of his kingdom. In addition, his expression of gratitude implicitly testifies that he will continue to acknowledge his dependence on their co-operation throughout his reign. His truth-bearing speech is a gift to his subjects. It grants them fame.14 It also ensures a counter-gift. It imposes an obligation on them to continue working for the welfare of the kingdom. The debate therefore can be understood as an articulation of the counter-gift.15 His people illustrate the particular ways in which he and they will continue to co-operate. It is a corollary to the inaugural ode/epithalamium where the king acknowledges the part which his people have already contributed to his affairs. By being given a public airing, like the inaugural speech itself, the debate allows their commitment past and future to serve as an example for the community. In an earlier age, the king united within his person all the offices necessary for the community (Binchy 1970: 15). For example, one man, the chieftain of early history, was the leader of the hunt or war. He was also priest and arbiter. Conchobar, likewise, has proven himself a savant, a man of means and war leader – the three functions by which early Irish society was defined. These same three functions define the principle roles of the contestants. At the same time, each contestant is also competent in the other fields of expertise as well. Each possesses with varying degrees of emphasis, the mental, material and martial attributes that separately and accumulatively determine the health of the community. Thus, the applicants also embody the qualities which Conchobar has attained. As a result, the attributes that determine the truth of the ruler are seen to be indistinguishable from those that determine the integrity of his subjects. Poet: Sencha

Many forms of higher knowledge and learning – jurisprudence, genealogy, history and antiquarianism, for example – were the preserve of a poetic class, known as the filid. Sencha was the supreme master in this respect. He was a learned man, a ‘master poet’ ollam, which, by definition, indicated that he was at the height of his career by virtue of having accumulated a vast store of knowledge over many years. As his name suggests, he embodied ‘tradition’ senchas, itself. His longevity together with his claim to have a good memory16 was an obvious 13 The old Irish wisdom texts belonging to the genre Speculum Principium originated in Ireland. As a catechism of advice given to a ruler on how to exercise justice within his realm, it acted as a verbal mirror in which an ideal of kingship was reflected. In The Testament of Morand, for example, the principles of just rule were outlined. For more information on the genre Mirror of Princes, see Smith 1927: 411–445 and Kelly, 1976. 14 Fame could only be bestowed through speech, for the basic meaning of fame was ‘that which is heard’ clú. It is part of the first word of praise sochla (renown, literally, good fame) that the king addresses to the people. 15 Binchy (1976: 23-31) identifies the opposition between folad and frithfolad as a reflex of the primitive system of gift/counter-gift on which, ‘the entire structure of obligations – legal, political, religious and domestic – was based’. His theories concur with those of Marcel Mauss’s pioneering work The Gift (1990). 16 On the importance of retentive memory for the transmission of all kinds of knowledge, see Slotkin 1977: 437– 450.

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asset for acquiring a large repetoire of sagas and other traditional compositons. Potential to store knowledge, in this way, carried particular weight in a society where customs and beliefs were handed down orally and where it was believed that truth was preserved in the precedents and maxims laid down by ancestors. He is chosen to educate the boy in the oratorical skills of speech and eloquence – the defining gifts of the master poet-scholar. The distinctive intellectual qualification aurlapra referred not alone to fluency of style but to the content of what was said. It included such background knowledge as was necessary,when, for example, controversy arose concerning possession of an estate (MacCone 1990: 22). Facts about its history and ownership were essential if hereditary or territorial rights were to be ascertained. Similar knowledge was crucial too in following correct protocol in pursuit of peace, especially in decisions regarding military affairs, or simply in determining lawful jurisdiction over land in general. However, to some extent, Sencha’s power was restricted, for he was bound to interpret the law and form his decisions in accordance with inherited rules and decrees (Binchy 1970: 16). His primary obligation to society was as guardian of the truth. Hence, his role parallelled that of the king in a radical and essential way. An anecdote in The Boyhood Deeds in Táin Bó Cúailgne (The Cattle-raid of Cooley) of which Compert Conculainn is a foretale, is worth mentioning in this context. Cuchulainn is portrayed as having a certain nous, when after creating havoc within the court at Emain, he identifies himself to his uncle Conchobar, who is angry at his behaviour and who didn’t recognise him. The precocious child, who has just attacked his uncle’s cadets, names himself in terms of kinship and genealogy, thus appeasing the immediate anxiety which his uncle might have concerning the legal repercussions of the boy’s behaviour. He meets Conchobar’s query about his family lineage with an answer that conveys essential information which extends beyond naming his biological parents. He places them in a context that reveals instantly a complexity of relationships, which has mutual social and political implications for him and for his interrogator. He is the son of Sualdaim17 who is legally responsible for him. He is also, through the bonds of consanguinity, linked to his interlocutor whose sister’s son he is. This kind of knowledge concerning his family pedigree, and the advantages and obligations thereof, can be imagined as the preserve of his early master Sencha. The boy is putting into practice the knowledge concerning his own noble status and heritage which he has garnered from his teacher. In his quick allusion to the close kinship, which he shares with Conchobar, a moment of potential confrontation is converted to one of mutual gain. The boy has put forward facts salient to the immediate crisis. Having just violated the king’s precincts, he has now produced evidence which quells the king’s fear concerning compensation for damages.18 Sencha was an expert, a sage gáeth unsurpassed in his field and the ulimate authority with whom one would consult. ‘I decide the judgements of Ulster, and I do not pass them on to another’. Although he identifies himself chiefly in terms of his office – master-poet and sage19 – he is proud of his participation in the wider society. It is obvious that his advanced learning makes a key contribution to the settlement of contentious legal or administrative problems that threaten individual or communal wellbeing. Yet, his self-evaluation begins with enthusiastic reference to his early renowned prowess as a strong, fiery, nimble warrior, skilled in arms. 17 This account of paternal relationship is central to Version 1 where a shift from incest to exogamous marriage is involved. In Version 2, however, Conchobar is Setanta’s father. The nature and relevance of Sencha’s influence is not altered by this discrepancy. 18 In this passage, Sétanta asks Conchobar for a guarantee against injury from the boy-scouts. In return, the boy guarantees them safety from himself. See, Jaski 1999: 1–32. 19 I am a learned man (at the height of my poetic career) ollam. I am a sage gáeth. The juxtaposition of these terms suggests a literary reflex of the ollam gaíse whom the legal tract Miadshlechtae distinguishes for … being consulted and for consulting nobody. See Deane 2013: 17, fn. 30.

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Hospitaller: Blai Briuguig

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In an age when there was no treasury or taxes to maintain a welfare system, public services depended upon the wealthy farmer-cum-hospitaller. He had a duty to use his resources for the common good by providing the material infrastructure to keep society operating. The somewhat idealised representation of the official hospitaller was as a man larger than life who went beyond the call of duty to welcome all-comers with the enthusiasm and courtesy of a good host.20 In this regard, he differed from other prosperous nobles, who were also expected to provide hospitality on a more limited scale according to the entitlements of the guests.21 Blai Briuguig expresses confidence that should he be granted the job, the child will not die of heedlessness or neglect ni epelai faill na esliss, for he has the wherewithal to support him. His citation of the various ways in which his capital had furnished the needs of the king on earlier expeditions tallies with the people’s (Deichtire’s) agency in the survival of Conchobar and his retinue when faced with cold and starvation.22 With the self-promotion worthy of a modern brochure, this man, well-schooled in the proper and efficient management of goods and services, gives the assurance that together with the staff at his disposal and for an agreed-upon duration he is fully able to serve the king.23 What’s more, his beneficence will extend to even the disreputable vagrants24 in the ranks, for the army of landed soldier-farmers, of whom the contesting fosterers are the most representative, had often to draw upon the ancillary services of social misfits. Responsibility for a class so at variance with his own conduct indicates a necessary flexibility and realism on the part of a man who could, nevertheless, gain from the protection they afforded (MacCone 1984: 22). It is clear that Blai Briuguig was not a member of the military (Mac Eoin 1997: 482–493). Yet, warriors depended on him to cover the infrastructural cost of war. During military campaigns, a wide range of needs encompassing food, lodging and the provision of camp sites, not to mention supplementary rations or accommodation for the king’s attendants, fell within his remit (Binchy 1970: 20). In addition, he had to meet their legal liabilities caused by affronts to their honour with his own wealth.25 This latter obligation arose from the public shame caused by verbal insults.26 Such loss of face was equated with loss of status and reputation. It affected the person’s rights and position in society. As a result, compensation had to be paid. Yet, in this respect, he was dependent upon a member of the intelligentia (Sencha, for example) whose knowledge of the status and history of the persons involved was nessary to help him come to an arrangement about the amount of compensation due. Warrior: Fergus

Fergus, who is also a king, enters the conversation at this point with argumentative fervour. ‘That is a shame’.27 He identifies himself immediately as a warrior and champion in military affairs. He

20 ‘He bids welcome to every face’, cf. Kelly 1995: 36. 21 Entitlements included status or the size of retinue, or whether it was personal or public business. See CharlesEdwards 2000: 526. 22 domroet iarsin secht gcairptiu. sephaind huacht do eochraidib She gave shelter to me and seven chariots. She took away cold from horses. 23 Nus biathaim gu cenn dechmuidi. Ro ferat mo thechta tosccoi co Conchobar. I feed them for a ten-day period. My envoys can supply the needs of Conchobar. 24 Fosidiur a n-dano ocus a n-dibergai. I provide sustenance for men of craft and marauders. 25 Forriuth a n-enech ocus a n-inechgreso amin. I support their honour and affronts to their honour as well. 26 Reactions to insult were rendered visible in the blushes and reddening on the face, thus causing shame to the victim. ‘Verbal blades have cut beneath his skin; blood has been aroused onto his cheeks and face so that it is evident in his countenance that he has been wounded by words’ (Breatnach 2006: 63, fn. 2). For further reading on verbal insults see Mc Laughlin 2008. 27 Is anble sin.

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is already a royal appointee,28 a serving bodyguard amus to the king. He is on a par with the other contestants in terms of family status. His own wealth and personal ability are incontestable. He insists that in terms of producivity there is little to chose between them. ‘No-one matches me for distinction and wealth’. However, the professional function of which he boasts and for which he exhibits most enthusiasm is military, He distinguishes between his ability to defend and to attack. ‘I am protection against every harm. I create trouble for [opponents]. Not only is he well armed, but he is superlative in ‘all the military skills’ gaiscid; this last word indicates a standard of excellence greater than the sum of its separate components – gae spear and sciath shield – weapons individually necessary for the offensive and defensive operations of which he speaks. Nevertheless, his claim that he tries to mitigate the suffering of the most vulnerable also carries conviction. Mercy, an essential attribute of the just king,29 is innate to Fergus, as his name implies.30 Yet, there is a suggestion that such ideal conduct is not always adhered to, given that the next person to speak, Amorgen, shows himself more cursory in dealing with the enemy. However, in Fergus’s case, wealth, mercy and battle ardour combine to present him as a prototype of the just ruler. Foster father: Amorgen

Amorgen intervenes with a request for space to explain why he, too, is a suitable candidate. As a poet, he resembles Sencha more than the other two. Yet, his superiority in every sphere of activity contrasts with the specialisation which has brought renown to Sencha. Having heard the claims made by his rivals, he attempts to out-score them. ‘One can praise me for every distinction’. He highlights his own great wealth and food supply, his advanced intellectual status and his valour and skill in battle. On this last, the boast that he ‘slays every warrior’ is designed perhaps to challenge both Sencha’s aforementioned dexterity in battle athlum and Fergus’s claimed supremacy in valour and weaponry ar gail ocus gaisced. Challenged in particular by Fergus’s undoubted reputation for excellence on and off the battle field, he claims distinction because men of like talent – the most glorious, brave and reliable – have maintained a continuity of service as his personal troops.31 Like Fergus, he had an already established working relationship with the king. Whereas the former protects his leader physically, Amorgen’s personal wealth enables him go surety for the king’s financial liabilities. It is his high credit rating that allows him to serve the king in this fashion and at the same time to benefit from the reciprocal good-will it engenders.32 Amorgen is undeniably versatile and prolific across a whole spectrum from martial prowess to wealth and learning. However, his impressive self-accolades are brushed aside by Sencha who says that nothing can be decided until they put their case to the adjuducator Morann. At this point, the king asks his sister Finncóem to look after the boy in the meantime. Sencha, Blai Briuguig and Fergus have made a case for themselves as worthy individuals, of incomparable merit in their specialised fields as poet, hospitaller and warrior respectively. At the same time, it is because he has all these resources in equal measure – intellectual, material and military – for which the others are individually distinguished that Amorgen remains a worthy peer.

28 Dorroegai tren occai. He has [already] chosen a champion to be by him. 29 Ba trócar … bad chosmuil ‘Be merciful … Be impartial’. See Kelly 1976: 16, §55. 30 gus can refer to natural instinctive kindness, cf. Charles-Edwards 2000: 143. 31 Ro moltar … ar aine ocus calmatus mo chleithe (169–72). 32 Ni tuillim buidi fri nech acht do Conchobar. Stress is laid not on Conchobar’s goodwill buid(h)e but on the action of Amorgen that causes it. This sentiment would tally with his pride that the king has advanced him goods in the firm conviction that he can repay. See O Rahilly 1928: 206–212.

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Foster mother: Finncóem

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The laws distinguished two types of fosterage (MacCone 2000: 203). One differentiated itself from the other insofar as one involved no fee. Finncóem’s role belongs to this latter, namely, ‘fosterage for affection’. Scholars have long held that foster parents in early Irish society were the unique donors and recipients of that special love which is understood today to be the natural prerogative of biological parents and their children. Yet, emphasis here is on maternal love, albeit indirectly. Finncóem was wife to Amorgen. She was also sister to Deichtire, as a result of which, she was, as a member of the mother’s kin, entitled to have a say in her nephew’s education (Charles-Edwards 1993: 24–25). At the very first sight of him, she expressly states that she loves him just as if he were her own child (Conall). Thus, stimulated by a memory of the love which Conall had awakened in her, she reacts with a spontaneous outburst of affection for her sister’s new-born. Best practice towards her own son, therefore, presented her as the ideal choice to be her nephew’s primary carer.33 Hers was an ideal domestic situation for the boy, for he was going to a household where there was another child and where each parent was individually chosen to be a fosterer. She and Amorgen had acted briefly in that capacity in the immediate aftermath of the child’s birth. Happily, Amorgen had built up an affectionate relationship with him, for he is called upon to be his aite, a term that that suggests that paternal warmth as well as multi-competence had dictated the choice. In addition, his massive fortune was an indication that he could provide for the boy according to his rank and meet any liabilities that could arise during the period of guardianship. This combination of wealth, military achievements and advanced learning guaranteed that he was well qualified not only to teach his foster son but also to oversee and judge the performance and trustworthiness of the other designated guardians. Similarly, as he himself valued no career to the detriment of another, it could be expected that he would bring the same objectivity to bear on overseeing the contributions made by others.

Sister’s son: Conall Cernach

Conall was chosen as companion so that the two young cousins should be ‘jointly reared’.34 He was recently nursed at his mother’s breast, thus making it possible for her to suckle her foster child. As Amorgen has already claimed a particular alliance with Conchobar through suretyship, an aknowledged warmth, based both on patronage and on kinship, already existed between the two families. But to comprehend the practical advantage that Setanta could gain from being reared with his cousin, one has to understand Conall’s particular affiliation with the king, his maternal uncle. It can be supposed from this close kinship that Conchobar, who was army chief, was already considering Conall, his sister’s son, for military service (Ó Cathasaigh 1986: 141). This, therefore, would be the ideal household for his own son. Family bonds were already secure, and, in all likelihood, a spirit of cousinly good will and competitiveness would encourage both children to strive together for a place in the higher echelons of the army.

Judge: Morann In early Irish society, aspirants for high office were eligible only if their qualifications were grounded in a professional background in which their father and grandfather had previously held position (Charles-Edwards 1993: 98). Therefore, Morann’s task was to make his choice from among a body of nobles, aristocratic warriors and professional experts.35 All the contest-

33 Guyonvarc’h translates cetaicce as next-of-kin. ‘Il est proche parent de Finnchoem’ (1965: 380). 34 ‘Foster brother’and ‘jointly reared’ are both denoted by comaltae. See Charles-Edwards 1993: 80–81. 35 nobles (kings) ríg, aristocratic warriors eirr and professional experts ollam.

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ants contributed either directly or indirectly to the demands of warfare. Each one was wealthy. Each represented the best from within his own sphere. The designation of Sencha as ollam makes this immediately obvious. Unsurprisingly, Fergus’s combative spirit and military skill together with his capacity for mercy designated that he was appointed to supervise the boy’s military training. It was Blai Briuguig’s genial disposition and readiness to provide that led Morann to announce ‘Let Blai Briuguig feed him’. He was, as we would say, cut out for the job. As indicated, Sencha’s and Fergus’s names denote innate characteristics for which they are commended ‘tradition’ and ‘mercy’ respectively, Blai Briuguig and the task of provider to which he is appointed have a similar force, for verb and noun are mutually self-defining – Rombiathad (Price 1966: 185–190). Amorgen’s excellence lay in the all-embracing range of roles which combined those of all three. Obviously, high achievement in any given field, while desirable and commendable in itself, did not nullify the value inherent in a latter-day ability to multi-task. Besides, Amorgen belonged to a household where the established ties of close kinship increased the likelihood that a foster child would be shown love and attention appropriate for his age. Each individual took his place in one category or another and made a unique contribution to it. Yet, paradoxically, each individual also reflected in his own make-up, in varying degrees, the attributes which distinguish the others. In this way, the most qualified brought their gifts to the enterprise for which they were most fitted, and relied on their aristocratic kin to respond on a correlative basis of wealth, learning or military support to keep the necessary balance upon which society depended. However, the delineation of each as a significant individual in his own right lends to the belief that a universal vision of humanity was championed as much as a specific political ideology. The nobles, in meeting their military and economic obligations and in their adherence to, and promulgation of, the truth, particularly, through the agency of the poet, were essential determinants of the success of the ruler.36 This conforms with the legally inscribed principle that society, just like the human body, depends upon the healthy functioning of each of its members. This metaphor of the body as a corporate unit is overt.37 The king, the ‘head’ of kin, oversees his son’s allocation to Finncóem to be nursed at her ‘breast’ before being relegated to sit at Fergus’s ‘knee’ for instruction. The debate could be part-reconstruction and part-invention of existing procedures where nobles gathered to consolidate contracts. Whether the transactions represent those that took place at court or at some other business venue, or perhaps, as suggested, at an actual inaugural ceremony, events follow a structured protocol. Speakers are afforded full opportunity to recommend themselves in person while paying due respect to the presiding officials – king and judge – whose dual presence gives maximum prestige to the formalities. They deliver an upto-date account of their careers to Morann who listens attentively before pronouncing his decisions. His appointments are enunciated with the solemnity and formulaic precision of a legal edict.38 In an oral society, use of rhetorical language and deliberate theatricality were widespread. It added to the publicity of such occasions. It made binding agreements memorable in and of themselves, and helped also, by virtue of the performance surrounding them, to fasten them in memory. Indeed, such was the seriousness attached to contract-making, that jurists equated their dissolution with the chaos caused by natural disasters or by war. They had seen, as had the protagonists in this tale, that the breaking of contracts rendered social and economic 36 ‘That is no tuath that has no king’. Accordingly, the people individually and collectively are seen to reflect or duplicate his attributes, for, in essence, the king and his tuath were mutually self defining. See, Byrne 1973: 31. 37 Imdich cach corp a meamra; every head defends its members (Cáin Aicillne in Ancient Laws of Ireland, Hancock et al. 1865–1901: 278–279). 38 Each individual verdict was uttered as a semantic unit, a one-sentence maxim in an alliterative style of verse.

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alliances unstable. As these affiliations extended beyond the parties themselves, an exaggerated fear developed in society lest a break-down of order on a global scale would follow (Stacey 1994: 27). The debate is an attempt to demonstrate how such a calamity could be avoided. References

Binchy, Daniel A. (1970) Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship (The O’Donnell Lecture for 1967–68), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Binchy, Daniel A. (1976) ‘Irish History and Irish Law: I and II’, Studia Hibernica, 23–31. Breatnach, L. (2006) ‘Satire, Praise and the Early Irish Poet’, Ériu, LVI. Byrne, J. F. (1973) Irish Kings and High Kings, London: B. T. Batsford. Hancock, W. N., J. O’Donovan, E. O’ Curry, T. O’Mahony, A. G. Richey, W. M. Hennesy and R. Atkinson (eds) (1865–1901) Ancient Laws of Ireland, Vol. 2, Dublin: A Thom; London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green; New York: Hein and Co. Charles-Edwards, T. M., with Morfydd E. Owens and D. B. Walters (eds) (1986) Lawyers and Laymen: Studies in the History of Law, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Charles-Edwards, T. M. (1993) Early Irish and Welsh Kinship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Charles-Edwards, T. M. (1994) ‘A Contract between King and People in Early Medieval Ireland? Críth Gablach on Kinship’, Peritia, 8: 107–119. Charles-Edwards, T. M. (2000) Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Simon (1981) The Foundations of Structuralism: A Critique Of Lévi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement, Sussex and New Jersey: Harvester Press. Deane, M. (2009) ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 23: 52–79. Deane, M. (2011) ‘From Sacred Marriage to Clientship: A Mythical Account of the Establishment of Kingship as an Institution’, in R. Schot, C. Newman and E. Bhreathnach (eds), Landscapes of Cult and Kingship, Dublin: Four Courts. Deane, M. (2011–12) ‘From Knowledge to Acknowledgement in Feis Tigi Becfholtaig’, Peritia, 22– 23: 149–176. Deane, M. (2013) ‘The Debate in Feis Tigi Becfholtaig: A Blueprint for Society’, Ulidia 3, Proceedings of the third International Conference on the Ulster Cycle of Tales. Draak, Maartje (1959) ‘Some Aspects of Kingship in Pagan Ireland’, in The Sacral Kingship, Studies in the History of Religions: Supplements to Numen IV, Leiden: E. J. Brill. Gaster, Theodor (1984) ‘Myth and Story’, in Alan Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative, Berkeley: University of California Press. Geertz, Clifford (1975) The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Hutchison. Guyonvarc’h, Christian-J. (1965) ‘La Conception de Cúchulainn’, Ogam, 17: 363–391. James, E. O. (1961) Comparative Religion: An Introductory and Historical Study. London, New York: Methuen. Jaski, Bart (1999) ‘Cú Chulainn, gormac and dalta of the Ulstermen’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 37 (Summer): 1–32. Jaski, Bart (2000) Early Irish Kingship and Succession, Dublin: Four Courts. Kelly, Fergus (ed.) (1976) Audacht Morainn, Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies. Kelly, Fergus (1995) A Guide to Early Irish Law, Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969) Structural Anthropology: Language and Kinship, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Schoeph, London: Penguin. Mac Eoin, Gearóid (1997) ‘The Briugu in Early Irish Society’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 49– 50: 482–493. Mauss, Marcel (1990) The Gift, London and New York: Routledge MacCone, Kim (1984) ‘Aided Cheltchair MaicUthechair: Hounds, Heroes and Hospitallers in Early Irish Myth and Story’, Ériu, 35: 1–30 MacCone, Kim (1990) Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature Maynooth: Maynooth Monographs 3 MacCone, Kim (2000) Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature, Maynooth: Maynooth Monographs 3.

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Mc Laughlin, R. (2008) Early Irish Satire, Dublin: Institute of Advanced Studies. Mc Leod, Neil (1982) ‘The Concept of Law in Ancient Irish Jurisprudence’, Irish Jurist, 17: 356–367. Ó Cathasaigh, Tomás (1977) The Heroic Biography of Cormac Mac Airt, Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies. Ó Cathasaigh, Tomás (1986) ‘The Sister’s Son in Early Irish Literature’, Peritia, 5: 128–160. Ó Corrain, Donnchadh (1986) ‘Historical Need and Literary Narrative’, in Celtic Studies 1983 – Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of Celtic Studies, Oxford, ed. D. Ellis Evans, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O Rahilly, T. F. (1928) ‘Tuillim Buidhe’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 17: 206–212. Price, Liam (1966) ‘The Origin of the Word Betagius’, Ériu, 20: 185–190. Rees, Alwyn and Rees, Brinley (1995) Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales, London: Thames and Hudson. Scowcroft, Mark (1995) ‘Abstract Narrative in Ireland’, Ériu 46: 121–158. Slotkin, E. M. (1977) ‘Medieval Irish Scribes and Fixed Texts’, Éigse, 17: 437–450. Smith, R. (1927) ‘The Speculum Principum in Early Irish Literature’, Speculum, 2: 411–445. Stacey, Robin Chapman (1994) The Road to Judgement: From Custom to Court in Early Medieval Ireland and Wales, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Watkins, Calvert (1979) ‘Is tre fír flathemon: Marginalia to Audacht Morainn’, Ériu, 30: 181–198. Windisch, Ernst (ed.) (1880) Irische Texte mit Wörterbuch, Leipzig: Hirzel.

Fans on the threshold: Steve Jobs, the sacred in memorialisation and the hero within Anu Harju and Johanna Moisander Aalto University

This paper examines the ways in which fans employ the mythological hero narrative after the loss of their object of fandom to make sense of and rationalise the past events. The study focuses on Steve Jobs fans and their online memorialisation practices and looks at how the fans as consumers construct the post-mortem identity of Jobs as a hero of our times. Our analysis suggests that through these communal memorialisation practices the fans engage in practices of fandom and identity work in ways that typically characterise religious groups. While death marks a separation in fan relationship, it also offers a threshold to the sacred realm and via memorialisation a continued and renewed connection with the object of fandom. ‘Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.’ Steve Jobs, 2005, Address to Stanford University.

Introduction

As myths operate on the basis of repetition and circulation of narratives (Maffesoli 2007), they are as pervasive as they are ubiquitous. In the literature on consumer research, myths have been studied extensively to understand the experiential, moral and ideological dimensions of consumption (Belk and Costa 1998; Kozinets 2001; Thompson 2004; Üstüner and Holt 2007; Thompson and Tian 2008; Luedicke, Thompson and Giesler 2010; Arsel and Thompson, 2011; Brown, McDonagh and Shultz 2013). Myths offer the enchantment claimed to have disappeared from our modern, technological world. It is often said that science has displaced religion, resulting not only in secularisation of religion, but also in alternative forms of spirituality. In most religions, the ideology of God being primary and thus representing the absolute truth is the foundation of the doctrine, monotheistic religions in particular. Cupitt (1998: 3, 8–9), in his examination of mysticism in our postmodern era, brings up the notion of ‘mysticism of secondariness’, by which he wants to underline the notion that nothing is primary. With no absolute origin or reference point, no entity representing the absolute truth, we may find mysticism in places other than religion or religious institutions. Consumption is one such activity that offers consumers the opportunity to experience the sacred in a secular context (Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989; Bonsu and Belk 2003; Belk and Tumbat 2005; Muñiz and Schau 2005). In this paper, we draw on the consumer culture theory (CCT) literature on sacralisation of the secular and mystification of the profane (Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989; Schau and Muñiz 2007; Rinallo, Scott and Maclaran 2013) to study fandom as a ‘sacred devotion with a secular focus’ (Belk and Tumbat 2005: 206). By means of a netnographic study, we set out to explore the practices of fandom that the fans of the late Steve Jobs engage in after the loss of their object of fandom. Focusing on the online memorialisation practices that the fans engage in, we elaborate, in particular, on the ways in which the fans employ a mythological hero narrative, the myth of the archetypal hero (Carlyle 1840; Campbell 1949), to construct the postmortem identity of Mr Jobs as a hero of our times and as a reflection of their unrealised self: the hero within. 51

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Our analysis suggests that in the process of bereavement, the object of fandom undergoes a significant resemiotisation process, whereby some meanings and artefacts become sacralised. In this discursively constructed transformation process, the fan object achieves an elevated status as object of worship, all the time becoming more and more an object of consumption. As fans create, recreate and negotiate the meanings produced in the acts of remembrance, a (digitally) mediated and discursively constructed simulation of the past emerges: during the process of memorialisation, the status and identity of the object of fandom is transformed from a celebrity CEO to a spiritual leader, a hero of our times. In this process, the commemorative fan productions create a site and a digital space for re-visitation of meaning(s) and ritualistic acts of remembrance. The newly created artefacts offer continuation and comfort amid sorrow and a sense of loss; the material commemorations allow the continuation of the fan relationship after death. In this way, the fans ensure the continued consumption of what once was, if in newly acquired and modified ways. A sociology of religion – perspective on fandom as sacred consumption

In building our theoretical perspective on fandom as hero worship and sacred consumption, we draw on the sociology of religion of Eliade (1959 [1957]), who emphasises duality of existence. In Eliade’s framework, the profane is separated from the sacred by a boundary and this boundary is essential as not only does it create the binary, it acts as a threshold allowing transition from the profane to the sacred realm. The sacred gains its significance as the ontological founding of what is real, of the world itself: the sacred, whatever it may be manifest as, provides the centre, a point of orientation. For Eliade, the need to locate the real drives people to the sacred; for the religious individual, the sacred is what constitutes the real. As a result, for individuals accepting to live in the profane space, existence appears unstructured. Eliade saw the notion of the sacred as a psychological construct, however buried deep and forgotten for most. Due to this even the most unreligious individual leading the most desacralised existence preserves religious valorisation of the world to a lesser or greater degree (Eliade 1959 [1957]: 23). This manifests in consumption behaviour today as consumers assign a qualitative difference to spaces and times of emotional importance, often anchored in and mediated by materiality. As the sacred is a matter of a qualitative difference as it is experienced, the notion is easily transferred to a secular context. Fans regularly engage in their fandom with objects with fervour akin to religious devotion and create rituals and practices to uphold their devotion: the sacred is inherently in the experience. Hierophany, the presentation of the sacred, is essential in the formation of religion (Eliade 1959 [1957]): his notion of ‘eternal return’ whereby rituals and myths not only commemorate hierophanies, but participate in and even constitute them. Religious behaviour can be characterised as participating in sacred events, not only commemorating or imitating them, and it is in this way that rituals restore the mythical time (Eliade 1959 [1957]). Hero worship in memorialisation

In studying fandom as hero worship, we draw on Carlyle (1840: 15), who viewed hero worship, the ‘transcendent wonder’ of someone greater than oneself, as ‘an eternal corner-stone’ of society that would always stop humankind from spiralling down to destruction. To Carlyle, hero worship was not only a natural and ever occurring behavioural tendency of all individuals but also what society was ultimately built on (1840: 12). In his view, individuals have an inherent need for worship, manifested throughout the times in religious worship and in worship based on mythologies. Today, many consumers follow and idolise celebrities. Even celebrity fandom reflects the values of the fans. What makes the Steve Jobs fans see him as a hero, and not only as a celebrity? Much of the hero worship takes place after his death. This is an interesting aspect of fandom as death is also an important element in the hero myth and in religion, too.

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Steve Jobs died on 5 October 2011. The fan community was shocked, saddened and hurled into productive action: they mourned visibly and publicly, paying homage to the former CEO of Apple by creating the most imaginary of tributes. The Apple stores flooded with flowers, candles and various digitally mediated farewells. From the humble beginnings of his life as an adopted child up to his very public and painful death, to many in this congregation, Jobs with his unique ‘from rags to riches’ life story epitomises the American dream. More than a celebrity CEO, his life is the ultimate hero narrative of our times. In his study on celebrities, Hollander (2010: 389, quoting Boorstin) brings up the temporal difference between the hero and a celebrity, stating that whereas the hero is made by folklore and sacred texts, the celebrity is always a contemporary. What happens to the memory of fandom object after death in the hands of devout fans is akin to transformation via folklore, that is, by revision and rewriting of history; the fans write their own fan text and construct meanings appropriate for their needs. Heroes have always reflected the needs of society (Carlyle 1840) and accordingly, the manifestation of the hero changes as times change; the hero stands to reflect the state of the society and its members at the time. Of time’s effect on the hero, Boorstin says ‘the passage of time, which creates and established the hero, destroys the celebrity’ (quoted in Hollander 2010: 389). Following the notion of time, we may note that in time, the memory also changes and acquires a different place and status in the cultural consciousness, which in itself serves to sustain the myth. As a contemporary, Steve Jobs transforms from a celebrity CEO to a hero of our times, but only after his death. Jobs and his identity undergo change as fans (re)create their own interpretations of the past in the numerous commemorations socially shared and consumed online. The problematic nature of memorials and commemorative statues is that they tend to make real something that is but a representation: they recreate the past as experienced by the group participating in the production. Jarvis (2011), in his research on online memorialisation of 9/11, discusses the constitutive nature of verbal commemorations and how these serve to recreate the past, thus changing it. Not only is the past recreated, as in the case of Jobs fans’ online commemorations, the ripple effects surface in the present as memorialisation becomes ritualistic and gradually the object of fandom is an image far removed from the original. Similarly, the post-mortem identity of the fan object is transformed and continues to be shaped by new appropriations and by fans continued contestation and negotiation of the values the content should reflect. Memorialisation, then, serves a multitude of functions. One of the purposes is to establish a continued relationship with the deceased. Another function is facilitation of adapting to life without the person who has died (Romanoff and Terenzio 1998). Generally, mourning is discussed in conjunction with the beloved. In the case of fandom, the relationship is one of affective consumption, framed in a cultural context and not based on a personal or a (seemingly) intimate relationship. However, as emotionally charged as fandom can be, it would be surprising if a sense of loss was not felt upon the death of the object of fandom. Memorialisation fills the gap left by the deceased. Producing commemorations and sharing in grief also helps sustain the community and legitimise grief. We may argue that post-mortem fandom is a form of extended memorialisation: as such, the object of fandom is in constant change, his/her postmortem identity subject to renegotiation as the collectively constructed and attached meaning(s) shift, reflecting the changes in the fan base and their ideologies. Eliade saw all myths as myths of origin, that is, creation myths that account for creation of something and also how the society came to be. This is because essentially what myth does is recount when the sacred first manifested itself, representing the truth. The creator is thus equally important. The Jobs fans tell the myth of how society as we now know it came to be; Jobs brought progress to humanity in the form of technology. They re-tell the narrative and in appropriating the story they mythologise his life as the hero narrative. It is understood in consumer culture studies that consumers regularly draw on myths to gain a deeper understanding of the culture. Myths are also used to frame individuals’ identity work, which fandom inherently is.

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Empirical study

Anu Harju and Johanna Moisander

Netnography, as defined by Kozinets (2010), was used as the method for data collection. Over the course of one year, 2012–2013, the author followed fan interaction in social media sites, e.g. YouTube. The author also investigated fans’ digital productions shared online. The researcher remained an observer only. One video with its user commentary was chosen as an exemplar, a video titled ‘In Dedication: Thank you, Steve!’. The video has 353,735 views and 680 comments, eliciting fierce debates over the representation of Jobs. Consumer comments on Apple’s memorial website, www.apple.com/stevejobs, were also observed for the purposes of further establishing the ideological basis of the fandom and the recurrent narrative themes. The research design is data driven and the research questions emerged from the empirical material. Looking at the fans’ memorialisation practices on social media sites, the study aims to shed light on the ideology underlying the fans’ collective identity. Examining the evaluation of experience(s) uncovers the signification process underlying collective memory construction and reveals which meanings are foregrounded. Looking at the role material plays in the fannish consumption and acts of remembrance helps establish the spiritual elements of consumption. The texts were analysed using content analysis and discourse analysis informed by Appraisal analysis (Martin 2004; Martin and White 2005), a framework for analysing negotiation of interpersonal and social relationships in text. The ideological and attitudinal positioning assumed by the writer manifests in text as positive and negative evaluations. Such interpersonal meaning is ‘the rhetoric power of language’ (Martin 2004: 341). Martin (2004: 341) points out that ‘a close reading of evaluation in discourse shows us something of the multidimensionality of what it means to belong’. Based on semantics rather than grammar, Appraisal is suitable for analysis in various research paradigms and it is particularly suitable for researching community interactions. Findings

Steve ... you have brought wonders to our lives. Thank you and we all love you. (Chew)

Religious narrative and the hero myth are prevalent themes in the fan discourse. In terms of his life events, Steve Jobs fits the hero narrative all too well. Typically, the hero answers the call to adventure and thus goes on a heroic quest. During the journey he gains knowledge and wisdom. The journey is riddled with difficulties, but the hero prevails and upon his return shares his wisdom. Steve Jobs’ epic journey of a career was riddled with difficulties, but he returned and shared his wisdom with the world in the form of technology. This type of narrative, depicting Jobs’ life as a heroic journey, is told by both Jobs and his fans. Jobs epitomises many of the characteristics of the archetypal hero, and true to the times, it is only fitting that he operated in the field of technology. Hero worship presents the central theme in the fandom studied here. It is contrasted with the hero narrative found in religion(s) and parallels will be drawn between fan practices in memorialisation and religious practices. The discussion on our empirical analysis will thus be divided into these two strands of emergent meanings. However, as these two themes are intertwined, the interrelation will be addressed in more detail in the discussion. Steve Jobs, the hero apparent in fannish consumption The hero is born – the journey metaphor

Hailed a hero by the fans, Jobs embodied the American dream; he was a self-made man who rose from rags to riches due to his resilience, individualism and extraordinary genius. The hero myth relies heavily on the heroic journey. It is not only the heroic deed, the gift, that defines the hero

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but the journey is of equal importance. The origin of the hero narrative can be traced back to the speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford 2005, his commencement address to the graduates. In his speech, Jobs rhetorically framed the struggles he had faced in his personal life and career as opportunities, and having later achieved great success the narrative, retrospectively, made sense: he was a survivor, and against all odds, at that. Having been given up for adoption, and rejected by the first adoptive parents, he was finally placed in a loving, if poor, family. The hero myth recounts miraculous circumstances surrounding birth. He had managed to go to college, again against the odds and through perseverance and hard work, yet he decided to drop out. In the speech, Jobs frames this as a positive outcome as he then had time to do things he enjoyed, which would later on influence his work. Jobs cultivated the meagre living and lead an ascetic lifestyle, recounted in his speech. Campbell (1949: 332–333) believed asceticism was a way for people to uncover what lies at the core. The realisation of the essence is at the very heart of the hero myth. In the speech, Jobs describes how, once at Apple, he was fired at thirty: ‘So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating’. In fact, he was fired by the very man he had hired, from Pepsi. Here enters the blunder (Campbell 1949: 42) that throws the hero to the other side; this corresponds to the call to adventure, which is not always self-initiated. Jobs, however, rhetorically frames this also as an opportunity that has a happy ending: now free, and freed, this time led Jobs to his most innovative creations. This period represents the time in the unknown, ‘the fateful region or both treasure and danger’ (Campbell 1949: 48); in real life, it was Jobs’ garage, which carries enough symbolism and is certainly not the only garage story in Silicon Valley, with Steve Wozniak as the helper on this journey through the unknown, riddled with challenges. But alas, the hero prevails: Apple hires Jobs and he makes a comeback that defies best fiction. In his personal life, Jobs had survived cancer (at the time of giving the Stanford speech). He talks to the graduates of hope, courage, love, and of death. All the elements of the great hero narrative are there. Jobs’ ideology most likely changed due to the battle with cancer, or so it would seem based on how his speech is structured and which themes arise. Facing death changes priorities, and this, too, may signify rebirth, as death is always followed by new birth, but death may mean the freeing of oneself from the shackles of one’s own past ideology. The rest of the hero narrative is filled in by the fans. New technological advancements, the iPhone, FaceTime, the iPad, were all taken as gifts from Steve Jobs. He is seen as the one who brought progress to humanity. He is seen as someone who is always sharing with and giving to the fans. The fans see Apple technology as Jobs ‘boon’, the hero’s gift, the elixir, that the hero hands down upon his return. This, then, is by definition of global benefit. Steve Thank you for changing the world. You leave behind so many fans, well wishers and now grievers. I can’t begin to say how wonderful of a person you were in my eyes. A warm smile and a kind heart shines in lasting memory and hope that your family can hold up ok without your presence. I love the feeling, that I knew you through the product you made. You will never be forgotten. You are Apple. I am Apple. Thanks for every seed you planted, for the roots that spread through the world and for the fruits of your beautiful mind and efforts. Thank you for Apple. (Kyle from Austin)

The hero’s first duty is to conquer fear; the last act, death or departure. However, even in the face of death the hero shows no fear – otherwise he would be no hero, Campbell (1949) notes. Incidentally, Jobs made a point of emphasising that ‘you can only join the dots afterwards’, thus encouraging the graduate students and others listening not to be afraid to take on new challenges. The clips the fans circulate all underline the basic tenet of Jobs’ own belief of follow-

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ing one’s own intuition; he vehemently warned against ‘living someone else’s life’, a message welcomed by the fans and recycled in their productions. Eliade points out that myth recounts the origin, as it is the story of when the sacred first appeared. After his death, the fans appropriated Jobs’ narrative to produce new meanings: which meanings become privileged and which are elided in the emergent hero narrative is telling of the underlying ideology of the remembrance. The fan productions most often revolve around the message first articulated in Stanford, by Jobs, so we recover Jobs as the one who initiated the hero narrative.

Elevation and the big divide

Mythical heroes regularly enjoy an elevated status as a marker of their special capabilities. In memorialisation, the fans discursively construct a divide to exist between them and Jobs, elevating him at the same time as someone to aspire to, but also as so unique that ‘mere mortals’ could never attain his level of genius. This ambivalent approach to his being is, on the one hand, indicative of the fans’ aspiration to be like him, yet on the other hand, of their resigned acknowledgement that only a few could be like him. It is in this quiet resignation that the notion of heroness is amplified and the myth gains momentum. After all, if we could all be like the hero, by definition, the hero would cease to exist. The following fan farewell demonstrates how fans conceptualise the relationship between them and Steve Jobs; as Jobs on a higher plane, which is most likely unattainable by any fan who is ‘just another Apple user’: The world has truly lost a great man, a creative thinker; a man who has changed all of our lives. I didn’t know Mr. Jobs personally, knew nothing about his personal life. I just followed his career as he appeared in the media like most anyone else. I could probably never hope to be as influential as Mr. Jobs was. I’m no one, really. just another Apple user. However, Mr. Jobs’ death comes at a time when I’m trying to figure out what life holds for me. I just moved to a new city, recently graduated with a Master’s degree – the world should be my oyster, so to speak. But it wasn’t until about an hour ago, when I learned that Mr. Jobs had died, that that actually meant something. We all have some untapped potential, and Mr. Jobs was living proof that if cultivated, some of us have the propensity to create something great and unfathomable to most. The life of Steve Jobs will be celebrated for years and years to come. May he rest in peace. (Danielle)

The ambivalence felt by the fans is what maintains the fandom and which serves as the basis of hero-worship. Elevation in position through the construction of mythical narrative to explain Jobs’ life is a means to comprehend the events and relate them in one’s own life.

Reverence after death: the social importance of hero-worship

If anything, the fans seek guidance from him even after his death; they draw meanings from his life, his words and his choices. They return to video memorials to experience the affective state Jobs’ words bring about time and time again. They consume him over and over again. Participating alongside heroes and other emblematic figures, Maffesoli argues (2007: 31), gives us a sense of ‘quasi-mystical communion, a common sentiment of belonging’. In a similar vein, Carlyle (1840) believed that in hero worship, the worshipper is indeed made higher, too, by doing reverence to an individual greater than oneself. Self-betterment is a common theme in the fan farewells, as this one from the Apple memorial site illustrates: Steve helped me to realise myself what I can do and what I should not pay attention to. Do best as one can. His spirit will be the part of my remaining life. It seems

Steve Jobs, the sacred in memorialisation and the hero within

that he did not pass away. I can feel him around my working time. (Bruce from China)

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Maffesoli (2007: 31) further states that these figures are objects more than subjects due to the fact that they only exist in the minds of other people as ‘ideal-types’. We see the construction of an ideal type in extreme fandom, where fans build the object of fandom ‘in their own image’, that is to say, as an extension of the (idealised) self (Sandvoss 2005). As the commemorative video tributes show, the initial recontextualisation of meanings is a selective representation of the fandom object, reflecting the fans’ vision. From the discursive construction of his being in the acts of remembrance emerges a new reality, the hyperreality whereby the new reality is a simulation of the past as it is imagined. In their narratives, the fans create a picture of Jobs as their inspirational leader, who gave the fans strength to follow their dreams and confidence to achieve it. These personal, emotional benefits continue to be felt after death: This is truly amazing, well done AzR you are really talented. We will all miss Steve very much, he has been a huge inspiration in my life and I just wanted to thank you for this great video. R.I.P Mr. Chairman! (Ptaz)

This video always gives me strength and motivation to keep following my dreams everything Steve says hits straight to the hart, God bless you Steve. (Anonymous 2)

Doing this, they also continue to co-construct the post-mortem identity of the object of fandom, shaping it in the image of their own ideology, their dreams and desires. Change – the sense of before and after

Heroes bring about change. Campbell talks about the different scope of the change, how in a nursery hero the change happens in the person and is internal, and how in the hero myth the change is global. In their lives, many people see the world change. Not many people, in their lives, change the world. To Steve Jobs, the man, the innovator, and living symbol of the American Dream who inspired us all. Though you lie at rest, the ideas, words, and actions you took in life will live on in the generations that follow as an eternal testament to what you have done for all of humanity. In the time you had, you chose to use the talents at hand to shape the future and make the world a better place. Thank you again for being the inspiration, pioneer, and leader you were and the symbol you now have now become. Rest In Peace. (Christopher)

The (unrealised) hero within

As the hero is in all of us, the hero is the one who realises he has no self. A true hero, then, is one with the cosmos (Campbell 1949). One of the fans wrote in their farewell on Apple website how thanks to Steve Jobs they found direction in life. Interestingly, the fan says: ‘The freedom of the universe is now yours’. Not only does this tie in with heroness as oneness with the cosmos, as Campbell sees it, but is also foregrounds freedom. Steve, Your creative inspiration touched not millions but the entire world. You gave me direction and a life. (I’m guessing I’m not the only one). The freedom of the universe is now yours. (Steve from Rhode Island)

A source of inspiration to millions, Steve Jobs represents a possibility: if I put my mind to it, I, too, can succeed. A true sense of self-betterment arises as a form of hero worship.

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Religiosity and the sacred in fannish consumption An anonymous, ideological congregation

The social practices associated with fannish consumption, particularly after death when fandom moves on to be realised through memorialisation, shares with religious following many of the same characteristics. The deep emotional engagement and ritualistic revisitation of the sacred, personal meanings that continue to be drawn after death and holding the memory and the message as a ‘guiding light’ in one’s life mark the Jobs fandom as different from a mere hobby. Like any fandom, the fans form a heterogeneous group. As anyone can convene online, they commune in anonymity around the fan-produced artefacts that have come to function as digital shires. The following video comment was made around September 2013, two years after Jobs’ passing and the creation of the video: wow. it is touchy when we’re all listening to his voice again. thanks for made this video. (Hang Le)

Fans gather in online sites of mourning to share meanings and ideologies, to communally validate and continue their fandom, their fandom conversely validating the community. In the online context, anonymity is often named as a problematic aspect of communion and, consequently, authenticity is often questioned. However, gatherings with a religious orientation share with online fandom this element of anonymity. Sharing a strong affect-based cause or ideology, as illustrated by the quote above, is in itself enough to validate authenticity of emotion and motivation. Examining these social collectives as communities based on shared ideology and a set of beliefs with a hero figure at the centre of the mythological narrative, the structure and formation of both fannish and religious organisation presents in the same light. While it is the church where religion is practiced in addition the home, the online space offers similar opportunities for the expression of one’s beliefs and identity, while sharing the fannish consumption of the hero myth legitimises the practice. Steve, you bring to all humanity the forbidden fruit of paradise: the Apple. (Anonymous 3)

Not without humour, the fans exploit religious metaphors and figures of speech in their farewells. Religious motifs are a recurring element, the act of giving as one of the most prominent: Jobs is seen as a giver of many things, ranging from progress to humanity to wisdom on the nature of life and death.

Death

Death and the notion of eternal life are central in religious belief: Jesus, for example, died for our sins and gave us eternal life. He was sent to Earth by God and was working as God’s medium. In the fans’ sentiments of grief, we see them frame Jobs’ life as the work of God in that Jobs was the medium sent down to deliver a message or to give a gift: I am so sorry. You are the best. Thank you for God who send you to us. (Seongil)

Framing religion as a hero narrative, the gift given to the world by the hero was eternal life; life, according to religious doctrine, continues after death in the sacred realm, in Heaven. Death is not a terminal aspect of life, but a qualitative difference in existence (Eliade 1959 [1957]). In the fan narrative, Jobs’ person lives on, his identity being re-shaped in the process and in the

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end, what is sacralised, and what is consumed in fandom, is an image (re)created rather the real individual Jobs once was. A wonderful video of a great visionary and a deeply spiritual person. Steve Jobs seemed to be most comfortable with Buddism and eastern philosophy, the comments made in this video reflect these beliefs and i am afraid that those who are offended by this video just dont get it. (Rajesh)

This further underlines that it is the meanings represented and embodied in him that are at the root of the fandom; he is the hero personified, and the fans continue to work on their own identities and at the same time on the hero narrative of their remembrance. Death is what allows this (re)creation and (re)construction. Religious narratives are also stories based on mythology, written post-mortem, with meanings that symbolise life, death, moral code, social ties and cohesion, to name but a few. Via their devices, the fans are closer to their hero figure: in a state of disbelief after his death, some Jobs fans imagined he continued living as Siri, the speech function in iPhone, now closer than ever, in the pocket. This further illustrates the spiritual dimensions of consumption in memorialisation and fandom, and relates to the conception of death in religion: death is but a qualitative change in existence, not termination of existence altogether. Eliade believes rites of passage were invented so as to avoid the concept of death. Death is then seen as taking place in the profane only, and life is seen as continuing in the sacred. People of religion attend the church for continued relationship with the creator. Fans, too, in their memorialisation continue to visit meanings while creating new ones. Drawing inspiration from Jobs’ life after his death, the fans associate Jobs with all that is good and integrate this belief with their own actions. The following is from the Apple memorial site: Steve will be with us for all time in the best of our human spirit. (Ron)

Incorporating the meanings fans associate with their object of fandom and with their personal ideology and outlook on life helps the fans carry the memory on as internalised belief. This way he continues to live, but in a different mode: in the sacred realm. This way the fan reverence as sacred devotion infiltrates the fans’ everyday lives and guides their action. Threshold

Death marks a separation. In rituals, artificial boundaries are created to stand for a threshold to the sacred. Sacred, for Eliade, is essentially in the experience (rather than representing an inherent quality of an object); he believed even the non-religious attach special meaning to some places and times of personal significance, and therefore the sacred, to him, is not necessarily a religious dimension. Rites of passage are often used as such artificially created threshold moments to signal and aid transition: to mark something as qualitatively different is to make real the transition that follows. In order to gain access to the meanings Jobs represents after his death, to feel close to him for the purposes of solace and inspiration, and more importantly, to be able to do this repeatedly, fans assign special meaning to various artefacts thus sacralising them. The commemorative video tributes act as such thresholds that are repeatedly visited in order to attain an emotional space deemed sacred: This keeps me going ... (Kay Lynn Gabaldon)

These threshold items become integral in the rituals and acts of remembrance as they help fans access the desired mental state. We find examples of such use of items in the church, for example, the rosaries used in Catholic faith.

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Affective engagement and sacralisation

Technology infiltrates the fans’ lives and there is a strong element of puritanism regarding the brand. The reason, however, lies with the creator, not the brand per se: to the fans, the products are proof of his genius, the reward of his heroic journey and his gift to the world. Indeed, the technology validates his triumphant return and his status as a heroic persona. This message was posted on the Apple memorial site and illustrates the depth and breadth of engagement with technology. Also, the Apple technology is credited to Jobs: as the fan below shows, many address Jobs as ‘you’, in the second person instead of talking about him in the third person. This term of address further illustrates the personal nature of the fan relationship and the continued need to address Jobs using these term even after his death. Dear Steve, although I have never met you, I will in fact miss you. I feel like I have known you half my life, buying my first iPod 5gig as soon as they came out, getting the iMac back in ‘99 and watching the Keynote videos annually. Your operating systems and innovative products have marked periods of my life and have allowed my creative side to develop through all you made possible. Steve, thank you for making my life more full, you were a great gift to the Earth. (Bob)

now that i write this letter using my mac book, which will then send this email wirelessly to you through my apple extreme, you [your] work will be remembered, even when i watch tv tonight i will use my apple tv and before i go to bed face time my 3 girls through my iphone 4, and i will then go to bed with music using my itouch and then my work out in the morning with my nano. you changed that [the] world and man [made] life simpler and fun for all R.I.P. MR. Jobs. (Anonymous 4)

After his death, some fans reported that their devices had ‘lost some of the magic’. Others were concerned what would happen to the world now that Jobs was no longer here. Affective engagement is not only relative to products; many of the fans formed a deep personal and emotional bond with Jobs, even if he was a celebrity CEO they had never actually met. Watching the video tribute, this fan describes their feelings of loss in terms of death: the following comment illuminates the fans’ relationship with their fandom object as internalised, and as Sandvoss noted (2005), integrated with the sense of self. Including product information the fan wants to communicate his fandom and separate himself from mourners of non-fandom orientation: When I found out Steve died I died a little and shed a tear. R.I.P Steve jobs, the father of technology – from my iPod 4g. (gankaru24)

References to family ties and sentiments of love are frequent in the fans’ farewells, as this message on the Apple memorial site shows: Steve Jobs was the greatest and the smartest person alive on this planet. He has a special place in my heart. I will miss him a lot. I loved Steve Jobs, and today I’ve lost a member of my family. R.I.P Steve Jobs. (Arpit)

The emotional relationship is based on the benefits felt by the fans regarding their own personal development, inspired by the heroic tale of Steve Jobs’ life. Campbell (1949: 32) states that the successful outcome of the heroic journey is ‘the release of the flow of life into the body of the world’, a notion echoed in the religious motif of eternal life as a gift to humanity from above. 60

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Consumption of religion, too, is emotionally invested and importance is placed on the reception of the gift, the eternal life. The memory of Jobs restores life to his fans in the form of a continued state of inspiration and hope even after his death, and to sustain it, the memory is given the form of a cultural narrative. Where heroes passed or where heroes were born, temples used to be erected (Campbell 1949) to mark the space of the sacred: the video tributes are the modern day version of the more glorious memorials.

Ritualistic practices and (technologically) mediated religiosity

In order to feel close to the hero, the fans engage with their devices ritualistically and frequently. It is not uncommon to have their house filled with Apple products. The fans describe feelings of unity and connection with Jobs when engaged with the products; they are in effect consuming his presence via proxy. Quoting Belk (1988: 157), Vander Veen (1994: 333) reminds us that relationships with objects are always three-way: person–thing–person. It seems natural to regard electronic devices, such as phones, as symbolic bridges connecting fans with their hero, producing a sense of intimacy. Such a three-way relationship holds for threshold items, too, and as Eliade theorised, they form a crucial part of experiencing the sacred as without them there is no boundary separating the profane from the sacred, no threshold granting access to the sacred. In rituals, artificial boundaries as thresholds are created, for example, rites of passage (Eliade 1959 [1957]). For the fans, threshold items are not limited to devices used in the everyday: commemorative videos may also function as a threshold to the sacred, prompting a strong affective response. They are material expressions of that which is sacred, the ideology embodied in the hero. Revisitations to these sites establish a ritual and render the social media sites into digital memorial sites: Fantastic tribute to Jobs. Watching over and over again. (Bobby Brenman)

RIP Steve Jobs. We love you, this video always make me cry. (Anonymous 5)

In their practices of mourning, digital artefacts, fan productions and devices alike come to act as thresholds in the ritualistic engagement with the items, granting access to special emotional place. This mediation is not limited to remembrance, as this fan describes, but the whole relationship with the object of fandom is mediated by the very technology: You know, I didn’t even know Mr Jobs and yet through his products, I feel like he’s a best friend. This video made me well up. RIP Mr Jobs, you will be very much missed by this world ... (Richard Davies)

Identity and continued practice after death

Religious belief is a part of one’s identity and integrates with the sense of self much in the same way as extreme fandom does (Sandvoss 2005). After the passing of a family member or an otherwise important person, a memorial service is organised to mark the death, to ritualistically honour the transition and to prepare the bereaved for their new social role in society as well as their new and modified identity and sense of self after the death (Romanoff and Terenzio 1998). However, as fandom is often seen as a peculiar form of interest and devotion, mourning for the loss of the object of fandom is not readily accepted, not even on the commemorative video sites: this is fucking stupid. Go cry in a starbucks or something. (TehShewz)

Anti-fans as social critics and as morally superior invade the memorial space and cast their regularly anti-capitalism discourse and consumerism-related disdain on the fans engaged in

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collective idolisation and positive mantra about the globally felt meaning of Jobs’ life and achievements. Framing their fandom in the positive and depicting Jobs as the hero of our times is a way to justify their hero-worshipping behaviour and devoutness of belief. It is in the collective acknowledgement of fandom and, more specifically, of grief that the fans continued identity as a fan after the death of Jobs is legitimised. The primary effect of the anti-fan invasion is a strengthened sense of unity among the fans as together they set out to defend their ideology and reverence. Having their fannish consumption trivialised and themselves being called delusional and consumerist, the fans defensive rhetoric ends to centre around notions of humanity as well as progress. Forget YOU ABOVE ... mister whatever. Steve JOBs Rocks. He was a good soul and a genius. Listen to the words. I hope I can accomplish 1/8th as much in my life. I couldn’t come close to what he gave America and the world! What’s your problem? Self-reflect and change your life. Listen to his words of wisdom ... He’s a Good Soul and he’s in HEAVEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (mjhd592)

In addition to visionary genius and innovator, Jobs is viewed by many of his fans as a humanitarian. This, of course, is in stark opposition to the collective anti-capitalist views of the antifans. Discussion

Death is not the final point for identity construction but it continues post-mortem (Bonsu and Belk 2003). The mythical hero lives on in the evolving narrative, and the identity of the fan evolves with it. In the process of recontextualisation and resemiotisation new meanings arise; the origin and type of meanings that are privileged offer insight on the meaning-making process and the prevailing ideology (Iedema 2003). Sandvoss (2005: 163) notes that the ‘intense semiotic productivity of fans […] confirm the increasingly reflective nature of fan texts’, underlining the notion that fandom is a self-reflective activity whereby the object of fandom is to be taken as a reflection of the self of the fan. This self-reflective relationship results in mutual change as the object of fandom ‘as medium of reflection gains the ability to shape the reflected self, [and] the ego reformulates the object’ (Sandvoss 2005: 162). We see the identity work as ongoing after death, fans appropriating the memory of Jobs, collectively negotiating and foregrounding the meanings they feel are the most significant to them. The constitutive role of the acts of remembrance in (re)making and (re)constructing history is documented by Jarvis (2011) in his research on 9/11 online memorialisation, and our analysis shows similar tendencies of creating, if not alternate, a heavily biased past. As to mysticism and the source of religion and sacred texts, Cupitt (1998) argues there is nothing prior to language. He maintains ‘[t]here is no such thing as “experience”, outside of and prior to language’ (1998: 74). He goes on to state that language functions not to convey, but rather, to determine and form experience (1998: 74). We shape our experiences as we describe them: the same applies to (re)constructing memories and retelling the past. By choosing to privilege some meanings in memorialisation, others are unavoidably rejected. Sacred texts, too, have been drawn up after the fact, defining and shaping the experience. Fans interpret the object of fandom through their own worldview; a phenomenon Sandvoss (2005) calls ‘fanalysis’. As a result, how the fans view the fandom object is dependent on their own existing ideologies. The ideological basis of the fan collective is thus reflected in the emerging characterisations of Jobs. In the face of the multitude of demands of today, fans gather around memorial artefacts as if these were emblems of individuality, to justify their personal choices and beliefs and to regain strength to follow through. ‘What would Steve do?’ was one fan’s mantra to get through the hard times. In its communality, the tribal conviction is also a very

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personal one. The ideological discourse enacted by the fans is strongly individualistic, celebrating freedom and the courage to act on individual choice. The heroic journey is very much a journey to the self. The difficulties we face, the metaphorical dragons we have to slay in order to get to our destination, all represent mental and psychological challenges we are to overcome if we desire to grow and change, to become all we can be. Campbell (1949) believes the All is in all of us, however, as it resides in the unconscious, and tapping to its potential poses a challenge. Myths in their allegorical nature, and rites of passage as celebrations of transition, illustrate the oneness that holds between the individual and the group, highlighting the great continuum of life where we are but a small part (Campbell 1949: 330– 333). Myths help create social cohesion and offer a framework for understanding our lives, but more importantly they provide a window to the culture and a connection with the past. Not everyone succeeds in becoming the hero of their wanting in their own life. As the fans worship their cultural hero, they reflect their hopes of personal attainment as they celebrate the great personal achievements of one individual, their hero. Drawing on the hero myth helps fans frame Jobs’ life in understandable terms and relate his life, career and death to their own lives. In the era where individualism is celebrated and consumers are seeking the lost connectedness as well as re-enchantment, witnessing a public person overcome their difficulties in both personal and working life with a triumphant finale speaks to many consumers’ hopes and desires. Moreover, the oppositional element woven into Jobs’ life story, succeeding despite apparently defying the norm, is testament to individualism and faith in one’s own abilities. It also foregrounds bravery: after all, the first task of the hero is to conquer fear (Campbell 1949). Even in the face of death the hero is to show no trace of fear. The seeds for the hero myth were sown in Stanford, if not earlier: addressing death in public and framing it as a ‘change agent’ that brings on positive change, Steve Jobs rhetorically took charge of the narrative of his life. While what is sacralised in the fans’ consumption is the ideology represented by the hero, it is the self that is realised and produced in consumption (Firat 1991; Firat and Venkatesh 1995). The hero represents a possible self of the fan: as (based on Jung) Vander Veen (1994: 332) argues, the hero archetype is a reflection of the archetype of the self. What essentially is produced by the various acts of remembrance is the image of the hero within. As essential as this is for continued fandom, so it is for the identity and sense of self for the fan as consumer. The heroic journey of the fan object also provides a source of inspiration in the form of solace during one’s own struggles, and identifying with one’s hero may help the fan reach facets of the self they do not yet fully know they possess. As Campbell points out (1949: 337), ‘it is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse’. Maybe, sometimes, it takes just one individual to unlock the potential of many.

References

Arsel, Z. and Thompson, C. J. (2011) ‘Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field- Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths’, Journal of Consumer Research, 37 (5): 791–806. Belk, R. and Costa, J. A. (1998) ‘The Mountain Man Myth: A Contemporary Consuming Fantasy’, Journal of Consumer Research, 25 (3): 218. Belk, R. and Tumbat, G. (2005) ‘The Cult of Macintosh’, Consumption Markets & Culture, 8 (3). Belk, R., Wallendorf, M. and Sherry Jr, J. F. (1989) ‘The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behaviour: Theodicity on the Odyssey’, Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (1): 1–39. Belk, R. (1988) ‘Possessions and the extended self’. Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 15(2): 139168. Bonsu, S. and Belk, R. (2003) ‘Do Not Go Cheaply into That Good Night: Death-Ritual Consumption in Asante, Ghana’, Journal of Consumer Research, 30: 41–55. Brown, S., McDonagh, P. and Shultz II, C. J. (2013) ‘Titanic: Consuming the Myths and Meanings of an Ambiguous Brand’, Journal of Consumer Research, 40 (4): 595–614.

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Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Collected Works, 3rd edn, Bollingen Series XVII, Joseph Campbell Foundation, Novato, CA: New World Library. Carlyle, T. (1840) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, London: James Fraser. Cupitt, D. (1998) Mysticism after Modernity: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Eliade, M. (1959 [1957]) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York: Harcourt. Firat, F. (1991) ‘The Consumer in Postmodernity’, in Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 18, ed. R. H. Holman and M. R. Solomon, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research. Firat, F. and Venkatesh, A. (1995) ‘Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (3): 239–267. Hollander, P. (2010) ‘Why the Celebrity Cult?’, Society, 47 (5): 388. Iedema, R. (2003) ‘Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as Multi-semiotic Practice’, Visual Communication, 2 (1): 29–57. Jarvis, L. (2011) ‘9/11 Digitally Remastered? Internet Archives, Vernacular Memories and WhereWereYou.org’, Journal of American Studies, 45 (4): 793–814. Kozinets, R. V. (2001) ‘Utopian Enterprise: Articulating the Meanings of Star Trek’s Culture of Consumption’, Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (1): 67. Kozinets, R. V. (2010) Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online, London: Sage. Luedicke, M. K., Thompson, C. J. and Giesler, M. (2010) ‘Consumer Identity Work as Moral Protagonism: How Myth and Ideology Animate a Brand-Mediated Moral Conflict’, Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (6): 1016–1032. Maffesoli, M. (2007) ‘Tribal Aesthetic’, in B. Cova, R. V. Kozinets and A. Shankar (eds), Consumer Tribes, Oxford: Elsevier. Martin, J. R. (2004) ‘Mourning: How We Get Aligned’, Discourse & Society, 15.2/3: 321–344, Special Issue on ‘Discourse around 9/11’. Martin, J. R. and White, P. R. R. (2005) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Muñiz, A. M. and Schau, H. J. (2005) ‘Religiosity in the Abandoned Apple Newton Brand Community’, Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (4): 737–747. Rinallo, D., Scott, L. and Maclaran, P. (2013) Consumption and Spirituality, New York: Routledge. Romanoff, B. D. and Terenzio, M. (1998) ‘Rituals and the Grieving Process’, Death Studies, 22: 697– 711. Sandvoss, C. (2005) Fans: The Mirror of Consumption, Oxford: Polity. Schau, H. J. and Muñiz, A. M. (2007) ‘Temperance and Religiosity in a Non-marginal, Non-stigmatized Brand Community’, in B. Cova, R. V. Kozinets and A. Shankar (eds), Consumer Tribes, Oxford: Elsevier. Thompson, C. J. (2004) ‘Marketplace Mythology and Discourses of Power’, Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (1): 162–180. Thompson, C. and Tian, K. (2008) ‘Reconstructing the South: How Commercial Myths Compete for Identity Value through the Ideological Shaping of Popular Memories and Countermemories’, Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (5): 595–613. Üstüner, T. and D. B. Holt, D. B. (2007) ‘Dominated Consumer Acculturation: The Social Construction of Poor Migrant Women’s Consumer Identity Projects in a Turkish Squatter’, Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (1): 41–56. Vander Veen, S. (1994) ‘The Consumption of Heroes and the Hero Hierarchy of Effects’, Advances in Consumer Research, Volume 21, ed. Chris T. Allen and Deborah Roedder John, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research.

Online references Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford, 2005, transcribed: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html (accessed 26 May 2014). Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford, 2005, on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RjKKp3NA (accessed 26 May 2014).

II

Ríastartha

Ríastartha – Introduction Donncha Kavanagh

University College Dublin

In 1968, Ray and Charles Eames released Powers of Ten, a short film depicting the relative scale of the universe in factors of ten. Starting with a picnic in Chicago, the film shows the original image from ten times further out every ten seconds, until we eventually reach the far edge of the universe. Then we zoom rapidly inwards, into the hand of the picknicker, magnifying by ten every ten seconds, until the film ends inside a proton of a carbon atom. It’s a wonderful wee movie and well worth seeing at www.powersof10.com. Most strikingly, it demonstrates how order and disorder are implicated in one another, how the micro and the macro can be uncanningly similar, and how the ‘world’ can shift its shape as one’s point of view changes. These themes are also reworked in ancient myths, which are often stories about order and disorder jousting with one another, where local narratives about small groups speak to wider social and cosmic issues, and where shape-shifting characters abound. We have grouped this selection of papers under the title Ríastartha, which translates as ‘contorted (though Kinsella (1970) coins the term ‘warp-spasm’) and speaks to the shape-changing attributes of the trickster, but also to the way in which order and disorder and the micro and macro are mutually implicated in a kind of cosmic Gordian knot. Philip Roscoe’s paper is about conceptions of evolutionary order imposed by competition, and, in particular, how neoliberal notions of spontaneous order have inserted themselves as a fashionable fantasy informing macro-economic policy and local practices in markets and organisations. Similar to the way Powers of Ten zooms in and out, there is a contemporary narrative that how order comes to be at the level of the gene also operates at the level of individual market transactions as well as the economy and society. Roscoe demurs from this story, arguing that turning Darwin (via Dawkins and Dennett) into a grand theory capable of explaining the behaviour of genes and market actors is an ‘extraordinary leap’ and is best understood as a form of mythopoeia, or myth-making. He makes the compelling point that the genes-eye view would have us see firms as mere containers for firm-level routines, which would lead us to the more than peculiar position of claiming that firms exist only to preserve practices like capital budgeting. More broadly, extending Dawkins’ biological theory into a theory of society seems inappropriate given the prima facie evidence that ants, while they may make interesting structures, don’t make movies like Antz (1988) nor do they send ants to the moon. Humans are different and a theory that buries these differences seems incomplete at best, and dangerous at worst. In particular, universal Darwinism loses any sense of historical reflexivity, with each situation being akin to a step in a Markov chain, wherein it is inconsequential how one got to a particular position; moreover, the fact that this position has been achieved, rather than innumerable potential others, provides the basis for a normative celebration of the status quo. Universal Darwinism, according to Roscoe, is the ‘myth of myths’ that seeks not only to explain the social and economic world, but also to justify actions that seem perverse and profoundly inhuman. For Roscoe, the writings of the Austrian economist Frederick Hayek were important in legitimising a view of the market as an extension of – rather than a mere analogy with – an environment that ruthlessly and neutrally selects that which fits best. Hayek has a more central role in the paper by Stephen Dunne, Jo Grady, and Chris Grocott, which describes particular instances of ‘shape-shifting’. First, it explores the peculiar phenomenon where the basic principles of neo-liberalism are, not only retained, but also actually sustained by the current eco67

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nomic crisis. Indeed a paradigm’s shape-shifting ability – as in the capacity to incorporate and feed on anomalies that should undermine its foundations – is perhaps a paradigm’s defining attribute. Second, their paper considers more individual examples of shape-shifting, specifically the case of Hayek who, while advocating a philosophy of openness, seems to have worked to close down certain forms of conversation. They also examine the curious case of Karl Popper who promulgated the idea of falsification yet was strangely silent when it came to holding the influential Mont Pelerin Society, of which he and Hayek were prominent members, up to the standards laid out in The Open Society (Popper 1940). Dunne, Grady and Grocott’s story describes and analyses how power is practiced, in terms of the power to determine who has the power to speak and how they can speak, as well as the power to know. Shape-shifting also features in the other two papers that make up this section, both of which focus on the character of the Fool and the Trickster, two liminal and related entities that feature in many myths and in the folklore of various cultures. Anna Zueva-Owens focuses on the Fool’s capacity for subversion and destabilisation, and the Fool’s ability (and duty) to speak to power, even if this can be dangerous. This aspect of the Fool’s character neatly captures some of the themes in the first two papers, which could be read as being about how to construct knowledge, the specialised nature of economic and managerial knowledge, and, more broadly, the problem of who has the right to speak. Linking the archetype of the Fool with the writings of Levinas, Zueva-Owens argues that the Fool is coterminous with ethical action and creativity, and she uses this to map out an idiosyncratic role for the contemporary corporate responsibility (CR) manager – one of organisational Fool – that provides a legitimising frame for critique within an organisational hierarchy. Echoing March’s ([1976] 1979) writings on ‘sensible foolishness’, she works to define and celebrate a creative, critical and yet marginal role for the CR manager. Cameron takes in a wider field of vision – analogous to the step changes in Powers of Ten – as his paper studies, not only the Fool, but also the related characters of the Trickster and Devil, and, most appropriately for this conference, their collective conjunction with changing understandings of money and the market. Much of his sparkling analysis is centred on Goethe’s Faust – written in the late eighteenth century when ‘modern’ money was coming to be – where the Devil, the Trickster and the Fool are brought together in one manifestation. He also analyses a musical comedy from the 1820s, Artois and Rochefort’s story about the ‘Money Devil’. The ambiguous relationship between money and the devil continues to be explored in contemporary popular culture, as in Martin Scorsese’s film, Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which is based on Jordan Belfort’s story about his hedonistic life as a stock swindler, drug addict and convict. The movie boasts the most number of uses of the word ‘fuck’ in a non-documentary film, which is interesting given Cameron’s gloss on that swear-word’s origins, and indeed Belfort’s own assertion to 2,500 souls in Dublin last month – each paying between €50 and €120 – that, ‘Getting rich is fucking easy’. Quite. Powers of Ten brings the viewer on a rapid and memorable journey from a picnic to the cosmos to the interiority of life itself. Similarly, these four papers, and indeed the wider collection of papers in this volume, presents us with a kaleidoscopic picture of the complexity of money and markets, and how a mythical perspective can weave a thread of insight into our contorted understandings of these fascinating phenomena.

References

Kinsella, Thomas (1970) The Táin, Oxford: Oxford University Press. March, James G. ([1976] 1979) ‘The Technology of Foolishness‘, in James G. March and Johan P. Olsen (eds), Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations, , Bergen: Universitetsforlaget. Popper, Karl R. (1940) The Open Society and Its Enemies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Money’s unholy trinity: Devil, trickster, fool Angus Cameron

University of Leicester

This paper argues that long-standing traditional associations between money and the devil remain with us – best seen in narratives about the (im)morality of money following the financial crisis of 2008. However, such temporary eruptions of moral concern about money and finance tend to mask the more fundamental problems of a money economy that these associations sought to articulate in the first place. The fundamentally ‘demonic’ nature of money is not necessarily either about ‘evil’ or ‘evil-doing’, but expresses the ontological insecurities both of money itself and of the social changes it brings about. The paper explores both the long historical association between money and three overlapping ‘psychologems’ – Trickster, Devil and Fool – and then the ways that the essence of these characters endures in contemporary narratives of money.

Introduction

In September 2008, just after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and as the full scale of the banking crisis was becoming apparent, a lone protestor appeared on Wall Street carrying a homemade cardboard placard. It expressed in rather abrupt terms what many people were feeling. Harking back to tales from an earlier crisis, in large black-painted letters it presented the banking community with an uncompromising invitation: ‘Jump, you fuckers’ (Hind 2009). As images of this placard spread widely on the internet, the main focus of attention, understandably, was on its blunt invitation to suicide. But what interests me here is its use of that particular ‘f’ word. While our protester was clearly at one level simply venting his spleen at the greed and stupidity of Wall Street, his choice of language was more subtle than it might first appear. It was, of course, intended to be offensive but the protester, knowingly or not, also invoked a much older history of money and banking. Specifically, the term used on his placard originated as a reference to the German banking family, Fugger (or Fokker) (Ehrenberg 1928). The Fugger family rose to prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and for a time completely dominated European finance. It was their notorious ruthlessness in getting to this position of power that caused their name to be linked to that older Anglo-Saxon word. Even knowing this particular etymology, the term could still be taken as simply abusive – and for many using it over the centuries undoubtedly that was its primary function. But the word also carries a more sinister meaning, one emanating from the religious rather than the economic context in which the Fugger operated. Along with the abuse comes an allusion to aspects of money and banking that have been written out of modern economics. Now a byword for dry technicality – all algorithms, graphs and mathematical derivatives – for much of its history finance was far more exciting – regarded as the stuff of the libidinous, tricksterish devil. Although money has been regarded with considerable suspicion throughout its history (Kurke 1999; Davies 2002), its conjunction with the devil has a more recent and quite specific history. Much of this stemmed from the energetic reinvention of Satan by all sides during the religious wars of Reformation/Counter-reformation in Europe (Burton Russell 1986). When Martin Luther nailed his ‘95 Theses’ to the door of the Wittenberg Church in 1517, one of his 69

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main targets was the practice of selling ‘indulgences’ – absolution from worldly sin bought for money.1 This meant that his energies were directed both against the Catholic Church for permitting such a corruption of faith, but more precisely against the Fugger. The Fugger bank, whose tentacles reached into all the commercial centres of Europe, had been granted the license to sell indulgences throughout the Holy Roman Empire and was thus regarded by Luther as the devil incarnate (Ehrenberg 1928). And if the Fugger were devils, the emergent system of finance capital over which they presided was ample evidence of evil abroad. Between the 95 Theses and our lone protestor, therefore, lies a 500 year history of connection between ancient modes of mythic personification and money. This is particularly true of the Devil, but I also want to include the closely related entities of Trickster and Fool; indeed these three are essentially the same character and all have at various times been associated with the material and moral ambiguities of money. These relationships have taken very different forms over the centuries and across the many places in which they have been articulated, but until comparatively recently have been consistently visible. They start to wane towards the middle of the nineteenth century and, apart from sporadic reminders such as that on Wall Street in 2008, have by now largely vanished from popular consciousness.2 What I want to explore here is what the mythic personification of money once achieved that might explain its longevity. I argue that it performed the important function – common to much that comes under the heading ‘myth’ – of representing (without resolving) tensions within and between social phenomena. If this was important to social understandings of money in the past, what have been the consequences of losing this peculiar way of representing money more recently? I argue that modernist/rationalist models of money – money as economic fact – present us with a onedimensional version of money that fails to encompass its profound and necessary complexity. The inability of bankers, politicians, economists and many other academics to adequately account for (let alone predict) the crises of 2008 and beyond is, I argue, partly a consequence of the conceptual impoverishment of debates about money. Our protestor in 2008, therefore, reminds us that there is much more to money than meets the (economistic) eye. The paper first takes a necessarily brief look at the social function of myth. It then goes on to review the associations drawn between three interrelated entities – Devil, Trickster, Fool – and money. This will explore the origins of these associations in ancient mythology and religion, their recasting with the onset of the Reformation and Enlightenment (in Europe), their subsequent evolution and eventual (apparent) disappearance. The paper then returns to Wall Street in 2008 and beyond to argue that the ‘libidinal economy’ represented by money’s devils, tricksters and fools remains with us, but that we no longer have a language rich enough to adequately represent it. The psycho-social function of myth

Although there is a vast empirical, critical and theoretical literature on mythology, there is little agreement either over precisely what a myth is or, more importantly here, what its socio-cultural function might be. This is partly because analysis of myth tends to fall across disciplinary debates – theology, anthropology, literary criticism, classical studies, psychology – that do not always communicate very well with other, and which in any case often pursue different intellectual agendas. Indeed one of the few things that theorists of myth do seem to agree about is the impossibility of pinning down this diffuse and ubiquitous human social phenomenon to a single 1 As a popular ditty of the time put it, ‘As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs’. 2 The association between money and the devil endures long after the figure of Satan had started to dissipate from European Christian cultures and philosophy. Ernst Gellner (1958) attributes his demise to Descartes, though only to argue that this simply means that all philosophers believe in the ‘devil’ (as a core problem of explanation) from then on. This is, however, a metaphorical devil (cf. also, Lefebvre 1995).

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definition. Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko, for example, identifies seven ancient and twelve modern theories of myth and, although she offers her own working definition, necessarily ends up with a fudge allowing for context-dependent ‘flexibility’ (Honko 1984: 51). In the same collection classicist G. S. Kirk concludes after his own overview of the main theories (1984: 55): Each of these universal theories […] can be negated by citing many obvious instances of myth that do not accord with the assigned origin or function. Indeed the looseness of the term ‘myth’ itself, and its wide range of applications in common usage […], together with the failure of specialists to offer acceptable special definitions, suggest that it is a diverse phenomenon that is likely to have different motives and applications even within a single society – let alone in different cultures and at different periods.

This situation presents any analysis of ‘myth’ with both opportunity and problem. The opportunity arises from the interpretative freedom that such a varied and open field of study allows – not quite ‘anything goes’, but not far off it either. This then produces the problem that with no agreed definition any approach can fall into a teleological trap – any selection of that which is deemed to be mythic will inevitably be influenced by the argument one wants to advance. Partly to head off such problems I will make no attempt to define myth here, but rather suggest in a more open sense that the materials I wish to consider are related to, but not reducible to, the mythic. The various images and texts I shall allude to all draw on and re-present mythic characters, but are not themselves ‘myths’ in any conventional sense. Rather they pull in some of the functionality of myth – by appropriating mythic personifications often of great antiquity – but linked to the distinctly modern and, for want of a better word, ‘real’ issue of money. Modernity and reality are not necessarily inimical to myth, but neither do they meet such criteria commonly applied to myths such that they should be, for example, ‘tales of the gods’, ‘traditional’, ‘sacred’, ‘ritualistic’, etc. (cf. various essays in Olson 1980 and Dundes 1984). What interests me here is not myth itself but the psycho-social functionality that myths and elements of the mythic perform. All human cultures produce them at some point, all still do, but the reasons why we do this are not always clear. Myth is somehow less than religion, but more than mere story. It is ancient and often considered sacred in some sense, but myth does not attract the reverence or respect that a Bible, Koran, Torah or other orthodox and/or institutionalised religious text is accorded. Indeed myths seem always to evolve and are reappropriated by other cultures and other times in ways that would be considered blasphemous or heretical had they the same status as ‘scripture’. Myths deal with gods and monsters, but are widely accepted to be a popular or folk literature – stories about the gods by and for the people. This popular aspect of myth seems key to the ways in which they function in the social settings that produce them. Emerging from oral traditions, there may be all manner of rituals and traditions around their telling, but they are not ‘owned’ in quite the way that other texts are. So what are they for? Most, if not all of those narratives, written and oral, that come under the headings of myth, parable, fairy tale, story, saga, epic, etc. have in common an explication of aspects of social life that cannot be easily or logically resolved. This ranges from obvious common themes of good vs. evil, the vagaries of love, life and death, duty and rebellion and so on, but within them are woven many more mundane issues: family relationships, wealth, poverty, hunger, anger, revenge, social status, morality, etc. Myths weave these complex, intermingled and often paradoxical phenomena into coherent, embodied narratives. Coherent, but not necessarily resolved, real or even credible, but presented in a narrative form that somehow ‘makes sense’. It is very important, therefore, that myth-makers have access to a full panoply of magic, gods, monsters, heavens, hells and other useful stuff that can conveniently be used to demonstrate that the irreconcilable oddities of life have cause and meaning. The apparently

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random destruction of human life and livelihood thus becomes the work of an angry god or two. Crop failure or impotence are attributed to malevolent witchcraft (Rosen 1969). Unexpected (or undeserved) good fortune is a product of a capricious demon (Hyde 1998). The obvious fact that the world is bigger and more complex that we can ever rationally explain naturally suggests the existence of a supernatural domain to which all that otherness can be attributed. None of this stops the world as lived being a mess of contradiction, unfairness and paradoxy, but does at least provide a mode of explanation that, even if it cannot resolve our problems, at least makes them the stuff of a shared experience placed at a comforting narrative distance. In general, and over many centuries, all aspects of everyday life for most people were inflected to a greater or lesser extent by aspects of myth – all that we now readily dismiss as ‘superstition’, ‘medieval’ (in the sense of pre-modern) and, more explicitly, ‘mere mythology’ (as ignorant fantasy) (Olson 1980). As such, myths form a diffuse class of hermeneutic devices that in various ways give a dreamlike sense to the world around us (Jung 1956). Myths may be tales, but they are also tools and they carry out some kind of work for us – conceptual, spiritual, social, aesthetic – that helps us to explain and/or live in the world. This means that myths – however defined – cannot be reduced to simple narrative stories that can be understood outside of the cultural context in which they are produced. Myths may travel between cultures and periods, but their meaning at any place or time depends on the reasons for their particular deployment and/or performance (Malinowski 1984) Partly because of this many theorists of myth emphasise its ontological role – one very different from the positivist and materialist ontologies characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism (Mason 1980; Oliver 1980; Dundes 1984). Indeed, much recent (since the 1970s) interest in mythology has been stimulated by a desire to push back against the process of ‘demythologising’ the major religions in particular and society in general that accompanied the rise of rationalist and scientistic approaches to knowledge during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Oliver 1980). Although led from critical hermeneutics traditions in the arts and humanities, this has also affected the natural sciences not least because of the ‘relational ontologies’ made necessary by quantum and relativity theory (Oliver 1980) and by the critical debunking of the absolutism of scientific method (Feyerabend 1975; 1987). A key aspect of myth, and one that is crucial to its associations with money, is its capacity to capture duality – the inherently ambiguous realm of the ‘between’. Betweenness is a central aspect of mythology partly because in conjuring up the supernatural some way of communicating with and/or reaching it must be established. But the domain of the between is much more fundamental to mythology than simply facilitating the invocation of another place/space, because it is one of the main aspects of everyday life that it tries to make sense of. Whatever else they might be, myths are often concerned with relationships between people, communities and nature that seem ineffable. In this sense the ‘sphere of the “between”’, as philosopher and theologian Martin Buber described it, is a ‘primal category of human reality’ (Buber 2002: 241). He continues: ‘Between’ is not an auxiliary construction, but the real place and bearer of what happens between men; it had received no specific attention because, in distinction from the individual soul and its context, it does not exhibit a smooth continuity, but is ever and again reconstituted in accordance with men’s meetings with one another; hence what is experience has been annexed naturally to the continuous elements, the soul and the world.

For Buber religion was the main means through which the ‘sphere of the between’ was to be represented, valorised and actuated. Long before he developed his particular mission – Buber was an influential promoter of Hasidic Judaism in the nascent Israel – myths of all kinds had played a crucial role in locating human relationships and foibles in a world in which the between

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was integral to reality (mythology’s relational ontology (Oliver 1984) and which had agency. Betweenness is not just another space like the physical world, but, as Buber suggests above, is a ‘bearer’ of complex human interrelationships. In many instances the ‘bearing’ is carried out by a boundary-crossing embodiment of the between – something or someone uniquely able to move between states of being. There are many such entities, but those that interest us here – those mythic characters that come to embody money and markets – are primarily devil, trickster and fool. The power of two: Devil, trickster, fool

Although all three of these characters have existed separately for many centuries, and in many ways overlap with one another, there is only one place where they appear together. And when they do come together, it is to conjure up the demonic, ambiguous in-between power of money. In doing so they draw in a range of traditions associating the strange power of money to the ‘sphere of the between’ and that connect it to the mythic. This isolated moment of convergence takes place in Part Two, scene one of Geothe’s Faust – the so-called ‘paper money scene’ (Shell 1980; Goethe 2001). The timing of their convergence is important here because it marks the beginning of the decline of an explicit association of money and myth that had circulated for many centuries. Although it had been in the making since the 1770s, the final version of Faust, including Part Two, was only completed in 1831. And while mythic embodiments of money had been commonplace throughout Europe until this point, Faust marks a conceptual watershed after which money increasingly takes its modern, abstract form. Before it does so, however, Goethe treats us to a dramatic concatenation of money and the demonism of the between. Part Two of Faust opens with the German Emperor and his counsellors agonising over how to deal with the finances of an empire bankrupted by war and excess. The answer to this dilemma is provided by the demon Mephistopheles, who persuades the Emperor that he has no need of gold to manage his debts. Playing on the court’s desperation, credulity and greed, Mephistopheles deploys a suitably convoluted argument, saturated with alchemical metaphors, to persuade even the most sceptical among them that the ‘mining’ of the power of the state and the gullibility of the public will produce paper money that will stand, ‘für gutes Gold’ (Goethe 2001). As Marc Shell (1980: 528) puts it in his much-cited essay on the depiction of money in Faust, ‘If one could mine the minds of men for credit then one would not need to mine the earth for the thesaurical commodity gold’. Shell and others argue that this scene extends the overarching themes of the play by echoing Faust’s personal tragedy in Part One. Just as Faust buys an illusion of worldly power by contracting his soul to the vampyric Mephistopheles by signing it away on paper in blood, so the Emperor signs away the moral and political power of the state for an illusion of wealth also represented as words on paper (Shell 1980). Faust contains many different strands, but the notion that a ‘real’, material, moral past is being traded for a fraudulent, hollow, paper future runs throughout. The ‘paper money scene’ carries strong echoes of Martin Luther’s battles with the Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Fugger and his fears that the demon of money would undermine the moral fabric of church and state. What has tended to go unremarked in the analysis of this extraordinary scene is the personal transformation that Mephistopheles undergoes in order to carry out his audacious scheme. One might have thought that wielding the power of the Devil would be enough, but Mephistopheles draws into himself the two other embodiments of the between to create an unholy trinity in pursuit of this ultimate monetary fraud. By the time the scene begins we already know that Mephistopheles is a demon – a manifestation of the Devil if not the Devil himself. This already complex character then redoubles himself both physically and rhetorically. The physical transformation comes in the form of Mephistopheles disguising himself as the Emperor’s Fool. As the main protagonists enter the chamber, Mephistopheles mugs the Fool,

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steals his motley costume and takes his place at the Emperor’s side. Now that we have Devil and Fool combined, Goethe adds a final archetype of dualism to the mix. The Emperor, himself bewildered that he signed up to such a demonic scheme, demands an explanation of his Schatzmeister (Treasurer). The Treasurer explains that it was the Emperor himself who ordered the adoption of the new money, but at the behest of a Tausendkünstler: trickster. This term does not translate directly into English, normally being transliterated as ‘man of a thousand arts’ which, although technically accurate, loses the meaning of the term. In fact Goethe is alluding to a line much used by Martin Luther which states that ‘Der Teufel ist ein Tausendkünstler’: the devil is a trickster (Luther [1529] 1580). In bringing these three together in one person, Goethe unites three interrelated figures which, for all their different histories, share the fundamental characteristics of duality and ambiguity. Goethe may be the first author to combine them in this way, but their interconnection was already well established. As Jung remarks in his analysis of the Trickster (1956: 195): this contradictoriness [of the Feast of Fools] also inheres in the medieval description of the devil as ‘simia dei’ (the ape of God), and in his characterization in folklore as the ‘simpleton’ who is ‘fooled’ or ‘cheated’. A curious combination of typical trickster motifs can be found in the alchemical figure of Mercurius; for instance, his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shapeshifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine, his exposure to all kinds of tortures, and – last but not least – his approximation to the figure of the saviour. These qualities make Mercurius seem like a daemonic being resurrected from primitive times, older even than the Greek Hermes.

For Jung, the Trickster is one of a series of ‘psychologems’ – foundational psychological figures shared by all human cultures and all individual humans – which underpin our individual psyches. Indeed Jung’s belief in these primordial figures was decisive in his split from Freud who held that the individual psyche was a tabula rasa at birth, only subsequently shaped by education and experience (Papadopoulos 2006). We do not, however, have to revisit these early battles between psychoanalysts to accept the long-standing nature of the interrelationship between, and socio-cultural importance of, these three overlapping, mythic, characters. Although they all appear in myths in the formal sense (notwithstanding the definitional caveats outlined above), none of the three has ever been wholly contained within a specific body of myth or, indeed, myth itself. Perhaps because of their inherently slippery characters, all three have over a very long time been periodically dragged from the domain of the myth and into the ‘real’ world. Their various embodiments, this is to say, are able to occupy both the mythic and the real without any apparent contradiction or loss of social meaning. So, for example, while the Fool is a common literary and mythic character, fools have also been very real. Jung above alludes to the European tradition of the ‘Feast of Fools’ in which social order was periodically inverted, but the fool also became a physical and powerful political figure in the form of the court jester (e.g. Henry VIII’s Will Somers or James I’s Archie Armstrong (Welsford 1935; Willeford 1969; Harris 2011)) and as part of the various ‘fool societies’ that flourished in many European cities through the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Lenient 1883; Zemon Davies 1975). The medieval fool was closely associated with theories and practices of sovereignty – capturing an embodiment of disorder at the very heart of order – and was therefore also linked to aspects of money (Willeford 1969). Indeed some of the bourgeois ‘fool societies’ in France, in addition to creating political hierarchies in pastiche of the ‘proper’ authorities, went so far as to issue their own coins during carnivals (Zemon Davies 1975). In practice, and despite the many different uses to which they are put and guises in which they appear, our three mythic figures are essentially the same character and perform, whether

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in myth or ‘reality’, much the same function. Essentially this is their capacity to embody the ‘between’ – their fundamental duality. This dual nature is articulated both in the modes of their existence, but also in their physical appearance. The Devil has two horns and cloven hooves and exists as part of a supernatural twinning – what Jeffrey Burton Russell (1986) calls a ‘doublet’ – with God in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Trickster is an ancient and ubiquitous character in folk tales from all human cultures and, while he or she can take many forms, almost always forms a character existing across or within boundaries (spatial, moral, gender, social, etc.) (Brown 1947; Jung 1956; Radin 1956; Hynes and Doty 1993; Hyde 1998). As novelist Michael Chabon put it (2008: 12), ‘Trickster goes where the action is, and the action is in the border between things’. Trickster figures are routinely symbolised by their dual nature – most famously Hermaphrodite embodying both male and female characteristics in Greek mythology and his/her progenitor, the Trickster-in-chief Hermes, a mischievous god that represented boundaries, market places, money and theft and whose emblematic staff bore two intertwined serpents – like the Devil forming an abstracted, ‘horned’ figure (Brown 1947). The Devil, like Trickster, is also strongly associated with boundaries and other intermediary spaces – particularly crossroads. The Fool, linked to both Trickster and Devil, likewise embodied duality: the servant that could mock the King, the idiot savant, the spirit of chaos at the heart of order (Lenient 1883; Welsford 1935; Williams 1979; Janick 1998). The Fool’s costume – the motley – is either multicoloured or bi-chromatic; striped fabric throughout the Middle Ages being associated with the demonic – the ‘devil’s cloth’ (Pastoureau 2001). In bringing these three together, therefore, Goethe is making a very strong statement about the nature of modern money: it is so false and duplicitous, it needs the force of all three to bring it into being. By the 1830s paper currency was still coming into wide circulation, but was regarded by many with considerable suspicion. This was partly because of earlier, failed experiments with paper currencies, particularly the infamous ‘John Law scheme’ which, a century earlier, had nearly destroyed the French economy and produced widespread misery (Murphy 1997; Bonney 2001). There is little doubt that in addition to invoking the Fugger, Goethe was referring directly to the Law scheme in Faust. Often painted as a rather Mephistophelean figure himself, Law had introduced a paper currency into a French economy suffering, like Faust’s empire, from a shortage of precious metal after years of war. Flaws in the design of the paper currency scheme, combined with governmental incompetence, fraud and the bursting of one of the first major speculative bubbles – the Mississippi Company, also a creation of John Law – produced a dramatic collapse of the French economy and massive price inflation, particularly for food, in the early 1720s (Bonney 2001). Although by the time Faust was published paper currencies were rapidly becoming normalised, memories of such earlier disasters were still fresh which meant that the association between the ‘new’ monetary order and the demonic were powerful and resonant literary devices. The fall of the money devil

Goethe’s drama was, of course, extremely influential – rapidly becoming one of the great works of German literature and establishing the tale of the eponymous Faust (although it had been circulating long before Goethe adapted it) as a core morality tale: a modern myth. Despite this, the play is better known and more often analysed as one of personal tragedy – the delusional Faust wrestling his personal demons – than for its wider social, and particularly monetary, resonances. As suggested above, Faust arrives at a moment when the cultural economic life of Europe is changing very rapidly and demonic aspects of money are starting to recede. This can be seen in another play, this time French, which opened at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris on 5 December 1820. Unlike Goethe’s epic psychodrama, d’Artois and Rochefort’s Le Diable d’Argent: Revue en une Acte et en Vaudevilles was a lightweight musical comedy aimed at the lowest common denominator of popular taste. As its tale unfolds – set to popular tunes of the

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day – various would-be merchants pitch their products to the eponymous Money Devil (essentially a suave venture capitalist in a natty gold suit) in the hope of winning his cash and the hand of his daughter, the lovely Recette. Not only are they thwarted by the Devil’s cynical valet, Grossous (Fatpenny), but Recette, complete with gold hat and miniature cornucopia, is in any case only interested in her Italian opera buffa singer, the roguish Belami. Peppered with in-jokes and monetary puns, in the end the whole thing degenerates into a cheesy reflection on the state of comic opera. D’Artois and Rochefort’s dreadful play may not be a milestone in theatrical history, but it does tell us just how ‘safe’ the idea of the money devil had become by the 1820s. The Diable d’Argent was the title of multiple series of popular prints that were produced in France and elsewhere in Europe from at least the early seventeenth century onwards and would still have been current by the time the play opened. Unlike the benign silliness of the play, in the prints the Devil is far from human. The iconography of the prints evolves from their earliest known version which is rooted in Reformation ideology (de Meyer 1967). This early French print, dating from the second half of the sixteenth century, shows a coin-covered demon rising from a treasure chest. On all sides, representatives of the great and the good – the Pope, bishops, princes, etc. – are trying to shoot the devil down with a vast arsenal of weapons ranging from cannons to bow and arrows. Entitled, Tous Estats Tirent à ce Diable d’Argent (all estates shoot at the money devil) both the image and its accompanying poem depict the efforts of the powerful and supposedly respectable, all of whom ‘want a piece of the money devil’.3 Later versions of the Diable d’Argent are less concerned with money’s effects on the upper hierarchies of church and state, than on much more ordinary people.4 In most, a hideous winged demon flies above a street scene across which are arranged various ‘typical’ craftsmen. The Devil’s body is made up entirely of coins. As he flies he empties money bags onto of the mesmerised crowd below, pissing, farting and shitting coins into their outstretched hands. Some use the tools of their (abandoned) trades to try to catch the elusive coins. The precise cast of characters changes, though there are common elements that always seem to appear: the artist, with a hat made from his palette, tries to shoot the devil down with a musket; the cordwainer tries to lasso him; the tailor (all puns intended) grabs his coin-clad tail only to find it broken off uselessly in his hands. In some versions, the Devil’s coins find their way under the skirts of women in various states of moral decline, bakers abandon their loaves, judges and notaries scrabble for the coins. In one early version, the money devil has a secondary demon clinging to his leg, this one carrying the unmistakeable symbols of arch-Trickster Hermes/Mercury (the winged headdress and his staff – the caduceus) and who in turn carries ‘Le Greffier’ (the clerk, symbolising bureaucracy) on his back. Produced in large numbers throughout Northern Europe, these images all tell the same story: money is a filthy and satanic intervention in the proper ordering of society, distracting men and women from their proper trades and stations as they all vainly grub for cash. Interestingly, what is depicted in nearly all of them is a cross-section of petty bourgeois economic life, rather than society as a whole. Money, therefore, appears as a libidinal, demonic and tricksterish disruption of the ‘normal’ economic life of the town. Although these images continue to be produced until at least the 1880s, by then they seem to have lost their force as a commentary on the diabolical nature of the money economy. The devil remains a very common subject for both visual and literary arts, particularly in Paris, but less concerned with money and the market than as a symbol of the evils of modernity more gen3 A full transcript and translation of the poem, and the image itself, can be found here: http://xenotopia.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/the-first-money-devil/ (accessed 5 May 2014). 4 A selection of these prints, all produced by the Épinal company in Paris from the early eighteenth to late nineteenth century can be found on the Baker Library website: www.library.hbs.edu/hc/cc/moneydevil.html (accessed 5 May 2014).

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erally. As David Pike (2007) has argued, the development of complex urban spaces, and especially the opening up of the underground of the cities, ushers in a very different function for the modern metropolitan devil who now finds himself occupying a new vertical spatial hierarchy. In France again, the Devil is also appropriated into new popular art forms that deploy him as a multi-faceted and satirical figure used to poke fun at a range of bourgeois social foibles. Several series of stereoscopic Diableries for example, were produced in Paris from the 1860s to the end of the nineteenth century, which create a parallel demonic Paris in which the habits of the real city are parodied by skeletons and devils (May, Pellerin and Fleming 2013). While these include a version of the Diable d’Argent (Series B, No. 3 in May, Pellerin and Fleming 2013: 194), it is much closer to the vaudeville version of d’Artois and Rochefort than to the prints.

Beyond the mythic economy?

Although it becomes little more than a source of entertaining imagery by the time the money devil finally vanishes from the popular imagination, the mythologies of devils, tricksters and fools clearly carried an enduring resonance for several hundred years. They ‘worked’, in other words, for successive generations of European economic citizens as they sought to make sense of new, frightening and occasionally disastrous changes in the nature and function of economic life. Devil, trickster and fool provided cogent images to, variously, describe, satirise and oppose these changes, because they embodied aspects of the troubling ‘between’ that had direct parallels with money. One of the key functions of money in all societies, after all, is to open up a transactional space between people. Money creates distance not just on the physical sense – through its capacity to store and transmit value it certainly does that – but in many other ways too. As the ‘universal equivalent’ it transforms particular commodities into the general currency and, in doing so, flattens and neutralises their cultural and emotional content. Partly because of this transformative power, however, money itself stimulates powerful emotional responses. Although entirely anthropogenic – albeit that its actual origins remain unknown – money is a deeply mysterious substance (Einaudi 1953; Davies 2002). Indeed one line of argument maintains that money emerges from ritual, mythical practices (Desmonde 1962). While we have become accustomed to ignoring this aspect of it, for thousands of years money’s capacity to evade objective categorisation, to hover between material and abstract value (tale vs. weight), to be both nothing and everything at once (by having no intrinsic value, but being the metric for all other value) and, above all, to be self-procreating. This latter characteristic – money begetting money through usury, fractional reserve lending, etc. – has been the focus of much of the fear and loathing that money has attracted over the centuries, particularly from the major religions (Shell 1993; 1995). For both Christianity and Islam, a worldly object having the creative powers properly reserved for the deity is a sure sign of wickedness at large, hence both religions’ long-standing prohibitions on usury. Money, therefore, exhibited characteristics that lent itself naturally to an iconology derived more from the mythic than what we might now recognise (at least until recently) as a ‘proper’ economic discourse. As hermeneutic devices, therefore, our unholy trinity in their very varied forms, represented the nature of money for audiences coming to grips with an evolving and often very alien phenomenon far more convincingly than would an economists’ mathematised rationalist account later. Indeed, to return to one of the functions of the mythic outlined above, one of the key problems for those attempting to design and run modern monies was precisely its problematic ontology. The tense political struggle over the nature of what was to become the post-bellum US currency in the 1860s and 1870s, for example, revolved around arguments about what constituted the ‘reality’ of money – its ontological substance (Ritter 1997; Poovey 2003; Ingham 2004). In that instance ‘ontology’ referred chiefly to the nature of that which was to underpin the value of the currency – circulating credit in the form (chiefly) of agricultural mortgages (the ‘greenbacks’) versus the traditional $US backed by gold reserves held by

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New York banks (the ‘goldbugs’) – but the problem of money’s ontology goes far beyond that (Carruthers and Babb 1996; Ritter 1997; Ingham 2004). As Georg Simmel (1991) and many others since have noted, money need have neither substance nor value to function – it only requires that we believe in it (Brown 1959; Goux 1990; Ingham 1994; Lyotard 2004). Just as traditional myths filled in the ontological gaps in complex social situations, so they provided mythic elements that could, for a time at least, do the same for money. While there is no doubt that Martin Luther and many of his sixteenth-century contemporaries genuinely believed in the existence of devils and the diabolical nature of money, by the 1880s the mysteries of money had largely been supplanted by its normalisation, the curbing of its wilder fluctuations, its increasing connection to relatively stable fiscal states and all the other paraphernalia of the ‘modern’ economy (Poovey 2003; 1995). Money’s ‘betweenness’ thus becomes an unthreatening, mundane fact rather than evidence of sinister supernaturalism. Jean-Joseph Goux describes this process of the transformation of narratives of money as evidence of a profound change in the nature of the symbolic order of modern economies (1990: 120, emphasis original). Now, not only has contemporary sociality, with its exchange and production processes, ceased to practice an emblematic mode of symbolization – the one familiar to ancient societies (and in certain respects the one perpetuated in the language of dreams) – but it tends to shatter the mirror of representation, opening on to a system of signifiers marked by the nonfigurative, the operational. This trend is not limited to a single agency, it can be read in many registers (aesthetic, economic, libidinal), gradually and unevenly affecting all social metabolisms and their signifying productions and leading toward the implantation of another sociosymbolic system.

Devils, tricksters and fools belonged to that ‘emblematic mode of symbolization’ that, for Goux, has now been supplanted by the ‘operational’. Because money now ‘works’ most of the time – which in practice means that the boundaries of its existence and function are only rarely challenged – it can operate without demanding the ancillary ontologies provided by the mythic. Fluctuating exchange or interest rates, which might impoverish me or enrich me, are articulated in terms of an internally coherent, systemic language that seems to be complete. I may no longer be able to afford my mortgage repayments, but this is the work of ‘the market’ rather than the intervention of a trickster god or the devil and his minions. My bad luck is my own fault – for not reading the market carefully, investing at the wrong time, for buying the wrong thing – and can thus no longer be located in a more complex supernatural, suprapersonal cosmos. The market and the money that circulates within it, therefore, seem to function as a system that is wholly coherent internally and thus has no need of mythic augmentation. Or, rather, it did until September 2008. The new demons of Wall Street

The collapse of Lehmans, the exposure of insane risk-taking, the stratospheric salaries and bonuses, the graft and fraud at the heart of global finance reminded us all, if we chose to look, that the cool, rational neutral world of money remains firmly rooted in a libidinal economy (Lyotard 2004; Cameron, Nesvetailova and Palan 2011; Horvat 2014). Libidinal economy, although it tends to produce some very dense and complex theoretical arguments, at root describes a very simple aspect of all kinds of economies: they are systems for the distribution of things that people want and need. As such while it might comfort us to imagine that the monetary and trade systems are just big, largely self-regulating machines, in practice they are always, necessarily, run by and for people, and people are subject to all manner of desires,

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fears, prejudices and idiosyncrasies that no economic theory has ever been able to model – mathematically or otherwise. In other words, the events of 2008 and the many and varied explanations of them since have, if nothing else, revealed once again the inherent incompleteness of a rationalist ontology of money. While this was very clearly articulated by our lone protestor, his voice, while momentarily entertaining, was by no means the only one expressing doubts about the nature of money in the context of the crisis. Many commentators questioned the materiality of money by asking, once the scale of ‘losses’ were articulated by the banks, ‘where all the money had gone’ (Cameron 2014). When the answer to this was unsatisfactory – usually that the money had never existed in the first place, but was a notional value of particular markets – some went further, albeit only briefly, to ask, what is money anyway? Such questions generally went unanswered and were, in any case soon swamped by governmental and regulatory attempts to explain and assuage the growing financial crisis gripping the global economy. Interestingly, however, those voices also, albeit usually unwittingly, echoed the libidinal fears of earlier narratives of the evils of money. This tended to take the form of blaming particular types of financial behaviour – greed, risk-taking, ignorance, youthful exuberance, etc. – and particular classes of financier – hedge fund managers, the young, the inexperienced – as all deviating from the ‘proper’ management of financial affairs. As argued elsewhere, the ways in which these narratives of deviant finance were articulated in the aftermath of 2008, claim that libidinal behaviour was a characteristic of a few aberrant people, and not of the market as a whole (Cameron, Nesvetailova and Palan 2011). Although the apportioning of blame during and since the events of 2008 has not resorted directly to the supernatural or the mythic, the sorts of language and imagery being used express similar sentiments. We may not blame devils, tricksters or fools by name, but we do attribute the same libidinal, capricious and/or foolish behaviours to those that brought us to the brink of catastrophe. The crisis was caused, according to subsequent accounts, by ‘Gods that failed’ (Elliot and Atkinson 2008), a ‘Spectre at the feast’ (Gamble 2009), the pursuit of ‘Fool’s gold’ (Tett 2009), because of an ‘age of greed’ (Mason 2009) in which ‘all the devils are here’ (McLean and Nocera, 2010). In other words, both participants in the troubled markets and their many critics, easily slip back into a language that alludes to the same mythic metaphors mobilised by Goethe and the various authors of Diable d’Argent. At one level, of course, these are simply phrases used to dramatise accounts of otherwise dull economics and sell books. But the antiquity of such imagery and associations suggests that they are being used because they seem to capture something more complete about the functioning of economies than standard, technical accounts can manage. Secularised accounts of money and markets, this is to say, are not as free from the mythic-inflected narratives of the past as they would like to believe. As Norman O. Brown argued in his extraordinary essay ‘Filthy Lucre’ (Brown 1959: 240): Modern secularism and its companion Protestantism, do not usher in an era in which human consciousness is liberated from inhuman powers, or the natural world is liberated from supernatural manifestations; the essence of the Protestant (or capitalist) era is that the power over this world has passed from God to God’s negation, God’s ape, the Devil. And already Luther has seen in money the essence of the secular, and therefore the demonic. The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God’s ape; the money complex is therefore heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.

It is not just that modern money and economics have developed their own new ‘mythologies’ – though in the blind faith we are expected to have in the rational and impersonal power of markets, that is clearly also the case – but that we have developed an economic ontology that denies, but

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has been unable to transcend those aspects of economic behaviour that myth once helped us to make sense of. As Brown suggests, money itself has assumed the role of embodying the ‘between’ once given form by devil, trickster and fool – homo economicus put forward as an abstracted and emasculated reduction of these older and more complex beings (Brown 1959: 238). This is not to suggest that we should therefore revive the mythic devil, trickster and fool, but that we never managed to get rid of them. The events of 2008, captured by the protestor on Wall Street, brought us up against the limits of the pseudosecular ontology of modern financial economics and forced us to confront again if only for a short moment the unstable, libidinal, in short, human aspects of money. To return to a phrase used by Goux in the quote above, mythology was part of a ‘mirror of representation’ (emphasis added) supposedly shattered by the secularisation and normalisation of money. Mythology, therefore, was a means by which we could see ourselves, warts and all. In other words, the symbolic system of the myth, which very specifically embodies ambiguous social relations and phenomena and, in doing so, represents them without resolution, has been partially supplanted by a new sociosymbolic system that eroticises the unitary and the rational, but retains an ineradicable connection back into that older, deeper symbology that has not been lost. This is not just because we retain it, as Goux suggests, in the language of dreams, but because we retain it in everyday speech acts that both describe and enact the libidinal economy of the mythic. What failed in 2008 (and since), therefore, was not just the technical operation of an otherwise functioning monetary machine, but an entire system of representing the economy. The failure of economists and bankers either to predict or to explain the crisis is a product not just of their use of inadequate models, but the universal adoption of an impoverished language to describe economic ‘facts’ that could not capture their variety and complexity. The very rapid reappearance of libidinal language and metaphor steeped in the mythic, suggests that such ‘primitive’ elements in the explanation of economic behaviour are perhaps more sophisticated than that with which we have replaced them. References

Bonney, R. (2001) ‘France and the First European Paper Money Experiment’, French History, 15 (3): 254–272. Brown, N. O. (1947) Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brown, N. O. (1959) Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Buber, M. (2002 [1947]), Between Man and Man, London: Routledge Classics. Burton Russell, J. (1986) Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cameron, A. (2014) ‘Where Has All the Money Gone? Materiality, Mobility and Nothingness’, Journal of Critical Globalization Studies, forthcoming. Cameron, A., Nesvetailova, A. and Palan, R. (2011) ‘Wages of Sin? Crisis and the Libidinal Economy’, Journal of Cultural Economy, 4 (2): 117–135. Carruthers, B. G. and Babb, S. (1996) ‘The Color of Money and the Nature of Value: Greenbacks and Gold in Postbellum America’, The American Journal of Sociology, 101 (6): 1556–1591. Chabon, M. (2008) ‘Trickster in a Suit of Lights’, Maps and Legends, New York: Harper Perennial. Davies, G. (2002) A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. de Meyer, M. (1967) ‘Le Diable d’Argent: Évolution du theme du XVI-ieme au XIX-ieme Siècle’, Arts et Traditions Populaires, 15 (3/4): 283–290. Desmonde, W. H. (1962) Magic, Myth and Money: The Origin of Money in Religious Ritual, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Dundes, A. (ed.) (1984) Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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McLean, B. and Nocera, J. (2010) All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Murphy, A. E. (1997) John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oliver, H. H. (1980) ‘Relational Ontology and Hermeneutics’, in A. M. Olson (ed.), Myth, Symbol and Reality, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Olson, A. M. (ed.) (1980) Myth, Symbol and Reality, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Papadopoulos, R. K. (ed.) (2006) The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, London: Routledge. Pastoureau, M. (2001) The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes, New York: Washington Square Press. Pike, D. (2007) Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworld of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Poovey, M. (1995) Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Poovey, M. (2003) The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radin, P. (1956) The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, New York: Schocken Books. Ritter, G. (1997) Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosen, B. (ed.) (1969) Witchcraft in England, 1558–1618, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Shell, M. (1980) ‘Money and the Mind: The Economics of Translation in Goethe’s Faust’, Modern Language Notes, 95 (3): 516–562. Shell, M. (1993) Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Shell, M. (1995) Art and Money, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, G. (1991) The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge. Tett, G. (2009) Fool’s Gold, New York: Free Press. Welsford, E. (1935) The Fool: His Social and Literary History, London: Faber and Faber. Willeford, W. (1969) The Fool and His Sceptre: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience, London: Edward Arnold. Williams, P. A. (ed.) (1979) The Fool and the Trickster: Studies in Honour of Enid Welsford, Cambridge: DS Brewer. Zemon Davis, N. (1975) Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis, London: Duckworth.

Dr Pangloss and the best of all possible markets: Evolutionary fantasies and justifications in contemporary economic discourse Philip Roscoe

University of St Andrews

The paper examines evolutionary myth-making in the economic discourse of contemporary neo-liberalism. It traces the translation of evolutionary concepts from the early twentieth century Darwinist synthesis to recent economic popularising, offering a close reading of Harford’s ‘Adapt’ (2011). Important points of passage in the development of ideas include the work of Dawkins, who moves from gene to ‘meme’ and Dennett, who insists on evolution as an algorithmic process. The paper argues that evolutionary myth-making carries a normative element, taking into economic discourse an ‘adaptionist’ position criticised in biology as Panglossian. It concludes with the suggestion that adaptionist arguments, if followed through, offer a powerful critique of neo-liberal ideals.

Introduction

As is well known, the last half-century has witnessed an enormous expansion in the reach and purpose of markets. It is equally well understood that the neoliberal political discourse which has accompanied this expansion is characterised by the implementation of competition as a formal process in all kinds of management activities, and a thoroughgoing adoption of cost-benefit analysis as a measure of performance (Foucault 2008). Neoliberalism has been accompanied by a myth of the market as an evolutionary device that serves as an explanation of, and justification for, the presence of competition, red in tooth and claw, in all manner of market activities. This paper sets out to explore the development of visions of evolution in economics, culminating in its presence in the contemporary economic discourse. Neoliberalism itself makes claims to the superiority of markets as computational devices driven by the price mechanism. Hayek, for example, characterised the economy through the metaphor – in fact ‘more than a metaphor’ – of an enormous computer, ‘a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunication’ (Hayek 1945: 527). There is something inviting to economists in biological conceptions of spontaneous order (Kauffman 1993), despite the facts that evolutionary theory possesses almost no predictive power. My contention in this paper is that current economic use of Darwinism, closely associated with the discourses of neoliberalism, is mythopoeic in nature. Mythical notions abound in economics (McCloskey 1986): the twentieth-century revision of Smith’s invisible hand and the Walrasian auctioneer, while the supply and demand curve is an icon (Klamer and Leonard 1994), a graphical description of a mythic account of market interactions. Myths may offer conceptual schemes through which we interpret the unknowable, or the unknown, and also offer justifications for the state of the world as we encounter it. The neoliberal insistence upon free markets has been closely associated with conceptions of evolutionary order. Milton Friedman (1966) characterises the business environment as setting firms problems to which they may or may not adapt and suggests that in the long run those firms which are fittest survive. Hayek’s mature writing represents a sustained attempt to apply ideas from evolutionary biology to the study of economics, evidencing some faith in the useful, virtuous outcomes of evolutionary process (Hodgson 1994). Hayek writes of ‘spontaneous order’ in nature and in 96

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society, at least if the market is left to its own devices (Hayek 2003 [1973]). In Hayek’s work we can glimpse the providential order of the Smithian invisible hand, and he introduces his own word, ‘catallaxy’ to describe the mutual adjustment and harmony of well-functioning markets. The myth is not one of equilibrium, but optimisation. It reflects a position in evolutionary theory termed ‘adaptionist’, and critiqued as Panglossian by its opponents (Gould and Lewontin 1979): just as Dr Pangloss claims that the purpose of the bridge of the nose is to support spectacles, so the adaptionist seeks to explain all features of organisms by inference from the environment. Whatever the status of debate among evolutionary theorists, as a mythic position in political justifications of markets, this Panglossianism has a tremendous impact, for Dr Pangloss proclaimed nothing less than the best of all possible worlds. The present paper traces the Panglossian fantasy of markets through the academic literature to the discourses of popular economics. It is far from exhaustive but highlights those authors whose contributions I consider pivotal. The paper develops a genealogical approach to the adaptionist concept of optimisation in academic and popular economics and management, and pays attention to narratives of causation, worth and justification (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006). Much of the writing covered is marked by what economic historian Philip Mirowski considers ‘an unaccountable enthusiasm for the writings of Richard Dawkins’ (Mirowski 2002: 533), whose intellectual segue from phylogeny driven by selfish, yet mindless, genes to a much broader conception of intellectual, linguistic or cultural ‘DNA’ makes it the centrepiece of my account. It is Dawkins’ extraordinary moment of myth-making which makes it possible for the logic of evolutionary competition to be expanded indefinitely, until all organisations, cultural artefacts, etc. are either memes themselves or institutional carriers that result from the process. Dennett provides a systematic philosophical interpretation of this approach. Finally we encounter similar arguments in the work of ‘Undercover Economist’ and popular neoliberal panegyrist Tim Harford who, in Adapt (2011), fuses elements of the Hayekian calculation thesis with evolutionary insights: ‘the economy is itself an evolutionary environment in which a huge variety of ingenious profit-seeking strategies emerge through a decentralised process of trial and error … what emerges is far more brilliant than any single planner could have dreamed up’ (2011: 174). Harford takes Dawkins’ ‘genes-eye’ view to its logical conclusion in the economic arena, treating the market as an optimising environment for ‘ideas’, and firms as highly fallible mechanisms for the transmission of these ideas. Firms may live and die, but in Harford’s Panglossian world, the market selects the best innovations, technologies and practices for preservation. I conclude with the suggestion that Harford’s myth-making represents the culmination of the adaptionist fantasy, but at the same time opens the door for a compelling Darwinist critique of neoliberal markets. Some preliminary notes on biological Darwinism

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his monograph, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, a title soon shortened to The Origin of Species. As is well known, the work laid the groundwork for our understanding of evolution, despite the fact that Darwin lacked much of the theoretical apparatus required for a fully developed theory, such as a proper understanding of the means of inheritance. He was also sympathetic towards the now discredited theory of Lamarckism, which advocated the retention of characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime, and unsure of the mechanisms of variation and particularly the strength of mutation. He was, however, certain that selection was a blind process driven by the environment, and that there was no sense of purpose behind it; evolution necessarily represented progress of a sort, at least understood in terms of development, but direction and teleology were absent (Flew 1984). Darwin’s friend and ‘bulldog’, Herbert Spencer, a polymath scholar and editor of The Economist, had less time for nuances and hesitations. Coining the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ Spencer ‘generated

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an entire metaphysics from some recurrent features of human history in conformity with Malthus’(Fuller 2008: 92). He saw evolutionary progress as an economic problem, worked out at the level of the individual. Organisms must invest capital in new, efficient mechanisms, and pursue a division of labour, leading to a surplus of vital capital to be reinvested in maintenance and reproduction (Kingsland 1994: 235). Spencer was also far more confident in evolution as a means of social progress than had been Darwin, seeing survival of the fittest as tied to economic virtue and free-market capitalism. The gaps in Darwin’s thesis were plugged early in the twentieth century through the incorporation of Mendel’s genetics to explain mutation and inheritance. Weismann’s distinction between germ cells (gametes) and body cells (somatic cells) explained why acquired characteristics were not passed on and put paid to Lamarckism. The resulting neo-Darwinist synthesis, developed by Theodosius Dobzhansky, became the dominant twentieth-century account of evolution. It sees natural selection as an external process choosing from random mutations in the gene pool. Moreover, it asserts that evolution is the cause of causes: Dobzhansky concluded a famous lecture with the claim that evolution is the ‘general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true’ (quoted in Fuller 2008: 96). Contemporary ‘adaptionists’ (so far as I can tell, the mainstream paradigm in evolutionary biology) argue that incremental adaptation and environmental selection are the cause of all characteristics. Adapted characteristics must therefore be optimal (most fitted) and nature is an optimising algorithm, producing a world that is at least in one sense the best of all possible worlds. Other schools of biology suggest that some mutations may come from random drift (neutral evolution), or be co-dependent on selected characteristics. This latter approach dates from a famous essay by Gould and Leowontin (1979) which critiques the adaptionists as ‘Panglossian’. They argue that some characteristics may just have come along for the evolutionary ride. They propose the metaphor of the ‘spandrels of St Marco’, the spandrel being a curved geometric surface between the top of archways in the base of the dome, so beautifully decorated that one might suppose they had been placed there especially to house the declaration, when they are in fact a necessary by-product of arch and dome. This ‘Panglossian critique’, aimed primarily at the optimising assumptions on which adaptionism is based and the convenience of lazy ‘just-so’ stories, remains controversial in biology. Yet it is a useful concept for us in terms of identifying just-so narratives in economic myth-making. Finally, the shadow of design lurks in evolutionary theory, not just in so-called ‘intelligent design’ thinking. Dobzhansky, a devout Christian, made his famous ‘nothing makes sense but in the light of evolution’ claim as part of an attempt to synthesise evolution and his religious faith. He developed the Jesuit Teilhard’s notion of tatonnement or ‘groping’, as evolution’s sense of purposefulness, a move towards ideal forms of a seemingly Platonic nature, not known in advance but evident in the world (Fuller 2008). Design may be banished from mainstream biology, but when it comes to economics, the spectre may once again be sighted. First steps: evolutionary economics from 1950-1980

Biology has borrowed from economics since the beginning, and in return economists have been happy enough to claim visiting rights in evolutionary theory. So Nelson and Winter’s book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change presents a developed account of evolutionary economics, ‘exercising an option to which economists are entitled in perpetuity by virtue of the stimulus our predecessor Malthus provided to Darwin’s thinking’ (Nelson and Winter 1982: 9). Just as evolutionary theory was borrowing equilibrium modelling from economics (Rosenberg 1994), the second half of the twentieth century saw much traffic from biology to economics. In the most part, this took the form of studies making use of evolutionary ideas as a heuristic device through which existing economic ideas could be augmented or critiqued.

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These early forays into evolutionary theory were relatively limited in their scope, aiming less at a grand universal theory and more at simple borrowing to generate better economic ideas. Economics needed to catch up with twentieth-century advances in science, and could learn much from the new developments in biology. It was, say Nelson and Winters, ‘as if economics has never really transcended the experiences of its childhood, when Newtonian physics was the only science worth imitating and celestial mechanics its most notable achievement’ (Nelson and Winter 1982: 10). Evolutionary ideas helped scholars engage with the concepts of rational agent and the firm, each foundational for mid-twentieth-century economics. The rational agent came under fire from evolution-inspired approaches such as Herbert Simon’s (1955) satisficing, later developed into a fully-fledged theory of ‘fast and frugal’ decision making (Gigerenzer and Todd 1999), while the development and survival of firms was modelled as an evolutionary process. The popularity of evolutionary theory in the economics literature may in fact be driven by the causal account it offers to support conceptions of the firm as a competent, autonomous economic agent in its own right (Schulz 2013). The intention to do economics better, rather than create a grand unified theory of any kind, allowed writers to play fast and loose with biological theories. If Darwin’s insight serves only as a heuristic device to analyse firm behaviour, we need not lose too much sleep over precise mechanisms of heredity. Spencer’s social Darwinism, discredited in biology, offers a natural metaphor for understanding the growth and survival of firms. Strategic interactions of the kind found in social systems constitute a Lamarckian evolution – intentional strengthening of useful characteristics during the lifetime of the entity which are then passed to subsequent generations. Of course, our attention is immediately drawn to the second half of this statement and the manner of replication in the world of organisations, and such problems preoccupied those writing evolutionary economics – Hirshleifer, Winter, Penrose and Alchian – in the 1950s and beyond. Their innovations made appearances in economics journals of the highest quality, and were later to grow into the highly influential resource/competence based theory of the firm (Prahalad and Hamel 1990; Shelby 1997). Hirshleifer (1977) provides a useful summary of biological models of the firm from the 1950s onwards. Armen Alchian (1950) had argued that notions of optimisation (i.e. profit maximisation) could not be sustained in the probabilistic environment of business, but the environment would at least select on the basis of a positive realised profit condition of survival. Stephen Enke (1951) suggested that the intensity of competition would be sufficient to produce an optimising effect. Edith Penrose (1952) suggested that economic adaption is too perfect to be the product of selected random behaviour in a business environment that lacks the extreme intensity of competition associated with organisms’ struggle for food. Therefore, the intention and success in making money is taken as an analogous driving force. Winter (1964), on the other hand, argued that market adaption is relatively imperfect and traces this to the inheritance mechanisms of firms, such as rules of thumb and organisational routines. Even the mechanism of selection, undisputed in biology, is unclear; Alchian’s (1950) and Winter’s (1964) suggestions posit a Lamarckian evolution, while Enke (1951) leaves selection to the environment. Nelson and Winter were the first to suggest that organisational routines, regularised and predictable patterns of behaviour, might be analogous to genes in evolutionary theory. As with genes, organisational routines determine possible behaviour, while actual behaviour is determined by interactions with the environment; just as an organism’s phenotype results from the interplay of environment and genotype (Nelson and Winter 1982: 223). It is not obvious what value evolutionary theory adds to these discussions. It does little more than providing interesting heuristic metaphors for economics, and some engagement with organisational sociology might have delivered the same outcomes (Schulz 2013). In summary, mainstream economics of the twentieth century employed evolutionary theory to develop theories of judgement under uncertainty, and elaborate its understanding of the firm.

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The latter developed into resource-based theories of the firm which were hugely influential in fashionable management literature in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Neoliberal conceptions of spontaneous order remained for the time being on the fringe of serious economics. The real impetus for the economic Darwinism of today, however, with its emphasis on cost-benefits and algorithms comes from the ‘hyperphysical sociobiologized version of economics’ (Mirowski 2002: 533) offered by Richard Dawkins and his selfish gene.

Selfish genes and universal Darwinism

In 1975, Edward Wilson published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, where he put forward a systematic study of the biological basis of all behaviour. He quotes Dobzhansky as saying ‘human genes have surrendered their primacy in human evolution to an entirely new non-biological or super organic agent, culture. However, it should not be forgotten that this agent is entirely dependent on the human genotype’ (quoted in Flew 1984: 116). Genes, according to Wilson, lead to dispositions to act in certain ways, so altruism emerges as a successful reproductive strategy embedded in kinship. In a line of enquiry parallel with Wilson’s sociobiology, the enormously influential zoologist Robert Trivers shifted the lens of analysis to the reproduction of the gene itself. He exposed supposed acts of altruism, such as the alarm calls given by birds, as disguised selfishness on the part of the genetic inheritance (Trivers 1971), and examined conflicts between parents and offspring in terms of the likelihood of future preservation of the genes: it is natural to contest resources with ones siblings, but only up to a point, beyond which one damages the prospects for the reproduction of the genes which both share (Trivers 1972). Economics swiftly saw the relevance of these studies, and began a process of disciplinary imperialism and myth-making that emphasised the evolutionary grounding of economics as a kind of ontological first principle for social science. Hirshleifer’s (1977) thorough synthesis of the parallels between economics and biology begins from the statement that ‘the fundamental organising concepts of the dominant analytical structures employed in economics and in sociobiology are strikingly parallel’ (p.2). Hirshleifer argues that as economics expands into the domains of sociology, anthropology and political science it will become (his italics) these disciplines, and as they grow increasingly rigorous they will become economics. We have, then, the whole of social sciences subsumed into the remit of evolutionary biology, a colonisation justified on the grounds that economics-qua-evolution captures the fundamental axioms of existence. Gene-focused evolutionary theory reached its apogee with the 1976 publication of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (Dawkins 1976). Dawkins’ power as a science communicator comes from his colourful language and his use of vivid examples. His book is splendidly anthropomorphic in its rhetoric, and these genes that are selfish and compete take on an almost theological significance as the ordering principles of life on Earth. Dawkins is hardly circumspect, and does not hesitate to infer the behaviour of the person from the selfishness of their genes: we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes … if you wish, as I do to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. (1976: 3) Genes take centre stage as ‘replicators’ that have been built up from stable chemical arrangements over billions of years: a vanishingly slim chance, but one that the sheer passage of time has made possible. Whatever the old-guard may have thought, a generation of biologists was won over by the sheer power of his rhetoric; more than any other work, Dawkins’ book established the genes-eye view as the dominant paradigm of evolutionary research (Laland 2004). But it does, or tries to do, more than shift how biology is done. One can speculate that Dawkins’ later campaigns against religion comes from his desire to see evolution, not just as a credible and widely accepted scientific theory, but as the myth of myths, as the organising principle by which everything and everywhere is understood.

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In this respect Dawkins’ argument becomes interesting in a later chapter, where he suddenly announces his ‘intuition’ that ‘Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene’ (Dawkins, 1976: 191, my italics). This is an extraordinary leap. Dawkins vaults, on the basis of intuition alone, from the closely argued – though perhaps disputed – narrative of the selfish gene to a quasi-theological point about the nature of the social world, as if no one had ever reflected on the history of culture before. (Indeed, Dawkins’ later career as scourge of the theologians has shown that ignorance of the topic at hand does not present a serious barrier to entry of the discussion.) Dawkins therefore suggests, taking Wilson and Trivers’ logic to a conclusion, that culture should be understood in terms of a ‘meme’, a neologism that he coins, providing a cod-etymology and a guide for pronunciation (from the Greek, or if you prefer, the French – to rhyme with ‘cream’ – patronising, Dawkins is not). A meme is a unit of culture or society, including science, and of course religion. It is worth quoting Dawkins directly to see the beginnings of a myth. Starting with the ‘law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities’, he applies the same logic to culture: memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain in a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation … when you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle of the means of propagation in the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of the host cell. (Dawkins, 1976: 192, my italics)

The essential qualities for a meme are therefore the same as for a gene – longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity. Dawkins’ great strength as a writer is his use of metaphor, and in this passage he is on full form. Memes swim and breed in a pool, they leap, they are planted in fertile soil, they even parasitise like viruses. On the pressing matter of how exactly the process works, despite the facts that the mechanisms of inheritance are a crucial element of the Darwinian synthesis, and that copying fidelity is an important characteristic of the meme, we are given no further detail than ‘imitation’. But this does not matter. In claiming that the social has evolved to preserve cultural artefacts, Dawkins has given rise to a tremendously powerful mythical beast, one that can leap from brain to brain, from discipline to discipline: the meme. The meme is explored most fully by Susan Blackmore (1997), who makes the meme the cornerstone of a whole theory of culture and the mind, where we must understand memes as equally selfish and demanding as genes. They are embedded in artefacts such as books, pictures, bridges or steam trains: memes are instructions for carrying out behaviour, stored in brains (or other objects) and passed on by imitation. Their competition drives the evolution of the mind. (Blackmore, 1997: 17, my italics)

In Blackmore’s account, minds are no more than robot vehicles blindly programmed, as Dawkins might have written. Memes mean that people are different, and dispense with the problem of determinism that sociobiology throws up – the notion that genes will always win out. The ‘ability to imitate creates a second replicator that acts in its own interests and can produce behaviour that is memetically adaptive but biologically maladaptive’, Blackmore concludes (1997: 35). A more subtle but not dissimilar account is given by Dawkins’ extended phenotype, where material changes in the environment provide a gene with a further mechanism by which it can ‘lever itself into the next generation’ (Dawkins 1982: 199) In summary, Dawkins’ first great innovation was to turn evolutionary theory on its head, identifying the mechanism for natural selection as a cost-benefit exercise carried out by genes (or memes) and their hosts. His second was to invent the meme, an imaginary creature with the power to shape society in ways that will preserve itself. A third and final innovation, and an

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elaboration on the myth of the meme, comes in The Extended Phenotype, where he proposes a ‘Universal Darwinism’, abstracting the mechanism of natural selection to a generalised abstract theory. Universal Darwinism holds that a central set of general Darwinian principles, augmented with domain specific explanations, may be applied to a wide range of phenomena (Hodgson 2002). Perhaps the most enthusiastic supporter of a universalised Darwinism is the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (1995), who builds the argument that evolution is always and exclusively algorithmic. Although Charles Darwin lacked the term ‘algorithm’, which stems from twentieth-century computer science, it is clear, according to Dennett (1995: 50) that in natural selection he had identified a cluster of algorithms. Dennett defines an algorithm as a formal process that will logically yield a certain kind of outcome whenever it is run: an algorithm is characterised by an indifference to its substrate, an underlying mindlessness and guaranteed results. As with Dawkins’ ambivalence to gene or meme, Dennett’s insistence that algorithms are indifferent to their medium, while quite correct, leaves the door open for an account of the economy (or anything else) as an algorithmic process. This is precisely the path that Dennett follows, his argument building up a complex interplay between economics and biology, as well as a little artificial intelligence for good measure, leaving us with a hybrid ‘cyborg’ evolutionary economics. For Dennett, the adaptionist on steroids, similarities of design – legs, fins, eyes and arms in pairs, or ‘mouth-at-the-bow-end’ arrangements are indications of algorithms at work. For all their mindlessness, despite the influence of chance or dumb luck, algorithms tend to do certain things; we can see immediate parallels with Friedman’s assertion that whatever the vicissitudes of luck or temperament, fittest firms tend to prosper and less fit firms fail. ‘In a vast space of possibilities’, writes Dennet, ‘the odds of a similarity between two independently chosen elements is vanishing unless there is a reason’ (1995: 132). This reason is that the algorithmic process is a cost-benefit calculator: we can discover ‘general principles of practical reasoning (including, in more modern dress, cost benefit analysis) that can be relied upon to impose themselves on all life forms everywhere’ (Dennett 1995: 132). If efficiency is taken as a virtue – and it is hard to see, in the light of the discussion above, how this could not be so – then what evolution has produced is not only the optimal, but also the best of all possible worlds. The steps that have been taken by Dawkins, Blackmore and Dennett are huge. First of all, Dawkins persuades us that Darwinism is too big for biology, and that we need an evolutionary theory of society; Blackmore argues that the evolutionary unit of society is responsible for the shape of our minds; and Dennett that evolution is an algorithmic, optimising process. From here is but a small step to arrive at an organisational Panglossianism, the assertion that every aspect of an organisation is the direct result of an adaptionist programme focused on efficiency, and the firms that have survived are the fittest: a just-so story that tells us whatever we find in the market is the best, in the sense at least, that it is the most efficient. That step is simply to provide an account of the mechanisms of change, mutation and heredity necessary for a functioning account of organisational evolution. A ‘generalised Darwinism’ in economics

Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorkild Knudsen are the most vigorous proponents of a generalised Darwinism, arguing (of course) that Darwinism is too important to be left to the biologists (Hodgson and Knudsen 2006; 2008; 2010). Their version relies upon the mechanisms of subset selection, diffusion and generative selection, where a subset selection is differential elimination of organisations, for example through bankruptcy; diffusion is the generalisation and differential adoption of new ideas; and generative selection is the differential replication of these routines due to the interplay between environment and organisation. Habits and routines stand for replicators, while the organisation functions as the interactor, analogous to the genotype and phenotype, the pristine germ line and the environmentally shaped exterior.

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There appears to be a conceptual difficulty with Hodgson and Knudsen’s specification. Suggesting that habits and routines are analogous to genes solves the problem of heredity, in as much as firms that, for example, conduct appropriate budgeting or run innovation labs may multiply and prosper, while firms that do not may fail. However, the genes-eye view makes clear that the purpose of inheritance is to preserve the gene itself; to claim that firms exist only so that, for example, capital budgeting can be preserved seems peculiar. I shall return to this point in the discussion. Hodgson (2002) heads off criticism that economic evolution does not constitute ‘natural’ selection. He argues that Darwinism involves a general theory of the evolution of all open, complex systems, as well as a basic philosophical commitment to detailed, cumulative, causal explanations, a statement not only about the nature of one of science’s most eminent theories, but the nature of science itself. In other words, it matters little whether evolutionary outcomes are the result of ontogeny, or self-organisation or artificial selection. In a final evolution of Darwinist theory, Hodgson (and Knudsen) are anxious to elevate it to a generalised ontological approach and a commitment to causal mechanisms reaching as far as human intentionality. Trivers has already argued that morals have a basis in reproductive success; it is only a small step to argue that all intentionality must be explained from below, in chains of causation. Hodgson summarises, ‘Darwinism does not deny belief, purposeful behaviour or foresight, simply asserts that they too are caused’(Hodgson 2002: 269). Of course, some have objected to such a far reaching expansion of Darwinist reasoning. Schubert (2013) argues that Hodgson’s generalised Darwinism ‘smuggles in unjustified preconceptions to normative reasoning’. Evolutionary biology may have something to say over how we come to hold the beliefs and norms that we do, but not whether they are true or valid (Flew 1984: 115). Even if some aspect of morality is embedded in our evolutionary heritage, the task of building just social institutions is far beyond the apparatus that we have inherited from our hunter gatherer forbears. Yet Flew, Schubert (2013: 25) and others fear the tendency to equate morality and justice with fitness and adaptive value, following the erroneous assumption that natural selection has somehow produced an optimal arrangement. It is, after all, very difficult to escape the notion of evolution as progress. Economic Darwinism and popular discourse: Tim Harford’s Adapt

In economic terms, Panglossianism can be taken as the process of inferring from the environment to explain – and therefore justify – organisational structures (Rosenberg 1994). Nature maximises under conditions of near-infinite complexity; if the market is best explained as an evolutionary engine, an algorithmic processor, it follows that the adaptions produced by the market will be far superior to those established by purposeful planning. Market order will be spontaneous, and will progress towards an ever-better world. The supremacy of the market is, of course, the founding myth of neoliberalism, and it is exactly the position taken by bestselling author and popular economic writer Tim Harford in his 2011 bestseller Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. This book presents an account of organisational development as driven by a process of environmental, i.e. market, selection, through a highly readable narrative, featuring examples as different as the US military’s tactics against the Taliban and the failure of the ‘play pump’ scheme in rural Africa. It flags its evolutionary credentials from the outset, its chapters bearing titles such as ‘learning’ (a hint at Lamarckian leanings) ‘variation’ and ‘selection’. Harford explains in his introduction: biologists have a word for the way in which solutions emerge from failure: evolution. Often summarised as the survival of the fittest, evolution is a process driven by the failure of the less fit … astounding complexity emerges in response to a simple process: try out a few variants on what you already have, we doubt the failures, copy the successes – and repeat forever. (2011: 12–13)

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So this book is about organisations and the environment, setting out to explain modern institutions as evolutionary artefacts. Nothing is quite straightforward, however, and Harford must make some sideways moves to build up his argument. The first comes in the assertion that evolution is all about failure. At the very least, a focus on failure suggests that Harford has repositioned the evolutionary story of selection and survival, now some way from Darwin’s original ‘better chance of surviving and being naturally selected’, or even Dawkins, who neatly defines evolution as a process of differential survival. Every organism dies, sooner or later, and what matters is that it reproduces before it does so. But organisations need not die, so the construction of a myth of Panglossian order requires a disciplinary measure, and here it is failure. From the title onwards, failure become the rhetorical foil, the hook, of Harford’s account, a means of repositioning the book as offering any generals, aid workers and executives who might be reading a way through the evolutionary problem: for if selection is blind and managed by environment, why even bother trying to manage? In his next step, Harford states that although we are used to looking at evolution as a biological process, it need not be so, citing the work of graphics expert Karl Sims, who built evolving electronic algorithms. The process he created was entirely blind and stupid: there was no foresight, planning or conscious design in any of the mutations. Yes the blind evolutionary process produced marvellous things … the evolutionary algorithm – of variation and selection, repeated – searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants are doing more of what works. (Harford, 2011: 14) Harford’s account parallels that offered by Daniel Dennett, moving to describe a fitness landscape, Dennett’s own favourite tool of evolutionary visualisation. The steps are similar to those taken by Dennett: evolution as a universal process; evolution as blind and mindless; evolution as an algorithmic process. As noted above, one of the central problems for evolutionary accounts of economics has been that of replication. Here is Harford’s synthesis: In biology, variation emerges from mutations and from sexual reproduction, which mixes the genes from two parents. Selection happens through heredity: successful creatures reproduce before they die and have offspring that share some or all of their genes. In a market economy, variation and selection are also at work. New ideas are created by scientists and engineers, meticulous middle managers in large corporations or daring entrepreneurs. Failures are culled because bad ideas do not survive long in the marketplace … good ideas spread because they’re copied by competitors, because staff leave to set up their own business, or because the company with the good ideas grows. (2011: 17)

The format of a popular account allows Harford to be relatively loose in his specification of heredity. He avoids the specificity of organisational routines argument, and suggests that ‘ideas’ are selected by the market, the bad ones swiftly culled and the good ones spread by imitation and growth. He takes an explicit genes-eye position, where the ideas themselves are the replicators, carried in the survival machine of the firm or organisation. Here Harford’s narrative is novel and outspoken. It is clear that the purpose of firms is not to make money but to produce innovative products. Products live on, while firms fail and die: after all, he asks, why should we expect a giant oil company to be good at renewable energy? The job of armies is to deliver the most successful fighting strategies: armies with the best strategies will succeed, and strategies will endure and be copied. Who, apart from anyone with a passing interest in military history, politics or philosophy, could criticise that logic? Harford’s narrative is rigorously adaptionist: in its intellectual adherence to Dawkins’ single gene-replicator, it supposes that all

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aspects of organisations succeeding into the long run will be optimised by the market, failures swiftly culled. There is also an explicit, acknowledged, Hayekian element in Harford’s thinking. Despite Hayek’s late career search for evolutionary progress, Harford focuses on his early work on information, and the celebrated essay ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (Hayek 1945). Throughout Adapt, Harford places a heavy emphasis on the problems of planning and knowledge identified by Hayek. In a short discussion of global warming, he identifies the market as a huge computer, suggesting that a ‘carbon tax would piggyback on the system of market prices, which acts as a vast analogue cloud computer, pushing and pulling resources to wherever they have the highest value’ (2011: 167). Again, Harford emphasises the mindlessness of this system, and its success compared with the failed attempts of centralised planning. It is no stretch to see the early Hayek here: It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement. (Hayek 1945: 527, my italics)

In an original move, Harford synthesises Austrian notions of the computational superiority of the market with the universal evolutionist’s insistence on mindlessness: indeed, if the economy is truly a blind selection machine, it follows that the contributions of chief executives are worth much less than systematic, random experimentation (a parallel to genetic mutation). Harford does not back down. He argues this point and more, suggesting that the Soviet economy failed through its ‘pathological inability to experiment’ (2011: 25), and that complexity theorists have found ‘that a group of the very smartest agents isn’t as successful as a more diverse group of dumb agents’ (2011: 49). He proposes, after the Soviet engineer, three ‘Palchinsky principles’: to seek out new ideas and try new things; to experiment on a scale where failure is survivable; and to learn from mistakes. Finally comes the segue back to evolution, a neat rhetorical closure, if scientifically inexact: ‘the first principle could simply be expressed as variation; the third is selection’ (2011: 25). Harford then must present an answer to the organisational problem he has sketched out. How should a manager manage, in the face of an environmental selection of ideas that overrides all other management strategies? Hayek can help here: ‘Hayek realised [in his 1945 essay] … that a complex world is full of knowledge that is localised and fleeting. Crucially, the local information is often something that local agents would prefer to use for their purposes’ (Harford, 2011: 72). Local knowledge and spirited experimentation must hold the key. A central chapter in the book is titled ‘Creating New Ideas That Matter or: Variation’. A string of anecdotes concerning the development of, for example, the Spitfire aircraft, show innovation activity as contrary to the demands of bureaucracy and cost-benefit demands. Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos is mentioned explicitly; Harford suggests that the specialised populations discovered on isolated islands mirror the kind of advances that have been created in relatively isolated commercial environments, such as small firms and independent research labs within corporations. He parallels the speculative research funding and biological mutations, arguing that ‘the ideal way to discover paths through a shifting landscape of possibilities is to combine baby steps and speculative leaps’ (Harford, 2011: 103). Bureaucratic supervision of research and development stifles such leaps, producing baby steps. Arguments of this kind suggest that Harford is familiar with the American management theory of the 1990s, and indeed, Gary Hamel – whose work popularised the firm capabilities approach, itself a product of evolutionary economics – is cited later.

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An omniscient market parallels the evolutionary environment; the best managers can do is throw out mutations and stand back. Harford has little time for policy nudges either. He reminds us of Orgel’s comment that ‘“Evolution is cleverer than you are”’ (Harford, 2011: 174); policymakers should stand back too. The ingenuity of the algorithmic method may in fact be counterproductive if interfered with by well-intentioned, but by definition myopic, nudge type strategies: ‘whenever we leap to conclusions about what a particular solution would look like … we are likely to discover unwelcome consequences’ (2011: 176). According to Harford, a more satisfactory approach is to ‘tilt the playing field’, to interfere with prices, for example, through a carbon tax, and leave economic evolution to sort it out: ‘Orgel’s law tells us that economic evolution, with the playing field tilted by the new rule, “greenhouse gases are expensive”, will produce entirely unexpected ways to reduce greenhouse gases’ (2011: 180). Here is the Panglossian heart of Harford’s approach. A combination of a Hayekian stress on human ignorance, and an evolutionary emphasis on the all-knowingness of the environment means that the best we can do is get out of the way, throwing out experiments to see which fail and which succeed. Failure, asserts Harford, is the predicate of success. Another direct evolutionary reference – biologist John Endler’s study of guppies – offers Harford the chance to assert once more that evolution is ‘driven by failure: some guppies were eaten, while others went on to produce future generations of well adapted baby guppies’ (2011: 222, my italics). Harford offers us a mix of Hamel-esque management optimism (‘Google is quite simply an evolutionary organisation’, ‘actively pursuing a Darwinian strategy of pushing out the largest possible range of products’ (2011: 233) and an account of the market as a culling, optimising device. As a source for the latter, he acknowledges The Truth about Markets by John Kay (2004); Kay uses the term disciplined pluralism i.e. exploring many ideas but cutting down the ones that fail. Harford’s adaptionist, genes-eye view of the market is perfect neoliberalism: it is not organisations or institutions that are chosen, but the ‘ideas’ (novel products, technologies, ways of doing things) that they promote. Such organisational genes will hop from body to body, parasitising production and organisation to reproduce themselves. Organisations that fail to adapt, that cling to sub-optimal, less well fitted, or as Harford simply puts it ‘bad’, ideas will be swiftly culled. Every feature of an organisation will be determined by adaption to the fitness landscape of the market, ruthlessly policed by inter-organisational competition. That a business landscape exists where competition is sharp enough to have such effects even exists is itself a tribute to the success of neoliberalism. Discussion: Dr Pangloss and the myth of the perfect market

This paper has presented a genealogical outline of the spread of ‘Darwinist’ theory into mainstream economics into the popular domain exemplified here by the work of Tim Harford. The spread of ideas follows, and benefits from, a similar diffusion of biological writing into the broader public arena. After a prolonged game of Chinese Whispers, the theory offered to the general public focuses on: the basic mechanism of variation, selection and retention as underlying all economic activity, including a particular emphasis on failure; a strict determinism of cause and a corresponding reduction in organisational control; an awareness of outcomes, seen as products, services or ways of doing, as optimised; an imminence of design, understood as processes of ordering or knowledge. The question must be: to what extent is the account of Darwinism put forward by, for example, Harford Darwinist? And, as the answer is, at least with respect to the lack of specification of the mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance, ‘not very’, what work does the narrative of Darwinism do in Harford and others’ accounts? It is clear from the discussions in recent economics that the translation of Darwinism from natural to social science is so imperfect as to make squabbles over the precise type of Darwinist theory irrelevant: Lamarckism and survival of the fittest can make themselves at home in economics without violating any scientific rules (Hodgson and Knudsen 2006). The main use of

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Darwinism in economics is as a myth of explanation and justification. Since Adam Smith, economists have been on good terms with myths and narrative schemes (McCloskey 1986). Some may be merely heuristic or illustrative, while others form essential conceptual schemes through which we interpret the unknowable or unknown world. In the latter case, myths and narratives – such as the invisible hand or liquid markets – are performative speech acts capable of bringing the world into being in a particular way (Austin 1978). ‘Natural selection’ as used by Darwin, is itself a mythic narrative that falls into the latter category. Evolutionary accounts of economics, on the other hand, began as heuristic devices that enabled economists to think in a new way. I suggest that more recent uses, grouped under the label of universal or general Darwinism, are active conceptual schemes. Despite the richness of Dawkins’ own narrative storytelling he is suggesting that memes really structure human culture; his illustrative metaphors of planting, jumping and parasitising hide a serious commitment to reimagining the social. When Harford argues that environmental selection produces better results than human planning he is offering a way of conceptualising the operation of markets and proposing that we should understand the complex, often unpredictable and sometimes cruel workings of the market as an evolutionary process. In doing so we have had recourse to an account of evolution that is no longer a specialised scientific theory. It has become a generalised, value-laden narrative of being, a central myth of free-market apologists. This brings me to the second point. As the universalised Darwinism of Hodgson or Harford is so far removed from the scientific theory – it is missing its scientific counterparts’ exacting understanding of variation and heredity, for example – then why should it be called Darwinism at all? The observation that we may try various strategies and stick with the one that succeeds is at best facile, and dignified with the term Darwinism it becomes just plain silly: my selection of the best route to work, or a teenager’s best nightclub chat up strategy, though driven by a process of trial and error, can hardly be termed Darwinist in any meaningful sense, at least if we wish to hold onto Darwinism as a credible scientific theory. Instead, the label Darwinism is deployed because it embodies enormous scientific and social capital. It is a foundational narrative for twentieth-century science, our primary conceptual device for making sense of our existence, and thus the modern counterpart to the creation myths of ancient men. Employing the metaphor represents a strategy of performative characterisation of the social world or the economy as an arena where weaker, less successful, less well fitted organisations, ideas, or whatever the relevant unit of selection may be, are discarded. The Darwinist framework makes sense only against a clear understanding of what economic structures, be they markets, firms or institutions, are for: to provide consumers with what we want, as efficiently as possible. In this avowedly neoliberal account, the market is the aggregated demands of consumers who are the best and final arbiters of what is good and bad. Harford makes this clear when he states that bad ideas do not survive long in the marketplace. His casual slippage between bad/good and fitted/ill-fitted gives the game away – it is just too easy to smuggle normative prescriptions into an evolutionary framework. Harford’s book sets out to persuade readers of the power of markets as calculating engines. It is Hayekian in tone, celebrating local knowledge and experimentation, alongside an enthusiasm for the latest in evolutionary management ideas. So it is not surprising to find an immanent sense of harmonious order – Harford claims that, given the ability to experiment, not only organisations but also individuals can enjoy successful, fulfilled lives. Here we find the sense of design that Darwin tried so hard to banish, but has ever since crept back in: the ‘groping’ of Teilhard’s evolution towards perfect forms, the catallaxy of Hayek’s naturalised market. Harford’s faith in innovation sits well here, and points to a much older tradition of thinking in evolution, that of Lamarck, whose metaphysics ‘secularised the Abrahamic imperative to transform earth through technology, realizing humanity’s birthright as created in the image of God’ (Fuller 2008: 176). Harford’s adaptive and innovating organisation, driven by the ana-

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logue cloud computer of the market, is conceived of as a powerful agent for social justice or global change. Yet power is exactly what Harford neglects. The neoliberal account of competitive markets he promotes ignores, or perhaps simply discounts, the possibility that some market actors may be more powerful than others. We can drive a wedge between evolutionary economics and biology at this point; for nature, in the long run, always wins, but a powerful organisation can preserve its status in the market for many years. A persistent criticism of evolutionary Panglossianism fits here, for human observers simply do not have the appropriate timescale to measure evolutionary progress. Life and death in the market may come more quickly, but the timescale may still be too long for us to observe what succeeds and what does not. We are all too likely to end up telling just-so stories, if only because evolution demands a long run, far longer than the lens we can cast on the market. The ‘spandrel’ critique, while disputed in biology, should make us alert in economics. For every evolutionary artefact, there may be many that have arisen as a side-effect, or simply come along for the ride. Are bankers’ bonuses, for example, the product of evolutionary ‘winner takes all’ markets (Frank and Cook 1995) or an artefact of historical and legislative moments, and a particular fashion in business school thinking. On a final point, it is possible that the genes-eye view adopted by Harford opens the door for a powerful critique of neoliberalism and one that I do not believe has been adequately explored, or even noticed. Evolutionary economics has taken habits and routines as the basis for replication (Nelson and Winter 1982; Hodgson and Knudsen 2010) and Harford has made use of the loosely specified term ‘ideas’, meaning products, technologies and new modes of production. It might equally be possible to identify organisational replicators as the ways of doing and technical practices particularly associated with neoliberalism and the preservation of capital. Bookkeeping might be one such, or capital budgeting, or hurdle rates and the apparatus of return on investment calculations. In this sense, the purpose of the replicator is to reproduce, through a circular causal relation, both itself and its extended phenotype, the latter being the mechanisms that ‘lever it into a new generation’. So the return on investment apparatus produces returns on investment, causes its robot carrier to be successful, and reproduces itself through processes of imitation, longevity and heredity. As it multiplies, it shapes the world around itself, becoming ever more successful. And so, with grand irony, we can find in the evolutionary assertions of the perfection of markets the germ of a Darwinist critique of the great structures of capitalism, where corporations and institutions are seen as blind robot vehicles programmed to preserve their selfish masters: calculations and measurements, the DNA of capital itself. References

Alchian, A. A. (1950) ‘Uncertainty, evolution, and economic theory’, The Journal of Political Economy, 211-221. Austin, J. (1978) How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackmore, S. (1997) The Meme Machine, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boltanski, L. and Thevenot, L. (2006) On Justification, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. C. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press. Enke, S. (1951) ‘On Maximizing Profits: A Distinction Between Chamberlin and Robinson’, The American Economic Review, 41 (4): 566–578. doi: 10.2307/1813588. Flew, A. (1984) Darwinian Evolution, London: Paladin Books. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics, trans. G. Burchell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Frank, R. H. and Cook, P. J. (1995) The Winner Take All Society, New York: Free Press. Friedman, M. (1966) ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’, in Essays on Positive Economics,

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Fools and jesters: The role of corporate responsibility managers Anna Zueva-Owens

Bradford University A Fool is an ancient and an ever-present character in stories of peoples throughout the world. Far from being dim-witted and incapable of meaningful action, he (seldom she) represents the unencumbered creative energy that subverts dusty certainties and opens up truly novel ways of looking at the world. In this paper, I suggest that the Fool’s capacity for subversion and destabilisation has much in common with the notion of ethics. I use the figures of the Fool and the court Jester to explore the role of corporate responsibility (CR) managers in commercial organisations. My analysis suggests that ethical action always contains the possibility of creativity and but also destabilises accepted norms and practices. This leads me to question the feasibility of ethics that always supports business objectives. The metaphor of the Fool also helps see the CR managers’ marginal position in organisations not only as curtailing their influence but also as enabling their creativity and unconventional insight.

Introduction

I have no way and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw. Full oft ‘tis seen, Our means secure us, and our mere defects Prove our commodities. Gloucester, King Lear, Shakespeare (1963 edition)

I use the mythical archetype of the Fool and the character of the European court Jester to understand the position of corporate responsibility, sustainability and other ethics managers (hereafter ‘CR managers’) in contemporary for-profit organisations. In doing this, I also make some tentative propositions about the possibility of the ethical in the context of a modern commercial company. I define the ethical in a Levinasian sense, not as definitive rules that create a clear good–bad dichotomy, but as a continuous and often torturous and uncertain process of change in oneself in response to the needs and demands of the Other (Roberts 2004; Bevan and Corvellec 2007). I also draw on the writings of Derrida that touch upon the notions of ethics and often closely echo those of Levinas (Jones 2003). The key aspects of this conception of ethics are uncertainty, incompleteness, reflexive struggle with self, ongoing critique of the present, and radical change. I am inspired by the Myths, Stories and Organizations edited by Yanis Gabriel (2004). Contributors to this text used myths, legends and popular literary works to understand the condition of work in contemporary organisations and of life in the contemporary capitalist society. The authors took the myths as encoded narrative multi-layered messages designed to communicate ideas about nature, human society and an individual’s journey through life. Similarly, I turn to two sources – the mythical past and more recent literature – in an attempt to arrive at a more in-depth understanding of a contemporary organisational phenomenon. My phenomenon of choice is members of business organisations assigned a specialised task of caring for the ethical or how their organisation fulfils and communicates its fulfilment of various responsi111

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bilities to society and the natural environment. Increasing numbers of organisations are creating such positions and whole teams and departments dedicated to the concerns about social and environmental responsibilities. The phenomenon, however, at this point is relatively unexplored from an academic perspective. In turning to the myths to understand the position of CR managers, it is tempting to focus on tales of heroes. After all, CR managers are ‘managers’ and as such are supposed to lead, to improve, to overcome the odds in their service of their community. However, a hero, although often capable of doing good, is not a primarily ethical figure in the Levinasian sense. His (rarely ‘her’ in Western myths) function is to reflect rather than critique or change the natural and social order and to find one’s place in it rather than change it. A hero may kill the dragon, defeat the usurper and save the princess, but he does not as a rule challenge the existing social and natural structures, rather restores the rightful order of things that has been temporarily disrupted. In many cases, the hero ends by simply inserting himself into the existing order by marrying the princess and occupying the throne. The heroic trials are thus often interpreted as an individual’s journey through life’s significant stages of growth, maturity and decline, teaching a person how to deal with immature and destructive aspects of the self and find a proper place in the world and society (Campbell 1993). I find the notions of uncertainty, reflexivity and critique embodied in a different mythical figure, that of the Fool, together with his associated manifestations of the Trickster and the Holy Fool, and the Elizabethan court Jester. I employ both these figures to examine the place and role of CR managers in the modern commercial organisation. In employing the figure of the Fool, I do not use any specific myth but draw on the broad Jungian-style archetypal notion, composed from a variety of mythical figures such as Loki of the Norse mythology (Von Schnurbein 2000) and Wakdjunkaga of the Native American Winnebago tribe (BabcockAbrahams 1975). Characters like Loki and Wakdjunkaga, however, are central and independent figures in their own mythologies, even when connected to other significant figures such as the other gods of the Norse pantheon. To supplement this vision of the Fool and to see what happens to the Fool within a hierarchical social context reminiscent of a modern commercial organisation, I will rely on Shakespeare’s King Lear and the figure of the court Jester that features prominently in this play. This paper is structured as follows: first, I briefly outline my position on ethics. Then I will present my understanding of the archetypal image of the Fool, relying heavily on the integrative analysis by Barbara Babcock-Abrahams (1975), and examine the relationship between this image and my conception of ethics, mainly drawing on the writings of Levinas and Derrida. Then, using King Lear, I will explore the function and remit of the Fool within a social hierarchy oriented towards its own preservation. Finally, I will bring these strands of thought together and their implications for our understanding of the place and role of a CR manager in a modern commercial organisation.

Striving for ethics

I follow the work of Emmanuel Levinas (e.g. Levinas 1985; 1989) to build my understanding of the ethical. Levinas’s work is often used by the poststructurally-minded scholars to debate the possibility of ethical behaviour within commercial organisations. The approach is characterised by a lack of attempts to devise a precise definition of the ethical or build instructions on how to behave ethically. ‘Levinas’s task is not one of constructing a system but rather one of trying to find the meaning of ethics’ (Jones 2003: 228). The central subject of Levinas’s ethics is the meeting with and interaction between the self and the Other, and the key characteristic of this interaction is the indeterminacy of its outcomes for the self. Ethics for Levinas is foremost about how one relates to others. Others can be treated as objects, as the same as self, as others with potentially different understandings and needs. However, the eth-

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ical only becomes possible when others are treated as the Other, implying an acknowledgement of difference and also an infinite openness to the possibility of change in oneself to accommodate this difference and the demands of the Other (Jones, Parker and ten Bos 2007). The relationship with the Other is also inescapable. The self is ‘taken hostage’ (Van de Ven 2005: 8) by the nature of existence that is not possible without touching and intersecting the Other in some way. The difficulty in the openness to the Other is the constant tension between the impossibility to view the word from the perspective of the Other and the inescapable violence towards the Other arising from this: I am not able to reduce the meaning of the other to the place he or she gets in my understanding of things. Although this reduction is inescapable, since I have to make sense of the world from my limited perspective, I cannot ignore the violence and injustice of this reduction. (Van de Ven 2005: 6)

Thus, ethics for Levinas is about self-sacrifice and radical self-change, accompanied by internal strife caused by indeterminacy. Jones (2003) relates the work of Levinas to Jacques Derrida’s writings on ethics, responsibility and justice, drawing parallels between the two authors. Derrida also focuses on the relation to the Other and sees responsibility as openness to the Other. He extends the understanding of openness by noting that it has to occur without certainty as to the consequences to the self or even a concern about the consequences. One has to be open without an expectation of reciprocation or return such as financial benefit for the business, and the nature of openness cannot be formalised or reified through set notions of duties or laws. Further, ethical decisions for Derrida are about choosing between two or more paths on the basis of incomplete information. This is in contravention to the utilitarian assumption that ethical decisions are based on a thorough knowledge of a situation and a careful weighing of all interests and calculation of possible outcomes. For Derrida, an ethical decision is one that always involves uncertainty. A decision based on complete information is not a decision but a simple case of following or not following the rules. ‘So we could say that indecision is a condition of possibility of decision’ (Jones 2003: 231). The ethical position outlined here inevitably contains danger. One is required to open himself/herself to the Other, on the basis of incomplete information, without calculating the consequences or expecting positive returns for the self. The possibility of positive returns for the Other is also never certain as one can never fully know the Other. ‘Without the possibility of radical evil, of perjury, and of absolute crime, there is no responsibility, no freedom, no decision’ (Derrida 1997: 219, quoted in Jones 2003: 233). Ethics, as a result, is a dangerous activity, never comfortable, never certain. Fools, tricksters and jokers

In Jungian psychology, archetypes are primordial ideas and abstract themes that constitute the human collective unconscious and appear in dreams and myths, manifested in particular images (Carr 2002). These ideas are the building blocks of the human psyche and are common to all peoples, hence the ‘collective unconscious’. The Trickster or the Fool is one of the archetypal images discussed by Jung. The figure of the Fool or the Trickster appears in many mythologies, and his common role is to upset the established natural and social order. For instance, the Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga, who is a subject of significant scholarly attention, partially due to his exploits recorded in a series of no less than forty-nine detailed tales, violates a wide variety of social conventions and crosses many lines by desecrating sacred tribal offices, committing acts of mindless cruelty and murder, inverting gender roles and identities, satirising the powerful and disobeying authority (Babcock-Abrahams 1975).

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In Jung’s understanding, the Trickster represents the infantile, self-centred, unsocialised and destructive aspect of being (Russo 2008). The Trickster is a being who is ‘undifferentiated’ or not cognisant of cause and effect or distinctions between commonly accepted human categories of self and other, light and dark, day and night, male and female, good and evil, etc. The Trickster is a childish figure who is not aware of the consequences of his own actions. In his selfishness and ignorance, he can cause great destruction, e.g. Loki stands against the gods in the final battle of the end of world – the Ragnarok (von Schnurbein 2000) – and thus some authors interpret the Fool primarily as a source of danger (e.g. Horvath 2008). Others, however, offer not necessarily opposing but alternative interpretations of the Fool. It is difficult to ignore the fact that in many tales the Fool’s destructiveness appears alongside the exuberant creativity. In Hindu mythology, Shiva is the dancing destroyer and a creator and transformer of the world. Loki spends much of his time assisting the gods, e.g. by extracting valuable treasures from the dwarves for the gods, and such significant characters as Thor depend on his help (von Schnurbein 2000). The trickster Wakdjunkaga protects people from monsters and also provides them with new tools (Babcock-Abrahams 1975). The Fool also appears to have an ability to see the world in unconventional ways, attaining unexpected insights. He is in close affinity to another figure, the Clown, who since ancient to modern times is associated with resistance through subversion of existing certainties by the use of the comic, the confusing and the grotesque (Amoore and Hall 2013). The figure of the Fool or the Joker in a game of cards is a wild card that does not have a fixed function but can assume many different roles and interject into the game in unexpected ways, offering novel possibilities. The Fool is also a prominent card in Tarot card decks that are often regarded as an aggregation of a variety of psychological archetypes. Some Tarot deck versions present the Fool as a blindfolded man, symbolising both ignorance and the ability to function through unconventional insight. The Rider-Waite deck shows him as a dreamy young man who is not looking at the path he walks and, in his folly, is about to step over a precipice. However, in this process the sun of divine wisdom is shown to shine on him behind his back and in his hand he holds a rose, another symbol of divine insight. These symbols indicate that the step off the precipice may not in fact lead to destruction but result in some other unknown and unexpected consequence that cannot be revealed through conventional means of understanding (Nichols 1980). This proximity of the Fool to the divine wisdom is also found in other traditions and contexts. For instance, the phenomenon of the Holy Fool is present in many cultures and in many forms. It ranges from nonsensical riddles used in some Buddhist practices to induce revelations to the treatment of mental illness sufferers as being close to god in some Christian traditions (Thompson 1973; Syrkin 1982; Phan 2001). While containing the potential for wisdom, his own nature is ambiguous. The Trickster is a habitual shape-shifter, assuming the forms of different animals and also moving with ease between sexes (Babcock-Abrahams 1975). The ambiguity is not confined to the Trickster’s nature but also defines his relationship to the outside world. The Fool occupies an ambiguous position relative to the rest of the world. He is neither excluded nor included. In a Tarot deck, the Fool is one of the trump cards of the Major Arcana but does not have an assigned place within the card hierarchy, being neither the first nor the last one. Loki is similarly uncertainly positioned ‘between disparate categories – giants and gods, men and women, man and beast’ (von Schnurbein 2000: 110). Fools and Tricksters are associated with liminal spaces such as crossroads and marketplaces and often act as intruders. They violate spatial and temporal boundaries by being active at night, living in secluded cells and caves or wondering the world, unlike normal people (Babcock-Abrahams 1975). The internal and external ambiguity and eccentric, unpredictable and anti-social behaviour results in the Trickster’s marginality in relation to the human society and the divine order. Tricksters are associated with dirt and impurity. Their affinity with chaos and rule-breaking is

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regarded as polluting and dangerous to the maintenance of social boundaries, categories and norms (Babcock-Abrahams 1975). Therefore, the Trickster suffers exclusion, albeit mainly of a voluntary nature, and is barred from the conventional social ties such as hierarchical and kinship structures. To summarise this discussion of Fools and Tricksters, I use an abbreviated BabcockAbraham’s (1975) list of Trickster characteristics. Tricksters: • ignore social, spatial and temporal boundaries • habitually instigate and take part in events that are chaotic, comic, childish, egocentric, resistant of authority, amoral, generally unthinkable, potentially destructive but at the same time innovative and creative • may make significant contribution to society, e.g. in the form of gifting new technologies and protection from monsters • are frequently associated with mental abnormalities • inhabit ‘in-between’ spaces such as crossroads and marketplaces • shape-shift, including changing their sex, can be of uncertain sexual status and of indeterminate age, can combine both human and animal features.

Finally, there remains the broader question of the function of the Trickster. What does the Trickster stand for and what role does he perform in human society? Babcock-Abraham’s (1975: 183) concludes that Trickster has a ‘reflective-creative’ function. Through laughter, caricature and juxtaposition of incompatibles, he exposes the fragile, inconsistent, shaky, relative and often unnecessary nature of social conventions and accepted knowledge. By breaking boundaries, he reconfigures ideas, opens up the realm of the possible beyond the known, gives a taste of freedom beyond the existing norms, and raises questions about the nature of existence beyond the everyday understandings. The ethical in fools

What does this creative destroyer of a Fool and Trickster have to do with ethics? There are, of course, significant differences between the archetypal character of the Fool and the understanding of ethics I outlined at the start of this paper. While the ethically-minded person experiences internal struggle and strife, the Fool plays with little regard for the consequences of his actions. While the ethically-minded person is in tangible danger of negative outcomes for the self, the Fool rarely suffers, at least in the long-term (Babcock-Abrahams 1975). While the ethically-minded person is focused on the needs of the Other, despite the impossibility of ever fully grasping them, the Fool’s actions are often motivated by own amusement or do not have any specific motivation at all. At the same time, there are links with Levinas that lie in the uncertain and the unfinished nature of the Fool’s actions. In the world of the Fool, as in the ethics of Levinas, there is no one definitive path and the truths are concealed, elusive and even non-existent. As the Fool, the ethical person acts without ever fully knowing the consequences of his or her actions. Without a full understanding of the Other, ethics is about steps into unknown territories and novel situations. As the Fool crosses lines and violates social conventions, ethics is about change. The world of the Fool is continuously shifting, making it impossible to hold onto or become comfortable with living within particular boundaries and by particular rules. The Fool makes comedy of the established ways. Similarly, ethics is about constant readiness to change oneself and one’s own environment in response to the Other. To act ethically, one cannot hold onto a constant identity and a reified understanding of the world. Ethics is about stepping out of comfort zones, about subversion of certainties, accidental discoveries and reinvention of the present.

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The Fool interacts with the world in haphazard ways. He does not have a plan or a long-term strategy, he does not calculate the outcomes of his actions; he works with and often produces chaos. The notion of control is not part of the Fool’s play. He is resistant to control in the form of certainties and plans and in the form of authority. Control also has little place in ethical action, starting with the basic understanding of being as an inescapable interaction with others. Ethical action is also about relinquishing at least control over the self and one’s own future in being ready to respond to the call of the Other. Little control is also possible in making ethical decisions as their nature is characterised by incomplete information and indeterminacy of outcomes. As the Fool’s adventures do not have an objective or a logical finishing point, the ethical is always in the process of becoming. It is never possible to finalise the ethical, to fully address the demands of the Other, to arrive at a situation where no further change is necessary. As the Fool highlights on-going conflict between the individual and society, freedom and authority, the ethical does not promise a resolution of conflicts but is rather about a continuous and open engagement with them. The Fool constantly encourages us to question existing certainties, readily mocking any established authority, just as Levinas’s ethics never allow the self to become reified. In this way, the Fool can be regarded as a vehicle for the ethical, demonstrating the attributes (playfulness, unpredictability, madness) necessary for the ethical to emerge. Last but definitely not least in the context of ethics, the Fool, for all his chaotic, dangerous and potentially polluting nature, offers a possibility of genuinely novel, creative and beneficial outcomes. Subversion of existing convention contains a promise of shifts in power balances and of liberation for the oppressed. Those who were previously silenced and contained by set boundaries have the possibility of being heard when the boundaries become the subject of ridicule. That which was previously worthless has a possibility of attaining value when the value systems are turned upside down. Having established a connection between the ethical and the Fool, I now turn to the exploration of a Fool in an organisational context and finally to the discussion of how the Fool helps illuminate the role of CR managers in commercial organisations. First, to situate the Fool within an organisation-like hierarchical structure, I turn to King Lear. The fool within a hierarchy

Admittedly, the following analysis of the Fool in King Lear is highly limited. Both the play and the character of the Fool (and the notions of foolishness and madness) in it are highly complex and multi-dimensional and can bear infinite insights. My focus is on gaining insight into the Fool as a member of a hierarchy. The plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear (I used the Signet Classic 1963 edition) will be familiar to many, so I will not be recounting it in detail here. In brief, an ageing king, Lear, wishes to remove himself from the matters of state and enter what in the modern world we would understand as retirement. In doing so, he divides his lands and powers among his three daughters. His one condition under which he will hand over the inheritance is a declaration of love from the beneficiaries. While his youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to participate in the farce and is banished, the older daughters, Goneril and Regan, wax lyrically about their love for their father and receive half a kingdom each in return. Both Lear and Cordelia suffer a tragic death as a result of a conflict that ensues when Goneril and Regan refuse to honour their promises to care for their father while safeguarding his dignity, respecting his seniority and preserving his independence. On his journey through a variety of perils, Lear is accompanied by his Fool – a court jester. In the character of the court Jester, the counterpart of the king, the Fool ceases to be an independently functioning character and is bound with and inserted into the worldly power and

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established order. His role is the constant and comical critique of power, and his position allows him to speak truths to the king, holding up a mirror to the authority’s shortcomings (Otto 2001). The Fool is the only person in the story who is allowed to speak the truth to the king with relative impunity. All other righteous and truthful individuals loyal to Lear either have to aid the king indirectly, under the cover of false identities, or are banished like Cordelia. The Fool, however, occupies a privileged position. Only the Fool accompanies the king, paradoxically, under his true identity, and can openly criticise the king’s decisions. However, the Fool’s privilege is conditioned. He cannot council the king using direct speech, and instead has to frame his opinions in verse, comic metaphors and riddles, albeit those that are transparent to any listener. The Fool’s form of language functions as a sign of his position apart from other people who use normal speech. Much like his belled patchwork cap, it places him outside conventional social boundaries and relationship frameworks. As long as he does not use the language of regular mortals, he can act outside the normal hierarchy and speak openly to the king. Through caricature and buffoonery the Fool can even criticise the king, e.g. by pointing out that relinquishing power was not the best decision on Lear’s part. Significantly, the Fool has the power to critique the king because, while being marginalised through the use of special language and dress and clearly being of low social origins, he still has a specific place in the court. He is officially attached to the king and exists under the king’s protection. This further adds to the contingency of his powers. He can offer critique, but only while existing within the boundaries of the court, much as the carnival clowns may mock the religious and secular powers only at designated times of the year. The Fool has little power to act but through the king. The king, on his part and as Lear does, can chose not to hear the Fool. In this sense, when embedded into a social hierarchy, the Fool both gains an officially sanctioned audience and loses license to unbounded independent action as this audience can chose not to heed him. Lear’s Fool is heard by almost no one in the play, except the audience. The dependence of the Fool on the king follows through to the end of the play, where the Fool apparently1 meets his death as Lear rapidly approaches his own. Despite this admittedly weakened position, Lear’s Fool performs his ethical function of illuminating the foolishness of others in an exemplary fashion. Lear himself has little capacity for reflection and self-critique. The Fool serves as a mirror to Lear’s actions. However, he does not simply reflect them in an identical form, but rather reveals their true nature, providing an ongoing critical commentary of the events. Importantly, the commentary does not consist of simple and rational explanations of why certain actions are unwise. It comes in the form of jokes, verses and riddles that can often be interpreted in more than one way and thus give the other characters in the play and the audience an opportunity to meditate and consider a variety of angles and implications. The Fool also continues with his commentary despite it producing little tangible effect and contributing little to the change in other’s actions. The immediate outcome of his play is not his primary concern. To summarise the discussion in this section, it can be said that a Fool within a social hierarchy can continue performing his destabilising, subverting, illuminating and guiding function. However, the possibility of this is contingent on two factors. First, the Fool must still be marginalised. He must set himself apart from other people, for instance by the means of eccentric 1 In the last act of the play, after Cordelia is treacherously killed, Lear exclaims, ‘And my poor fool is hanged’. The word ‘fool’ can be interpreted in two ways, the first being a term of endearment used by Lear to refer to his daughter. The second possibility refers to the Fool himself, who has disappeared from the scene some time before and does not enter the play again. It has been suggested (e.g. Stroup 1961) that both Cordelia and the Fool were originally supposed to be played by the same actor, as was a common practice in Shakespeare’s times. Thus, Lear’s enigmatic utterance could be a game of words that refers to this fact, as well as to the spiritual affinity between Cordelia and the Fool.

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behaviour, outlandish dress and, most importantly, a different kind of language. Second, the Fool must secure the protection of a powerful benefactor or receive some other officially recognised social licence that would sanction his destabilising activity. Otherwise, he risks being banished from society like Wakdjunkaga every time he breaks the rules. A final special note is reserved for the language that is used by the Fool. It performs a double function. In addition to setting him apart from others, Fool’s speech can have many interpretations, opening up possibilities for critical and creative thinking.

Corporate responsibility managers as court fools

The archetypal character of the Fool and the figure of the court Jester described above can help us develop a deeper understanding of the role of a CR manager within a commercial organisation. Similar to the Fool and Jester, a CR manager has to perform an ethical function within a hierarchy oriented towards its own survival and perpetuation. His or her task is to provide a critical reflection on the activities of the organisation (e.g. via composing a social report), think beyond the immediate bottom line (e.g. by considering the organisation’s long-term environmental impact) and question accepted norms and practices (e.g. by re-evaluating present use of resources). A CR manager provides a critique of an authority from inside the authority structure. As the Jester has to work with the king, the CR manager’s activity is directed at others and he or she has to strive to make himself or herself heard by the managers of other departments and by the senior management in particular. Often, the CR manager is not heard by the others in the organisation, and his or her projects are discounted as being damaging to the profit prospects or to the clarity and coherency of organisational mission (Bondy 2008; Visser and Crane 2010; Wright, Nyberg and Grant 2012). As the play of the Fool always contains the possibility of chaos and destruction, the activities of the CR manager can pose a threat to organisational survival. At the very least, they pose a threat to individual organisational members as the CR manager attempts to break down the familiar profit-oriented logic of daily business functioning. Further, it is not possible to avoid this danger. A safe Fool is a failed Fool, his function is not to support and reproduce reality but to subvert it. A CR manager who entirely serves the business case ends up avoiding responsibility, and this has been the subject of the critique of the business ethics movement by numerous authors (e.g. Bevan and Corvellec 2007; Banerjee 2008). Some authors documented the frustration of CR managers who feel powerless when forced to always prioritise the business case (Wright, Nyberg and Grant 2012). The analysis of the Fool’s nature supports such critiques and unambiguously points to the fact that ethics that do not pose risks for business are not possible. The business case for ethics is likely to be too limited in scope to be of true innovative potential, too narrow to offer many alternative paths. Of course, there are differences between the Fool and the court Jester that have implications for the understanding of CR managers. While the Fool is generally unencumbered by social ties and has room for free playful subversion and mischief, the court Jester has to contend with his subordination to and dependence on the king. The court Jester’s ‘job’ is also officially sanctioned by authority and recognised as legitimate by society. This indicates that just as with most initiatives within an organisation, the efforts of a CR manager are unlikely to be recognised and supported unless backed by senior management (Bondy 2008). At the same time, the CR manager is unlikely to be the source of effective critique if he or she is completely integrated and legitimised within the organisational hierarchy. Such integration contains the danger that the Fool may become too much like the king to reflect his shortcomings. Language is likely to be of primary importance here. As discussed above, the language used by the court Jester not only opens space for creative interpretations but also sets him apart from others. A few researchers of the CR managers’ work pointed out that to gain recognition within organisations CR managers are regularly forced to adopt the language of business effi-

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ciency and align their goals with cost minimisation, profit margin, growth and other commercial concerns (Visser and Crane 2010; Wright, Nyberg and Grant 2012). Ultimately, a limited linguistic repertoire focused on business efficiency is likely to foreclose wide-reaching critical and creative reflection. For instance, a CR manager’s job can be focused on maintaining order by increasing the intelligibility of stakeholder demands to the corporate authority and controlling for ‘non-financial’ reputational risks as opposed to destabilising existing organisational certainties. To prevent this, a CR manager will need to maintain a certain degree of outsiderhood. Just as a court Jester, he or she will have to play a balancing game of securing legitimacy and managerial support and at the same time remaining on the margins, set apart from the rest and their concerns. The last note about marginalisation is curious because it tends to be presented as a negative factor in the writings on CR managers (e.g. Bondy 2008; Visser and Crane 2010; Wright, Nyberg and Grant 2012). CR managers view it primarily as an obstacle to making themselves heard – it is always an opposite of legitimacy with no productive function of its own. In the Fool’s situation, however, marginalisation is the very source of his ingenuity and deep insight. Being accepted in one social role and focusing on one legitimate goal (efficiency and profit in a company) would compromise the Fool’s ability to shape-shift, to switch roles, to roam the ‘inbetween’ spaces that allows him to develop his unconventional points of view. Similarly, in the case of the CR manager, outsiderhood may paradoxically be enabling as well as an obstacle.

Final remarks

In this paper, I contended that the notion of ethics has much to do with the notion of foolishness. I used the figures of the Fool and the court Jester to come to a deeper understanding of the role of corporate responsibility managers in commercial organisations. The analysis supported some of the existing findings in regards to the CR managers, for instance, the fact that CR managers can expect to be marginalised in their organisations. The analysis also put in further doubt the currently popular contention that ethics and business profit objectives are perfectly compatible. The Fool, while being a potential source of divine wisdom, attains his unconventional and unsettling insight by walking close to the precipice that leads to chaos. The ultimate outcomes of his actions are indeterminable, they can result in both creation and destruction, confusion and insight. It does not appear to be possible to go about questioning existing practices in a safe way. Finally, looking at the figures of the Fool and the Jester led me to considering the question of marginalisation of CR managers in their organisations. While so far it has been presented in the negative light in the literature on CR managers, it is this being apart from society that allows the Fool his freedom to experiment, create and see differently. As a result, I suggest that the subject of marginalisation of CR managers needs to be examined more closely to consider its ethical and productive potential.

References

Amoore, L. and Hall, A. (2013) ‘The Clown at the Gates of the Camp: Sovereignty, Resistance and the Figure of the Fool’, Security Dialogue, 44 (2): 93–110. Babcock-Abrahams, B. (1975) ‘“A Tolerated Margin of Mess”: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, 11 (3): 147–186. Banerjee, S. B. (2008) ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, Critical Sociology, 34 (1): 51–79. Bevan, D. and Corvellec, H. (2007) ‘The Impossibility of Corporate Ethics: For a Levinasian Approach to Managerial Ethics’, Business Ethics: A European Review, 16 (3): 208–219. Bondy, K. (2008) ‘The Paradox of Power in CSR: A Case Study on Implementation’, Journal of Business Ethics, 82 (2): 307–323.

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Campbell, J. (1993) The Hero with a Thousand Faces, London: Fontana Press. Carr, A. (2002) ‘Jung, Archetypes and Mirroring in Organizational Change Management: Lessons from a Longitudinal Case Study’, Journal of Organizational Change Management, 15 (2): 477– 489. Gabriel, Y. (2004) Myths, Stories and Organizations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horvath, A. (2008) ‘Mythology and the Trickster: Interpreting Communism’, in A. Wöll and H. Wydra (eds), Democracy and Myth in Russian and Eastern Europe, Abingdon: Routledge. Jones, C. (2003) ‘As If Business Ethics Were Possible, “Within Such Limits” …’, Organization, 10 (2): 223–248. Jones, C., Parker, M. and ten Bos, B. (2007) For Business Ethics, London: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1985) Ethics and Infinity, trans. R. Cohen, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1989) ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. S. Hand, Oxford: Blackwell. Nichols, S. (1980) Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, York Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser. Otto, B. (2001) Fools are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Phan, P. C. (2001) ‘The Wisdom of Holy Fools in Postmodernity’, Theological Studies, 62 (4): 730– 752. Roberts, J. (2004) ‘The Manufacture of Corporate Social Responsibility: Constructing Corporate Sensibility’, Organization, 10 (2): 249–265. Russo, J. (2008) ‘A Jungian Analysis of Homer’s Odysseus’, in A Cambridge Companion to Jung, ed. P. Young-Eisendrath and T. Dawson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1963) King Lear, ed. R. Fraser, New York: Signet Classic. Stroup, T. B. (1961) ‘Cordelia and the Fool’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 12 (2): 127–132. Syrkin, A. Y. (1982) ‘On the Behavior of the “Fool for Christ’s Sake”’, History of Religions, 22 (2): 150–171. Thompson, E. (1973) ‘The Archetype of the Fool in Russian Literature’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 15 (3): 245–273. Van de Ven, B. (2005) ‘The (Im)possibility of a Levinasian Business Ethics: Towards an Interpretation of the Ethical in Business’, Working Paper, Tilburg University, www2.le.ac.uk/departments/ management/documents/research/research-units/cppe/conference-pdfs/levinas/vandeven.pdf (accessed 26 May 2014). Visser, W. and Crane, A. (2010) ‘Corporate Sustainability and the Individual: Understanding What Drives Sustainability Professionals as Change Agents’, SSRN Paper Series, No. 1, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1559087 (accessed 26 May 2014). Von Schnurbeing, S. (2000) ‘The Function of Loki in Snorri Sturluson’s Edda’, History of Religions, 40 (2): 109–124. Wright, C., Nyberg, D. and Grant, D. (2012) ‘“Hippies on the Third Floor”: Climate Change, Narrative Identity and the Micro-Politics of Corporate Environmentalism’, Organization Studies, 33 (11): 1451–1475.

III

Tórann

Tórann – Introduction James Fitchett

University of Leicester

Fuat Firat’s ‘Thoughts on Symbolic Culture’ offers a historical reflection on myth, and the culmination of enlightenment and humanistic thinking into what for many commentators has now become an economised and marketised mythic-reality. Fuat’s commentary emphasises a point that is implied through many of the papers being presented here, that the idea of myth in the world is still a controversial and perhaps uncomfortable one: that a world without myth – or with myth marginalised to the periphery of social experience – would be, if not a better world, then one that was somehow more real, more clean, with more analytical potential – more development. I read Fuat’s comment as a diagnosis of a long and frantic attempt within modernism and enlightenment thinking to contain and repress the horror of myth, and the terror that comes with accepting the mythological nature of experience. Dominque consistently reminds that this must be realised, and Gianluca shows how this is done. Being in the world is sacrificed to an endless process of cutting up, dividing and separation – only to produce social life as dominated by domains, and separated into distinct spheres of conduct and operation. Fuat notes the double importance of myth here, because in order to remove myth from the world it is essential to ground these divided realms upon their own founding mythologies. Firat writes, ‘the greatest modern myth is that there is any experience outside myth’. Dominique describes this as the mirror of myth, a reflection of itself within itself. In the quest for better ways of being, the search for alternatives to the debased and discredited mythologies of market-economy, Firat offers forward the potential of symbolic culture, for which new mythologies are needed in which the symbolic potential of humanity is recognised and valued. The fading echo of Mauss’ gift and Baudrillard’s symbolic exchange is no doubt present here in both Fuat and Dominique’s presentation. In all of these papers we are confronted with this symbolic malevolence, to set against – and take revenge, on the strife and misery of commodification and signification. Fuat concludes on the upbeat, proclaiming that ‘we are ready for new myths’ but that the realisation of the symbolic is something that must be struggled for against the ceaseless resilience and progress of market mythologies and their iconographic reinforcement of contemporary forms of social organisation. For Dominique the act of critical awareness around questions of sustainability is the essential priority. Gianluca Miscione adopts a similar panoramic approach to mythology in his paper on the unknown and the place of myth in mediating transitions to, and even making possible particular technological futures and potentialities. The focus of the analysis attends less on what myth is (or is not) and more on what myths do, and what social actors and institutions are able to achieve through myth. Myth is a remedy to uncertainty, organising behaviours and aligning actors. Gianluca mentions the ‘powerful banality’ that myths transition as technologies are transformed and embedded into common social practice. Through an analysis of two indepth case settings the paper shows how technology mythologies (in telemedicine in the Amazon and Spatial Data Infrastructures) around progress, development and efficiency collide with preexisting social realities which result in seemingly chaotic, prolific and unintended outcomes. Myths are a powerful structure which bracket out doubts, cement particular networks and alliances that maintain action despite these uncertainties. Myths enable ‘normal reality checks’ to be suspended which allow uncertain future potentialities to be progressed and implemented. 123

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Towards the final sections of the paper the power of Western ‘developed’ myths to mediate and offer direction in other cultural contexts is questioned. The prospect of radically different future uncertainties and mythologies is hinted at, with myths from other cultures gaining more traction and permanence. Dominique Bouchet’s ‘Permanency of the Myth’ contemplates the troubling nature of mythology for the moderns and the prickly relation to ideology and nature. The nagging question that the paper returns to several times is how can we avoid reducing the analysis of market-myth to pure ideology, and by doing so provide mythical thinking with an appropriate alibi for modernity? The revenge of the symbolic is that modernity has to know that it must produce its own myths – to confront their unpalatable necessity, while at the same time acknowledging their indeterminacy and contingency. Dominique writes that ‘traditional societies did not relate to myths as if they were their own products’. The crisis in modernity then culminates in a kind of neurotic lack of social confidence in the nature and reality of the world that gets varnished over with ideology. Reading the papers together as a (somewhat arbitrary) set is interesting in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious commonality that can be drawn concerns the collective acknowledgment that modernity and enlightenment ideologies deserve critical attention, and that the mythologies of the ‘West’ are shown to be less sustainable now and becoming more so. Dominique gives an essential bibliography for this argument in Levi-Strauss, Castoriadis, Marx and others. Western mythologies, at least those that are dominant in terms of ideology, are increasingly dissatisfying and implausible. Fuat and Gianluca offer different possible potentialities but both are predicated on looking beyond the enlightenment myths of progress and the market. It might be interesting to explore how some of the techniques and processes Gianluca outlines in terms of the operation of mythologies of technology might become deployed in the achievement of the symbolic futures imagined by Fuat. Any movement towards alternative market and marketing futures, including symbolic culture, is uncertain and unknown. Gianluca’s analysis would suggest that the mobilisation of powerful mythologies will be important to grow and cement these alternative potentialities. Perhaps our analytical gaze would be well deployed on looking to identify these emerging mythologies and their potential for alignment. These may even speak to some of the potentials alluded to by Dominique and Fuat. As the banality and brutality of market relations become ever more realised there is certainly much hope to be placed in mechanisms that can suspend and disarm these realities. The idea that myth might be creatively used to destabilise market ideology is certainly worth contemplating.

Market myths and iconographic culture: Thoughts for a symbolic culture A. Fuat Fırat

Introduction

University of Texas – Pan American and Aalto University

Imagine that you cannot see, you cannot hear, smell, taste, or feel, , imagine, that is, all of your five senses are lost. Existence as we know it would cease. For us human beings, it seems, the five senses, as we categorise them, are the beginning of all experience of existence in the universe. This may also be true to different degrees for all other living creatures, especially animals. Yet, as human beings we seem to have a key difference from the rest. We conceptualise at higher levels of abstraction. We experience our universe, that is, not simply through our senses but by the interception of concepts such as gravity, freedom, love, democracy, and the like. Conceptualisation at higher levels of abstraction turns out to be a great gift. Through these concepts we organise our lives according to our choices rather than be otherwise organised. It may also be a curse; it seems that we cannot only sense things, but we have to make sense of what we sense, and this becomes obsessive. For a human being a banana is not, cannot remain to be, something that is tasty to the mouth, to gobble up. We cannot help but categorise it as a fruit, consider its nutrition qualities, think about when and for what purpose it is good to eat, what is the right thing to do with its peel and why, and the list of conceptual categorisations that are inevitable to elicit through which we make sense of the banana goes on.

The symbolic

This means that even the material things we interact with are sensed and made sense of within the symbolic realm. Even the categorisation that something, anything, is ‘material’ is a symbolic act. Consequently, we can say with confidence that from the moment that humans conceptualised at higher levels of abstraction, they irreversibly moved into the symbolic realm. All experience became conceptual, every sensation had to be given a conceptual meaning and, conversely, for any sensation to be processed and recorded, or perceived, it had to have a conceptual counterpart. Thanks to abstract conceptualisation, sensing and making sense became coupled and making sense of every sensation became a human obsession. I think that it can be said that modern humanity’s impulse to measure things and measure them at increasingly minute increments is the result of this obsession. Even if triggered by sensory experiences, concepts are symbolic material. The symbolic is the set of images and the imaginary through which humans recognise, process, signify and communicate their encounters. It is how humans assign meaning to their experiences. The symbolic is the fodder of myths. Humans tell stories to themselves about themselves by employing symbolic material, such as gods, truth, courage, freedom, and the like (Campbell 1990). These symbols, concepts of human cultural making, are free of what triggered them and free-floating (Baudrillard 1983). They can acquire different contents, as ordained by cultural discourses, in and over time and in and over contexts. What is courage has been defined very differently at different times and by different cultures, as has what is freedom been defined differently (Fromm 1994). Myths are made and broken by such symbolic concepts. 125

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Thus, it can be said that all human experience is myth based; dependent upon the concepts humanly constructed through which all experience is recognised. Furthermore, humans act upon their world, altering it, and this acting is also based on the imaginary of what the world and life could be like. That is, human actions upon the world are not purposeless; they are performed to achieve ends. Depending upon the imaginary of those who act, their ideology, purposes will change, but especially with the advent of modernity, the purpose becomes the control of nature through scientific technology (Angus 1989) in order to take control over the determination of human destiny. Destiny, modern ideology posits, is not ordained by forces above and beyond humanity’s control, it is in humanity’s hands (Ehrenfeld 1978). Modern myths

Traditional cultures were captivated by the heavens and the unknown. Comets were linked to omens of disasters and disease. Forces beyond the human consciousness of the time triggered imagination and mythologies. Gods, angels, Satan captured human interest and the major means of expression of myths and imagination, the arts, focused on depicting them. Interest in the human and human experience with nature, the fauna and the flora, was relegated to the background. Human interest finally found release in and through the Renaissance. The human, artists of the Renaissance insisted, is a worthy subject to be of central interest. It was artists such as Da Vinci who studied cadavers and potential products of human engineering to discover the wonders of nature – to understand it, not simply to be awed by it – that initiated many a scientific interest to come. Science and art were not yet separated. The arts fostered the interest in science and reason, which culminated in the Enlightenment around a century later. With the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment, a class, armed with the ideology that human beings could know how the forces of nature worked through scientific enquiry and eventually control these forces began to struggle against traditional powers to constitute an order that would cater to the will of individual human beings. They would negotiate and debate the construction of a potential grand future and grand society in the modern public arena where people of reasoned mind and scientific knowledge would meet (Rorty 1979). As articulated by Habermas inspired by Weber’s work, they organised public debate into three major discursive domains: science, art and morality (Foster 1983). Each domain was guided by its specific internal logic, its principles. Objectivity and reason guided science, aesthetics (especially beauty) guided art, and fairness and justice guided morality. In modern thought, for humanity to achieve its goal of creating the grand future, each domain had to adhere to its own principles, not to be contaminated by the principles of the other domains. Modern culture also separated into its practical domains. These were the political, social and economic domains. Each domain has its principles and its institution(s) to ascertain the execution of individual free will by all ‘citizens’; the citizen being the original subjectivity of the modern human being as conceptualised by the architects of modern culture. The modern citizen was conceptualised to be the actor in all public domains using reason based in scientific knowledge of the universe that she or he inhabited. This knowledge was to be interpreted and negotiated in the public arena to best fulfill the principles of each domain: ‘democracy’ for the political domain, ‘civility’ for the social domain and ‘efficient allocation of material resources available to humanity’ for the economic domain. Each practical domain of modern culture had its corresponding institutions that would enable these principles to be practiced. The political had its nation-state, the social had, as its central institution, the nuclear family, and the institution for the exercise of the economic principle was the market. The principles of the first two domains were to organise humanity’s efforts in a way to best distribute responsibility and authority in assuring everyone’s participation. The principle of the

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third domain was to maximise the fruits of humanity’s organisation in the first two domains towards the attainment of the grand future and the grand society. With these principles exercised, humanity could not miss its goal to take control of its own destiny and actualise it in the best possible manner. In modern thought, the three domains complemented each other by assuring the independence of the human individual from all oppression through the exercise of the principles in each domain. Democracy, through the nation-state, ensured that each individual would participate in the determination of humanity’s future with equal voice; civility, through the nuclear family, public education, etc., ensured each individual to be aware of her or his rights and responsibilities to be safe from being misguided and harassed; efficient allocation of resources, through the market, ensured each individual to access products she or he needed, according to her or his free will and without obligations beyond the exchange she or he made in the market. Myths of the market

In an excellent essay by Bouchet (2014) on Adam Smith’s legacy, the linkages between the three practical domains are articulated. Unlike many who followed him, often misinterpreting his observations or intentionally misrepresenting his insights to support their own ideologies as Bouchet points out, Smith was aware of the institutional nature of the market. He understood that the modern market had to be organised and regulated, that it had to be ‘instituted’, in order to produce the welfare of nations as intended. Many examples of traditional markets already existed when Smith wrote his renowned book, but these markets were instituted according to traditional norms, practices and social relations present in cultures predating modernity. They could not accomplish the modern principle of efficient allocation of resources as efficiency was defined. The modern market had to be instituted to work according to the modern mythology of economic value. Eventually, the economic domain would take centre stage and become the engine of modern society. This was inevitable because the idea of taking control of nature, the material essence of the universe, was central to the vision of humanity taking control of its destiny. It was by surrounding itself with the products of its own making, such as dams, nature resistant buildings, irrigation systems, mobility enabling vehicles, medicine, and the like, that humanity would mitigate nature’s forces that could otherwise thwart its aims and increasingly transform these forces into the purview of culture rather than nature. The cultural domain where such production occurred was the economic domain, thus it gained increasing significance as modernity advanced. This was the time of material culture (Miller 1997) extraordinaire. The mythology of the market’s ‘invisible hand’ gained support from the bourgeois class in its efforts to dismantle the power of traditional institutions and as the modern state became increasingly coordinated with capitalist interests. The invisible hand of the modern market would assure efficient allocation of resources available to humanity as it would also remove human bondage from all oppression. The market enabled freedom from obligation beyond the exchange of equal values between buyers and sellers in the market. Before the exchange, and once the exchange was completed in the market, neither side had any reason to feel beholden to the other. Market exchange would, then, free everyone from obligations that earlier traditional relations based on kinship or servitude required. With such myths of the market increasingly capturing imaginations and feeding the interests of an increasingly powerful class that promoted these myths, the ideology of the ‘free market’ dominated. Consequently, liberalist ideology transformed into neo-liberalism with the economic increasingly taking centre stage and the ideology of free market dominating – now, for humanity’s achievement of its modern project all that was necessary was the unimpeded workings of the market. When and if the market was empowered to work, all other prin-

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ciples of modern culture, democracy and civility included, would be automatically accomplished. Workings of all other modern institutions of significance for the establishment of a liberalist ideology – the nation-state, family, educational institutions, etc. – would now be secured through the unimpeded market. This myth is so strong that what Adam Smith knew, that the market is not ‘free’ but instituted, goes unnoticed. Possibly the most enduring modern myth is that there is a reality out there independent of human experience through the senses. To be expressed in other words, the greatest modern myth is that there is any human existence outside myth. Our capability to attribute meaning to experienced senses with increasingly commonly shareable scientific instruments and measures gives us greater confidence in the ‘existence’ of what these meanings represent, as we also feel more certain of the primitiveness of the meanings attributed to experiences by those who lived before us. It seems hard for humans to recognise the arrogance of this attitude despite a history of repeated realisation that what we once commonly experienced is found to have had an element of ‘blindness’ to some dimension or another we later discovered. This attitude extends to reification of culturally constructed experiences (Honneth 2008). Thus, the market(s) we institute tend to take on a mythical existence considered to be independent of human culture: the market is ‘out there’ working its miraculous benefits for humanity’s freedom from bondage. We come to accept ideas, such as (1) the market perfectly reflects how humanity values things – so, for example, if humanity values education more than entertainment, education will command a higher market value than entertainment (educators higher value than entertainers) – and (2) utility and value are definable and determinable beyond cultural and/or subjective bases, as ‘real’ and given rather than hyperreal (Baudrillard 1983; Eco 1986). We, then, organise our modern lives according to these myths, and as keenly observed by Dholakia and Turcan (2014) in the case of bubbles, we blindly adhere to them: Of all the observers and commentators of contemporary bubbles, mainstream economists – neoclassical economists and their successor and spin-off streams – exhibit the most resistance in recognizing, labeling, and analyzing bubbles. This is because bubble phenomena gnaw at – indeed make deep gashes in – the very foundational substructure of rationality that supports neoclassical economics and successor and distributary streams. If bubbles are acknowledged, especially in terms of their successive frequent occurrence in recent decades, then economic expectations guiding markets and the economy – forces that are usually salutary in nature except for the gentle ups and downs of economic cycles – fall by the wayside. A world of frequent, even accelerating, occurrence of bubbles represents a runaway train with failed brakes rather than a train that accelerates and decelerates, but whose throttle is basically under the benign control of a ‘fair, invisible hand’.

Modern mythology briefly exhibited above has been conducive to the development of an iconographic culture as the symbolic nature of human existence has increasingly eroded material culture and the growing hegemony of the economic domain has eroded the effectiveness of the institutions of the political and social domains, also eroding the citizen subjectivity of early modern culture. Subjectivity and the iconographic culture

With the hegemony of the market and the ascendance of neo-liberalism came the transformation of modern subjectivity, from the citizen to the consumer. Now, individuals increasingly exercised all of their political and social roles, as well as their economic roles, as consumers. The institutionalised practices of the market, marketing, became the mode of discourse in politics and in the social (Miller 1988). Political candidates, social programmes became products of marketing campaigns. The symbolic, as the core of campaigns, began to

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rear its head, challenging the myth of a material human existence in the natural universe. Yet, the market principle of transforming all symbolic meaning into exchange value and commercial output, as well as the consumer subjectivity complementing this principle, have stunted the development of a symbolic culture, which is necessary for humanity to fully exercise the symbolic nature of human existence. Instead, we currently inhabit an iconographic culture (Bengtsson and Fırat 2006). In an iconographic culture discourses are not able to institute autonomy from the historically constructed conditions of human existence. The mode of discourse, therefore, is predominantly representational, which also is consistent with the modern idea that there is an existence out there that is to be scientifically, objectively and with reason represented for humanity to fulfill its potential for a grand future. Different from symbols, which are completely arbitrarily signified through cultural negotiations – such as the ‘dove’ acquiring a meaning of ‘peace’ or Marilyn Monroe becoming a symbol of sexuality – and have no compulsory bonds to any preexisting things or signifiers, icons are signs that are necessarily linked to existing, experienced things or signifiers – such as the icon of a smiley face having a semblance to a smiling human face. Thus, different from a symbolic culture, in an iconographic culture there is a high degree of self-referencing, a necessity to practice representational modes of discourse. In a symbolic culture, on the other hand, people would practice presentational modes of discourse. We witness the predominance of a self-referential mode of representational discourse in contemporary Western cultures. Television programmes, music performances, and possibly the dominant mode of discourse, marketing communications of all kinds, political, commercial, etc., campaigns, and even news programmes constantly refer to past episodes and to themselves – such as news programmes that often refer to how they represent the news as they broadcast the news. This iconographic mode of discourse tends to reinforce and reproduce the myth upon which the contemporary social organisation of life is built, because it takes this myth as the given condition of being. Iconographic culture has other characteristics that reinforce the sustainability of contemporary forms of social organisation. Through the primary use of icons, communication and discourses are constructed in a form where signs utilised are structured to at once elicit emotional responses and less to provide meanings that are rationally processed. This is ‘a culture where meanings are relayed less and less through sets of words (signs in general) constructed according to linguistic (or more generally, semiotic) rules of formulating analytically logical connections and, thus, sense making unit(ie)s, but more and more through iconic signs that at once conjure up images that transmit meanings and elicit senses that can be felt as well as cognitively processed’ (Bengtsson and Fırat 2006: 379). Consequently, emotional bonds to present cultural sensibilities are continually strengthened. Thus, in contemporary market societies, in a world where marketisation of all cultures is rapidly progressing, the mythology of the wonders of the market persists. In an iconographic culture escape from self-referential signs is difficult, imagining potentials outside of currently progressing technological means is stunted. Extrapolation from current trends to predict what ‘is’ to come tends to guide and capture imaginations; imagining utopias and revolutionary transformations is rendered increasingly difficult. Eventually, even the modern imagination of producing a future based on democratic negotiations and ideas debated in the public is repressed by the complete faith in technology and the workings of the market now left to determine the future. Human agency is transferred to the agency of the market and its trusted capabilities in selecting technological advances. In that sense, it is indeed possible to imagine that we have never been modern (Latour 1993). The institutional principle of the market is its continual enlargement. This modern institution gets its resilience from the possibility of co-opting all movements and trends, even and especially those that originally are or give the impression of being counter-market culture. The

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market empties these movements and trends of their ‘counter-’ contents replacing them with commercial ones and turning them into marketable items. The advent of punk – which originated as a counter-commercial culture movement, but later all its expressions, from spiked hairdos to ripped pants, have all become successfully marketed products – is an excellent example of this process. Even feminism has fallen victim to the resilience of the market. Expressions of this worthy political movement are now utilised to market feelings of power and status to women as they increasingly purchase these as products in the market, as at the same time consciousness regarding inequalities between the sexes wanes. Symbolic culture?

Moving into a symbolic culture to fulfill the symbolic nature of human existence requires a new mythology, one that does not deny humanity’s symbolic existence but constructs organisations of life recognising the symbolic. It is, foremost, a culture of presentational rather than representational discourses. In a symbolic culture people will emphasise more what can be and less what is. Yet, this emphasis on the potential of what can be will be less about the future and more about the creation of the potential in the present. A symbolic culture is one where myths are not about the past or the future, but they are the building blocks of the present. Also, in a symbolic culture it can be expected that mythology is about the constitution (Hardt and Negri 2000) of how life is to be organised, not about elements outside of human culture that determine life’s organisation. For a life that is far more meaningful for humanity, free of contemporary strife, misery and discriminations among people, and of detriment to the universe, which also threatens humanity, we need to agitate for a symbolic culture. We are ready for new myths; that differing organisations of human life can coexist; that there is not one best order to replace all others; that people are not just consumers but construers – they participate in the symbolic culture of producing myths (Fırat 2013); that people can liberally move among the organisations of life without barriers (Fırat and Dholakia 1998); that the best chance for having a grand future is to have a sensible present. Finally, it is necessary to realise that the arrival of a symbolic culture is neither inevitable nor automatic, especially given the resilience of the market. It is important and required to keep envisioning and working for it!

References Angus, I. (1989) ‘Circumscribing Postmodern Culture’, in I. Angus and S. Jhally (eds), Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, New York: Routledge. Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations. New York: Semiotexte. Bengtsson, A. and Fırat, A.F. (2006) ‘Brand Literacy: Consumers’ Sense-Making of Brand Management’, in Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 33, ed. C. Pechmann and L. Price, Valdosta, GA: Association for Consumer Research. Bouchet, D. (2014) ‘Adam Smith (1723–90)’, in J.D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn, London: Elsevier (forthcoming). Campbell, J. (1990) Transformations of Myth Through Time, New York: Harper & Row. Dholakia, N. and Turcan, R.V. (2014) Toward a Metatheory of Economic Bubbles: Socio-Political and Cultural Perspectives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming). Eco, U. (1986) Travels in Hyperreality, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Ehrenfeld, D. (1978) The Arrogance of Humanism, New York: Oxford University Press. Fırat, A.F. (2013) ‘The Future of the Consumer Subject’, Paper presented at the Anthropology of Markets and Consumption Conference, (March), Irvine: CA. Fırat, A.F. and Dholakia, N. (1998) Consuming People: From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption, London: Routledge. Foster, H. (1983) ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, in H. Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

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Fromm, E. (1994) Escape from Freedom, New York: Holt and Co. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Honneth, A. (2008) Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miller, D. (1997) Material Culture and Mass Consumption, London: Blackwell. Miller, M.C. (1988) Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Marketing and consumption or the permanency of the myth: Why and how an understanding of the mythical foundation of the market is more useful than marketing in times of crisis Dominique Bouchet

Universiy of Southern Denmark, James Cook University, Australia Our humanism remains deaf and blind as long it doesn’t hear the myths. Manuel de DIÉGUEZ (Diéguez (1989): 32)

It is always difficult to bring to the fore the myths that are the very basis of the society one lives in. Georges GUSDORF (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]: 351)

If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth. Jean BAUDRILLARD (Baudrillard 1998 [1970]:193)

The collapse of the ‘Econo-myth’

We might be witnessing the collapse of an old myth and the difficult emergence of a new one. For centuries society was conceived as a train going where it had to go. The locomotive was called economy, its engine technique, and its fuel the resources of the earth (Bouchet 1994: 410). Both the left rail and the right rail rested on the same ties heading in the same direction: paradise on earth thanks to production. Now the rails have lost their ties, and as Castoriadis notes: ‘we have paid the price today to know that it was a matter of two forms of the same illusion, that there is, as a matter of fact, no “immanent meaning” in history and that there will be only the meaning [le sens] (or the non-sense) we will be capable of creating’ (Castoriadis 2005: 261; Castoriadis 2010 [2005]: 262). And during this time, as Castoriadis writes, ‘the autonomized march of technoscience continues to destroy the earth’s environment and to create huge risks for a future that is fast approaching’ (Castoriadis 2005: 175; Castoriadis 2010 [2005]: 187). Numerous intellectuals have come to warn about the same alarming tendencies. Twenty years ago Edgar Morin (born 1921) declared that, ‘we have become increasingly aware [...] of how technoindustrial development gives rise to many forms of pollution and environmental degradation’ (Morin and Kern 1999 [1993]: 17; Morin and Kern 1993: 31). Death itself – a new kind of death – hovers in the air. Morin insists: ‘With these threats, a new kind of death has been introduced into the sphere of life of which humanity is a part’ (Morin and Kern 1999 [1993]: 17; Morin and Kern 1993: 31). Nevertheless, most of the plugging and patching we experience from within the capitalist imaginary tends to negate the issue of collective death by hanging on to the myth of progress, thereby reducing creativity and innovation to maintenance. Yet, as Castoriadis stressed, ‘the passivity of contemporary man rests on the following imaginary signification: Technoscience as capable of resolving problems in his stead’ (Castoriadis 2005: 174; Castoriadis 2010 [2005]: 132

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186). Rather, ‘it would be necessary first of all to become deeply aware of the fact that no technoscientific activity is guaranteed to be innocent’ (Castoriadis 2005: 175; Castoriadis 2010 [2005]: 188). Joining the choir, Francastel also points out that, ‘technique never ever has been the sole wellspring of our actions; it does of course provide the wherewithal, but it is merely a potential or an application process’ (Francastel 1965: 11). With Castoriadis’s help we should also remember that, in a society, the canonical procedures of making and doing things cannot be separated from the imaginary significations: ‘Both terms express, at different yet articulated levels, the creation and auto-positing of a given society’ (Castoriadis 1978: 235; Castoriadis 1984 [1978]: 243). The autonomy of the production and consumption spiral

In my previous work I have discussed the status of utility and consumption in modernity and postmodernity (Bouchet 1994). I concluded that postmodernity is a phase of modernity. The modern project of autonomy was thus, from the start, blurred by the myth of progress and the assumption of certainty. Indeed, these were also parts of modern imaginary. Postmodernity, I argued, is when these assumptions lose intensity – when it becomes clear that the industrial revolution does not necessarily lead to the establishment of paradise on earth. This does not, however, entail a return to focusing on autonomy as an end, but rather as a means. This, I said, is where one finds the ambiguity of postmodernity: rediscovering the vanity of positing a common, future paradise merely to fall back on maximising private consumption in the present. In postmodern times, we are urged to engage forcefully with the present while still pretending to build a future. The future is not so much a goal as an alibi. Before modernity, charity often consisted in pretending to wish others well in order to achieve one’s own end, thus preventing the self from questioning the legitimacy of arbitrariness. Similarly in postmodernity, achieving the material well-being of individuals is supposed to benefit all, thus making it possible to amuse oneself until death (Postman 1986) in order to, not only keep the whole system running, but to retain it as the only possible outcome. There is no longer a need to wonder, merely the desire to consume. Consume and fall into oblivion, that is to say: forget to wonder about what could fundamentally make sense. Rekindling a controversy with the situationists, Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) says: We are living not in a society of the spectacle but in a society of oblivion: forgetting of death, forgetting of the fact that life has no meaning other than the one is capable of giving to it. The spectacle is there to facilitate and cover over this oblivion. (Castoriadis 2005: 258 ; Castoriadis 2010 [2005]: 259)

(Castoriadis alludes here to the situationist critique of ‘the society of the spectacle’ which he criticises for lack of insight. According to Guy Debord (1931–1994), ‘the spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonisation of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see – commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity’ (Debord 1967: 31; Debord 1970: 42; Debord 1995: 29)). One must understand what is meant in that ‘commodities are now all that there is to see’. Maybe it would have been more proper to say ‘all what can be seen’. In any case, although it looks like commodities are invading our world, the metaphor of invasion is not proper. As Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) pointed out, ‘consumption is a myth’ (Baudrillard 1970: 296; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 193). That is to say – he explained, ‘it is a statement of contemporary society about itself, the way our society speaks itself’ (Baudrillard 1970: 296; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 193). Thus, it is not commodities that invade our world, it is us who build our world around the idea that consumption is what matters. As Baudrillard wrote:

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In a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption; it is this reflexive, discursive configuration, endlessly repeated in everyday speech and intellectual discourse, which has acquired the force of common sense. Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as a consumer society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean to that idea. This not a supplementary dimension; it is a fundamental one, for it is the dimension of myth. (Baudrillard 1970: 296; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 193)

This was written a couple of years before the publication of the epochal ‘Limits to growth’ report from the Club of Rome in 1972. This was before the 1973 oil crisis, that is to say at a time when the environment was not the concern of many. Baudrillard explained that the way we perceived our problems is through the myth of consumption: consumption is our environment, the rest is secondary. We are at the point where consumption is laying hold of the whole of life, where all activities are sequenced in the same combinatorial mode, where the course of satisfaction is outlined in advance, hour by hour, where the ‘environment’ is total – fully air-conditioned, organized, culturalized. (Baudrillard 1970: 24; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 29)

According to Baudrillard, the logic of consumption can be defined as a manipulation of signs, and ‘the symbolic values of creation and the symbolic relation of inwardness are absent from it: it is all in externals’ (Baudrillard 1970: 173; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 114–115). Thus, the object loses its objective finality and its function, he says: ‘it becomes a term in a much greater combinatory, in sets of objects in which it has a merely relational value’ (Baudrillard 1970: 173; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 115). Moreover: it loses its symbolic meaning, its millennial anthropomorphic status, and tends to peter out into a discourse of connotations which are also simply relative to one another within the framework of a totalitarian cultural system (that is to say, a system which is able to integrate all significations whatever their provenance). (Baudrillard 1970: 173; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 114–115)

Referring to the mass media not as much as a catalyst but as part of the system which he calls the ‘systematic consumption effect’ (Baudrillard 1970: 188; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 124), he argues that, instead of going out to the world via the mediation of the image, ‘it is the image which circles back on itself via the world (it is the signifier which designates itself under cover of the signified’ (Baudrillard 1970: 188; Baudrillard 1998 [1970]: 124).

The myth of the consumption myth

The question arises then as to how come consumption became the myth. Later we might ask whether it is really consumption that is the myth. It could also be called a new ethic (Bouchet 2004). Consumption could also be a part of a system, in which something, that stills remain to be identified, plays a more central role. Still, what matters at this point, is that in Baudrillard’s perspective, consumption does have a history. Let me just refer to the Elizabethan England in the sixteenth century when Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 until 1603, used goods as an instrument of government. First, the court became ‘a sort of parade, a theatrical spectacle’ (Braudel 1973: 307). Second, noblemen became increasingly dependent on royal favour for their survival, also started using goods to compete with each other, thus introducing a cult of

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novelty later to be reinforced and generalised. Thus, it can be said that the cult of novelty, so central to modern consumption, originated as a means of submitting noblemen to the royal court long before the reign of political economy: When each nobleman was drawn to court to bid for the Queen’s attention, he was drawn away from the locality in which he was the undisputed apex of a steeply hierarchical society. Drawn to the court and to London, this nobleman was suddenly one of a number of individuals with a claim to pre-eminence. His reaction to this new crowd of status-seekers was one of anxiety-stricken concern for his honor, his social standing, and his relationship to the monarch. It was almost inevitable that he should have been drawn into a riot of consumption. (McCracken 1988: 12)

The central power thus ended up submitting noblemen to the court by compelling them to consume novelty rather than proudly sticking to objects with patina. The cult of novelty now subjects everyone to this reign. Research journals for instance now use this very same strategy; in order to publish, researchers are often required to refer to the newest journal articles within their own field and therefore have less time to learn from the patina of the classics. In extension, universities have entered the reign of novelty. Some sixty years back, at the time of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) and Jean Duvignaud (1921–2007), novelty was still leaning on fashion that was itself leaning on distinction. Novelty became a core element in the consumption and production spiral. (Perhaps the word ‘novelty’ is more proper than that of ‘consumption’ as one has to figure out how what Baudrillard called the ‘systematic consumption effect’ operates.) Anyway, now novelty seems more and more to feed on itself. Everyone is exhorted to become his or her own reference. Most of the proposed heroes are characterised and mainly differentiated by chance. The slogans of today are for instance: ‘Program 3! You are what you hear!’(The Danish Radio slogan repeated many times during the day: P3 ! Det du hører, er du selv!’) or ‘Product A! Because you are what you are!’ or again ‘Product R! Be your own fashion designer!’ A hundred years ago, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) stated that ‘every growth of a fashion drives it to its doom, because it thereby cancels out its distinctiveness’ (Simmel 1971: 192; Simmel 1983: 46). He identified that the characteristic of fashion is to go out of fashion: ‘As soon as a fashion has been universally adopted, that is, as soon as anything that was originally done only by a few has really come to be practiced by all [...] we no longer characterize it as fashion’ (Simmel 1971: 192; Simmel 1983: 46). I am not sure whether Simmel anticipated this would apply to the phenomenon of fashion as such. After all, Karl Marx (1818–1883) did not predict the impact of worker demands on the expansion of capitalism. Nor did the impressionists and the surrealists ever imagine that it could be fashionable to pretend to be against fashion. Some situationists did, but only many years later however. Thus, what is it that could be said to be the core principle of this system of fashion and novelty that seems to play a central role in the production and consumption spiral? Is the concept of myth useful in an analysis of such a spiral?

What is a myth?

What is a myth? Bear in mind that anthropo-sociological concepts are not discovered but created. They are always part of a conceptual apparatus. Thus, the use of concepts may vary from one social researcher to another. It is clearly the case between Bataille, Castoriadis, Morin and Lévi-Strauss. The role of a university teacher like me is to introduce to the world the structure and coherence of the respective conceptual frameworks, and to show how they relate to each other and to social developments. It is also important to identify the core logical relations between the most fundamental concepts, which determine the whole set: the paradigm. A par-

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adigm is like a verb in a sentence, if you remove it, the sentence does not make sense. All mentioned researchers agree on the fact that not only ideas and conceptions, but even perceptions and experiences, are influenced by cultural patterns and social frames of reference. Typically, we solely perceive the aspects of reality that fit into the schema of our socially and culturally preformed dispositions of perception. The intellectuals referred to here merely use different concepts to stress the challenge our society is facing. They have slightly different ways of expressing how humankind – at a collective level – is bound to make fundamental choices concerning how it relates to the world and itself. As I see it, the concept of the sacred relates to the fundamental question that cannot be avoided, whereas the concept of myth relates to the fundamental answer that cannot be ignored. Most commonly, the word myth refers to some kind of wandering misleading story or distorted truth developed or merely accepted by some groups of people. When used in such a way, the concept of myth makes it hard to distinguish between rumours, lies and ideologies. This kind of use is somewhat ‘mythical’ as it partially prevents us from theorising social change seriously. Sometimes, however, the concept of myth refers to a misleading story or distorted truth only when these play a key role in a group of people’s behaviour or their judgements underlying behaviour. The weakness of the concept is less glaring then. Nevertheless, it is still more confusing as it helps much in developing theories regarding how societies function. The purpose of a conceptual apparatus should be to distinguish between more or less important and central representations, significations, stories, distinctions, etc. It seems that the concept of myth relating to fundamental answers not to be ignored to questions that could not be ignored can especially be useful in times of crisis. In other words, instead of using the word ‘myth’ to debunk the image of a brand, I would rather use it to reveal the blind spot in our collective mind that not only makes it hard for us to repair the failed brakes of our runaway train (Dholakia and Turcan 2014), but to figure out whether there still should be trains, rails and ties (Bouchet 1994), and if not what to build instead. What is a mythology?

It does not mean that we should not refer to different critical approaches to this issue of how humans – more or less consciously – end up relating to the world, including themselves. Thus, many of us remember how Roland Barthes (1915–1980) disclosed principles that played a strong role in French people’s behaviour in the 1950s. Barthes understood myth as a communication system that remains more or less hidden to those who use it. It seems that in Barthes’ mind almost any kind of discourse could be a myth. The selections he made and the processes he described were rather arbitrary. The systematic analyses Barthes was using concentrated more on the corpus he gathered than on what should be gathered and why. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) also analysed a corpus, but its components had much more in common and owed much less to the researcher’s way of putting it together. The kind of corpus Barthes gathered can be compared to a collection of pictures taken driving through Europe during the 1960s; whereas Lévi-Strauss’s can be compared with a collection of the first pictures ever taken all around the world. In other words, Barthes’ use of the concept of myth is much more related to semiology and qualitative methods than to anthropology and epistemology. Barthes contributed to cultural studies and cultural sociology applying the signifier/signified dichotomy in the study of popular culture, showing that things there were not as they seemed. Lévi-Strauss contributed to anthropology also applying some new ideas from linguistics, but – as we shall see – was trying to figure out why things were as they were. Nevertheless, Barthes claimed that the core principal of the myth is to transform history into nature (Barthes 1970 [1957]: 215; Barthes 2013 [1957]: 128). He also explained that ‘meaning loses its value, but keeps the life’ (Barthes 1970 [1957]: 203; Barthes 2013 [1957]: 117). ‘The meaning will be for the form like an instantaneous reserve of history’, he says 136

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(Barthes 1970 [1957]: 203; Barthes 2013 [1957]: 117). ‘The form must constantly be able to be rooted in the meaning and to get what nature it needs for its nutriment’ (Barthes 1970 [1957]: 203; Barthes 2013 [1957]: 117). Obviously, Barthes was not only inspired by linguistics, literature and popular culture; he also took ideas from sociologists and anthropologists. Still, he did this in his nonchalant way, practising ‘a kind of intellectual flânerie, roaming widely across the fields [...] plucking ideas from the terrain and re-arranging them to suit his purposes’ (Rojek 2001: 164). Therefore, although the reference to Barthes is more likely to be present within the fields of marketing and consumption research, it might not be the most inspiring. As we shall see, the work of Lévi-Strauss can help us to go much deeper into the issue of contemporary crisis. This although it seems to be related mainly to the study of human groups [differing] from our own by virtue of the absence of writing and mechanisation (Lévi-Strauss 2011: 26; LéviStrauss 2013: 14). In fact, in a conference given in Tokyo in the spring of 1986, Claude LéviStrauss asked himself the following question: Now that Western-style civilization no longer has the resources it needs to regenerate itself on its own and to thrive once again, can it learn something about humankind in general, and about itself in particular, from the humble societies, those long held in contempt, which until recently had escaped its influence? (LéviStrauss 2011: 17; Lévi-Strauss 2013: 5)

Myths are never evident

According to Lévi-Strauss, myths are not freely constructed and do not refer to a consciousness that is active and transparent to itself; they provide an image of the world in a more natural way because, as Jean Pouillon put it, ‘they make manifest the “natural” functioning of constrained, unconscious thought which is part of the world’ (Pouillon 1966 : 105). This is an interesting idea. The myth is indeed a cultural phenomenon, but it presents itself as a natural one. It should not – and cannot – be traced historically nor be related to an individual. What matters for Lévi-Strauss is the universality of the human mind, but also the symbolic origin of society; sociology can therefore not explain the genesis of symbolic thought, but has to take it for granted in humankind. Cultures can be considered as combinations of symbolic systems, but that there is something to be combined in a symbolic system is due to the fact that the human brain ended up being able to organise its specific perception and interpretations in specific ways. If cultures develop very particular myths, which are remarkably homologous with respect to each other, it is – Lévi-Strauss tells us – because they are the fruit of a single human mind. It is because there are some fundamental – not categories – but differentiations. Lévi-Strauss points to the unconscious categories that are prior to conceptualisation – fundamental building bricks. According to him, myths represent the first and most profound expression of the human mind. Myths can be said to be consubstantial with the mind. The same goes for language in its constitutive form, which is why the way myth and language operate have so much in common. The human mind, or rather a mechanism proper to the human mind, generates the structure of myths, as well as the structure of language. Thus, the concept of myth in Lévi-Strauss’s work does not so much refer to a specific kind of story relating to the origins of the world, people, languages, rituals and such things. No, for Lévi-Strauss, myth is a fundamental and original category of the human mind, to which a specific way of thinking corresponds, namely mythic thought, which proceeds by successive dichotomies and oppositions. It is because of this universality of mind, that one can identify redundant themes and similar fundamental oppositions in the stories told in all different cultures. There is no room here to discuss a potential a-historical understanding of the concept of myth in Lévi-Strauss’s work. Please bear in mind though, that if ‘an order or orders’ (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 347; Lévi-Strauss 1963: 305) is necessary for societies, if they construct it in myth, reli-

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gion, political ideology, it must be a result of the most immediate requirement of the human mind in all exercise of thought. Still, once the system starts, developments by means of new combinations of its elements are almost bound to happen. There is no need to assume the primacy and permanency of an ‘infrastructure’. There is no need to buck up the out-dated thesis of historical-materialism that bet on the existence of a deeper and more essential order whether this order’s principles are inscribed either in society, nature or in the human mind. What interests me here is that no society, no group, no individual can avoid thinking through basic assumptions and patterns of thought. Lévi-Strauss’s work revolves around societies in which written language does not exist and mechanisation is absent. His corpus of myth is made of more than 800 myths taken from dozens of different such tribes across the two Americas. Thus, for instance, in the first of the five volumes of Mythologiques, he looks into how the ‘raw-cooked’ dichotomy – which relate to the opposition between nature and culture – operates in various myths (Lévi-Strauss 1964; LéviStrauss 1983 [1964]). Mythic thought, he explains, reduces reality by means of a specific binary logic of oppositions, and it is so because its own rule of functioning has to build upon such kind of binary code. This is why one finds similar ways of arranging the world into myths in so many different cultures. This is why myth and thought can be said to be independent of contingent historical conditions. This of course does not mean that myths are transcendental in nature – to the contrary. Because this mind and this binary logic come from the materiality of the human brain: ‘myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part’ (Lévi-Strauss 1964: 346; Lévi-Strauss 1983 [1964]: 341).

Myths are groundbreaking and ‘crackfilling’

We do not have to keep focusing on some original form of the myth. What we inherit from LéviStrauss is a concept of myth as related to something really fundamental, something that lies below the surface so to speak. It refers to building blocks of a system of representation and action. Even though Lévi-Strauss deals with ‘primitive’ societies and ‘savage’ minds (terms he uses with no condescension), his ideas have great value for modern societies. It is worth paying attention to the fact that there are ways to make sense of the world around us that are more fundamental than others, and which unconsciously take part in people’s way of interacting within societies and with the world. In modern society, once radical answers are given to fundamental issues, once ‘imaginary significations’ have been given, as Castoriadis calls it, it is difficult to think and act differently. Also, if those configurations no longer fit with the challenges of those imaginary significations, they are no longer very helpful to imagine the future. An ideology – I will come back to this concept – refers to the dissimulation – within a society and for a specific group – of something that can or could easily be perceived and understood. A myth does not have to be perceived and understood. If it is, it is not a myth, or, if it were, it is no longer a myth.

The myth does the interpretation

Claude Lévi-Strauss told us that a myth does not have to be interpreted. This is because it is the myth, which does the interpretation anyway (Bouchet 2014b). In other words the myth is at the very basis of all that would be used to interpret the myth. Using Castoriadis’s terminology, the myth is, within the social imaginary, what posits the most fundamental assumptions, starting from who we are as a collectivity, in what kind of world we are, what to desire, and what is possible for us to do. Every society up to now has attempted to give an answer to a few fundamental questions: Who are we as a collectivity? What are we for one another? Where and

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in what are we? What do we want, what do we desire, what are we lacking? Society must define its ‘identity’, its articulation, the world, its relations to the world and to the objects it contains, its needs and its desires. Without the ‘answer’ to these ‘questions’, without these ‘definitions’, there can be no human world, no society, no culture – for everything would be an undifferentiated chaos. The role of the imaginary significations is to provide an answer to these questions, an answer that, obviously, neither ‘reality’, nor ‘rationality’ can provide. (Castoriadis 1975: 205–206; Castoriadis 1987 [1975]: 146–147)

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This is why myths usually deal with where humanity comes from and where humanity is going. At the beginning of the 1950s, the French philosopher Georges Gusdorf (1912–2000) – who taught Louis Althusser (1918–1990) and Michel Foucault (1926–1984) – was writing a book on myth and metaphysics (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]) (a work never translated into English). In it he explains that within a society, myth shapes a human order. ‘Man intervenes in nature as a being, which transcends it and questions everything’ (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]: 57, my translation). That is what myth is about. Thus, he echoes Castoriadis’s ‘shaping of chaos’. In this book published in 1953, he also echoes Lévi-Strauss: ‘The myth is related to the first knowledge man acquires of himself and of his environment; moreover, myth is the structure of this knowledge’ (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]: 57, my translation). Also, for Gusdorf, myth has a fundamental impact on social and mental structures alike. Myth makes up for collective sense making as it expresses cohesive ground values, which are perceived as obvious and reinforced every day. Myth not only refers to origins and potentials, it is also about life, death, language, clothing, food, family relations, production, consumption and more. Myth is an interpretation of the identity of humankind. Myth serves everyday life, informs intentions and frustrations, as it posits what is necessary and what is not, what is possible and what is not. What is at stake within myth is beyond the realm of truth and falsehood. It is a matter of faith, which is why outsiders can hardly believe someone can have such faith: myths of a place always remain strange to them. Yet, ‘a myth should not be taken literally, what matters is how it makes sense’ (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]: 43. My translation). Gusdorf also tells us, that, it is always difficult to identify myths that serve as base for the society in which one lives. The operation [of uncovering fundamental myths] is attempted in times of rupture and of pluralism: Voltaire in France delegates his Huron and Montesquieu his Persian. Samuel Butler carried out his indirect criticism of Erewhon. However, he who denounces myths appears like a conscientious objector, and his attempt, by the same reactions it gives rise to, makes it clear that the myth provides the human order with its social and mental structures. The myth is the conservatoire/repository of the core values. (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]: 351, my translation)

Ideology is but a varnish compared to myth

Adding to this, the concept of myth should not be reduced to the concept of ideology, which is much less general. The concept of ideology should be used to describe how, within society, the reality of a perceivable social situation remains hidden for some. Since Marx, the concept of ideology refers to a constructed representation from the point of view of the subject that constructs it with a more or less conscious intention to impose it on others who, from their point of view, should not see it that way. According to the French philosopher Isabelle Garo (born 1963): ‘It can almost be said that all of Marx’s thinking about ideology can be refracted and summed up in the discovery that what has to be set against a reign of ideas is the invention of a whole new world’ (Garo 2009: 165).

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Thus, the concept of ideology refers to a partial and incomplete representation that cannot account for itself – and this is an important point, but participates in a system of domination and exploitation. Whereas, far from being just some obstacle to truth, myth pertains to the foundation of all understanding in a given society (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]). This is of course until another myth replaces it after the moment of crisis. Here the reference to history is pretty clear. Gusdorf also proposes this idea that our contemporary crisis is linked to the fact that modern science and technique framed our world into abstract patterns and placed our society on deterministic efficiency tracks. ‘The mythical intelligibility which ensured the cohesion of archaic societies has been superseded by the advent of rationality supported by technical efficiency’ (Gusdorf 1984 [1953] : 43, my translation). Thus, our society is still locked by a myth. However, the questioning seems more open. The nature of contemporary myth is a little more puzzling, as earlier myths ‘liberated’ humanity from the responsibility to face its own choices (Gusdorf 1984 [1953]). Autonomy is the preferred option of modernity. It does not seem that simple though. In another text already mentioned, leaning again on some of the French masters of socio-political philosophy, I tried to describe the paradoxical situation any society is caught in: ‘In order to perceive itself and work upon itself, a society has to produce a representation of itself and create a distance to itself’ (Bouchet 2007: 48). This is paradoxical, because society always produces a mirror to look at itself, and work upon itself, but it is this mirror that sees itself. Traditional societies did not relate to their myths as if they were their own products. In modernity the paradox has become obvious: individuals and society assume that they maintain a relation of mutual transcendence towards each other. Nevertheless, the relation between the individual and the social remains ambiguous even though autonomy and interrogation of the social emerge: as soon as the traditional religious points of reference are disclosed and disappear, the community gives itself new points of reference in order to put the social at a distance. It cannot be otherwise. Thus, autonomy remains trapped between transcendence and immanence. Still, as Castoriadis puts it, a democratic society recognises in its rules, its norms, its values and its significations its own creations, ‘whether deliberate or not’ (Castoriadis 1997: 48). In other words, modernity is when society claims to know that it has to produce its own myths. It is when we get to ‘a higher level of consciousness’ of the relation between the sacred and the symbolic. Our symbolic world does matter and is sacred, although it has to change. And, as Nancy stressed, ‘the secret of the symbolic consists exactly in its sharing’ (Nancy 1998 [1993]: 136; Nancy 2001 [1993]: 209). To produce myths, knowing they are myths, is not easy. As we have seen, the reference to the myth of the origin can still be traced in some contemporary description of the hominisation process. Also the modern version of the myth of paradise persists: it is the myth of progress. Historical causality is hard to give up even though we now know the role that coincidence played in the advent of our ‘thermo-industrial civilization’ (Gras 1998). (The term ‘thermo industrial’ is from Grinevald (1997).) But again, in times of crisis nothing is evident and many things are possible. This is why Morin says that ‘it is in as much as there is uncertainty that there is a possibility of action, decision, change, transformation’ (Morin 1984 [1976]: 140). It is a paradoxical situation then, to consciously to have to deal with the fundamental necessity of the myth, knowing well how contingent it is. It helps though to realise that what was believed to be a natural phenomenon – the market as we have understood it for over two hundred years – in fact had so much in common with a transcendent God. But this will be the theme other papers (Bouchet 2011; Bouchet 2014a). People in the eighteenth century were living in a pre-capitalist world. One would never have guessed the root-and-branch transformations that were to come in the next century from the minor changes in production and consumption that were then taking place. Intellectuals like Adam Smith (1723–1790) and later Karl Marx (1818–1883) tried to figure out what was happening and to contribute to the future (Bouchet 2014a). Marx and Smith’s ideas have been

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hijacked for ideological purposes and reduced to the role of rabble-rousing slogans. The galvanising effect of the dribs and drabs of their ideas that have been bandied about are a long way from the powerful insights imbued in their original ideas. None of them though could predict the overwhelming importance that the production-consumption spiral would take in the twentieth century. None of them realised how important a role such old assumptions as ‘Nature is to fulfil the desires of mankind’ played in the capitalist system. Now that sustainability is playing a central part in economics and politics, we should look into the whole system of assumptions and conceptualisation still underlying most of our understanding of what a market, society, economy and politics are. References

Barthes, Roland (1970 [1957]). Mythologies, Paris: Seuil. Barthes, Roland (2013 [1957]) Mytologies: The Complete Editions in a New Translation by Annette Lavers and Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard, Jean (1970) La Société de consommation, Paris: Denoël. Baudrillard, Jean (1998 [1970]) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, London: Sage. Bouchet, Dominique (1994) ‘Rails without ties: The Social Imaginary and Postmodern Culture: Can Postmodern Consumption Replace Modern Questioning?’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 11 (September): 405–422. Bouchet, Dominique (2004) ‘Moralen i varen. Om relationen mellem forbrugersamfundet og individualismen’, in Anker Brink Lund, Janne Normann, and Anders Klostergaard Petersen (eds), Kære samfund. En debatbog i anledning af Jørn Henrik Petersens 60 års fødselsdag, Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, pp. 229–239. Bouchet, Dominique (2007) ‘The Ambiguity of Modern Conception of Autonomy and the Paradox of Culture’, Thesis Eleven, 88 (February): 31–54. Bouchet, Dominique (2011) ‘Political Economy’, in Dale Southerton (ed.), Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, Volume 3, Los Angeles and London: Sage. Bouchet, Dominique (2014a) ‘Adam Smith’, in James D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn, Oxford: Elsevier. Bouchet, Dominique (2014b) ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss’, in James D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edn, Oxford: Elsevier. Braudel, Fernand (1973) Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1975) L’Institution imaginaire de la société, Paris: Seuil. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1978) ‘Technique’, in Les Carrefours du labyrinthe, ed. Cornelius Castoriadis, Paris: Seuil, pp. 221–248. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1984 [1978]) ‘Technique’, in Crossroads in the Labyrinth, ed. Cornelius Castoriadis, Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, pp. 229–259. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1987 [1975]) The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: Polity Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius (1997) ‘Culture in a Democratic Society (1994)’, in David Ames Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis Reader, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 338–348. Castoriadis, Cornelius (2005) Une société à la dérive: Entretiens et débats 1974–1997), Paris: Seuil. Castoriadis, Cornelius (2010 [2005]) A Society Adrift, translated from the French and edited anomymously as a public service, www.notbored.org/RTIASA.pdf. Debord, Guy (1967) La Société du spectacle, Paris: Buchet Chastel. Debord, Guy (1970) The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, MI: Black and Red. Debord, Guy (1995) The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books. Dholakia, Nikhilesh and Romeo V. Turcan (2014) Toward a Metatheory of Economic Bubbles: Socialpolitical and Cultural Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Diéguez, Manuel de (1980) Le Mythe rationnel de l’Occident: Esquisses d’une spectrographie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

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Diéguez, Manuel de (1989) Le Combat de la raison, Paris: Albin Michel. Francastel, Pierre (1965) La Réalité figurative Éléments sructurels de sociologie de l’art, Paris: Denoël/Gonthier. Garo, Isabelle (2009) L’Idéologie ou la pensée embarquée, Paris: La Fabrique. Gras, Alain (1998) ‘Anthropologie et philosophie des techniques: Le passé d’une illusion’, SocioAnthropologie (Directeur: Pierre Bouvier), 1er semestre (3): 37–48. Grinevald, Jacques (1997) ‘L’Effet de serre et la civilisation thermo-industrielle 1896–1996’, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 35 (108): 141–146. Gusdorf, Georges (1984 [1953]) Mythe et métaphysique, Paris: Flammarion. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1958) Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1993 [195863]) Structural Anthropology I, London: Penguin. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1964) Le Cru et le cuit: Mythologiques 1, Paris: Plon. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1983 [1964]). The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2011) L’Anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne, Paris: Seuil. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2013) Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. McCracken, Grant (1988) Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Morin, Edgar (1984 [1976]) ‘Pour une théorie de la crise’, in Edgar Morin (ed.), Sociologie, Paris: Fayard, pp. 139–153. Morin, Edgar and Kern, Anne Birgitte (1999 [1993]) Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the Millenium, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Morin, Edgar and Kern, Anne Brigitte (1993) Terre-Patrie, Paris: Seuil. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1998 [1993]) The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc (2001 [1993]) Le Sens du monde: Édition revue et corrigée, Paris: Galilée. Postman, Niel (1986) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Pouillon, Jean (1966) ‘L’Analyse des mythes’, L’Homme, 6 (1):100–105. Rojek, Chris (2001) ‘Roland Barthes’, in Anthony Elliott and Bryan S. Turner (eds), Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory, London: Sage, pp. 162–173. Simmel, Georg (1971) ‘Fashion (1904)’, in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writing, edited and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 294–323. Simmel, Georg (1983) ‘Zur philosophischen Psychologie. Die Mode’, in Philosophische kultur. Über das abenteuer, die geschlechter und die krise der moderne gesammelte essais, Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, pp. 26–51.

Myth, management of the unknown Gianluca Miscione

University College Dublin

Since centuries, myth, progress and technology are interwoven in ways that explain the past and anticipate the future. The relevance of myths is not in being true or false, but in contributing in orienting social praxes, thus in acting as a regulator of human behaviour in front of unknown consequences of today’s decisions and actions. This is particularly evident beyond Western settings, where the thirst for progress is imported with technologies.

Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them

Albert Camus

How come that new markets, whole industries and even social and technological revolutions start wrapped in some kind of myth of how better the world would be if they succeeded? In the nineteenth century it was predicted that the railroad would bring peace to Europe, even though shortly afterwards the Spaniards built their own railway system out-of-standard to impede the French from using trains to invade their territory. Steam power would have eliminated the need for manual labour, but the first industrial revolution has not entered history books for liberating humankind from physical work. In the Soviet view, nuclear power could have melted Siberian ice and made its vast land cultivable;1 instead it became the main war deterrent during the decades of the Cold War. History is full of similar mythical visions of progress and unanticipated consequences. Myth as a bridge between vanguard aspirations and common praxis is the focus of this paper. This paper is organised in sections as follows: an extended cross disciplinary literature review is articulated in three steps, each one with its own focus: (1) myth, (2) progress, and (3) technology. Then, the research approach is introduced in section 4. It is divided in two parts: where to study myths as defined in the first paragraphs, and how. Two cases studies of mine are described, also referring to previous publications, in sections 5 and 6. Finally, the discussion in section 7 distils the contribution about myths as modes of coping with the unknown. Myth, a Western narrative

Myth has many and quite diverse definitions. Here, I do not consider those which tend to go into sacred domains. According to Lévi-Strauss (2001), myths are manifestations of people’s mental structures, especially in relation to regulations of behaviour. In particular, myths help people to deal with contradictions they face in their lives (like individual/community) by offering possible mediations. Lincoln defines myth as: […] ideology in narrative form. More precisely, mythic discourse deals in master categories that have multiple referents: levels of the cosmos, terrestrial geogra-

1 Komsomolskaya Pravda, main Russian newspaper, published this and similar ideas on 31 December 1959 envisioning how Russia would have been 50 years later, on 1 January 2010.

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phies, plant and animal species, logical categories, and the like. Their plots serve to organize the relations among these categories and to justify a hierarchy among them, establishing the rightness (or at least the necessity) of a world in which heaven is above earth, the lion the king of beasts, the cooked more pleasing than the raw. (Lincoln (2006) 242 emphasis added)

Following Emmet and McIntyre (1970), myths are neither true nor false, but dead or alive, i.e. believed or not. Myths are alive as long as they can give meaning to the diversity of human situations, resolve inevitable contradictions and paradoxes of the human condition, alleviate the fear of uncertainty. Simple illustrations that I propose here are: ‘The US leads the world’ and ‘Greece is the cradle of civilization’. Their relevance in disparate sorts of communication does not derive from their truth/falsehood but by transcending daily nitty-gritty and legitimising quite diverse courses of action, say ‘exporting democracy’ (also with arms) and ‘maintaining the integrity of the Eurozone’, staying with these two illustrations. According to Barthes (1972), myth is a sign (image, word …) which acquires the values of the society at large and makes them perceived as natural. In semiotic terms, myths connote (hint at) while appear to denote (stand for). For instance often a red rose does not stand for itself but signifies romance, in many cultures. Myths evoke what is desired and hide incoherence and difficulties. In essence, myth distils a desired object and puts it above the multiple entanglements of social praxis. In this respect, myths simplify the complexity of experience and help in shaping orientations. Indeed, myths are not conceived as opposite to reality, but as a way to look at it, to provide explanations and justifications. Similarly, according to Mosco (2004), myths are seductive tales containing unfulfilled and even unfulfillable promises; like the horizon, myths back up when approached but do not disappear. Myths are performative in legitimising something to the extent they make it believed as real. So, myths can engender a ‘suspension of disbelief’. In other words, myths leverage the Thomas theorem: ‘If someone believes that something is real, it will be in its consequences’. A contemporary example comes from Bitcoin: we do not know how this crypto-currency may affect global financial transactions cutting middle-men (central and private banks). But as long as a growing mass of users believes in its libertarian myth enough to convert their money, its chances of bootstrapping beyond small circles of tech-savvies are real.2 Needless to say, the power of myths has political relevance: by constituting and re-enforcing a shared frame of reference that enables actors to deal with contradictions that can never be fully resolved (Lévi-Strauss, 2001; March & Olsen, 1989), myths play a defining role in framing sense-making thus shaping collective action while at the same time leaving out alternative views. Closer to common experience, Pollitt and Hupe (2011) refer to governance, networks, accountability, innovation and management as examples of ‘magic concepts’. Magic concepts, although more concrete, share with myths a widely agreed normative bias. Because of that, they can dissolve dichotomies and overcome impasses due to antagonistic or paradoxical situations, the same as myths do. Basically, in a decision making setting, no one would disagree with the need of governance, accountability, innovation, etc. Magic concepts are intended here as the ‘petty cash’ of myths: items of the toolkit to keep myths alive. If myths imply their own cosmologies, magic concepts operate in the same way on finer grained decision making, especially when there is lack of empirical support. This view on myth frames my use of the concept in relation to technological change. When a paradigmatic change takes place, like with an industrial revolution, uncertainty about the 2 Professor Zittrain (Harvard Law School), echoing Gibson’s definition of the cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination’, defined Bitcoin a ‘collective hallucination’.

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future is particularly prominent because existing understandings may not help in making sense of what is next. In those situations, it is argued here, myths play a central role in framing our (lack of) knowledge about the future by creating consensus and bracketing out dissent.3 In short, myths can contain and counteract anomie (Durkheim) due to lack of knowledge. As technology, modernity and progress are assumed to be tightly interwoven, my argument might be seen as a criticism of Modernism as a myth. A digression into philosophy can clarify my stance and introduce the rest of the argument. Vattimo (1992) introduces three ways of looking at myth that emerged throughout the centuries: archaist, relativist and narrative. Archaism can be seen as apocalyptic. It originated and grew as a reaction against techno-scientific (Western) culture that broke the authentic relation between humankind and nature. Often, archaist stances criticise capitalism as the engine of contemporary societies and advocate for a return to a mythicised Golden Age. Through the centuries, without considering religious thoughts here, several movements that rejected Western Rationalism can be grouped under the archaism label, from Luddism to environmentalism. Vattimo recognises that the contemporary popularity of critical philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger finds its roots in archaism. A second strand of approaches to myth can be seen as a collection of cultural relativisms. The common understanding is that any knowledge is based on myths, which have a foundational role for each knowledge. Therefore, in this view all forms of knowledge stand equal, there is no one Golden Age or principle superior to others. Rationalism is neither above nor below mythical knowledge. It is a myth among many. Kuhn’s original epistemology and mainstream contemporary Hermeneutics lean towards this cultural milieu. The third approach to myth addressed by Vattimo is called ‘tempered irrationalism’ or bounded rationality. This view goes back to the etymology of the word myth: legend, narrative. From this perspective, myth is not against scientific objectivity, but is a form of knowledge that is more adequate to some kinds of experience than positivism. Psychoanalysis, especially Jungian archetypes, studies on historiographies and media studies are proposed as examples of this third approach to myth. As supporting evidence, Vattimo refers to the multiplicity of histories of cultures and societies that have taken the stage on mass media since the 1950s and 1960s. The plurality of perspectives that gained social visibility through the media questioned any unique telos of history. Vattimo seems not to adhere to any of the three, and later states that ‘de-mythizing is the passage from modern to post-modern’ (Vattimo 1992: 61). Progress, utopism as symmetric of archaism

What I think that Vattimo overlooked in his threefold view on myth is somewhat symmetric to archaism: utopism. To approach them, I start from Nisbet (1980) history of the idea of progress. According to Nisbet the idea of progress permeated the whole history of the West since the ancient Greek civilisation, it consolidated with Puritanism through the alliance of religious morality and secular capital economy (Weber read it as an age of faith rather than reason) and reached its zenith with philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rationalist conceptualisation of progress dominated over two centuries of Western and world history, and has been challenged and weakened since the 1950s. Comte (positive philosophy and law of progress), Spencer (evolutionism), Hegel (rational unity) and Marx (communism as the end of history), in spite of radical differences of their thoughts, share a sense of a desirable – and to some extend inevitable – future that is the cul3 Certainly myths can also provide stability to and sustain cultures and societies that do not undergo much change. This aspect, usually the domain of traditional anthropology, is not considered here, as my aim is not to develop a comprehensive conceptualisation of myths, but more modestly to see how they mobilise actions and resources.

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mination of the social and technological changes they were witnessing through their lives. The same tension towards a better future yet to come is expressed by utopians like Saint-Simon and Fourier. The myth of progress reverberates in their utopias, as they sound like secular millenarist aspirations. The teleology of utopia has survived the criticisms of its Western ethnocentrism especially in the production of the Frankfurt School and in particular in the Ideal Speech Situation theorised by Habermas (1989). He develops a ‘procedural utopia’ according to which societies have to create and maintain a plain field of open communication where all instances can be brought in and discussed rather than only those of hegemonic groups.4 The strong influence of the idea of progress echoes in the usual polarisation of apocalyptic vs. integrated and utopia vs. dystopia. The whole history of the West (Hertzler, 1923) is full of utopic/dystopic visions. Through the last century, then-new technological possibilities inspired and permeated utopias/dystopias. Some of them, like the hypertext as a mode of organising knowledge (Bush, 1945; Nelson, 1965), participatory design (Bannon, 2009; Simonsen & Robertson, 2012), and the global panopticon (Miscione, 2014), materialised to some extent. Other utopias failed, like the cyberspace ‘radical difference’ (Barlow, 1996) and Allende’s cybernetic socialist Chile (Medina, 2006). I do not intend to lean towards either apocalyptic or integrated views, the point here is that myths of progress are real in the Thomas sense and their influence manifests in originating both utopias and dystopias. Classic utopians are characterised by similar teleology of contemporary believers in technology, well characterised by Bell, quoted in Mosco (1998): ‘One hears that new adventures in technology mixed media, computer-generated images, radical juxtapositions of materials, virtual reality will open up new horizons. It reminds one of the radical agitators who proclaimed that Communism was on the horizon, until he was told that the horizon is an imaginary line that recedes as you approach it’.’ In case it is needed to make clearer that these attitudes are not a matter of the past, here are some common rhetorical tricks used to deride dissenters and confirm that progress is inevitable: it was believed that arable land is an inescapable limit of economic growth; Lord Kelvin in 1895 declared that ‘heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible’; Ken Olson (head of Digital Equipment Corporation) in 1977 stated that ‘there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home’; Sir William Preece declared ‘the Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys’; Thomas Edison thought that the phonograph was of no commercial value because no one wants to listen to music at home. Kavanagh, Lightfoot, and Lilley (2007) provocatively put into perspective hyperbolic acceleration, which allegedly characterises our age, by taking a long-term perspective on key indicators like life expectancy, death rate, prevalence of diseases, suicide rate. Their argument, based on data from the USA, is that not much acceleration seems to have happened in recent decades. Rather, Western societies have plateaued. So, while probably the acceleration is a magic concept for the maintenance of the myth of progress, the same basic indicators are remarkably changing in emerging and developing economies, where the Western myth of progress is largely exogenous. The Brave New World of information technologies

Technologies often come wrapped in stories about politics. These stories may not explain the motives of the technologists, but they do often explain the social energy that propels the technology into the larger world. (Agre, 2003)

4 In response to some criticisms of irrationalism, Rorty (1989) advocates for a similar position.

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As hinted in previous passages, technological development is certainly not alien to myths and their role of promising an (ever retreating) promised land of a better future. Myth of technological progress keeps mobilising distributed collective action: private and public companies offer new products and services of incalculable value, customers buy what is perceived as trendy, investors pour money into start-ups of all sorts but all with a common trait: little to no evidence of being able to achieve what they promise. The myth of a previously unconceivable revolution originating from garages in California and university dorms is widely assumed throughout the IT industry that continuously refers back to the origins of the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. This foundational – and ‘so sixties’ – myth goes hand in hand with the utopic assumption that the US, and California in particular, is ‘where the future happens first’.5 Walsham (2001b) and Avgerou (2002) pushed research beyond these assumptions and put information systems in the broader global context by discussing cases from all over the world. Recent studies on innovations (Govindarajan & Trimble, 2012; Radjou, Prabhu, & Ahuja, 2012) show the limitations of this Silicon Valley ethnocentrism in an increasingly multi-polar world. From a different standpoint, Mazzucato (2011) debunks aspects of public/private mythology in technological innovation by demonstrating the key role of state actors, that can be both visionary and patient, in long-term innovation. Still, the outreach and omnipervasiveness of the IT myth is such that I would say that in many settings IT is a totem without taboos: in spite of decades of failed promises and unexpected developments, IT is believed to transform governments and businesses as much as religion or gender relations. Technology as myth has not been studied extensively. The main works on IT and myths that are considered here are Mosco (2004), Bekkers and Homburg (2007), Noir and Walsham (2007). In different ways, all of them concur in arguing that IT acts as a legitimiser to facilitate courses of action that would not take place otherwise. Mosco (2004) offers the most articulate, and enjoyable, analysis of contemporary IT as a seductive myth and the politics of hype it brings about. Mosco starts his book showing how the conceptualisation of the cyberspace as a myth explains the level of transcendence it achieved and benefitted from for many years. Manufacturing the digital sublime today, Mosco writes, ‘is not done by having Moses climb a mountain to receive the Word and bring it to the people. Rather it takes the banal but powerful forces of political economy to promote the cultural discourse’ (2004: 42). Because the myth of cyberspace was (and is) widely believed, those involved in building the cyberspace were granted very large payments in advance in forms of investments with little to no strings attached and loose regulations. One could say that myth fostered a sort of stock-market Keynesianism to bootstrap cyberspace. From his perspective, the 1990s dot com bubble is a perfect example of how myth is an integral part of the boom-andbust cycle. Thus, myths can distance a plethora of actors from the status quo of any historical contingency (transcendence) and legitimise something new by making it believed. Similar processes can be identified at the beginning of flight and electricity. So, myths can be a step towards ‘powerful banality’, i.e. when a set of technologies moved from their vanguard stage to seamless embeddedness into common societal praxes. It is noteworthy that what sticks in the collective memory is the mythical period. Indeed, if one hears ‘age of electricity’, its pioneer period comes to mind – although it has long passed – rather than today, although we have never been so dependent on electricity. Bekkers and Homburg (2007) identify, analyse and reflect on the myths underlying the egovernment programmes of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark and the 5 Donncha Kavanagh, personal communication: ‘The American Dream is, in many ways, a reworking of the biblical story of the search for the Promised Land, which, in turn, is a version of Heaven (or utopia) on earth’.

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Netherlands. They found that in all those national policies myths of technological inevitability, a new and better government, rational information planning, and empowerment of the citizen can be discerned. They continue stating that, even if mobilising powers of these myths are acknowledged, existing studies have generated little justification for the high expectations of these myths about e-government. Nonetheless, large IT systems for public and private organisations (e-government, e-health services, spatial data infrastructures, broadband internet access …) are commonly believed to be inevitable steps towards national development.6 All these systems constitute the telos of the myth of technological and socio-economic progress nearly everywhere on earth, including remote places (Medina, 2006, 2011; Miscione, 2005). The case of IT policies of Kerala, a Southern Indian state with ancient cultural heritage, is quite representative of IT hype’s outreach: ICT has opened up the possibility of radically different information exchange patterns by facilitating faster and more efficient dissemination of information. It can play a vital role in sustaining the democratic ethos of the Indian society and ensuring a high level of transparency and accountability in governance […] The Government has a comprehensive view of ICT as a vehicle for transforming Kerala into a knowledge-based, economically vibrant, democratic and inclusive society. (Government of Kerala, quoted in Miscione (2012)

Following Meyer and Rowan (1991), Noir and Walsham (2007) analyse the implementation of IT for the health care sector in India and argue that IT and data collection may end up being ceremonial to comply with social and organisational norms, therefore of use to reinforce existing social relations (as with a rain dance) but not to improve health service. The difference between the points of these works and the present argument is that I emphasise the consequences of myth on future courses of actions. Of course it is impossible to falsify today’s beliefs on the base of future outcomes, and perhaps it is not the most interesting approach to conceive. Rather than debunking myths, my aim here is to show their might in shaping organising processes in the face of unknown consequences. In more concrete organisational terms, the focus is on how myths help in organising and aligning behaviours in recognisable and acceptable ways by inspiring and guiding actors (decision makers, experts, stakeholders, consultants, etc.), on how myths organise meaning and sense-making by providing shared, meaningful ways of connecting events. In smart-pants business parlance, one might say that myths are knowledge management devices to explain and order experience in the face of the unknown.

Research approach ‘It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future’ the saying goes. But of course natural sciences are quite good at predicting the speed and acceleration of falling objects and similar phenomena. The situation becomes more complex when the objects of study are people, with their own will and who ‘talk back’, i.e. respond to the theories about them. This has been labelled ‘double hermeneutic’ by Giddens (1982). An illustrative example is Marxism: it is a theory of evolution of societies; people who adopted this view started understanding and modifying their own behaviours according to the class-based worldviews that Marxism assigns them. Now, a problem with technologies in society is that engineers use to borrow natural science (positivist) methodologies and apply them to artefacts to be used by people, who are less predictable than rolling stones. The outcomes are very often unanticipated, as a considerable part 6 Another example is provided by Faik and Walsham (2012) about modernisation of Morocco judiciary system.

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of information systems research demonstrated. The encounter of highly promising IT projects and use in actual social settings is introduced with two case studies, approached with interpretative research methodologies.

Knowledge, unplugged

Now, where to study empirically myth as a knowledge (or ignorance) management device? Wittgenstein once observed, ‘How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!’ Nisbet (1980) expresses concern about the declining legitimation of the sacred and related concepts, including progress. What is missing in his analysis are the consequences of the idea of progress on non-Western civilisations, which are only peripherally considered in Western philosophy as exotic, (nobly) savage, not rarely primitive. So, if there is an element of ethnocentrism in the Western idea of progress, I find reasonable that the seductive and mobilising power of technology-related myths is more evident in social settings where the Western thirst for progress in not endogenous. In other words, the myth of progress and modernisation as exogenous force is peculiarly evident, therefore interesting to study, in societies organised differently. From here, it is a short step to see anthropology as empirical philosophy (Latour, 2010). Using an analogy from music, unplugged usually refers to acoustic execution of music popular in its electric or electronic version. Unplugged music is perceived as essential and pure because its qualities are not buried under the bells and whistles of electronics.7 Similarly, an unconventional way to study information systems is to look at them under conditions where little can be assumed, therefore essence is more evident. This suggests why the myth of IT progress is discussed here by presenting a case study of telemedicine in the Amazon and another one on spatial data infrastructures (SDI) in India. In both cases, it is like unplugging a rock band’s Marshall amplifiers and making them perform in front of an audience comprising listeners of classical music or jazz of the 1920s. This is why it can be relevant to study telemedicine in the Amazon rain forest, and SDI in India, where IT is certainly not an epiphenomenon of local praxes. Indeed, telemedicine – the provision of health care at a distance – and SDI assume the possibility of sharing knowledge as information across electronic networks. As presented below, both telemedicine and SDI carry the sense of inevitable need of modernisation. Both case studies took years of research, it not possible to report the variety of methodological approaches and tools used. References to published works are provided below. Suffice here to say that those works were informed by an interpretative approach (Silverman, 1993; Silverman, 1998; Silverman, 2005; Walsham, 1993; Walsham, 1995; Walsham, 2006). Classifying problems, defining risk

How to remain coherent with a framework that does not favour rationalist standpoints over others? The problem with non-industrialised societies is that their variety makes comparison troublesome: ‘If anthropologists want to compare two types of ancestor worship, for example, or two kinds of belief in witchcraft, the cultural differences will often be so vast as to render vain the effort of comparison. Cultural Theory is a kind of solution to this problem’ (Douglas, 2007). Cultural theory (CT) proposed a two-by-two scheme for classifying different types of cultures. On one axis one can put the level of group pressure on individuals, on the other the level of behavioural regulation. This is why it is also known as grid-group theory.

7 Music savvies may argue that there are types of music that cannot exist without electronics, so cannot be unplugged. This is a limit of the metaphor proposed that, I hope, does not obfuscate its meaning.

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Table 1 CT classification of types of social groups. Fiske’s (1991) relational models in brackets

Fatalist

Market individualist (Market pricing)

Enclavist (Equality matching and communal sharing are not differentiated)

Hierarchist (Authority ranking)

- grid + The four types so defined correspond to some extent to Fiske (1991) four elementary relational models, the difference I see is that Fiske is more articulated in discerning community relations in sharing and matching and leaves the a-social fatalist out of his focus. For this reason, his may be an appropriate lens to look at the following cases. On the other hand, CT has been extended to study risk and governance. So, how to study the way people approach the uncertainties of the future? Risk has attracted much researchers’ and practitioners’ attention. Beyond traditional organisational and Western empirical settings, Douglas (2013) work on risk and blame is probably one of the most authoritative. Mary Douglas, the leading figure in the development of cultural theory, uses it to understand how uncertainty about the future is handled by different groups and societies depending on their grid-group position. According to CT, each group has an own way to perceive risk (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983), therefore to respond to problems. Fittingly for this research, (Hoppe, 2010) applied and developed CT for governance, more precisely the governance of problems (of which IT in society is squarely a subset) and the way they are structured. The following graph adapted from Hoppe (2010) classifies the types of problems depending on if there is agreement on values, norms and goals, and on the other axis on knowledge certainty.

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Table 2 Types of problems, adapted from Hoppe (2010) Unstructured problems

Problems of competing knowledges (example: improving health care)

Problems of different values (example: global warming, planning)

Structured problems

- Agreement on values, norms and goals +

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As illustration, the adoption of traffic lights can be seen as a structured problem: it is known it reduces risks at crossroads and everyone agrees on related values (all drivers are the same), norms (Highway Code) and goals (road safety). Improving global health can be seen as a problem of competing knowledges: even though there is agreement on the value of people’s health, different forms of knowledge may make problems complex, as the following case shows. Global warming is a problem of different values: there is overwhelming agreement on its causes, but countries with strong interests in the status quo of energy industry, including emerging economies, have other priorities. Finally, the unstructured problems cell is where ‘wicked problems’ are. I now move to present two case studies. As they are extensive, produced several publications, and this is not intended as an empirical contribution, I will delineate them to the extent they are relevant for the present argument. References to publications are provided for those who would like to know more details about them.

Trespassing the border of the knowledge society The case of telemedicine in the Amazon is described by first introducing the expectations related to it, then co-existing medical knowledges are discussed to the extend they affect telemedicine use. Finally, the more complex situation than the IT myth allowed to foresee is presented. According to a standard definition, telemedicine is the use of medical information exchanged from one site to another via electronic communications to improve a patient’s clinical health status. Telemedicine assumes the possibility of sharing medical knowledge as information across an electronic network. This can be achieved by accessing remote databases, facilitating remote diagnosis and monitoring, and/or asking for second opinions also to more specialised doctors. All these and other enhancements of medical practice are intended for better informed decisions and better accountability. Knowledge management has been one of the recent re-incarnations of technology-related means of progress. In spite of balanced stances like Blackler, Crump, and McDonald (1998) and Walsham (2001a), a basic assumption is that knowledge in digital form can travel seamlessly via IT. Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty – unnecessarily … Poor countries – and poor people – differ from rich ones not only because they have less capital, but because they have less knowledge … This World Development Report proposes that we look at the problems of development in a new way – from the perspective of knowledge. (World Bank, 1999)

For decades now, information technologies have been holding the promise to diffuse knowledge and enable progress everywhere. Is IT fulfilling this promise? The liminality of a case of telemedicine in the Amazon offers an original story. How information translated into health care practice where on-site health care knowledge is not necessarily informed to biomedical assumptions was a research question whose answer can help put the myth of progress into perspective. Indeed, studying telemedicine in the Amazon highlights the assumption that health care knowledge existing on-site matches with what IT designers assumed (Miscione, 2005, 2006). Main partners of the telemedicine project referred to here are Spanish and Peruvian universities, a Spanish non-governmental organisation, the upper Amazon branch of the Peruvian health care system and international funding agencies. According to them, the purpose of this project is to design, implement, evaluate and formalise a model of telemedicine systems to

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improve health care in rural areas of developing countries. The declared background motivation behind the project is to reduce the gap between First and Third World, where most people are unable to meet their basic needs. On the other hand, promoters declare that ‘society is advancing towards information and knowledge driven structures, where communications and information technologies play a crucial role in development, and may be key to effectively improve living conditions of broad sectors of left out population’. Within this general framework, a ‘tremendous potential exists for improving health matters through the use of telecommunications and information technologies’ (Miscione, 2005) This transnational effort requires mobilising a hybrid network made up of actors, norms, agreements, expectations – and to ‘align’ them. The point is how telemedicine gets legitimised to orient agencies and becomes central for organised actions involving so many different actors. From the documental analysis of the online interorganisational communications and the main publications by this project’s promoters, the key concepts legitimising telemedicine within and beyond the partnership are: equality, cost effectiveness, timeliness (Miscione, 2006). They can be seen as the magic concepts for their strong positive bias and mobilising capacity. They are trusted to be achievable, relying on scientific medicine and leveraging IT capacity to diffuse medical knowledge. This means that the telemedicine system’s designed and expected use reflects the routines implied by a scientific conception of illnesses and treatments: abstraction of symptoms, exams by a physician, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. Elements of those routines can be carried out remotely through an information system. Beyond the organisational level, those magic concepts contribute to wrap telemedicine with a sense of modernity, which was clearly perceived by all the people involved, including medical doctors and even populations of remote areas of the jungle (Miscione, 2004). Referring back to the CT table, one sees that the problems that telemedicine aims at solving are assumed to be structured (bottom right quadrant): medical knowledge is certain, involved actors agree on values, norms and goals, providing information is what is needed; nothing that would place them elsewhere is mentioned.

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Table 3 CT table representing the way telemedicine promoters approach health problems Unstructured problems (deadlock)

Problems of competing knowledges (agreement on ends like improving health care)

Problems of different values (agreement on means like IT)

Structured problems (telemedicine solves problem, ‘just do it’)

- Agreement on values, norms and goals + In spite of widely held expectations, telemedicine has been tried with mixed success in a variety of settings (Schwamm et al., 2009). Here is a case about how telemedicine was used in 2003/2004 in the Peruvian Amazon.

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A jungle of treatments

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During fieldwork, what became apparent is the difference between the information system’s claimed and actual uses. In the Amazon there are as many risks for health as alleged cures. Those health care practices help in explaining a divergence between planned and observed use of the telemedicine system, the former being accountable to the context of origin of the project and to the funding agencies, the latter being indirectly affected by unexpected health-seeking behaviours of the target population. The purposes of the telemedicine system were remote consulting, distance learning and sending epidemiological and activity reports. Participant observation revealed that it was used to provide logistical support for medical activities, to coordinate and track transportation along rivers of documents, blood samples, patients, gasoline, medicines, and to send reports. Expectations reflect principles of knowledge management, whereas practices reveal coping strategies with a different set of contextual issues (Miscione, 2007). A first empirical illustration can help here in setting the scene. Before the introduction of electronic communication channels, all messages had to travel along rivers, so information could be lost or it might not have been sent, it was difficult to request reports and their absence was always justifiable. The electronic communication network had not increased the quantity of information officially required (about epidemiological vigilance, reporting and control, tracking of people and goods), but it reduced the excuses for not sending or receiving information. As a result, coordination within the health care system was tightened, and a closer shared understanding about what had to be done was produced (Miscione, 2007). More poignantly for knowledge management is that different kinds of medical knowledge co-exist in the Amazon and biomedicine is just one among them. People hop from one to another. Tellingly, an interviewee stated that ‘A physician is someone who studies medicine through the university’. From the ethnography it emerged that public health care is associated with quick recovery and electronic communication channels strengthened this aspect. But different and incommensurable forms of medical knowledge continue to co-exist side by side. Here is an illustration of how scientific medicine evidence may not work in the Amazon, as in any social context where scientific rationality is not hegemonic: a health worker was trying to show mosquito larvae that he found in a dark house as evidence of inappropriate water management. The empirical evidence was not visible in that family’s actual material environment, and not significant in their cultural environment. They would continue to attribute disease and death to sorcerers. This example clarifies that the spread of scientific medicine is not simply a matter of medical information transmission (Miscione, 2007). A conception of telemedicine as moderniser sees traditional healing practices as obstacles to enhanced health care delivery. Medical anthropology notes that Western medicine is informed by the triad: 1) data collection, 2) illness cause retrieval and 3) treatment. However, the distinction between health and illness may vary in different contexts and historical periods. Good (1994) work about illness in different cultures shows that the understanding of illness does not arise from a direct access to patients’ state but from their perceptions. Accordingly, telemedicine in the Amazon accentuates what people already expect from Western medicine: quick recovery. Other perceptions and expectations are met by other medical practices that push people outside of the health care system (Miscione, 2007). Diagnosis as an outcome of recovery

The diagnosis process is of particular interest. In scientific medicine’s pattern of action, patients express their symptoms, the necessary clinical data are produced, and then this information is associated with a disease to make sense of it. This model encounters little obstacles where scientific medicine is hegemonic. In the Upper Amazon, most of the public health personnel com-

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plained that patients frequently attended a health facility at quite late stages of disease. Indeed, they often arrived to the public health system two or three weeks after the first symptoms because they tried herbal remedies first. Treatment was difficult because there was a limited range of medicines available and there was no medical literature on how pharmaceuticals might interact with the herbal medicines that patients might have taken earlier. The public health care system is associated with quick recovery, which implies that diseases requiring long treatments cannot be completed because patients move on to the next level: traditional healers, who cure evil eye. Evil eye is an illness that appears not to be treatable by plants and public health care. It does not correspond to any scientifically categorised disease, indeed – from a biomedical standpoint – it is not a disease itself, it can be any serious illness that could not be cured so far, hence no diagnosis is possible a priori. Several accounts and statements by patients and doctors, and some patients’ apparently ‘irrational’ behaviours, confirmed that the understanding of the disease is a process co-extensive to patient’s trajectory between different kinds of treatment: the diagnosis is the product of the trajectory. More properly, the recovery says that the medicine used was right. The most important point here is that different medical knowledges see the same patient’s condition differently, therefore move the problems that telemedicine aims at solving up, to the upper right quadrant of the CT table.

+ Knowledge certainty -

Table 4 CT table representing the kind of problems surfaced by an ethnographic study Unstructured problems (deadlock)

Problems of competing knowledges (diverse health seeking behaviours pertain to different medical knowledges)

Problems of different values (agreement on means like IT)

Structured problems (Telemedicine solves it all, ‘just do it’)

- Agreement on values, norms and goals + So, in a nutshell, diverse medical knowledges make the IT supported progress a moderately structured problem while the IT myth of progress bracket out our lack of knowledge about the local accommodation of diverse medicines and keeps stakeholders confident that problems are structured. The all-embracing view of spatial data for governance

Spatial data infrastructures reflect in the geography and planning world what has been happening through other domains heavily affected by IT: the move from stand-alone and task-oriented information systems, to open-ended and widely interconnected information infrastructures. Similar to the previous case, this second case is introduced by presenting the perspective of the SDI promoters. Then, empirical material from the implementation of SDI in India shows how practices tend to exceed the neat expectations of progress that propel IT projects.

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Let me start with an image of an electricity pole built in the middle of a road.

Figure 1 Available on many websites (original source is impossible to trace back).

Were the builders wrong? Probably not, the mismatch is so evident to immediate perception that it is more likely that they were executing a wrong plan obsequiously, which was probably based on poorly geo-referenced spatial data. This provides a vivid example of organisational errors derived from not sharing data, and introduces adequately the SDI motto: ‘produce data once, use it many times’. This would eventually result in an all-embracing view based on consistent integrated datasets.8 Spatial data infrastructures commenced at the beginning of the 1990s, drawing on studies of Multi-Purpose Land Information Systems and similar developments in North America. Already then, it was clear that rather than addressing individual organisations, spatial data had to be considered in the context of inter-organisational relations, along which geodata was expected to be shared and used (Calkins et al., 1991; NCGIA, 1989; NCR, 1990, 1993, 1994). At the close of that pioneering decade for geographic information systems (GIS) and SDI, Groot and McLaughlin (2000) proposed a widely accepted definition of SDI, stressing its sociotechnical character: The networked spatial databases and data handling facilities, the complex of institutional, organizational, technological, human, and economic resources which interact with one another and underpin the design, implementation and maintenance of mechanisms facilitating the sharing, access to and responsible use of spatial data at an affordable cost for a specific application domain or enterprise.

The ultimate objectives of SDI are to promote economic development, stimulate better cooperation and government, foster environmental sustainability and social wellbeing by means of 8 This vision reminds of Scott’s (1998) Seeing Like a State even though at that point in time data were not as prominent as today.

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more integrated and efficient government (Nedovic-Budic, Crompvoets, & Georgiadou, 2011). Traditionally aligned with the premises of e-government, SDI is the continuation of ‘public authorities’ natural inclination to gather information in order to govern society on the basis of that information’ (Prins, Broeders, & Griffioen, 2012). So, SDI are designed and implemented in countries all around the world to provide new tools for better governance. Homburg and Georgiadou (2009), in line with previous work on e-government myth by Bekkers and Homburg (2007) and Czarniawska and Sevón (2005), read the translation of SDI from North America to Africa, highlighting its mythical dimension. In doing this, they detail how the SDI myth was reinterpreted and domesticated in the African SDI discourse and pushed decision makers to ‘enact reality’ (i.e. develop SDI) even if there was a lack of hard facts corroborating the positive outcomes of SDI deployments. Here I present the case of the Indian National SDI. As in most domains of activities that IT expands to, these technologies are always portrayed as a panacea to solve a variety of problems: decision making, planning, disaster management, natural resources management, climate change, property mapping, taxation and monitoring are the main activities that are expected to benefit from digitalisation of spatial data. The most comprehensive reference of the expectations from the Indian SDI is certainly Kumar (2009) edited volume published by the Government of India. In this policy document it is stated that the National SDI is the culmination of integration of surveying, geographic information systems, global positioning system (GPS) and earth observation capabilities. So, this document prospects how SDI make a difference for governance: The fact that data sets from diverse sources with diverse formats need to be mixed and meaningful inferences are to be extracted to enable the stakeholders to connect to their decision support systems, clearly point out the need for the NSDI concept. Current issues like global climate change, disaster management, location-based services, energy production and distribution are some of the areas that will stand to benefit from NSDI. (Kumar 2009: xiv)

Spatial data is vital to sound decision-making at the local, regional, state and central planning levels. It also plays a crucial role in the implementation of action plans, infrastructure development, disaster management support, and business development. (Kumar 2009: 29)

Analysing this and other SDI related policy documents (Department of Science & Technology, 2009; Ministry of Urban Development, 2006; NNRMS standards committee, 2005) it emerges that some key concepts are recurrent (Richter, 2014): alignment, coordination, better decision making, development, governance are magic concepts reinforcing each other to attract consensus and make policy documents difficult to disagree with. When SDI documents and workshops focus on more concrete actions, those general concepts are echoed into more mundane ones like: standards, data accuracy, comprehensiveness, integration. Even though these are more concrete than the previous ones, they maintain a normative positive bias that allures people into coordinated action towards common goals. So, acting according to them would pave the way to achieve the SDI grand vision. Applying the CT table to this case, one can see that the myth that propels SDI pushes the problems it promises to solve to the lower right quadrant. More precisely, tying undoubtedly SDI to decision making, accountability, etc. keeps the problems on the right side of the graph. Reducing SDI to standardisation, data accuracy, integration assumes certainty of knowledge (lower part of the graph) about how to achieve goals.

Myth, management of the unknown

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Table 5 CT table representing the way promoters frame SDI

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Unstructured problems (deadlock)

Problems of competing knowledges (agreement on ends)

Problems of different values (agreement on means)

Problems are structured (SDI offer viable solutions for main governance problems)

- Agreement on values, norms and goals + From 2008 to 2013 I was contributing to a research project focused on SDI in India. More details than can be provided here are in (Richter, 2011, 2014; Richter, Miscione, & Georgiadou, 2010; Richter, Miscione, Pfeffer, & De’, 2011; Richter, Miscione, Pfeffer, & Georgiadou, 2008) The research context spanned different levels, from districts to city and state administrations and up to national ministries and international collaborations. Warned by Walsham and Sahay (1999), Barrett, Sahay, and Walsham (2001) and Sahay and Walsham (2006), we were sceptical about the correspondence between IT related expectations and the actual situation on the ground. On a similar line, Silva (2007) reported faltering institutionalisation of SDI in Guatemala, and explained it criticising the assumption that SDI would trigger necessary institutional transformations whereas his case suggests that a fitting institutional context is a pre-requisite for successful SDI deployment and use. Harvey (2006) analysed conflicting interests in SDI development in Poland focusing on the different practices of establishing, registering and maintaining land property rights. In particular, he stressed the mismatch between top-down SDI implementation and local practices. By criticising an excessive focus on data and standards, Davis and Fonseca (2006) showed the importance of emancipatory knowledge in the successful implementation of SDI in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. They rely especially on Gadamer and Habermas to understand the problem of how SDI can succeed. Down to a urban and bureaucratic jungle

The beginning of the millennium saw the first efforts of starting an Indian National SDI. They were initiated by academics, top ranking administrators and practitioners who start meeting at conferences in North America, Europe and India. Those diverse people were kept together by the aim of integrating data from many task-oriented systems to create a multi-purpose scalable system to support planning at all levels. Besides the obvious technical obstacles that arise when diverse systems are connected, organisational and social issues proved prominent. First, two ministries were jointly responsible for the SDI initiative: the Ministry of Space with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which has always been very powerful in India9 and the Ministry of Science and Technology, which comprises also the Survey of India that was funded by the English during 9 A few years ago this ministry landed an unmanned mission on the moon and is now looking at Mars.

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the colonial period. The former envisioned SDI as a highly technological endeavour relying on satellite and advanced earth observation machinery. The latter, especially for what concerns the Survey of India, operates on the basis of a large labour force of surveyors. The former was capable of producing large amounts of up-to-date data, while the latter maintained that data previously collected should be used. On the top of this divergence, only the Survey of India has the sealing power of accepting geo-data for the purposes of government activities. For these and possibly other reasons, the SDI initiative reached a stalemate. The institutional entrepreneurs pushing the initiative realised that at the state level the tensions between ministries were more tenuous and state administrations had a strong interest in embracing the SDI vision of improving governance. So, SDI action at the state level took the shape of geoportals that collect and redistribute geo-data to different organisations. Our empirical observations led to a departure from the formal requirements of SDI development towards a better appreciation of the actual organising processes. Since my first twomonth fieldwork in a southern Indian city it became apparent that local players had little understanding of SDI, and limited practice of the GIS that SDI is intended to integrate. Much more prominent were large scale programmes of urban development and renewal, and deeply entrenched problems related to rapid urbanisation, especially informal settlements that covered more than a third of the city area (there is no agreement on this proportion). Informal settlements proved quite difficult to survey uniquely, classify formally, thus to include in databases. For instance, the slum declaration process is characterised by a multiplicity of inconsistent lists, some of which are carried out by non-administrative actors (Richter, 2011). As a simple illustration, the signs on the door in the picture below show how the same household is classified again and again according to different schemes. Figure 2 Picture taken during fieldwork (Richter et al., 2011)

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Noteworthy is stressing that the introduction of new survey schemes and new technologies do not seem to help standardisation and accuracy of data collection. Rather, any new initiative adds complexity as the previous ones are not dropped; at least to the extent some actors have interest in maintaining them (Richter et al., 2011). In sum, this research found that the supposedly universal concept of SDI is so stretched and dispersed across a multiplicity of independent and often conflicting activities that SDI has moved from an expected foundational role, i.e. shaping how other (downstream) organisations would have formatted and shared geospatial data, to a post-hoc function of coping with a variety of ongoing SDI related (upstream) activities. Universal visions and unclassifiable practices

Referring back to the CT table, one can see that even if most actors could see the point of classifying space also in digital format, there were unsolvable disagreements about what these classifications should be used for. Therefore everyone was pushing their own classifications suited to their views and interests. So, the quadrant that best frames this case is the lower left one.

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Table 6 CT table representing the kind of problems surfaced through mixed method and multi-site research Unstructured problems (deadlock)

Problems of competing knowledges (agreement on ends)

Problems of different values (agreement on means)

Problems are structured (SDI offer viable solutions for main governance problems)

- Agreement on values, norms and goals + It has to be stressed that the drift from the SDI expectations is not a failure in itself, but a usual phenomenon affecting large technical systems (Ciborra et al., 2000). Indeed, the flexibility of SDI and of what is associated with the term is one of the reasons for its longevity and successes (Miscione & Vandenbroucke, 2011). It is because of both SDI vagueness and common agreement about its usefulness across academics and practitioners that SDI could travel from North America to many countries, including India. Dismissing the grand SDI vision as naïve would be reductionist. Possibly, being more precise about what SDI would have entailed would have deprived key stakeholders of the necessary vision to transcend their day-to-day conditions. Noteworthy is that when Indian National SDI was initiated, it would have been difficult to foresee the outcomes, therefore to mobilise the necessary actions and resources. Obliterating the uncertainty about the SDI consequences and risks was achieved by implying agreement on values and goals and by assuming certainty of knowledge, derived from experiences and experts in developed economies, sometimes even having them directly in project consortia.

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Over more than two decades telemedicine and SDI travelled across the world by mobilising actions of plenty of public and private organisations. Usage is where myth of technology-based progress and praxes collide, and where different methodologies clash (see section 4). As designers fail in predicting social transformations, the future remains largely unknown and people remain anomic, unsure about what is next. Flyvbjerg (2001) and Flyvbjerg, Landman, and Schram (2012) argue that social sciences should not be aspiring at predictive knowledge like natural sciences. Rather, they have to recognise the inescapable double hermeneutics of social research, as much as of the human condition, and orient themselves to phronetic research, practical wisdom. Although I agree that double hermeneutics is unescapable, I see good reasons not to think that it would fall back to a refurbished sort of never-ending relativism in which the difficulty of finding solid foundations translates into everything has the same level of legitimacy (Eco, 1994). Referring back to the CT table, both Rottenburg (2005) and Hoppe (2010) discuss how actors in search of solutions move across the quadrants. There is a kind of law of gravity according to which people prefer to deal with ‘structured problems’. The issue here is that in front of paradigmatic changes there is no certainty of knowledge or agreements on values. This may induce a paralysis that cyclically renewed myths of progress help in overcoming. Mosco (2004), Bekkers and Homburg (2007), and Noir and Walsham (2007) argued convincingly that IT operates as a legitimiser. Here I extend their point to consider the always unknown future and myths’ role for ‘ignorance management’: by aggregating consensus, they reduce the variety of courses of action that actors would pursue, therefore reduce uncertainty about the future. ‘Ironing’ the double hermeneutics

At the beginning, myth has been defined as ideology in narrative form that serves to make sense and organise experience. As such, myths are not relevant for being true or false but to the extent they are believed or not. To the extent they are, the cosmology they imply gives order to the diversity of human situations by resolving contradictions and paradoxes, ultimately alleviating the sense of uncertainty about the future. Deriving from that, conceiving myth and might as a dichotomy is probably wrong because myths are mighty in mobilising coordinated actions in the face of unknown long-term consequences of today’s decisions. From this perspective, the evidence of myth’s might is not the factual verification of impacts but their persuasive power: whether stakeholders of all sorts believe in the myth of IT progress, and use it as an inspiration for action. So, myths transcend the day-to-day impasse by providing shared cosmologies on the base of which people interpret and act in going about the unknown future. Myths fill the gaps of the unknown by making people believe that something is real, which therefore becomes real in its consequences (the Thomas theorem). As long as they are believed, myths keep alive and act as a compass of praxis in the face of the unpredictable future. This is how I frame the influence of myths on managing the double hermeneutic. Although a punctual counterfactual proof is not possible, myths are suggested to have a function in bracketing out doubts and cementing alliances to keep action going also in front of unknown consequences. In more colourful terms, myth helps in ‘ironing the double hermeneutics’: making future human behaviour more streamlined, regulated and thus less unpredictable. Going back to the Marxist example, it is possible that societies are not evolving towards communism; whether this is true or false, we can reasonably expect that proclaimed proletariats are not advocating a reduction of state taxation on capital. Therefore, a corollary of the Thomas theorem may be proposed: ‘Myths, by suspending normal reality checks, make the future less mundane, therefore more amenable’. Myths suspend

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judgement and act as a compass of praxes. Whether this facilitates self-fulfilling prophecies or not is beyond the scope of this paper. Engineering the other by alluring

The corollary offers a way to recognise assumptions which are increasingly challenged by contemporary cross-cultural, globally dispersed contexts of activity, providing a view on contemporary post-colonial science and technologies (Anderson, 2002). Indeed, although it is a reasonable statement that technology and science are not teleological, both of them promise a better future. On the other hand, diversity of forms of knowledge, otherness of cultures have been a long-term concern for anthropology and a pressing issue for contemporary societies. Countless have been the works addressing the issue of globalisation as homogenisation, spread of an allegedly world monoculture, etc. Through the 1990s, critical scholars like Ferguson (1994) and Escobar (1995) argued that development is the latest re-incarnation of concepts like progress and civilisation, and that it provides the framework according to which to make sense and act in relation to the unknowns of different world societies. In this sense, progress provide lenses through which people became problematised as illiterate, rural, lacking of knowledge and capacity, and so on. Following that line, it is possible to argue that myth or progress may prevent ‘alternative modernities’. This criticism of post-colonialism is possible but beyond the scope of the present discussion. Works like Berger and Huntington (2002) distance themselves from simplistic views on globalisation as homogenisation. Rather, they take diversity empirically and describe through several cases how many globalisations are taking place at the same time, in different settings and according to a variety of dynamics, originating diverse hybrids. Both telemedicine and SDI efforts rely on widely dispersed hybrid networks that are mobilised and kept aligned in face of unknown outcomes by an alluring future spelled out by means of non-contentious magic concepts, which are useful to set agendas and provide a fitfor-purpose vocabulary to discuss and act. The shared cosmology that myths provide is particularly important when coordinated action spans different cultures, and little can be assumed as common. This is the case for telemedicine in the Amazon and SDI in India. To argue that, cultural theory has been used as a sensitising lens to show how problems are consistently framed in ways that bracket out lack of knowledge, diverse value systems and ultimately uncertainty about future outcomes. Utopians active in developing contexts have another strong point in alluring stakeholders and propagating technologies: they can claim that the same technologies are already working in developed economies. As before, my point here is not to contest if this is true or false – suffice here it say that anywhere it is difficult to pinpoint clear causation – but to foreground how myths operate. Indeed, telemedicine and SDI are framed as ineludible steps towards modernisation, as in developed economies. But Bekkers and Homburg (2007) argued that IT is a myth in developed economies as well. In sum, my view on the technology myth is not that of Prometheus stealing fire from gods to give it to humans, i.e. taking from the haves to give it to the have nots. Rather, myths operate indirectly by alluring stakeholders and actors to engage in action coherent to a common vision of the future. Empirical cases where the myth of IT progress is not endogenous expose the reality of myths in seducing people and alluring them. Myths can iron the double hermeneutic, thus break inertia and help in bootstrapping artefacts that would have few chances of growing otherwise. On a similar line of reasoning, Czarniawska (2004) – referring to the legend of a baron who could lift himself by the hair – argues that reforms may fail their goals but creating a distance from daily (autopoietic) routines can open up chances for unintended consequences. So, perhaps the West is not so much about exporting technologies and engineering societies with efficient command and control programmes. Rather, the IT myth irons the double

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hermeneutic and makes the future more amenable across societies on the global scale. Recognising this dimension of IT in the world stage is necessary, although not sufficient, to answer the question of whether we are making a better world with IT (Walsham, 2012). Final remarks

In conclusion, I would like to voice scepticism for some kind of future all-encompassing Western myth of progress. Generally speaking, especially since the turn of the millennium, societies seem to be adjusting to an increasingly multi-polar world. At the same time, contemporary crisis has been questioning the West as a source of societal models. This doubt has been voiced by a blunt reverse racial comment by the ex-Brazilian president Lula who declared that the ongoing crisis has blue eyes,10 hinting at Western experts (carriers of modernisation) who had no clue of the consequences of what they were doing with financial markets. Recently, Moyo (2013) expressed increasingly spread doubts about Western models. So, the crisis has revealed a huge gap between what was thought to be known and what was known. Myths of progress may to have blinded many about what we do not know. Perhaps this is a chance for other myths from other cultures to gain the stage, and even allure the West. Who knows about how the future unfolds before it is ironed. References

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IV

Echtra

Echtra – Introduction Norah Campbell

Trinity College, Dublin

An echtra or echtrae is a genre of story in Old Irish that refers to a ‘moving out’ – an adventure or expedition to the Otherworld. Our hero is bade to this world by a beautiful maiden, a government official or a military warrior, and his fate varies from myth to myth. Sometimes they return to us, with gifts and wisdom; sometimes the transition back to this world kills them. This session is fittingly titled. Gareth Brown’s eloquent and poetic paper (‘In Iron Light: Eeeriness, Problematics and Social Movements’) focuses on the elegiac and hopeful nature of the Otherworld of social movements. Gareth takes as his context the massive decline of mass organisation of the left. Rather than lamenting the decomposition of radical political movements or feeling more alienated than ever (‘bouncing between anxiety and dissociation like a fly between the panes of a double-glazed window’), he finds that this disintegration is both desirable and propulsive. This paper will introduce many of us to the philosophical mechanics of symptomatology and decomposition – both enjoying recent revival through the works of people like Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour, though Gareth uses them in even more dynamic ways. The ‘iron light’ of the title refers to that eery time between dusk and dawn, a time for ‘fairyfolk and other forest-dwelling folkloric characters and cryptids with crepuscular shifts’. With this, Gareth would like to cultivate a way of being in the world that emulates the eery dusk/dawn – the ‘softening of our vision, the lengthening of shadows that wreaks havoc on the geometries and geographies with which we had felt secure mere hours ago, allow[ing] for radically different interpretations of our physical environments’. Jack Tollitson and Diane Martin’s paper (‘Understanding Myth in Consumer Culture Theory’) is itself an expedition through the eclectic world of consumer culture theory. They come back with a cartography of how ‘myth’ has been used in CCT; no mean feat considering how consumer researchers have sailed though every discipline – from psychology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, to literary criticism, history and political economy – to understand myth and the market. Jack and Diane’s cartography is an indispensible guide through the murky waters of consumer research, which has used myth to understand American rodeos, brides-to-be, white-water rafting and the natural health market. Their expertly synthesised paper explains how myth has been understood in consumer research from five perspectives – symbolic, functionalist, semiotic, structuralist, critical theory and monomythic. In each, Jack and Diane carefully parse out the major theoreticians and each of their influences on consumer research projects, while depicting in clarifying focus the intellectual evolution of consumption theory. Robert Caruana and Sarah Glozer’s paper (‘The Myth of the Responsible Consumer: Interpreting Consumers’ Responsibility Narratives in the Tourism Market’) has an obvious link to echtra. The paper takes as its context the marketplace myths of travel. More specifically, Robert and Sarah note an evolution of a mythic archetype of the ‘responsible tourist’. Interestingly, marketing expresses this archetype and addresses it as monolithic – ethically idealised, moralised and self-sacrifying. While this has been explored in other pieces of consumer research (including their own), no research as yet investigates how the actual person who does the ‘responsible travel’ engages with this archetype. Through depth interviews, Robert and Sarah find that the myth of responsibility is demythologised, by consumers, in order to negotiate a less contradictory, more flexible and achievable identity in relation to this myth. The mechanics of this negotiation are complex; expert interviews and analysts that they are, Sarah 169

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and Robert draw them out, and term them demythologising and moralising, neutralisation and levelling. This detailed and nuanced reality of consumer experience forcefully shows us, yet again, that ‘there should be no expectation that the mode of signification offered by marketers maps smoothly onto consumers own experiences’. In the echtra genre, sometimes the hero stays among the sídhe forever. This is the case with Katherine Casey, Maria Lichrou and Lisa O’Malley in their paper ‘Myth Spinning in an Ideological Community: A Barthesian Analysis’. Their research participants are residents of an ecovillage in Ireland, and like the previous paper, Katherine, Maria and Lisa offer interesting insights into how these residents take a seemingly unified myth (the moment their village came into existence), and use it to mobilise their individual ideological positions. Their unit of analysis is the ‘story’ – clearly a key rhetorical device in mythology. Their analysis is a detailed and high-level use of Barthes’ semiology. While this ecovillage initially appears ideologically aligned, their analysis reveals nuances in story-telling. ‘It is at this point’, the authors tell us, ‘that myth interjects; it soothes over these differences and creates a vacuum which can contain these differences’. Finally, Amee Kim’s paper (‘Creating Harmony in Crisis Periods: Exporting Cultural Values through Yin-Yang Mythology’) also brings us into the work of Barthes and mythology. Her study innovatively examines how the recent financial crisis was represented on front covers of economic magazines in Korea, as well as interviewing those designers responsible for the artwork. The lens of analysis is Yin-Yang mythology – a system of thought which permeates Korean life – and one that is based on the careful and harmonious balance of Yin (disaster) and Yang (opportunity). Her visual analysis of these magazine covers shows a striking similarity of the representations of debt, unemployment, bankruptcy and survival, which she then contextualises by explaining what was happening in Korea and beyond at the time. As the title suggests, Amee makes the point that such representations are ‘exported’ – again echoing the expedition theme – in that they have a profound impact on how Koreans then subsequently imagine the crisis.

In iron light: Eeriness, problematics and social movements Gareth Brown

University of Leicester

In this paper I present the fading resonance of the mass organisation in UK social movements as a problem of decomposition and recomposition. I argue that a focus on processes of unity coupled with a preoccupation with maintaining structural integrity mask the vital problematic of dynamism, or how organisations move and metamorphose. I suggest that the dissolving of organisational bodies into social movements is not only a key facet of the present historical moment but is also desirable. With this in mind, I explore the idea of careful, collective de/recomposing. My starting point is symptomatology, a methodology of composition. In attempting to imagine a reversing of this methodology I draw on surrealism, Keats’ ‘negative capability’, encounters with fairy-folk, the composite gods of the renaissance magi, and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the refrain as clues as to how dynamic ecologies of loving doubt might be organised. A spectral presence lurks between each of these things. The eerie.

The light of day

I had never heard flower music before – I don’t think one can unless one’s in the ‘eerie’ state – and I don’t quite know how to give you an idea of what it was like, except by saying it sounded like a peal of bells a thousand miles off. (Carroll 1987: 348)

It is commonplace for the political to be thought of as if it were a practice of negative entropy, as if the political moment lies somewhere along a line that moves us from chaos to organisation, from cloudiness to precision. Often the result is an ossification of social movements into structures purely devoted to the maintenance of political dogma. But the future never seems to grow into these tailored outfits, and the constellations of the possible that they represent drift further and further off from the shoreline of the present. In short, the significance of a social movement must be assessed not only upon its ability to cohere but also upon its ability to dissolve itself, to create cartwheeling structures of discohereing in one place and recohereing in another. In this paper I contextualise this problematic through an examination of the dwindling resonance of the mass parties and mass organisations of the UK left. Rather than a glib assertion that we are once more passing into an era in which the open network form holds sway (or worse, an era in which radical organisation is impossible), I suggest that it may be possible to develop methodologies that allow for more productive passage from more ossified political forms to more fluid ones and back again as and when demanded. In particular, my interest here is with the process of deconstitution, of breaking apart. I argue that, far from an indicator of failure and in contrast to the trauma and resentment that such processes can often bring, this process is both necessary and desirable as a means of collective imagining and action. In short, what I explore here is a form of political organising that rejects the notion of unity as its holy grail. I begin by looking at methodologies of coherence. In particular, I look at symptomatology and the important underlying notion of ‘the problematic’. I argue that, building on Deleuze’s attempt to develop symptomatology from a methodology of reading into a methodology of everyday life, we are provided with a potentially invaluable armoury for collectivist political organisation and 171

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for social movement. I pose though that while symptomatology provides a means of moving towards functional problematics, it fails to provide clues as to the mechanics of the reverse movement, out of the ossified, the process of active envaguening. In attempting to imagine symptomatology backwards I articulate the concept of eeriness. I find precursors to this idea in surrealist practice, in the work of certain poets, and in elements of folklore associated with encounters with fairies and fellow otherworldly inhabitants of forests and shadows. In short, this is intended to be an investigation into organisational but also organised decomposition. The last decade, and in particular the last five years, has seen a remarkable decline in the mass organisations and political parties, the institutional actors of social movements in previous generations of struggle. In the UK, membership of the main political parties has dropped from more than 4 per cent of the electorate in 1979 to a current figure of less than 1 per cent. This decline has been particularly acute in the Labour party who, despite still having the largest membership base, had close to 10 times the number of members at that time. The steepest decline (across all main parties) has been in the last decade (UK Government 2012). During the same period, union membership has almost halved from over 13 million to just over 7 million and continues to drop (UK Government 2013). Though shrouded in mystery and misinformation, membership of larger left revolutionary parties is in rapid decline also. The Socialist Worker Party, for example, although still officially claiming a membership in the thousands with a slow increase, is widely believed to have a steadily decreasing membership possibly, as low as the hundreds.1 That a significant constitutional crisis around the internal investigation of an allegation of rape against a member of the central committee precipitated this decline must not detract from the fact that it is very much a part of a continuing trend and does not appear to be a special case, and new mass-organisation initiatives such as Left Unity are also having difficulty finding a foothold. It isn’t only these more formal or more structured organisational forms that have faltered of late though. Occupy, arguably the UK’s most significant recent grass-roots movement, also failed to metamorphose into anything lasting at the level of structured networks or organisation. Some commentators on the movements from which Occupy emerged equate this with a failure to ‘become political’ (such as Cooper and Hardy (2013) in Beyond Capitalism?) On the other hand, a small number of scholar-participants in Occupy Wall Street have enthusiastically declared the movement as the herald of a new ‘anarchist turn’ (see, for example, Blumenfield, Bottici and Critchley’s 2013 book of the same name). I don’t subscribe to Cooper and Hardy’s indefensible synonymising of becoming political with becoming/joining a political organisation but cannot agree either with Blumenfield, Bottici and Critchley, who seem ignorant of the long cycle of alter-globalisationist struggles of which Occupy arguably represented a limit point imagining it instead as having sprouted from an emergent moral sensibility. Occupy has some legacies. However, what must be noted is that these legacies do not take the form of lasting organisational structures or networks. What this demonstrates is that it is not simply a case of one political party or organisation falling out of favour and being replaced with another. There is rather something about the very form of the mass organisation that is failing to resonate. These disparate collapses and stillbirths can seem immensely destructive for those caught up in them. To have given one’s life over to the building and defence of an organisation that one considers to be the mass organisation of the oppressed, only to see that body crumble, can be personally devastating and overwhelmingly disempowering. It makes sense of course that in an era of capitalism in which the dominant affect is one of anxiety (as argued by The Institute for

1 It is very difficult to find reliable sources around this issue. However, an internal debate on the subject can be found recounted in the document ‘SWP Conference Minority Position and Reply by Central Committee’ (Socialist Worker Party, n.d.).

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Precarious Consciousness (2014), for example), structures capable of resisting change, of weathering storms, steadfast invariants facing-off against a cascading waterfall of profit-oriented progress, should be attractive and psychologically important. We must acknowledge though that invariance, ossification in an organisational structure can be equally damaging, even on a personal level. Our working lives, our social lives, how we experience our families and the physical environment all change, for better or worse. Capitalism is dynamic, mobile, frenzied even. If we don’t subscribe to the idea of a ‘natural’ or ‘authentic’ existence outside history, then the anchoring structures that political organisations can form can actually serve to trap us outside everyday life. They quite literally fortify against social movement, which, if it must do anything, must move. We may end up using the party to combat anxiety only to produce dissociation instead. Dynamism of social movement is important. In the context of political organisations this maps onto the ability to morph, expand, contract, deconstitute and reconstitute. It involves developing the ability to incorporate ideas and experiences from places wholly outside the traditions from which they formed, developing the ability to dissolve dogma in the flowing liquid of the everyday. The collapse of organisations is not just a fact of political organising in the present day, it’s also desirable. How then that can this be achieved in a way that is collective, reciprocal, on-going, and propulsive? Is there an alternative to bouncing between anxiety and dissociation like a fly between the panes of a double-glazed window? If it is to be propulsive (i.e. to correspond to social movement) this must be the motion of the cartwheel rather than that of the pendulum. Put differently, methodologies relating to the coherence of political imaginaries, of collectively moving from the vague to the clear, need to be linked to the reverse movement, that of collectively, cautiously, actively envaguening. As such, we might begin to think about it be examining processes of cohering. Composition and problematics

We can map such processes by beginning from methodologies of composition. One such methodology is Symptomatology. I take this concept from Deleuze although he is far from the only theorist to have developed methodologies of coherence from the idea of reading symptoms and it will prove productive to trace the commonalities that the Deleuzian permutation shares with others. Symptomatology is an analytical method concerning the clustering of symptoms. Ostensibly the concept draws upon clinical analysis wherein empirical observation precedes the collation of a symptomatological aggregate. If this aggregate fits closely with an existing model, it may be interpreted as a specific disease or, if the symptoms seem always to be found in this grouping for reasons obscure to the clinician, a syndrome. However, the emphasis is on the cluster rather than the disease that encapsulates it. This is not the same as a diagnosis. It is an observation that there is something underlying a symptomatological aggregate that serves to draw its symptoms towards one another so that it can be confidently predicted that it will be repeated elsewhere. In Deleuze’s work on Masoch and Sade, he demonstrates that symptomatology belongs as much to critical processes as to clinical ones (Deleuze 1997: 53–55). The key difference for him is that the clinical project must at some stage end its symptomatological digging in order to fulfil its utilitarian functions relating to cause and cure. In the absence of this role, symptomatology is open ended. Clinically speaking, symptomatology can be thought of as an intermapping of a body as presented onto a context-adjusted ideal of a healthy body. In doing so, it is hoped, the points at which the body ceases to ‘make sense’ can be revealed. In Deleuze, as in other critical uses of the idea (we will come to Althusser and Žižek presently), symptomatology might be thought of as a process of the articulation of problematics, the introduction of which into this argument requires that we draw a genealogical line to Bachelard and his phenomenology.

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In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard articulates the difference between his own method and that which might be used by a psychoanalyst when writing about poetry: [The psychologist and the psychoanalyst], if they take the image as symptomatic, will try to find some reasons and causes for it. A phenomenologist has a different approach. He takes the image just as it is, just as the poet created it, and tries to make it his own, to feed on this rare fruit. He brings the image to the very limit of what he is able to imagine. (Bachelard 1994: 227)

His analytical action, therefore, is not intended to be one of finding a resting point in the cure, but one of endless movement, of problematics unfolding like the travel-case of a door-to-door infinity salesman. While the process, as Maniglier writes, is one of going from ‘a rough theme or question to a precise problem’ (Maniglier 2012: 22), those precise problems, like symptoms in clinical analysis, are always contextual and always subject to history’s compulsive sculpting. For Bachelard this corresponds to a ‘functionalising’ (Bachelard 2012: 28), which can be read as an investing the object with life. To problematise is to breathe movement into an otherwise static idea. Deleuze sets up his symptomatological approach in opposition to phenomenology, arguing in Difference and Repetition that the methodology is irrevocably tethered to Hegelian universalism. ‘All phenomenology is epiphenomenology’, he tells us, meaning to argue that it rests upon unquestioned assumptions that entirely undermine the project of reflective enquiry (Deleuze 2010: 63). However, to me, Deleuze’s project doesn’t seem as far removed from that of Bachelard as he implies. One could easily make the argument that a Hegelian universalism is not so much a property of phenomenology itself than of phenomenology practiced sloppily. Indeed, while Deleuze’s criticisms are entirely valid, the reason that the underlying assumptions of phenomenology remain unquestioned is surely because it is not the phenomenologist’s intention that there should be any. These barriers to the perpetual unfolding of problematics, far from being the deliberately constructed outer-parameters of the phenomenologist’s work are there because they have been overlooked. The similarities between Deleuze and Bachelard are clear when one compares them both to Althusser, whose symptomatic reading in Reading Capital also owes a strong debt to the latter (Althusser and Balibar 2009: 43–44). Symptomatic reading focuses on what is present but does not speak. By exploring these silences, the loci of the author’s presuppositions and assumptions, one can begin to articulate the hidden political problems that underlie the text (often beyond the grasp of the author). Like Deleuzian symptomatology, this is an open-ended project that can be perpetually renewed from the point of view of the present. However, it remains a means of interpretation, a method via which we can grasp the hidden engines of the author’s articulation. This is not though a question of ‘correct readings’. Like symptomatology, it drags the text into the historical moment of the reader without applying to that moment an end of history status. But its focus is still the writer, the text, the historical record. Deleuze, like Bachelard, moves away from a methodology of record reading towards a methodology of lived experience, a means of organisation. The text certainly has a place in this process but can only occupy that place in as much as it is able to be absorbed into the now. Žižek’s system, although sharing with Althusser a distinctly interpretive character, corresponds, like Deleuze’s to an ambitious onto-epistemological project. The focus of his symptomatic method is the critique of ideology and it is in his key text on this subject, and we find the most useable elaboration in The Sublime Object of Ideology (2008). Beginning from a discussion on Marx’s theory of the commodity in relation to Freudian dream analysis, he uses a symptomatological approach to move from the commodity ‘at face value’, first to the its hidden content (which for Žižek is a somewhat banal revelation just as the latent content of the dream

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was for Freud), then to the form of the process of commodification. This, for him, is the important question, the point at which the functional problematic finds its genesis. Both the manifest and latent contents of the commodity are, in Žižek, symptoms of the process of ideology (Žižek 2008: 3–18). Luckily for us, Žižek applies this symptomatic approach to some resoundingly simple scenarios. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (2005) for example, he juices problematics from the US justification for the 2003 war on Iraq by showing the closed circuit of interference generated by the following propositions: (1) Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction which pose a ‘clear and present danger’ not only to his neighbours and Israel, but already to all democratic Western states. (2) So what to do when, in September 2003, David Kay, the CIA official in charge of the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, had to concede that no such weapons have so far been found (after more than a thousand US specialists spent months looking for them)? One moves to the next level: even if Saddam does not have any WMD, he was involved with Al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attack, so he should be punished as part of the justified revenge for 9/11 and in order to prevent further such attacks. (3) However, again, in September 2003, even Bush had to concede: ‘We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks’. (Žižek 2005: 5)

The ‘borrowed kettle’ in the title refers to an anecdote related by Freud where a defense against an accusation of having broken the said object displays similar internal contradictions: (1) I didn’t borrow the kettle, (2) I returned it to you unbroken, (3) The kettle was broken when I borrowed it (Žižek 2005: 5). While Althusser writes in terms of ‘silences’, Žižek uses noise or interference. These analogies may appear at first to be incompatible with one another. That is unless we think of symptomatology in terms of waves rather than one wherein sense appears as an object that is either present or not present. Two different things can produce the appearance of wavelessness. The first is a true absence of activity. Thought about in terms of sound, this situation would correspond to a failure of matter to act in such a way that kinetic energy is transformed into sound via vibration. True silence. However, waves can also be cancelled by equal and opposed values. The behaviour of liquids can illustrate this. If one is able to resist the trance-like state that sustained observation of the shoreline produces and focus on assessing the movement of the water, one will observe among the peaks and troughs areas of absolute stillness and flatness where the sea resembles glass. This is not (only) a result of the under-surface but of the trough of one wave attempting to occupy the same space as the peak of another, thus producing a flatlining, an absence. This happens in sound too. Indeed, the idea is central to the more technologically advanced areas of soundproofing. However, one is less likely to be able to observe the process in everyday life. The symptomatologist brings different wave formations into the same space in order to probe for wavelessness, asking ‘is this a wavelessness produced by silence or noise?’ We can watch these wave processes at work in the becoming of social movements. An example here could be that the narrative of ‘to each according to their effort’ or of sure-fire technological advancement that underlies neo-liberal capitalism, when placed atop the experience of trying to make ends meet, of finding a secure job, of having time to look after oneself, of a thirty-year technological stagnation, produces areas of wave interference or symptoms which we then articulate as problematics. Momentarily, this articulation resulting from the new symptomatology produces new sense. The vehicle that secures this sense might be (but doesn’t have to be) the political organisation, which, in addition to its systems and offices, is always structured around a shared understanding of the point/place from which it emerged, the world as it

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currently is, and the future into which it might move. These different permutations of symptomatology share with one another the character of being precision movements; they begin from the vague (meaning, it should be noted, ‘wave’) and move towards the exact. They give us clues as to the processes by which a body coheres but the problem remains that this is a methodology of wave taming. The end result, if we leave this process as it is, is a sea of neutered constancy across which waves roll with uniform height and interval. This is only possible if the new sense, the new ‘sea’, is maintained in isolation rather than treated as if it is itself merely one symptom-set among infinitely many. Given that we know sense to be fleeting, dependent upon an historical context, this situation is unsustainable, results in collapse or stagnation. To restate the initial problematic then, how do organisations, as isolated seas or tidal pools, throw themselves into the ocean while preserving the possibility of recohering once again and how can this process be structured in such a way that it is sustainable and repeatable? Isabelle Stengers takes us some of the way there. In an unpublished piece ‘Another Science Is Possible’ (2013), Stengers elaborates a series of problematics concerning current ‘fast science’ models practiced in academia. While it would constitute too great a diversion to discuss the text in any detail, there is much that parallels the arguments I’m making here. Stengers writes about a science mobilised by the market for specific interests in such a way that its reliability and creativity are diminished. The suggested alternative is a ‘slow science’ grounded in process and rhythm and the free and careful sharing of knowledge. Central to her argument is the embracing of messiness. A civilized mode of appreciation would imply to never identify what is well-controlled and clean with some truth transcending what is messy. What is messy from the point of view of fast science is nothing else than the irreducible and always embedded interplay of processes, practices, experiences, ways of knowledge and values that make up our common world. (Stengers 2013: 9)

Her slow science, then, constitutes a way of embracing the mess. It will be clear why I feel an affinity with this argument as it provides a productive contrast to the rush to sense that I’ve described as constituted by symptomatology above. However, Stengers is still discussing a methodology for moving cautiously, collectively, and slowly out of the mess. This remains an implied movement from generality to precision. In contrast, I am suggesting here that such a methodology must be circular or reciprocal, must have, inbuilt, the capacity to move out of, and back into, the mess. Stengers provides some insight into how her slow science might work in practice when she draws on the idea of relays from Deleuze and Guattari and we shall revisit this idea further along in the present text.

Decomposition and eeriness

Before looking at possibilities for methodologies of collective decomposition, it may help to look at a few specific examples of left organisations whose ending, rather than being born of scandal or simply the result of gradual petering out, was carefully negotiated in a way designed to ‘return’ the body to the broader social movement. Lotta Continua in Italy in the 1970s, Class War in the UK in the 1990s, and more recently, the Camp for Climate Action share with one another the character of careful dissolution. In each case the organisation in question recognised a change in the dominant or most innovative forms of social struggle that they were unable to incorporate into their existing structures. For Lotta Continua this was the growth of the feminist movement and, more broadly, a turn towards ‘difference’ as a central component in class struggle (Wright 2002: 197). For Class War, among other things it was the anti-roads movement and the nascent alter-globalisationist movement that it helped to spawn (Class War 1997). For the Camp for Climate Action, it was the diffusion of struggle that the 2007 crisis brought with

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it (the student movement, the riots, activism against bankers and tax dodgers, and slightly later, the Occupy movement) (Camp for Climate Action 2011). Crucially, these are not ‘ends’ with any sense of finality. The narrative delivered by each of these organisations was one of dissolving back into the movement as a whole, of clearing space for new thought and action. This are not instances of defeat but of politically vital expressions of radical doubt. The prerequisite of this doubt of course is that organisation must refuse to see itself as the organisation destined to bring about the revolution or as the authentic voice of a specific populous (such as the working class). The editors of Class War (the paper) explicitly recognise this in the introduction to the important ‘final issue’: 73 (Class War 1997).2 Interestingly, the organised decomposition of another UK-based revolutionary organisation, Big Flame, helps to make exactly this point. In a forthcoming book, Max Farrar notes that after years of sustained engagement with the Social Worker Party, Big Flame was forced to acknowledge that large political organisations were only able to sustain themselves through an element of hermetic sealing, that the price of solidity and longevity was a total inability to change, a blocking of all escape routes back out from the precise. Unable to think a way out of this problem and unwilling to make this compromise, Big Flame called it a day (outlined in an email to the author on 29 April 2014). These processes are interesting in that they demonstrate the possibility for a social body to actively disperse itself. This cannot be reconciled with a conception of politics as the moving always towards order, institution and its struggle against natural entropy. There is a deeper mechanics at work here though. How do these structures actually loosen and break apart? Leaving aside for a moment the organisation of a political body, we turn here to Surrealist method. To understand surrealist methodology, it is necessary first of all to do away with the notion that surrealism has been concerned with the creation of works of art. Although the earliest attempts to declaw surrealism in the 1920s consisted in its presentation in the cultural press as a literary movement, it is as an art movement that the English-speaking world largely encounters it today. Surrealist practice can often result in the creation of artefacts of some sort, be these assemblages, paintings, texts, or films. However, it’s important on the one hand to note that these are rarely considered to be anything other than the excrement of critical processes and on the other that large numbers of participants in organised surrealism have never produced anything of the sort (as Rosemont (1998) expertly argues in Surrealist Women). We should also lay to rest here notions that surrealism is (a) French – it is international and (b) a movement of the pre-war era – organised surrealist activity has continued uninterrupted since the 1920s (particularly in Paris and Prague, the latter of which has endured two separate periods of clandestinity). It is actually in the last 40 years that many of its key practices have been developed and most important collective texts produced (see Richardson and Fijalkowski 2001 for an overview of much of this period). Surrealism is a set of methodologies developed for the investigation and articulation of a specific ontological critique – that capital limits our experience of the world and that which we understand to be the real – to a utilitarian engagement. Surrealism is concerned with a swelling of the real; it is a demand for more reality. While it is beyond the scope of this text to offer an overview of surrealist investigative methods there are certain qualities that they all share: The probing of a breach-point and the drawing upon Objective Chance. This breach-point, which tends to be left unanglicised as La Bréche in surrealist discourse, is the point at which ‘the marvellous’ intervenes. Easily misunderstood as a synonym for ‘the fantastical’, the marvellous can perhaps be given a more specific surrealist meaning as a blockage in the normal flows of capitalist value, an arresting moment wherein the

2 ‘Final Issue’ appears here between quotation marks on account of the fact that the newspaper was continued by a small remaining section of the organisation for a further decade.

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real seems to overspill the channels of utility (utility here ultimately subordinated to the accumulation of profit). This breach-point is close to what John Holloway talks about as the ‘cracks’ in capital (Holloway 2010). Importantly, in both these cases, these breaches/cracks/flaws are not spaces into which to escape as they might be in fantasy, they are spaces within and beyond the everyday under capitalism, they are space that capital cannot hold, ‘moments of excess’ to borrow a term from The Free Association (2011: 31–40), flatlining or megapeaking waves of sense. Surrealism is not primarily a practice of making La Bréche. Rather it is one of finding it. The terms in which surrealist practice are couched therefore are often those of searching for evidence of the marvellous. It is worth noting here that in contrast to the ideas of the Situationist International who developed surrealist ideas into a notion of capitalism as a façade behind which lies some sort of more authentic reality (Debord 1983), the surrealist breach does not rely upon a notion of authenticity or an ultimate real. The mechanism by which the breach points are probed is absolutely a symptomatological one. The symptom-aggregates are often drawn on the one hand from ‘the objective’ (received understanding of use and possibility corresponding to a hegemonic capitalist narrative) and on the other ‘the subjective’ in the form of the unconscious. Left there, it might be objected that this is simply the basis of poetry rather than something specifically surrealist. However, two elements counter this, the first is theoretical. Surrealism emerged at a time wherein ‘inner experience’ was acquiring a whole new set of parameters through the work of Freud. Early surrealists saw in Freud’s work the potential to expand his theories from a set of tools for understanding the individual to a set of tools for understanding the construction and deconstruction of the real. In short, they saw in Freud the potential to collectivise the unconscious, to use the unconscious as a means of seeding a commons of the imagination. The second counterpoint is the active introduction of a third symptom-aggregate, Objective Chance in order that the critical process is opened up to the intervention of an outside element drawn neither from the critic’s unconscious nor residing in the objective. This is key. The opening up to Objective Chance constitutes the means of surrealist decomposition, of envaguening. It moves the participant out of the fixed; it affects a ‘derangement of all the senses’ (Rimbaud 2003: 367). I use the word ‘participant’ deliberately because the use of Objective Chance means that the larger part of surrealist investigation takes the form of games, indeed many of the surrealist works adorning the walls of galleries and attributed to individual persons of genius are the result of these collectively devised games. The game ‘Exquisite Corpse’ wherein one person writes a line of text or draws a part of an image, obscures it, and passes it to the next participant to continue, still remains one of the simplest examples of this overlaying of the three aggregates, subjective, objective and chance, in a process that first produces non-sense in order to produce new-sense/nuisance. How can we carry this active disordering out of surrealist practice and employ it in the collective organisation of our lives though? I have found it useful to experiment with the idea of eeriness as a means of exploring this, in particular, with the concept as employed in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno. Although the unconventional narrative of this book makes it hard to give a straight-forward synopsis, the crucial piece of information here is that the story concerns at some point a narrator/protagonist’s encounters with the sibling title characters who at some point become, are revealed as, or are portrayed as fairies. For most of the book the world and concerns of these title characters are quite separate from those of the narrator, and it is implied that the long passages concerning their antics and those of fellow denizens of Outland are recounted to us as dreams as he continually drifts off, seemingly whenever seated. Later on though, these waking and sleeping worlds begin to merge. This can only happen, we are told via the cultivation of eeriness. The first rule is, that it must be a very hot day – that we may consider as settled: and you must be just a little sleepy – but not too sleepy to keep your eyes open,

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mind. Well, and you ought to feel a little – what one may call ‘fairyish’ – the Scotch call it ‘eerie’ and perhaps that’s a prettier word. (Carroll 1987: 338)

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Despite a certain assonance, eerie and fairy do not appear to share a root. While the source of the word fairy is thought to lie in the Greek furies, eerie comes to us through an etymology that passes a whole host of European languages usually with a meaning relating either to fearfulness, cowardliness, or a more nondescript ‘bad’. The everyday use of the term will suit just fine as a starting point for its deeper elaboration though. We talk of eeriness as a sense of things being weird, fearfully uncanny, or not right. It is a word we associate with being scared, with feeling that we may come to harm in ways that it is quite impossible to articulate. With Carroll, I wish to expand upon these negative connotations. Carroll’s eerie is about seeing through the act of unseeing. It is about deliberately unsettling an understanding of the whole in order to allow for the discovery of elements of the real not previously been incorporated in that whole. Following from this we might replace not right with not fixed. The idea that Carroll wished to convey with the term is certainly not of his own invention. The long association of fairy-folk and other forest-dwelling folkloric characters and cryptids with crepuscular shifts, with the iron light of dusk and dawn, is well known. This may in part be to do with the fact that this represents the time of strange encounters with the non-mythical native wildlife of much of western Europe, many of which are either nocturnal or are themselves crepuscular. We diurnal beasts often experience these chance meetings as uncanny or special. Sightings of bats, foxes, owls, and badgers remain moments of note for many of us for the whole of our lives. If these incredible animals come out after we ought to be sleeping, what else stalks the night? In thermodynamics, the point at which matter changes from one state, such as liquid, to another such as gas is known as phase transition. These crepuscular moments are perhaps something like the phase transition of the imaginal. The softening of our vision, the lengthening of shadows that wreaks havoc on the geometries and geographies with which we had felt secure mere hours ago, allows for radically different interpretations of our physical environments. While not wishing to invoke the ire of folklorists who caution against the drawing of broad commonalities between the stories of radically different parts of the world, it is certainly worth mentioning that other beings that we might think of as fairy equivalents also occupy spaces that are somewhat hostile to humanity and rich in nocturnal life, such as the djinn of the Arabian deserts. It might also be noted that passage to the underworld, or otherworld, is very frequently associated with some sort of loss of self-control, such as through death, love, or lust. The English romantic poets utilised this same trope frequently, writing of the liberatory nature of the flight into night-time. Shelley’s To Night with its lament ‘When I arose and saw the dawn, I sigh’d for thee’ (Shelley 2002: 524) is particularly clear as an expression of this. Interestingly Keats even goes as far as to begin to elaborate a methodology that we can see as being close to eeriness when he writes on the idea of ‘negative capability’ in a letter to his brothers. This, Keats tells us means being ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts’ (Keats 2010: 277). Negative capability is a useful concept here as it has already been borrowed by the social theorist Roberto Unger for whom it is central to the process of making and imagining social systems. Unger’s use of the term treads closely to my own use of eeriness in that he means the process of breaking apart that which has been instituted or the structures of formative causation. Also similar is that fact that negative capability does not, for Unger, as with eeriness for myself, constitute a closed, one-directional process; it is not a case of nature versus politics. Where the two approaches differ is that Unger has a tendency to move from the individual to mass politics and back again without alighting on that which lies between. Unger elaborates the mechanics of negative capability (which is a part of a larger theory of ‘false necessity’ that I

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shall not outline here) with regards to the individual in Passion: An Essay on Personality (Unger 1984) and with regards to the mass movements of the working class in False Necessity (Unger 2001). In this latter case though, his concern is which the dissolving of bourgeois institutions via the negative capabilities of the class as a whole. The molecular processes of negotiating the possible between different bodies tethered to different formative contexts are underexplored. This does not detract from the value of his unfolding of Keats’ term but it leaves open the question of how one does negative capability – indeed this criticism has been levelled at Unger by Stanley Fish (1990: 400). It should be noted that Unger treats negative capability and empowerment as synonymous; to be empowered is to master negative capability. It is nothing else. It must therefore be something one can do rather than something that passively happens. Eeriness is useful here. To enact one’s negative capability, one produces eeriness. That the spectre of the Freudian uncanny haunts every one of these methodologies of decomposition cannot go unmentioned. But Freud can only take us so far before we’re forced to watch as the uncanny is put to conservative ends. In Freud the uncanny, which we might well describe in terms of a sense of the eerie, offers insight into the workings of the id, and is formulated as a tool for returning the analysand to the real. Of course, for Freud, the real is a particularly narrow conglomeration of possibilities structured moral determinism and a liberal subject. Were we to allow ourselves such a digression, we could turn once again to early surrealism in order to witness attempts to appropriate this tool within the context of communist understandings of subjectivity and a desire to change the world. Freud’s uncanny constitutes a way for an individual to return to the same place better, whereas for the surrealists it was a potential basis of permanent social transformation. We can draw some parallels here with recent work on the physical organisation of the brain. The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) holds that consciousness emerges not from the activity of a small, dedicated area of the brain but from the processes and interconnectivity of neurons firing throughout most of it. Central to this is the notion of reentry, which refers to the rapid and reciprocal interaction between different groupings of neurons. While different groups may be responsible for specific sense-elements, such as colour or texture, it is only the continual communication-loops operating between these groups that create a conscious understanding of the world. In time, this reentry process shapes the brain itself in the same way that muscle use shapes other parts of the physical body. In situations where the preferred routes of reentry are not available to a brain, for example if damage to the brain tissue has occurred, it reroutes its networks bypassing the damaged area. In their book Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, Edelman and Tononi suggest that similar conclusions might be drawn about certain dissociative disorders, admitting that there have been too few studies into this area from within the field of neurology to be able to speak with any authority. Their hypothesis, however, is that dissociation occurs as a result of a malfunction of these processes of reentry, where the circular reciprocity between neuron groups is blocked so that the brain must create a new diversion. Bodily activity doesn’t cease in these circumstances but the relation of that bodily activity to conscious thought is radically altered (Edelman and Tononi 2001: 67). Though the authors do not consider it, we might tentatively enquire into whether this is not the same or a similar process at work as that in deliberate methodologies of dissociation such as those associated with certain forms of meditation or with certain kinds of psychoactive drug use. It is no coincidence that in some cultures, the use of dissociation through psychoactive drugs and plants is associated with revelation, with thinking differently in such a way as to facilitate the movement of those cultures. This is the production of eeriness on a very physical, bodily, albeit individual level. We must remind ourselves here that we are not content with merely dumping the social body into the woods at dusk and leaving it there. What we’re trying to explore is the cartwheeling motion of destabilising certainty, moving collectively into the fog of uncertainty,

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restabilising a new temporary certainty, and repeating the process ad infinitum: An organised, collective, process of productive doubt, a loving doubt. We need to look again at myth here before looking finally at the refrain. Recomposition and refrains

Myth is sometimes understood as an immovable narrative structure within and around which we perform daily life. While this can bring great comfort, it can also bring the opposite. When we learn, for example, that both George W. Bush and Tony Blair determined policy in the Middle East based, in part, on Christian teachings and end-times mythology, it gives us cause for concern. How can such people make empathic or even pragmatic decisions on behalf of their respective nations in a world populated by wholly different peoples and societies organising their lives in very different ways to those concurrent with the development of the stories that structure the decisions? How can we feel that the demands of democracy are being met when at least some of the participants in that democracy are inhabitants of another realm either to which most of us have no access, or don’t believe in at all. If life is structured around a story that already has a beginning, middle, and end, then change becomes impossible. The modern, literalist bent of the dominant religious mythologies though obscures a whole series of much more supple, fluid, and modifiable narratives. Patrick Harpur provides a useful illustrative example when he writes about the continual bringing into being of composite gods drawn from a variety of mythologies among renaissance magi (Harpur 2009: 253–254). This in part performs a symptomatological game ritual with the characters intended to reveal hidden meanings and essences. More importantly, it is an experiment with resonance that seeks to investigate which new configurations allow for greater amplifications of the key problematics of the historical moment. These new gods simultaneously both structure and are structured by, everyday life, politics, and the changing physical environment. This is a particularly striking example because the mythologies from which these gods are drawn (Greek, Egyptian, Roman above all but also Norse and Arabic) are those with story cycles that are now, for us, fixed. In contrast, there is a sort of democracy around the superstition and folklore concerning fairies and other non-specific magical entities. It is perhaps, therefore less surprising that we might feel free to play with, change, and transform the stories around them. What this fluidity of myth allows is a form of guided, temporary decomposition, a way of moving between one space and another space (or an otherspace) where that other space is already decked out with makeshift architecture and its own people and customs like cats eyes in the fog. While these denizens of elsewhere impact upon our here, they also provide structured passage from our here to the elsewhere. They perform the function of the rolling refrain. In turning to the refrain we once again encounter Deleuze, this time in collaboration with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (2004). In it, the two authors discuss the idea in relation to territoriality. The refrain for them constitutes a territorialisation with a deterritorialised chaos. They begin with the example of a child whistling a tune when feeling a sense of fear. Because rhythm is of central importance to their argument, a sonic model of the refrain is the one on which they focus. However, a refrain might also be a place such as a home, social centre, or a place of worship. It might be an object or an arrangement of objects. It might be a story or even a critical methodology. It is a resting, gathering point, a point of recomposure, a safe-space of sorts. Buts such spaces can take a variety of forms. A safe space can be a fixing space in the sense of permanent stasis rather than of mending, it can be a space that shields from the chaos or the mess so effectively that we begin to forget that it’s there at all. On the other hand, it could be a fixed point to which our relationship is elastic, from which we can launch ourselves into the unknown only to the brought back to the same spot time and time again. Or, it can be more like a caravan, a temporarily territorialised space to be taken with us as we move. In Deleuze and Guattari’s system of classification of the refrain it is this latter one that interests

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us and which addresses the problematic from which this text stems. Namely, refrains ‘mark new assemblages, pass into new assemblages through means of deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 360). The example the authors provide is that of the gradual transformation of nursery rhymes as they move from region to region. One could posit mythology of course as a parallel example from the slow movement of particular stories having their details and characters changes to more rapid deterritorialisation-reterritorialisations like the composite gods of the renaissance. When Deleuze and Guattari write later in the same book of the need to become an ‘ambulant people of relayers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 388). They mean it, I think, in precisely this sense of a collective movement that composes a shifting refrain at each point of relaying or each point of articulation. There is a pluralism in their argument though that might be better expounded through the idea not of becoming an ambulant people but of becoming ambulant peoples. What makes these peoples move, what, subsequently, makes them relay, is the distant resonance of a compatible refrain drawing them towards itself through the unknown like a just-visible island in an uncharted sea. We can map this directly onto the dance of organisations and collectives within social movements. Collectives generate refrains such as organisational structures, critical models, principles, systems of ethics, codes of behaviour, position papers, hallmarks, and other rituals in order to provide sanctuary from the endless fog of the possible. The mass organisation, the political party, the organisation that is the organisation does so in such a way that it rarely needs venture into the fog. Instead it draws other bodies with their island refrains towards itself in order to absorb them or, failing that, casts them off entirely, decrying the lack of resonance in their refrain, perhaps declaring it a siren song. Organising a pluriverse though, organising to be ‘more than one, less than many’ (Mario Blaser quoted in Stengers 2013: 15) requires a real openness and attentiveness to this music floating in on the fog, to the ‘peal of bells a thousand miles off’ (Carroll 1987: 348) with which we started. It requires too the active welcoming of chance and external circumstance. It requires floating islands rather than static ones, the building of structures through which the ‘we’ might emerge rather than the defence of a ‘we’ presupposed. Concretely, it requires collective bodies that can build their own refrains, practices, critiques, and cultures, while actively facilitating the growth of communities of reference, ecologies of loving doubt, articulating or relaying at the points at which those refrains, practices, critiques resonate and tessellate, rather than insisting on the collective singing of a prematurely completed and closed composition. This movement from refrain to refrain variant is a recomposition process and as such incorporates collapse into its organisational methodology, welcomes it. Perhaps this is an alternative to the continual procession of faltering drives to unity, enabling us to remark with Unger that ‘rigidity does not mean security’ (Unger 2001: 282) and create organisational structures in social movements that can actually move. References

Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne (2009) Reading Capital, London: Verso. Bachelard, Gaston (1994) The Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bachelard, Gaston (2012) ‘Corrationalism and the Problematic’, Radical Philosophy, 173: 27–32, www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/corrationalism-and-the-problematic (accessed 31 May 2014). Blumenfield, Jacob, Bottici, Chiara and Critchley, Simon (eds) (2013) The Anarchist Turn, London: Pluto Press. Camp for Climate Action (2011) ‘Metamorphosis: A Statement from the Camp for Climate Action’, www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/metamorphosis_a_statement_from_the_ca mp_for_climate_action (accessed 29 April 2014). Carroll, Lewis (1987) The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll, London: Chancellor Press. Class War (1997) ‘Introduction’ and ‘An Open Letter to Revolutionaries’, in Class War, 73, https://libcom.org/library/class-war-73 (accessed 29 April 2014).

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Cooper, Luke and Hardy, Simon (2013) Beyond Capitalism? The Future of Radical Politics, Winchester: Zero Books. Debord, Guy (1983) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Black & Red. Deleuze, Gilles (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2010) Difference and Repetition, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (2004) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, London: Continuum. Edelman, Gerald M. and Tononi, Giulio (2001) Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, London: Penguin. Fish, Stanley (1990) ‘Unger and Milton’, in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Free Association (2011) Moments of Excess: Movements, Protest, and Everyday Life, Oakland: PM Press. Harpur, Patrick (2009) The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination, Glastonbury: Squeeze Press. Holloway, John (2010) Crack Capitalism, London: Pluto. The Institute for Precarious Consciousness (2014) ‘We Are All Very Anxious’, www.weareplanc.org/we-are-all-very-anxious (accessed 22 April 2014). Keats, John (2010) The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Whitefish Montana: Kessinger Publishing. Maniglier, Patrice (2012) ‘What is a Problematic?’, Radical Philosophy, 173: 21–23. www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/what-is-a-problematic (accessed 31 May 2014). Richardson, Michael and Fijalkowski, Krzysztof (2001) Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, London: Pluto Press Rimbaud, Arthur (2003) Rimbaud Complete: Poetry and Prose, New York: The Modern Library. Rosemont, Penelope (1998) Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, Texas: University of Texas Press. Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2002) The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley, Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Socialist Worker Party (n.d.) ‘SWP Conference Minority Position and Reply by Central Committee’, www.marxsite.com/SWP%20debate.htm (accessed 22 April 2014). Stengers, Isabelle (2013) ‘Another Science Is Possible: A Plea for Slow Science’, discussion document, CPPE@10, Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy, University of Leicester, 16–18 December. UK Government (2012) Membership of UK Political Parties, ed. Feargal McGuinness, London: House of Commons Library. UK Government (2013) Trade Union Membership 2012: Statistical Bulletin, London: Department for Business and Innovation Skills, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/299291/bis-13-p77-trade-union-membership-2012-corrrection.pdf (accessed 31 May 2014). Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (1984) Passion: An Essay on Personality, New York: The Free Press. Unger, Roberto Mangabeira (2001) False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Politics Vol. 2), London: Verso. Wright, Steve (2002) Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2005) Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj (2008) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.

Understanding myth in consumer culture theory Jack Tillotson and Diane Martin Aalto University, Helsinki

This paper provides an understanding of the multidisciplinary synthesising of myth conceptualisation in consumer culture theory. Mythology is an umbrella term that has been used in a variety of forms and interpretations. This review draws from psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, history and political studies to examine the historical and discursive constructions of mythology. We distinguish multiple perspectives of mythology and demonstrate how exemplars of each are used in consumer research. Finally, we suggest new directions for mythology that pertain to consumer culture research.

Introduction

Consumption as a means to happiness and fulfilment remains the overarching marketplace myth that fuels national economies and deepens personal debt. Its widespread use exacerbates consumer discomfort and swells corporate profits. In the hands of the free market, the untethered myth drives over-consumption, environmental destruction and unhealthy lifestyles. This powerful force is a significant agent of modern life that demands elucidation. In 1924 Max Weber argued that modern bureaucratisation and intellectualisation had a significant hand in the disenchantment of the world. Weber explains that modern experience is divided between the ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation and mythological mysticism (Weber [1924] 1948; Ostergaard, Fitchett and Jantzen 2013). In the effort to escape Weber’s modern disenchantment, a normative preference for enchantment transpired (Curry 2012). No institution has been more willing and able to respond to this desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace. Attempts to invert modern disenchantment to one of monistic mythical enchantment is philosophically, environmentally and academically irresponsible (Curry 2012). Thus, the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences. Marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental. Early in the cultural turn of consumer research Levy (1981: 52) drew a connection to myth: ‘if we take the idea that myths are ways of organizing perceptions of realities, of indirectly expressing paradoxical human concerns, they have consumer relevance because these realities and concerns affect people’s daily lives’. Consumer culture theory (CCT) scholars continue to examine consumption from an amalgam of theoretical perspectives and traditions including anthropology, history, literary criticism, political science, psychology and sociology (Arnould and Thompson 2005). These multiple perspectives and subsequent disciplinary lexicons results in some confusion in CCT scholarship such that definitions and conceptualisations disagree with one another. In essence, some theorists use the term mythology to describe new phenomena, while others use mythology to definitively advance theoretical and cultural discourses. Although consumer research is rife with mythology research (Thompson 2004; Brown, McDonagh and Shultz 2013) myth is also deeply rooted in other social sciences. Much like the archaeologist, this paper excavates and analyses the theoretical body of knowledge on mythology, drawing from psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, critical theory along with consumer research. The scholars and literature singled out from social science and mythology literature (e.g. Blumer, Campbell, Durkheim, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Barthes and Eagleton) are chosen 184

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because they constitute theoretical foundations for many of the prominent contributions on marketplace mythology in consumer research literature (e.g. Levy 1981; Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989; Velliquette, Murray and Creyer 1998; Holt 2004; Arsel and Thompson 2011; Brown, McDonagh and Shultz 2013). We provide a representation of theoretical foundations for marketplace mythology. The paper represents neither the complete oeuvre of mythology nor that of the scholars selected for this review. This paper focuses on myth theories in consumer culture research and is not to be taken for an account or phenomenological description of the ‘mythological form’, Our purpose is threefold: (1) to investigate how the notions of mythology are discursively and historically constructed from various schools of thought; (2) to analyse how these constructions reflect assessments of mythology in consumer research; and (3) to identify previously unexplored avenues for consumer research. This paper is structured as such: we start by describing distinct perspectives of mythology. Each perspective is examined through its historically and discursively constructed standpoint of the meaning, function of myth, and philosophical position of myth. Each distinct perspective is then exemplified by consumer culture research. We then examine emerging uses of myth in CCT. Finally we formulate suggestions for use of myth in future research. Symbolic perspective of myth

The symbolic perspective of myth explores how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction (Mead 1964; Blumer 1969). Symbolic myth research involves both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in dayto-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment. In this perspective mythology is represented as narrative. While Blumer, Campbell and Lévi-Strauss offer different views regarding the emergence of symbolism, a general consensus among scholars holding this perspective is that mythology is embodied through human interaction with the symbolic. Symbolic interaction and personal myth

Perhaps one of the earliest representations of the symbolic perspective is found in Sigmund Freud’s use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis. The Freudian Oedipus Complex (Freud [1900] 1974) and Jung’s Electra Complex ([1959] 1981) are metaphors explaining theories of personal unconsciousness. Jung specified archetypes as embodiment beliefs, ideas and images inherited unconsciously and collectively producing myth and religion. The entirety of mythology can be understood as an extension of the collective unconscious into society (Jung [1959] 1981). Sociologist Herbert Blumer (1969) argues that human beings take action based on the meaning prescribed to symbols and that meaning is derived from social interaction. Individuals consider, modify and interpret these meanings. Social life is thus an on-going process, not a relationship of structures directing human life: ‘the human act is not a release of an already organized tendency; it is a construction built up by the actor’ (Blumer 1969: 94). The ability to act toward oneself is the central way individuals interact in the world. Humans have the ability to internally define themselves as objects, which creates the concept of self and the other (Blumer 1969). Individuals can be the objects and symbols of their own actions. This occurs when, for example, we set goals, formulate compromises or make plans with ourselves. The actor recognises objects and applies significance over and over again as a construction of meaning, which eventually leads to action. Without the ability to act, life is meaningless.

Personal myth and meaning

Individuals create personal myths through narrative storyline as a means to organise meaning in their lives (McAdams 1993). These narratives are used to organise and comprehend time,

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events, and meanings (Ricoeur 1984). Thus, formation of self is developed through conscious reflection on past, present and future (Sartre 1956) and tends to hold meaning through narratives, which in turn reflect personal myths. Personal myths embody meaning and the human duality of agency and autonomy. Culture provides the fodder for imagery, archetypes and characters evoked in the personal myths. What McAdams (1993: 61) calls ‘a vast but finite catalogue of images’ differs by culture and provides the raw material for narratives and personal myths. Historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology, form the context for personal myth creation. However, socio-historically influenced factors may be contradictory to one’s sense of self. When culturally sanctioned ideologies take the form of race, class, gender and age (Arnould and Thompson 2005) individuals must negotiate contractions through personal narratives.

Personal myth and CCT

CCT scholars have long focused on personal identity in culture and consumption (e.g. Levy 1981; Belk 1988; Schouten 1991; Thompson 1996; Luedicke, Thompson and Giesler 2010; Arsel and Thompson 2011). While ‘identity and society are together responsible for the life story’ (McAdams 1993: 95), the personal myth is the interpretive strategy (Thompson 1997) for negotiations between ideology and society. The concepts of consumption and identity are increasingly featured in contemporary CCT literature. It is incumbent that scholars avoid confusing identity work with personal myth. In their analysis of tattoo culture, Velliquette, Murray and Creyer (1998) examine consumption and personal myth, carefully maintaining the concept of personal myth. They focus on myth, symbolism and self, and adopted the perspective of simulacra and simulation (Baudrillard 1988). Personal myth and symbolism within the tattoo culture blurs the line between public and private spheres. Individuals build reflexive historic narratives attached to particular tattoos. For example, a marathon runner creates a narrative around a roadrunner tattoo as it symbolises personal running practice. However, a person tattooed with a brand emblem may have done so because they saw the tattoo on another and thought it was cool (Velliquette, Murray and Creyer 1998). The line between private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands. Velliquette, Murray and Creyer (1998) and Velliquette, Murray and Evers (2006) argue that individuals attach meaning to consumption as a result of negotiating the cultural tensions created through the perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (e.g. race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressures. Thus, meaning becomes embodied within objects from both sides of the relationship as a dialectic interaction between object and consumer. The monomyth of Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell’s (1949) comparative critique of mythologies develops what he christened the monomyth, a universally applicable narrative of mythology. The familiar pattern of storytelling in contemporary Hollywood films follows the logic of the monomyth. In the first stage, separation, the hero suffers disjunction. In the initiation stage transcendence is found in the duality of death and rebirth. Finally the hero brings hard-earned transcendental knowledge back to humanity in the return stage. Campbell theorises the hero’s rites of passage as the experience of life in accordance with the phenomena of time. For Campbell time is essentially a duality: past and present; dead and alive; man and women; mind and body; being and non-being. Myth provides insights that transcend duality by providing harmony to live in accord with duality. Campbell theorises that myths and dreams come from the same place; they are realisations of the same kind that have to find expression in symbolic form (1949). Grounded in Jung’s ar-

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chetypes ([1959] 1981) Campbell theorises that characters of monomyths are strikingly identical to those that show up in our dreams (1949). According to Campbell (1949) ritual is an enactment of a myth and by participating in a ritual you are engaging myth. Societies’ movement into modernity created a new view of myth: The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organization. Its ideals are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. (Campbell 1949: 358)

The present day ritual is imposed through materiality whereas in the past ritual would be performed through spirituality. The monomyth and CCT

In the 1986 a group consumer researchers went on a hero’s journey, both metaphorically and physically, by spending a summer travelling across America in a motorhome. They called their project the Consumer Behavior Odyssey and their goal was to learn about self, the world, and other people (Belk 1987). They learned about American consumers from a cultural perspective (Levy 1981). The academic collaboration of the Odyssey is the birthplace of the CCT (Bradshaw and Brown 2008) in part due to the transcendental knowledge of the American consumer passed on through subsequent academic literature. The consumer Odyssey found that ‘the journey’ holds a sacred status that transforms knowledge generation into new mythological epistemologies and opens up new doors to understanding American consumers. Arnould and Price (1993) also explore extraordinary experiences through the context of white water river rafting. Emergent themes of personal growth, communitas and harmony with nature translated to other consumer experiences. Drawing in part from van Gennep’s ([1909] 1960) discussion of extraordinary experiences as rites of passage, the authors identified these themes that then translate to a variety of consumer experiences. Rites of passage occur through a pilgrimage that occurs in three essential features - Separation, transition, and reintegration, a pattern that mirrors Campbell’s monomyth of departure, initiation and return. Arnold and Price note that river rafting is an activity rife with ritual. Ritual is the enactment of myth (Campbell 1949). Arnould and Price (1993) also show that the narrative of service embodies the initiation of the journey. Moreover, extraordinary experience is both an event and an enchanted temporal period. Liminality is the threshold of a ritual where ambiguity and disorientation occurs before the ritual has been completed (Van Gennep [1909] 1960; Turner 1995). The development of community contributes to the extraordinary experience and the building of mythological renewal of self (Arnould and Price 1993). Dobscha and Foxman’s (2012) exploration of new brides-to-be experience extends understanding of monomyth. They theorise how a joyous activity is actually stressful and invokes transcendent experiences of a mythic journey. Brides who shop for wedding dresses at Filene’s Annual Basement Bridal Event in Boston are faced with the challenge of an over-crowded mob-like shopping frenzy. Brides are called to adventure by the need resolve their ideological and socio-historical expectations of a traditional wedding through the purchase of perfect wedding dress in a chaotic retail setting rife with conflict. They seek information and shopping strategies from friends and mentors who have successfully negotiated Filene’s chaotic basement. According to Campbell (1949) myth is the insight that transcends duality; the duality between the drive to find the dress and reality of Filene’s basement. Faced with challenged expectations consumers engage and overcome these conflicts and cross the mythic threshold that transform the consumption process into extraordinary event. When faced with stressful conflict consumers rely on the transcendence of myth to negotiate this duality that myth can

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transcend. Brides who find the quintessential perfect wedding dress at Filene’s have overcome conflict by enacting power, achievement, and mastery that is mythic agency (Dobscha and Foxman 2012). The dress becomes the elixir to share with the secular world. Structuralism and myth

Anthropologists have long investigated the role of myth in pre-literary (i.e., primitive) societies. A central conflict among theorists is whether mythology of the pre-literary is dead and what sort of mythology might emerge in the face of scientific discovery and knowledge (e.g. Tylor 1871; Malinowski [1926] 1971; Frazer 1959; Lévi-Strauss 1966). Pre-literary societies produce images and narratives that resembled nature and the meaning of the mind (Lévi-Strauss 1979). Mythic narratives are interpreted and remembered by individuals and passed on to subsequent generations. Rather than written histories about progress and achievement, these narratives embodied resolution of contradiction (Lévi-Strauss 1979). Myth functions as a template to overcome contradictions and binary oppositions created through human interaction with the natural world (Lévi-Strauss 1966). Literary societies (i.e. modern) are governed by agency to ‘achieve mastery over nature’ (Lévi-Strauss 1979: 17). Scientific minds of the modern world chose to pick the rationality of modernity over nature. For Lévi-Strauss, the holistic nature of myth resolves the anxiety of overcoming the dilemma over man’s desire to conquer nature, yet inability to ultimately do so. Man’s illusion of mastery over nature gives us the illusion that we can control a universe that we will never fully understand. Lévi-Strauss recognised a commonality of mythical structures present in different types of societies, both primitive and modern. Mythic structures are generalisable forms common in all types of societies and universal categories of the human mind (Doja 2006). Here myth is seen as a phenomenon where cultures and populations of people are replicating a structure to create a chain event. Thus myths are superstructures that result from collective structures. Myths insert themselves through human minds. As Lévi-Strauss argues, ‘I therefore claim to show not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact’ (1969: 12). This theory is built around Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on language. For de Saussure, ‘there are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language’ ([1915] 1966: 112). For de Saussure language is a way of understanding the world. Words were considered signifiers to signs where meaning is held; furthermore, because translations are an approximation, meaning is dependent on difference and not independent concepts outside language (de Saussure [1915] 1966). From the structuralism perspective, myth is form of speech that exists before ideas. Social structures at the heart of myth are repeated in a variety of cultures. For example, giftgiving is found throughout different cultures (Mauss [1925] 1967). Mauss theorised that gifts are not truly freely given but evoke the obligation of reciprocation. This power relationship creates a binary of giver and receiver and through the reciprocity the synthesis of the gift. However, in his efforts to outline a unified anthropological perspective on gift giving, Sherry (1983) identified two different perspectives. The first – a structuralist perspective – deals with the reduction of the phenomenon into oppositions and subsequently understanding how the unifying principle of gift giving reflects mythology. This perspective supports Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of binaries typically abstracting out to the most basic of notions of nature and culture. At its centre, the first perspective underscores the theory that gift giving evolved through an affinity to avoid incest taboo and through the exchange of women and groups created society and caste systems. Yet, the second perspective follows the interpretive branch of anthropology which paints binary opposition as too simple and demands the detail of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973), to truly understand the phenomenon in its entirety. Levy (1981) explains that myth is a ubiquitous mental exercise of bridging perceived binary oppositions and creating triadic arrays of meaning.

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Levy (1982) also begins to incorporate symbolism, which leads to an understanding of myth around identity as well as interpretation and socio-cultural patterning. Levy argues that our ability to have an objective self allows us to project how we would want others to see us. Consumption becomes a way of symbolising this desired projection. Objects and actions are used for this symbolisation. Levy builds on sociocultural patterning by showing how symbols interact with each other. For example, owning a big home and a small car says something different than a big home and a big car. As Levy argues, ‘It may be salutary to recognize that we are just more others observing selves ... we are studying fantasies about personalities, their ages, their sex, and their social status, and in so doing having fantasies of our own’ (1982: 543). In his critique of structuralism, Derrida (1967) claims that we are not bound by the deterministic human need to understand origin as a transcendental anchor to build signification. Rather, signifiers move around randomly and freely allowing for infinite production of meaning and possibility. Derrida is juxtaposing Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the exemplar model that was speech and remembrance for pre-literary cultures, which created a transcendental grounding for signifiers and meaning. According to Derrida, we are free to interpret meaning anyway we like without upsetting traditions including the interpretation of a world full of absurdity and meaninglessness. Semiotic perspective

Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Charles Sanders Pierce developed theories from Ferdinand de Saussure’s ([1915] 1966) concept of sign and signifier. De Saussure describes the understanding of the relationship between the signifier and the signified as semiology, the science of signs. Signs are a conceptual object or image that consist of a signifier, the name of the sign, and signified, the connotation created in the mind by the signifier. Barthes ([1957] 1972) argues ideological tendencies of cultures manifest as myth. He demonstrates how ideological, politically-driven myth can distort history. Myth ‘depoliticizes speech’ (Barthes [1957] 1972: 142) so that the language of the cultural elite becomes the unquestioned normality of the day. The language of the bourgeoisie becomes the myth of universal truths, obscuring the power relations and blocking the perspective of power between class, race, gender and other marginalised people. Myth functions to perpetuate existing social conditions through ideology. However Peirce (1931: 58) rejects the dualistic ontology behind semiology, replacing it with a three-part system. Pierce argues that triadic relations between the signifier, signified and interpretant (e.g. the mind) creates a relationship between the mind and experience. This relationship between the mind and an experience that changes behaviour and in turn creates new signs. In short, the sign constructs the relationship between the mind and experience. When the signification occurs between the mind and the experience, the interpreters practice changes. Practices create the meaning behind an individual’s interaction with a sign. Signs mediate reality and the process of signification and meaning that creates through triadic symbolism. Systems of signification create discourses (Best and Kellner 1991). Cultural codes are needed to interpret signs (Mick 1986). Advertisers and marketers use signs and symbols to create meaning surrounding their brands. Consumers interpret these signs and symbols in different ways. In early representations in consumer research, Barbara Stern (1989) utilises semiotic analysis to understand how advertising text is culturally and historically determined in relation to the imagery of women as mothers and homemakers. Semiotics and CCT

Consumer culture research utilises the semiotic perspective as a way of understanding individual and collective experiences within society. Thompson and Haytko (1997) explore consumer conversations to gain an understanding of how consumers feel, experience and perceive

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fashion. Peñaloza (2000) uncovers the American symbolism inherent in the western livestock shows. Brown, McDonagh and Shultz (2013) demonstrate how literary narratives of an iconic brand can be used to elucidate the ambiguous. The semiotic perspective of mythology provides a wealth of opportunities for understanding consumption and culture. Thompson and Haytko (1997) employ perspective theory and its relation to mythology and semiotics to understand the naturalisation of ideological assumptions and how consumers problematise those assumptions in creating individual identity, shared identity and symbolic significance through consumer narratives. Perspective analysis functions to problematise interpretations of the socialisation process, or what seems natural: Naturalization refers to what is probably the most discussed function of ideology. Through this ideological function individuals become immersed in a shared understanding whereby the culturally contingent aspects of social life (such as common cultural associations, social practices, or power relationships) are seen as being the natural order of things. (Thompson and Haytko 1997: 20)

Through problematisation researchers highlight ideological subtexts that formulate binary opposition and in turn, through their naturalisation, constructed consumption meaning. Historical constructs of the old west, the frontier and the cowboy help to frame the significance of stock shows. Peñaloza (2000) found four major imaginaries within stock shows centre around cultural contradictions. First, stock shows mythically relieve anxiety created between symbolic freedom and independence of rancher life that is in opposition with commercial ranching. Second, stock shows mediate the contradiction between love and respect for nature and need for food and control over nature. Third, imagery of the market as a community is opposed by competitive realities of ranching life. Fourth, stock shows depicts family values, which mythologises family unification in opposition to male domination and female subordination. Brown, McDonagh, and Shultz (2013) utilise ambiguity as their theoretical framework to understand mythology around the Titanic as an iconic brand. The authors conceptualise storytelling as a commonality and signification of myth (Segal 2004) as a way to transcend the discursive contradictions inherent in not only the Titanic myth but also the construct of myth itself. Proponents of the symbolic perspective of mythology are mainly concerned with the transformation symbolism to meaning and how that meaning becomes transposed to larger narratives of the collective society. Narrative performance is like ideology in that it allows people to act without logic, facts or values through illusion or myth (McAdams 1993; Holt 2003, 2004, 2006). Accordingly, mythology is a storyline crafted by the process of individuals’ incorporation of symbolic resources provided through the marketplace, which then must be negotiated between the cultural contradictions and sphere of the dominant and public viewpoints (Holt 2004). A functionalist approach to mythology: Social cohesion perspective

Functionalism portends each part of society is dependent on other parts of society, creating social cohesion. All aspects of society are interdependent, relying on each other to function (Merton 1938). The functionalist perspective relies on the certainty that whatever is happening in society is what is supposed to happen (Ritzer 2007). Myth in the functionalist approach is a collective representation that empowers and supports social solidarity (Durkheim 1912). Myth substitutes for traditions, rituals and beliefs of both pre-literary and modern societies alike (Malinowski [1926] 1971). Functionalist Emile Durkheim postulates that knowledge is socially constructed and the world exists through collected representations (1912). These symbols embody collective beliefs and values of a social group. Collective unconscious projected through myth creates bonds and cultural interdependencies holding society together (Calhoun, Gerteis and Moody 2007). The power of social cohesion lays in its coercive ability to influence an individual’s psyche and in-

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tellect. The social cohesion perspective celebrates mythology as a fundamental enterprise for solidifying communities by reflecting societies’ values and moral obligations. Mythology emerges through the contradiction imposed by the duality of personal desire and community obligation (Durkheim [1914] 2005). When alone, individuals will act upon their own desires. Myth valorises community such that individual actions are dominated by obligation to conform to the moral order. If the mythology of social cohesion breaks down, anomie takes over and chaos results (Durkheim [1897] 1951). Mircea Eliade ([1954] 1959) argues that myth was most clearly elaborated within pre-literate societies and is evoked in contemporary times through an archaic ontology. Myth for these societies is the foundation for life and culture. It depicts the origin of life and is expressed as the sacred, absolute truth of historical beginnings. Individuals imitate exemplary acts of origin myths. In pre-literate societies myth is the true history of what came to pass at the beginning of time, the transcendental origin, a pattern for deportment and an exemplary model for all human actions. ‘Myth, then, is always an account of a ‘creation’; it relates how something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of that which really happened, which manifested itself completely’ (Eliade [1963] 1998: 5–6). Religion exemplifies this shared set of central social values that bind the individuals to each other (Durkheim 1912). Social cohesion and CCT

Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry (1989) examine the contrast between sacred and profane consumption. The authors demonstrate how sacred consumption inherent in material objects (Durkheim [1914] 2005) that embody myth (Eliade [1963] 1998) helps to develop social cohesion (Eliade [1954] 1959). Consumers resist commodification of cultural resources (Holt 2002) that in Eliade’s ([1963] 1998) view are the embodiment of myth. Ultimately the profane apotheosis is built to mirror those cultural resources unveiled through consumers’ sacred creation. Kozinets’s (2002) ethnography of the temporary consumption community Burning Man examines a synthesis of community and markets through the exchange of goods and creative acts of art and performance. Community narratives embodying mythological creativity (Eliade [1954] 1959) as art and performance ‘construct a temporary cohesiveness’ (Kozinets 2002: 31). Liminality is inherent in the community. Festival participants create and amass goods in the desert that are creatively redistributed and reconstituted rendering them sacred only to be acknowledged profane as the festival comes to an end and participants return to the ordinary world (Sherry and Kozinets 2007). Belk and Tumbat (2005) investigated communal solidarity of consumers whose cult-like loyalty to the Apple brand renders products in a mythical light. The authors found evidence of hierophany, the breakthrough of the sacred from the profane world (Eliade [1963] 1998). For enthusiasts, the Apple brand is a sacred creation manifested in contemporary time through the archaic ontology (Eliade [1954] 1959) of Macintosh products. Owning Macintosh creates transcendent experience and a strong social cohesion among the brand community. The functionalist perspective of social cohesion offers a theoretical lens in which mythology engaged to make sense of the world. Consumption is therefore a means of consumer conformity to culture. The cohesion perspective affords a positive feeling through the appropriation of creative agency and resistance to challenge the unreflexive consumption at the heart of the marketplace myth. Critically reflexive mythology perspective: Critical theory

Myth in critical theory stems from Barthes’ ([1957] 1972) concept of myth as naturalising socially constructed and historical discourse. Dominant societal actors oppress subordinates by normalising markers of segregation and subordination. The primary concern of critical theorists is to take the side of the oppressed whose language and ‘that of his emancipation’ (Barthes

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[1957] 1972: 150) is politicised. Emancipation occurs through demythologising dominant ideology. Advocates of this perspective are concerned with social change, particularly the new forms of consumption that allow for escape of oppressive ideological forces. Understanding myth through ideology

Marx ([1932] 1970) conceptualised ideology as the mode of ideas expressed from the dominant class and had no relation to the subordinate except through ‘false consciousness’, For example, capitalist ideology conceals and naturalises managerial power and implicit subordination of workers. Eagleton (1991) broadens Marx’s concept, noting that ideology lives in dominant as well as subordinate forms: ‘Ideologies are often thought, more specifically, to be unifying, action oriented, rationalizing, legitimating, universalizing and naturalizing. Whether these features apply to oppositional ideologies as well as to dominant ones is a question we shall have to consider’ (Eagleton 1991: 301). Subsequent theorists answered this question finding that either side of a power duality can become valorised. Hegel conceptualises mythology as ideology aesthetically expressed for easy adoption by society. Ideology becomes an imaginary map that furnishes motivations for action within society and secures social solidarity. During political breakdowns, ideologies become apparent and independent of mythology individuals lose the feel for social regularity (Geertz 1973). Once ideology of subordinates overcomes domination ideology, it becomes mythical (Eagleton 1991). Critical theory and CCT

Critical theorists focus on the tensions or inconsistencies between subject and object and become the source of change: reality is enacted or socially produced, but in time these social structures become stubborn, resist social change, and thus become constraining. Unless reflection occurs, the meanings people attribute to social structures change more slowly than the structures themselves. Thus, reality-the meanings given to social structure and the objective structures-is inherently contradictory. (Murray and Ozanne 1991: 133)

The contradiction lies in the idea that societies both create reality and are shaped by it. There is an inconsistency between subject and object. Critical theorists seek to emancipate individuals from social control created by this ontology. Kozinets and Handelman (2004) move beyond Durkheim’s (1912) theory of social solidarity and show how consumers are an oppressed class in postindustrial society. Durkheimian myth seeks to understand how the solidarity is continued while critical theorists break down ideology through critical reflection. Kozinets and Handelman (2004) uncover the problems of new social movements (NSM) that stray from ideological influences and focus on consumers as adversaries. Thompson (2004) addresses the underlying mythic architecture of nature, technology and science that encompasses the natural health market and addresses whether consumers hold any agency over the power structures enforces through cultural and national ideologies. He breaks the natural health myth into two merging ideologies based on the dominant consumer segment of natural medicine known as ‘cultural creatives’. First, the Romantic ideology derived from technologies’ ill effects on humanity and nature wherein: nature is mythologized as an Edenic paradise where all living organisms exist in a state of harmony. Conversely, science and technology represent the forbidden knowledge that has cast humanity out of paradise, severed our organic connection with nature, and led to spiritual and physical distress. (Thompson 2004: 164)

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Second, the Gnostic myth emerged from a desire of consumers to bridge technology and spirituality and ‘the immune system is metaphorically rendered as a mysterious immaterial force, constituted by intricate mind-body connections and ephemeral energistic forces, which can be brought to practical ends through quasi-magical practices of holistic healing’ (Thompson 2004: 166). Advertisers exploit these tensions as conflicting ideologies converge with reality. They capitalise on myths of purity, nature and eastern medicine. As individuals seek to fulfil identity projects and iconic selves, they look to consume goods aligned with metaphors and mythical promises created by advertisers. Consumers gaining agency over their situation resist mass media’s brand messages. This resistance creates unmasks power between consumers and enterprise wherein more levels of structure and agency become exposed. Thompson and Arsel (2004) develop the construct of a hegemonic brandscape to understand how brands inadvertently create a point of difference and oppositional meanings. Hegemony is an overarching concept that includes ideological, cultural, political and economic features of civil society (Gramsci 1971; Eagleton 1991). In the context of coffee giant Starbucks, Thompson and Arsel (2004) found anti-hegemonic consumption patterns. Coffee shops that don’t personify the Starbucks hegemony produce an attractive social and creative buzz. This symbolic boundary is defined aesthetically rather than politically. Anti-hegemonic consumers hold strong preferences for decor that symbolises the counter-culture. Kristensen, Boye and Askegaard (2011) probe emancipation of Danish dairy consumers from the ideological forces and beliefs around health and wellness imposed through history and the government. Building on Thompson (2004) and Barthes ([1957] 1972), the authors focus on morality and the understanding of how communities develop conceptualisations of right and wrong. Moral systems are inherently ideological and in order to emancipate consumers from these forces critical reflection must occur. Storytelling solidifies new forms of ideologies allowing community to form and beliefs and values to spread. The authors note that the consumers don’t escape the market per se but instead reshape collective identity through counter-mythology. Arsel and Thompson (2011) explain how hipster consumers use large investments of time and social capital (Bourdieu 1984) in their attempt to demythologise a consumption ideology in order to protect themselves from mainstream consumers or ‘followers’, Hipsters have sizeable cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) invested in their identity field. When followers begin to encroach on the identity value insiders will demythologise using three distinct methods: aesthetic discrimination, symbolic demarcation, and proclaiming consumer sovereignty. Consumers demythologise their consumption practices allowing new avenues of consumption to occur in an emancipated state. Consumerism can be enslaving and manipulative mythology crafted by the ruling class, can be overcome through resistance and demythologising. Critical theorists view the market as an arena of domination and power struggle and are mainly concerned with the transformation of consumers to less oppressive states of consumption. As such, emancipation occurs in the form of new consumption arenas that hold a favourable power dynamic for consumers. Critical theory it is not necessarily addressing escape from capitalism, but an unveiling of oppressive ideologies that allow for new emancipated avenues of consumption to occur (Murray and Ozanne 1991; Murray, Ozanne and Shapiro 1994). A future for myth and CCT

Early examinations of myth in consumer studies (e.g. Levy 1981; Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989) reflect their cultural and theoretical times and focused primarily on personal and socially cohesive forms of mythology: symbolism and functionalism. Symbolic mythology concerns the transformation symbolism to meaning in collective social narratives. Functionalist mythology provides stabilisation of existing social systems and discourages change as a break from reified

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function. More recent research again reflects cultural and social times and scholars investigate mythology with consumer resistance, emancipation and identity projects. CCT researchers contribute to critically reflexive theoretical perspectives of consumer resistance (i.e. Murray and Ozzane 1991; Murray, Ozanne and Shapiro 1994) hegemonic brandscapes (Thompson and Arsel 2004), natural health and wellbeing alternatives (Thompson 2004), counter mythology (Kristensen, Boye and Askegaard 2011), and demythologising consumption strategies (Arsel and Thompson 2011). The post-structuralist critique of myth is metamorphic and will transmogrify (Brown, McDonagh and Shultz 2013) society, culture and technology; it is can be an agent of change (Kristensen, Boye and Askegaard 2011; Dobscha and Foxman 2012). Kozinets and Handelman (2004) expanded our understanding of the pitfalls new social movements when they stray from ideological influences and focus on consumers as adversaries. Murray and Ozanne (1991; 1994) explain it is not necessarily the escape of capitalism that critical theory addresses within consumer culture but the unveiling of oppressive ideologies that allow for new emancipated avenues of consumption to occur. Society has proven its ability to manipulate nature through intellectual and technological advancements resulting in modern disenchantment. Modern advancements of post-industrial society provide a sense of overpowering and unstoppable progression into a future unknown (Brown, Kozinets and Sherry 2003). The human/nature duality and resulting insatiable thirst to control the natural environment evokes imbalance and the potential anomie of society through environmental disaster (Hawken, Lovins and Lovins 2010; Scott, Martin and Schouten 2014). Scott, Martin and Schouten (2014: 7) expand on the concept of new materialism explaining how it, ‘bridges the gap between dualities of matter and meaning, culture and nature, and science and humanities’, emphasising a materialism that evokes mythical enchantment to all that is non-human. The possibility of industrial focus on symbiotic relationships with nature through cradle-to-cradle strategies (McDonough and Braungart 2002), allow for a more meaningful change and emancipatory consumer strategies. Scott, Martin and Schouten (2014) argue that change requires an ontology and methods that are capable of demythologising materiality so as to unmask techno-social reality. The authors examine how myth is used in mass marketing and the importance of exposing the ontological fallacies when a society needs to move toward more sustainable consumption. They highlight a need to expand into new philosophical understandings of ontology and myth in consumer culture theory. Community based meaning of goods (McCracken 1986) are transformed when individuals are able to attach meaning to objects in their own self-expressive way (Thompson and Arsel 2004; Velliquette, Murray and Evers 2006). This transformation paralleled the rise of neo-liberalism over global economic-political organisations (Campbell 1949). Campbell describes individuals’ unrecognised and subjugated by the economic system: ‘One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled’ (1949: 359). Salient mythical storylines offer safety and happiness allowing consumers to overcome the chaotic paradox of post-industrial society (Brown, Kozinets and Sherry 2003). Consumer culture research has shifted from a focus on the solidarity of social organisations (e.g. Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry 1989; Schouten and McAlexander 1995; Kozinets 2002; Muniz and Schau 2005; Sherry and Kozinets 2007; Giesler 2008) to epistemological theories that effect social change and action with regards to particular situations (e.g. Holt and Thompson 2004; Thompson 2004; Thompson and Arsel 2004; Thompson and Tian 2008; Arsel and Thompson 2011; Kristensen, Boye and Askegaard 2011; Dobscha and Foxman 2012). Mythology research has shifted the focus of myth from organisational cohesion to understanding agency and emancipatory consumption practices in oppressive situations. This paper uncovered the nature of myth theory within consumer research, advancing understanding of mythology and its conceptualisation and empirical investigation of consumer culture theory. Two major conclusions emerge from this analysis, which help to further define distinctive characteristics of mythology theory within CCT literature and identify avenues for future research.

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First, instead of simply accepting the ambiguous nature of mythology, analysing myth through these perspectives reveals how various typologies of myth theory interact to advance theoretical and cultural perspectives. The symbolic perspective of mythology takes a micro- to mid-level analysis of mythologies representation in society. The functionalist and conflict perspectives each demonstrate how a macro-level analysis can be combined with the symbolic perspective given informed and purposeful theory borrowing (Murray, Evers and Janda 1995). Arnould and Thompson (2005) stress that CCT studies addresses parts of four main CCT pillars: consumer identity projects, marketplace cultures, socio-historic patterning of consumption and mass mediated marketplace ideology and consumers’ interpretive strategies. CCT research theoretically foregrounds a respective advancement or contribution. Myth theory must then also utilise similar levels of theory-borrowing in order to embody the holistic nature of CCT. We offer various myth typologies to support theorists in evaluation of myth theories and appropriate integration of theoretical advancements in the field of CCT. Our second conclusion considers with the closing the gap between marketing theorising and managerial practice. Contemporary theoretical advancements in consumer research reflect holistic theoretical preferences and culturally acquired tendencies of consumer culture that influence scholars toward particular forms of analysis and explanation. Reflection of these takenfor-granted ideas and predispositions may make theoretical contributions more accessible to marketing practitioners. The breakdown of mythology offered in this paper is designed to allow theorists an understanding how mythology is being used in consumer research, were the foundations for those contributions came from, and in turn allow stronger and more accessible theoretical contributions. Our arguments are based on the idea that in order to advance mythology and consumer research, we have to more seriously consider the implications of foundational literature and the formation of contemporary theories. References

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.64.4.82.18073. Ricoeur, Paul (1984) Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ritzer, George (2007) Contemporary Sociological Theory and its Classical Roots: The Basics, Boston: McGraw-Hill. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956) Being and Nothingness; An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. with an Introduction by Hazel E. Barnes, special abridged edn, New York: Philosophical Library. Schouten, John W. (1991) ‘Personal Rites of Passage and the Reconstruction of Self’, Advances in Consumer Research, 18 (2): 49–51, www.jstor.org/stable/2626836 (accessed 31 May 2014). Schouten, John W. and McAlexander, James H. (1995) ‘Subcultures of Consumption: An Ethnography of the New Bikers’, Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (1): 43–61. www.jstor.org/stable/2489699 (accessed 31 May 2014). Scott, Kristin, Martin, Diane M. and Schouten, John W. (2014) ‘Marketing and the New Materialism’, Journal of Macromarketing, 1–9, doi:10.1177/0276146714532471. Segal, Robert A. (2004) Myth: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sherry, John F., Jr. and Kozinets, Robert V. (2007) ‘Comedy of the Commons: Nomadic Spirituality and the Burning Man Festival’, Research in Consumer Behavior, 11: 119–147, doi:10.1016/508852. Sherry, John F., Jr. (1983) ‘Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective’, Journal of Consumer Research, 10 (2): 157–68, www.jstor.org/stable/2488921 (accessed 31 May 2014). Stern, Barbara B. (1989) ‘Literary Criticism and Consumer Research: Overview and Illustrative Analysis’, Journal of Consumer Research, 16 (3): 322–334, www.jstor.org/stable/2489513 (accessed 31 May 2014). Thompson, Craig J. (1996) ‘Caring Consumers: Gendered Consumption Meanings and the Juggling Lifestyle’, Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (4): 388–407, www.jstor.org/stable/2489789 (accessed 31 May 2014). Thompson, Craig J. (1997) ‘Interpreting Consumers: a Hermeneutical Framework for Deriving Marketing Insights From the Texts of Consumers’ Consumption Stories’, Journal of Marketing Research, 34 (4): 438–455, www.jstor.org/stable/3151963 (accessed 31 May 2014). Thompson, Craig J. (2004) ‘Marketplace Mythology and Discourses of Power’, Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (1): 162–180, doi:10.1086/383432. Thompson, Craig J. and Arsel, Zeynep (2004) ‘The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization’, Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (3): 631–642, doi:10.1086/425098. Thompson, Craig J. and Haytko, Diana L. (1997) ‘Speaking of Fashion: Consumers’ Uses of Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings’, Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (1): 15–42, www.semanticfoundry.com/docs/Speaking_of_Fashion.pdf (accessed 31 May 2014). Thompson, Craig and Tian, Kelly (2008) ‘Reconstructing the South: How Commercial Myths Compete for Identity Value Through the Ideological Shaping of Popular Memories and Countermemories’, Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (5): 595–613, doi:10.1086/520076. Turner, Victor (1995) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Tylor, Edward Burnett (1871) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, Vol. 2, London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. Van Gennep, Arnold ([1909] 1960) The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Coffee, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Velliquette, Anne M., Murray, Jeff B. and Creyer, Elizabeth (1998) ‘The Tattoo Renaissance: An Ethnographic Account of Symbolic Consumer Behaviour’, Advances in Consumer Research, 25 (1): 461–467. www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=8195 (accessed 31 May 2014). Velliquette, Anne M., Murray, Jeff B. and Evers, Deborah J. (2006) ‘Inscribing The Personal Myth: The Role of Tattoos in Identification’, Research in Consumer Behavior, 10: 35–70, doi: 10.1016/S0885-2111(06)10003-4. Weber, Max ([1924] 1948) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London: Routledge.

The myth of the responsible consumer: Interpreting consumers’ responsibility narratives in the tourism market Robert Caruana and Sarah Glozer University of Nottingham

Marketplace myths act as powerful cultural repositories of meaning for consumers’ personal identity projects. While much is known about the role of markets in mythologising responsibility, next to nothing is known about consumer responses. On the back of growing interest in socially and environmentally responsible marketing practices, this paper explores the processes through which consumer tourists engage with the market-based ‘responsible tourism myth’, which emphasises harmonious relations with culturally vulnerable and ecologically sensitive ‘Others’. Findings from discursive analysis of tourists accounts suggest that the myth of responsible tourism is variously not uniformly interpreted by consumers; both as a source of self-identity and personal moralism as well as a focused context for ethical praxis. Through processes of demythologising and moralising, neutralisation and levelling, consumers demythologise and recast marketplace myths of responsibility into highly personal, moralised accounts of their product experiences, while intricately collapsing wider mythic elements that contribute to the subjugation of other stakeholders. Tiffany: I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of these eco-friendly warriors, who camp out in trees and all that.

Jenny: See, you could go really far and say you should only travel far if there’s a purpose to it, like people travel for business, but so I suppose it’s a bit selfish travelling for your own pleasure but I like travelling and I like seeing new places. So I guess you should travel to places that you want to go to, but be mindful when you get there and try and be as green as possible.

Marketplace myths act as powerful cultural repositories of meaning for consumers’ personal identity projects. From the rugged individualism of the modern Mountain Man, and the liberatory machismo of the Harley Davidson biker, through to the anti-science aura of alternative health marketing, researchers have explored the role of marketplace myths in mediating the cultural meanings of brands, products, services and practices (Williamson 1978; Levy 1981; Schouten and McAlexander 1995; Stern 1995; Belk and Costa 1998; Kozinets 2002; Holt 2002; Holt and Thompson 2004; Thompson 2004; McCracken 2005; Thompson and Tian 2008; Luedicke, Thompson and Giesler 2010). Often drawing on the works of Roland Barthes and Levi Strauss, researchers commonly view marketplace myths as constitutive of potent consumer imaginaries representations that transform simple product attributes and signs fabric, logos i.e. denotative signs into complex connotative orders of cultural meaning (Williamson 1978; Barthes [1957] 2009). They are also viewed as transcendental (Lévi-Strauss 1955), wherein the telling of product or brand-based myths serves to ameliorate existential ambiguities surrounding their personal ‘identity burdens’ (Holt 2002). Marketplace myths thus speak to questions of selfhood and journey; augmenting services with social, ideological and moral allegories through which consumers articulate their spatio-temporal transformations. 199

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Early studies follow a structuralist ontology, wherein myths are seen as the articulation of the deeply embedded and broadly shared social conventions they reveal (Levy 1981; Hirschman 1985; Stern 1995). Such researchers observe, for instance, consumer behavior as ‘a language through which that society unconsciously reveals its structure’ (Lévi-Strauss 1955: 495). It is this theoretical connective between language, structure and agency that continues to render myths valuable to researchers, with Levy (1981) and Stern (1995) defining myths as a ‘narrative “tale or story” that gives cultural meaning to, and rationale for, social conduct’ (Stern 1995: 165). In later poststructuralist research the locus of myth shifts from broad social structures to more focused subcultural texts. Contemporary marketing myths circulate meaningful cultural knowledge (Thompson 2004) through segment-specific texts for example, advertisements, guidebooks, diaries which help consumers discern and connect to meaningful identity-positions within the marketplace (Arnould and Thompson 2005; Caruana and Crane 2008). However, the question of how consumers respond to marketplace myths and how the nature and context of a service or brand shapes this response is less known. In fact, marketplace myths can be experienced as problematic, disenfranchising the very consumers they aim to speak to, for and about. As marketplace myths become subject to popular appeal they can inadvertently devalue consumer’s identity investments. Consumers who have high cultural investments in certain ‘field domains’ of consumption, e.g. hipster, skater or backpacker culture employ counter-narratives in an attempt to ‘distinguish their investments in a field of consumption from a devaluing marketplace myth’ (Arsel and Thompson 2011: 798). This is perhaps an inevitable outcome given the vehemently ‘independent’, non-commercial ethos of the hipster myth. In the present study, we investigate how consumers demythologise in responsible domains of the tourism market, a domain of consumption where consumers encounter inherently conflicting logics for example, pleasure and obligations. Our study reveals consumers varied responses to a ‘responsibility myth’ in an ‘ethically charged’ domain of the tourism market, one that purportedly helps consumers resolve ethical tensions within the actual service encounter. We throw light on consumers’ use of responsible marketplace myths. Rather than experiencing responsible tourism as a devaluing marketplace myth a threat to their identity investment, our consumers’ demythologising is a way of personalising, contextualising and ultimately reconciling their identity work with conflicting logics intrinsic/extrinsic inherent in the holiday service encounter. Here a more personally achievable and less culturally-conflicting mythic archetype is offered: Conscious Hedonist. While much is known about the role of markets in mythologising responsibility (Caruana and Crane 2008), next to nothing is known about consumers’ responses to and use of them. How do consumers engage with market-based responsibility myths? Do they appropriate them as read or are they resisted, adjusted or integrated into other – contrary and/or conflicting ‘tour myths’ for personal identity interests? Our constructionist perspective informs a qualitative research framework to the collection and analysis of data. In-depth interviews with practicing ‘responsible tourists’ follow a phenomenological tradition wherein consumers own personal experiences of responsible tourism were the subject of the interview. Our findings suggest that the myth of responsible tourism is variously not uniformly interpreted by consumers; both as a source of self-identity and personal moralism as well as a focused context for ethical praxis. Rather than identify strongly with, or vehemently against, a responsible consumer archetype, our consumers variously negotiate, an underlying self–other tension inherent to responsible tourism – involving countervailing discourses of exotic, authentic paradise self-identity/moralism on the one hand, and obligations to vulnerable others ethical praxis on the other. Through processes of demythologising and moralising, neutralisation and levelling, consumers variously demythologise and recast marketplace myths of responsibility into highly personal, moralised accounts of their service experiences, while intricately collapsing wider mythic elements that contribute to the subjugation of other stakeholders.

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This paper is structured as follows. We first offer a discussion of current literature surrounding consumers and marketplace myths, building upon consumer culture theory CCT and marketing scholarship. We then situate these developments with the tourism context of this study more broadly and offer an exploratory discussion of marketplace myths surrounding responsible tourism. Following the study methods, the analysis explores responsible tourism as personalising identity work and as an ethical praxis and the discussion and conclusion provide conceptual and practical implications for this research. Consumers and marketplace myths

Previous studies have highlighted the role of market myths in organising consumer interpretations of journey, space and identity such that iconic brands like Harley Davidson symbolically and materially deliver consumers into freer identity spaces. Similarly, Belk and Costa’s (1998) Mountain Man myth offers consumers a liberatory leisure space in which to construct a rugged, heroic, retro-pioneer self, reifying positive identity traits unattainable in their normal institutionalised lives. Johns and Clarke’s (2001) study of boating holidays, shows how consumers construction of a ‘free-roaming’ self, juxtaposes identity-subverting spaces home with identity-liberating leisure spaces away. These symbolic and material movements echo Belk, Wallendorf and Sherry’s (1989) polarisation of a problematic ordinary-self everyday/home/family and ideal sacred selves exotic/away/self. This has contributed to the use of myth in areas of consumer research that involve consumer’s movement between spaces (Celsi, Rose and Leigh 1993; Belk and Costa 1998; Johns and Clarke 2001; Kozinets 2002), where the consumer’s arrival in the new space and thus distance from the origin culminates in both self-transcendence (Firat and Venkatesh 1995) and the temporal achievement of a more stable, whole or ‘authentic’ self (Belk and Costa 1998). Market myths that bestow on products and services such liberatory representations of identity also carry moralistic dimensions in their articulation by consumers. Myths are often ‘put to work’ by distinguishing cultural distance from and/or moral elevation (Luedicke, Thompson and Giesler 2010) over an imagined problematic Other (Thompson and Haytko 1997). From ‘commercial’ Others spring independent, alternative and radical selves. Equally, from passive dupes and mainstream consumptives are born active, productive and authentic selves. Luedicke, Thompson and Giesler (2010) find that the contours of Hummer brand membership can be vociferously defended in these moral terms, allowing consumers to render their brand-based identities unambiguously moral for example, self = patriotic, while casting doubt on the moral validity of others for example, other = unpatriotic. While the identity-morality connection is a compelling element of mythological analysis of consumption, a further dimension is yet to be fully explored. Thompson (2004) argues that marketplace myths are socially powerful, drawing on potent ideological resources and reorganizing them into culturally meaningful views of a product or experience. A corollary of this is the obscuring effects of myths that come from their focusing consumers’ attention upon personal identity investments. Marketplace myths interact with relations of power (Thompson 2004), allowing consumers to place moralistic identity concerns over potential ethical dimensions of self–other relationships. Of the dominant social mythology surrounding French wine, Barthes ([1957] 2009: 68) argues the following: For it is true that wine is a good and fine substance, but it is no less true that its production is deeply involved in French capitalism, whether it is that of the private distillers or that of the big settlers in Algeria who impose on the Muslims, on the very land on which they have been dispossessed, a crop of which they have no need, while they lack even bread.

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Little is known about consumer contexts involving myths that ostensibly place these self–other tensions into the foreground of consumer imaginaries augmenting the product, service, or brand. ‘Other’ stakeholders involved either don’t feature in consumer myths or are employed primarily as symbolic objects through which to ameliorate personal identity anxieties. How consumers work with marketplace myths that address ethical anxieties, locating the consumer self in-relation-to-the other, is less known. Mythology and tourism markets

Tourism can be viewed as a discursive genre (Foucault 1972; Fairclough 1995) of consumption in which particular tourism meanings are made available to consumers through a distinct system of representation. In this context, myths function as representational devices that organise the meanings knowledge for, and orientate the practices of, consumers in different tour segments. While we use myth in this study as an analytical lens through which to examine a certain segment of the tourism market, the growth in scale, structure and form of tourism markets is historically directed by myth practices. Tourism is a much mythologised social practice, stemming from the travel biographies of a history of adventurers, pilgrims, merchants and travel authors (Barthes [1957] 2009; Urry 1990). The writings of and about Marco Polo through Columbus and later, Livingstone, captured the imaginary of wealthy European aristocrats, whose gaze upon classical antiquity, the Renaissance and European aristocratic civility sparked the Grand Tour. The mythologisation of these early journeys would later motivate the aspirational bourgeois mindset, sparking the first organised tours (Cook Tours) and the subsequent growth of modern mass tourism. The relationship between tourism and myth continues to fuel the twenty-first-century tourist imaginary, entering into tourism marketing and consumption via brochures, diaries, travel blogs, postcards, advertisements, guidebooks and tourists’ own storytelling. While early tourism metamyths like the Grand Tour have fragmented into a constellation tour myths for various markets (Urry 1990) – luxury, adventure, cultural, hedonism, independent, ecological and even war, death and slum tourism – some core properties of tourism myth remain essential to the structuring of tourism markets and consumer practice in them. Contemporary tourism markets are structured similarly, through mythic dimensions involving; a journey from a problematised core to an idealised periphery; a tour subject whose self-identity is affirmed through a ‘Quest for Otherness’ (MacCannell 1976; Cohen 1988; Selwyn 1996; Urry 1990). Tourism myths appeal to consumers by interrelating these three dimensions in ways that construct the ‘tour product’ as a transcendental vehicle for self-identification (Caruana and Crane 2011). Myths project the consumer, as a displaced, incomplete and/or restricted subject/self located at the journey’s core, into a potent imaginary of Otherness at the periphery. They invariably ‘locate the Other frequently a pre-modern Other … in a world which is in some way more whole, structured and authentic than the everyday world they inhabit’ (Selwyn 1996: 2). For example, Norton’s (1996) analysis of tourism marketing shows how the Western myth of ‘Primeval Nature’ and ‘Primitive Culture’ frame the tourist’s journey in terms of an escape from a modern core into an ‘undeveloped’ pre-modern periphery. Here the Noble Savage is encountered in Primeval Nature as a marker of (pre-modern) original (authentic) social community, all things absent from the consumer subject’s individualistic modern life. Transcendental in structure, tour myths provide for consumers’ meaningful connections between their identity investments and morality. In Barthes’ ([1957] 2009) analysis of Guide Blue, for example, mountainous terrain is conferred an ‘inaccessible’, rugged and risky aura, explicitly distinguished from the flat, accessible plateau, where ‘mere’ tourists might be found. Ostensibly derived at some point from a Protestant ‘morality of effort and solitude’ (Barthes [1957] 2009: 85), this tourist myth projects the guidebook consumer into this more challenging geographical space, conferring upon them the moralised self-identity of resilient, inde-

‘The impact on natural resources and local communities is to some extent unavoidable, but the news isn’t ALL bad ... With good planning and management that actually encourages sustainable development and responsible travel the overall negative effects of tourism can be minimized and in many instances, the ‘right’ visitors can actually bring positive benefits to the communities with whom they come into contact’

Sample: Grand Hyatt New York City: ‘they’re leaving future generations with a healthier planet … From employee environmental education and training to eco-purchasing and even GO GREEN bracelets, this Grand Hyatt is serious about sustainability and making a positive impact …’

‘Responsible Travel: We scratch our heads and wonder just when Bali’s Kuta or India’s Goa morphed from quiet surfer escapes or laid back hippy hangouts into international resorts of wall to wall shops, restaurants and package hotels … It’s not hard to understand how each one of us needs to consider our personal contribution as Lonely Planet does to sustaining the natural and cultural wonders of our planet so that future generations can enjoy the same life-changing adventures we have shared’

‘Absolute Awareness: Not only is Absolute Travel dedicated to creating life-changing trips, we are also committed to protecting the places we love, all over the globe. The cornerstone of our approach is called Absolute Awareness, and its mission is two-fold: to inspire people to care about protecting our world’s wild places and its creatures, and to prove to the locals that their natural resources are invaluable, vital to their livelihoods, and worth protecting’

‘Responsible travel ... giving back: Boundless Journeys is sensitive to the effects of travel on the places we visit. Our mission is to contribute positively to the world community – striving to preserve traditions and cultures, and protecting fragile natural habitats…

‘Local destination communities: As well as supporting numerous local charities overseas, we are also working hard to bring positive impacts to the destinations we visit by investing millions of pounds into sustainable tourism projects. We have made a commitment to maintain our leading level of support for the Travel Foundation – the UK’s sustainable tourism charity. They have an ambition to work with 500 businesses to improve livelihoods in destinations. We are also working with experts to measure and improve the socio-economic benefits that All Inclusive hotels bring to destination communities’

Niche: Responsible Tour Operator UK

Niche: Ecological-focus, hotel screening website US

Alternative: Independent/ ‘Backpackers’ UK/US

Alternative: Luxury Package

Alternative: Adventure / Activity Travel US

Alternative: All Inclusive Hotel Packages EU

Istaygreen

Lonely Planet

Absolute Travel

Boundless Journeys

Thompson

Traveling in small groups, forming partnerships with local people, and providing support to indigenous co-ops are just a few of the ways Boundless Journeys has committed to sustainable tourism in the adventure travel industry’

‘Ethicalescape has been created for those who wish to travel lightly and to encourage others to do so … minimising negative environmental, social and cultural impacts; generating greater economic benefits for local people and enhancing the well-being of host communities, by improving working conditions and access to the industry … involving local people in decisions that affect their lives and life chances … making positive contributions to the conservation of natural and cultural heritage and to the maintenance of the world’s diversity’

‘Authentic experiences are more fun … But what if, as well as benefitting you and without costing you extra, your holiday could also mean that fewer indigenous forests are chopped down, that slum children get more meals, and that wildlife is conserved?’

Godifferently.com

Niche: Environmental focus, increasing range of ‘responsible’ holidays UK

Niche: Ethical screening website UK

Tribes

Ethicalescape.com

‘Richer and more authentic travel experiences that also benefit communities and conservation … discover travel secrets away from the tourist crowds. We’ve found specialists who know places intimately to run the tours and help you to ‘travel like a local’. They want to keep their homes special & unspoilt by tourism, which we like!’

Key Responsibility Statement

Niche: Broad range of ‘responsible’ holidays UK/EU/US

Niche/Alternative Market Focus

Responsibletravel.com

Tour Company

Table 1 Responsibility statements from responsibility-focused and mainstream brokers

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pendent traveller. Such myths continue to function as important representation devices for consumers in the independent travel market today, with guidebooks (Bhattacharyya 1997; Caruana, Crane and Fitchett 2008) and backpacker’s own narratives (Noy 2004) reinforcing moralised distinctions between superior and inferior tourist identities. Thus, marketing myths in tourism draw moral distinctions between types of spaces, others tourists/locals, journeys and even different types of self. While tour myths can connect identity with morality they also, and increasingly so in contemporary tourism discourse, are being structured along ethical contours. Mythologising responsible tourism

On the back of growing consumer concern about their impacts on society and the natural environment, Kriendorf (1987: 174) recognises that the tourism industry would have to gradually adopt ‘environmentally-orientated and socially responsible’ marketing practices. This has contributed to the emergence of marketing communications that emphasise tourists’ harmonious relations with culturally vulnerable and ecologically sensitive Others encountered on holiday (Goodwin and Francis 2003; Shepherd 2003; Bramwell et al. 2008; Caruana and Crane 2008). In a crucial departure from contemporary tourism myths, where the self is the primary locale of transformation tensions ‘left behind’ at the core, the responsible tourism myth anticipates a set of explicit tensions in tourists encounters with others at the destination. Caruana and Crane (2008) show how marketing communications invoke and then manage these tensions, by offering the consumer a responsible tourist identity capable of transforming the vulnerability of Others, otherwise threatened by the tourist encounter. Marketplace myths of responsibility represent what Lévi-Strauss (1955) terms a cooking of nature for consumers (Dann 1996) in ways that render it pristine, virgin, and untouched for example, ‘ecological’ images devoid of people, and of culture as authentic, friendly and participative for example, images of tourists with smiling natives wearing folk costume. Through this representational cooking, nature and culture are presented as simultaneously pristine and original while also vulnerable to deleterious changes in these static states, threatened by mass tourism. These elements are captured in various ways in Table 1. Cultural brokers in this area of the tourism industry propagate a powerful myth of responsibility that emphasises harmonious tourist-other relations that minimise impacts and maximise benefits. The outcome of this mythic nexus is the availability to consumers of a responsible tourist identity – a mythic archetype – that appears culturally and ecologically unproblematic (Caruana and Crane 2008), while morally self-affirming for the tourist. The responsibility statements contain a variety of shared mythic elements that together focus the consumer on a set of responsible practices that the service offers that overcomes ethical tensions in tourists’ relations with others culture/nature. Referencing the inherently destructive impacts of the tourism industry unspoilt by tourism to the natural and cultural elements of destinations, the mythic archetype of the responsible tourist is depicted in participative relations with locals rather than instrumental or voyeuristic ones, is shown to share rather than retain wealth locally and to ‘tread lightly’ on the environment leaving only footprints. The emphasis on authenticity in many of the statements is deployed as a symbolic marker of the ability of the responsible tourist to enjoy their holiday while leaving it in a natural, unchanged, sustained condition. Responding to Kriendorf’s (1987) concerns, cultural brokers in the tourism industry have thusly contributed to a responsible tourism myth; consumer imaginary in which consumers can adopt – through a set of mythic practices – an identity-position in the tourism market that is not destructive and that sustains the authenticity natural state of destinations’ cultural, economic and ecological dimensions. Responsible tourism’s explicit management of ethical tensions between tourists and Others is at least in part a marketing myth; a symbolic representation of responsible good and irresponsible bad categories of tourist types and practices that enable

The myth of the responsible consumer

Pseudonym

Carla Charlie Claire Dev Gavin Jenny Jeremy Jordan Krishna Martha Matthew Michelle Paulo Rachel Russell Tiffany Tracey

Age

40–49 30–39 30–39 40–49 30–39 20–29 60–69 40–49 50–59 60–69 40–49 20–29 50–59 40–49 20–29 40–49 20–29

Table 2 Profile of respondents

Occupation

Public Sector Public Sector Public Sector Private Sector Private Sector Public Sector Retired Private Sector Private Sector Retired Private Sector Mother Private Sector Public Sector Private Sector Public Sector Private Sector

Marital Status

Divorced Single Married Married Divorced Single Married Married Unknown Married Married Single Single Unknown Single Divorced Single

205

Purpose of Holiday

Relaxation Relaxation Time with children Educate children New experience New experience New experience New experience Time with daughter New experience Relaxation Relaxation Relaxation Time with daughter Time with girlfriend Time with son Relaxation

consumers to infer and adopt a responsible space in the tour market. At least it would seem this way when we look at the myth at an industry level. The question of how consumers experience this myth is central to this study, and it provides a unique context in which to examine the interaction between mythic constructs of self-identity and moralism as well as ethical praxis. Study methods

Our post-structuralist perspective informed a qualitative research framework to the collection and analysis of data. We broadly follow the definition of Barthes ([1957] 2009) and Williamson (1978) of myths as a representational ‘mode of signification’; a system of signs and signifiers that denote the cultural meanings by which an object, subject or practice is interpreted. Myths therefore are a useful way of exploring how markets domains, brands, services and products become subjects of certain patterns of significations produced for and by consumers. While we focus on the myth of responsibility – as a segment-specific mode of signification that focuses consumers’ interpretations onto a particular type of tourism practice – we investigate the role of consumers’ narratives in responding to it. Through purposive sampling (Silverman 2006), a sample of UK-based, practicing ‘responsible tourists’ were recruited on the basis they had recently booked a holiday through a niche ‘responsible’ tour company. Pseudonyms are provided for each of the participants to ensure anonymity and Table 2 provides a short profile of each participant and details the holiday purpose for each participant to ensure data contextualisation. A series of unstructured, in-depth interviews lasting between 45 and 90 minutes were recorded and transcribed with the 17 participants. The interviews followed a phenomenological tradition (Arsel and Thompson 2011) wherein consumers’ own personal experiences of responsible tourism were the subject of the interview. The interviews were conducted one-to-one, allowing both the interviewer and the respondent to socially construct the narratives organically (Holstein and Gubrium 1995). Conceiving ‘responsible’ holidays as narratives cultural vehicles for organising concepts and themes of responsibility, the researchers undertook iterative coding and analysis to identify the processes through which the respondents worked to repurpose the responsible tourism myth against a metaphor of ‘conscious hedonism’. From here, higher-order themes were

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identified and iteratively cross-referenced, with direct extracts from the transcripts being provided to ensure reflexivity on the part of both the researchers and the readers of this paper. Analysis

The analysis is broken down into two sections. Section one deals with the myth of responsible tourism as personalising identity work, discussing processes of de-mythologisation and moralisation of self–other relations. Section two focuses upon responsible tourism as ethical praxis, discussing processes of neutralising and levelling. Responsible tourism as personalising identity work

This section interpretively develops the ways in which consumers attempt to employ the marketplace myth of responsibility in articulating their holiday experience. Rather than finding that consumers closely align their personal identity with this myth, our respondents’ accounts of their experiences display two unexpected patterns of self-identification. First, respondents distance their personal identities from an imagined mythic archetype ‘the responsible tourist’ through demythologising processes. Here, they identify with a less contradictory and more flexible version of this myth, akin to a form of ‘conscious hedonism’. Second, respondents attempt to appropriate certain generic aspects of the responsibility myth that help them contextualise the moral import of their experiences. Moralising processes are shown to focus on tourists relations with others, mapped across their journey from core to periphery. In sum, this first section shows how consumers confidently problematise and re-purpose seemingly inflexible and incongruous marketplace myths to better fit their identity work in ways reflective of the spatiotemporal nature of the tour experience. Demythologising responsible tourism

Akin to other studies of consumer cultures (Thompson and Haytko 1997) that observe the role of consumers in juxtaposing positive and negative categories of self, we observe several disidentifications in the respondents’ accounts of the responsible tourism myth. These dis-identifications should not be seen as absolute rejections but as a process of careful positioning within a particular tour myth context involving countervailing logics. Respondents’ accounts often work to distance their identity from the self-sacrificing connotations they attach to the responsible tourism myth: Tiffany: I mean don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of these eco-friendly warriors, who camp out in trees and all that.

Matthew: I’m not a carbon –, anything else or like that. Why? It conjured up, sort of, like, living in a green forest in a tent or something, and it’s not me.

While respondents would go as far as connecting their choice of responsible tourism to some everyday, moderate environmental practices such as ‘recycling’ and ‘not dropping litter’, a prior commitment to the environment in holiday experiences was only sparingly observed, most predominantly in discussions of the ethicality of flying. More frequently, very pragmatic and instrumental reasons for purchasing a responsible holiday were foregrounded: Michelle: Yes. I didn’t think of that at the time, though. I’m not of those Greenpeace sort of people. It does make it like I always recycle and I always do the best that I can do. I would never ever drop litter or whatever. At the time, the responsible travel, I didn’t pick it for that reason. I think maybe, it should be made more aware to people. Once it was on the website, yes. I think I got there by accident, kind of thing … I looked round. It was reasonable, the price.

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Respondents’ demythologising here works to mitigate against the self-sacrificing expectations and concomitant practices they attach to the responsible tourism myth. For many, this worked to set the expectations bar at an achievable level, leaving malleable the boundaries within which accounts of responsible tourism are formed. Claire, for example, ‘supposes’ that she is ‘basic level’ and does not conform to the archetypal radical activist who might be prepare to go ‘all out’ in enacting their ethics: Claire: I suppose I am more a basic level than all out.

Similarly, where the responsible tourism myth emphasises social participation homestays, volunteer work etc. and sharing of economic wealth in local communities, not all were comfortable with this proposition, distancing themselves from any associated self-sacrificing identity-practices: Matthew: holidays that can benefit the local community but more from an arm’s length distance rather than a hands on approach … It’s not me, no.

Asked for further clarification by the interviewer:

Matthew: Well, as I said before, one is me going away, enjoying it and everything else but from walking round, appreciating it, going to have a coffee in a coffee shop or buying bits and bobs from local shops as opposed to saying, ‘Right, I’m going to spend a week out of my time. I’m going to go to-, what’s the place that was flooded a few years ago in England. Go there’, and I literally roll up my sleeves for a week and go and help try and restore somebody’s home or an area that was badly damaged. To roll up the sleeves there and to stay in something really basic, you know, basic accommodation. That’s the arm’s length one. That’s the hands on one. It’s not me, no.

While the structuring force of the responsible tourism myth hinges upon fairly uniform juxtaposing of responsible/irresponsible types of tourists, respondents themselves do not experience these category contrasts in such simple, dualistic terms. For many, the responsible tourist is idealised as an evangelistic and self-sacrificing character whose more extreme, pious practices are incompatible with respondent’s own moderate commitments to ‘recycling’ and ‘doing my bit’. Moreover, where the responsible tourism myth actively denigrates ‘hedonistic’ and thus, irresponsible forms of tourism, e.g. pleasure-focused package holidays, respondents are more open to the importance of pleasure and self-interested choices in their accounts: Jenny: See, you could go really far and say you should only travel far if there’s a purpose to it, like people travel for business, but so I suppose it’s a bit selfish travelling for your own pleasure but I like travelling and I like seeing new places. So I guess you should travel to places that you want to go to, but be mindful when you get there and try and be as green as possible.

Crucially, respondents’ accounts reveal certain underlying anxieties and contradictions that they continually seek to negotiate through their narrative journeys. First, they function to bridge seemingly contrasting logics of responsibility for others and pleasure of the self, perceived to underlie this experience: Matthew: To be honest with you, it’s purely selfish, when I’m on my holiday, I’m about myself, my wife etc. Enjoying and maximising the enjoyment out of where I am. I’m probably very selfish in that way. On the other hand, I’m also very con-

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scious of looking after the local environment wherever I am and trying to respect the local customs, local environment etc.

Second, they function to avoid logical contradictions surrounding, for example, the notion that responsible tourism can protect the natural environment. Here Carla explicitly states that had she been highly concerned about environmental impacts, that is, as a ‘Greenpeace’ or ‘Tree Hugger sort’, she obviously wouldn’t have travelled in the first instance: Carla: I’m concerned and then sometimes it’s like –, which is bad. If I did all that, I wouldn’t have gone, because straightaway, flying. It’s a contradiction in terms really.

Moralising self–other relations

This section highlights the ways in which consumers employ the responsible tourism myth to elaborate upon moral dimensions of identity-work and builds upon three key themes which inductively emerged from the data. First, respondents routinely articulate their experiences in reference to the kinds of relations they have with others. To different ends, these relational comparisons construct the self in some kind of morally elevated category. Second, this process of moralisation unfolds along the relational dimensions of socially (e.g. family, friends, tourists or locals) and spatially situated ‘others’ (e.g. familial, unknown and encountered). Third, the content of the responsible tourism myth is either largely absent or marginal here, principally serving as an instrumental normalising marker of moral worth.

Familial others

Deviating from traditional conceptions of responsible tourism, an emergent feature of the responsible tourism market myth related to social proximity. Respondents’ narratives connect responsible tourism with familial relationships, with a number of respondents articulating responsible tourism as a vehicle for the continuation of everyday caring and nurturing practices, and the experience of ‘time together’: Paulo: education of the children.

Michelle: I want the best for the kids. Dev: The kids are getting to an age, this was, when was it, last year or the year before? About a year and a half ago, I think. I wanted the kids-, they’re starting to learn at school about ethics and stuff like that, and they start asking daft questions.

While the invocation of caring familial relations evidences identity work of an ostensibly moral value, respondents go further, juxtaposing responsible tourism with other types of tourism not conducive to these goals: Rachel: I think you’re just shoved in a complex in different kinds of holidays, and you wouldn’t see that. You’re just sat on your sunbed for two weeks and you wouldn’t get that experience, and I think that’s one of the things that children should see.

The use of the term ‘complex’ where tourists sit on sunbeds all day, point to ‘different kinds of holidays’ (not responsible tourism) that inhibit the possibility of learning experiences for children. These hedonic, ‘package tourist’ enclaves are painted not only as inhibitive of learning but as toxic environments, threatening the very health of the family;

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Michelle: I just think if anything’s going to be better for the kids, not the hustle and bustle, no traffic and fumes and no – you know when you go to Blackpool on the sea, I wouldn’t like the kids in the sea. Not a chance. Whereas if they were abroad in somewhere where Responsible travellers go, they’ll be like, let’s get your snorkels on and let’s go in the sea and see who can get their head under the water and get crabs or shells and stuff like that. I wouldn’t say no to anything there. Go on, I want you to see something. Whereas I think they’d be getting something like a disease from Blackpool or something.

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Responsible tourism is thus appropriated for undergirding conventional moralised identities such as the ‘good parent’ while at the same time embedding these in morally superior responsible tourism over inferior package tourist, mindless hedonist tourism categories. It was also evident that relationships between friends were subject to moralising identity work. Social comparisons were made, for example, between one’s own predisposition as a concerned citizen and other ‘friends’ to whom this concern did not register as a source of reflection or guilt! Jordan: So okay, I went abroad, I caught a couple of flights I understand. I am not proud of it but it was the only way apart from obviously going seaworthy, doing it that way. Again, with time and work and so on and so forth – I will take a holiday once every three, maybe four years abroad. The rest of the time I’ll take two maybe three holidays in this country. So my impact is a lot less than like I say a pal of mine who goes abroad three or four times a year. A lot less.

Other tourists

While the previous theme focuses on the respondents’ direct relations with known others, this section shows how the responsible tourism myth is employed to distinguish between different types of tourism category. Respondents variously portray non-responsible, pleasure seeking, mass-tourists as enjoying only low or immoral relations with others. These amoral ‘tourist Others’ become important discursive resources against which the respondents moralise their own categories of tourism. Here, quite vociferously, Carla provides a caricature of the morally baseless ‘tourist’, emphasising how tourist others employ instrumental, self-serving and inherently destructive relationships with, in this context, cultural entities: Carla: ‘idiots’ and ‘slags’… Typical English tourist that you’re embarrassed about’. [With responsible tourism] The clientele is going to be different, but also, all the idiots – well, it’s not the kind of place they’d go. That’s what we were hoping. You’re not going to get the beer-swilling louts and tramps.

Their accounts suggest that the mere presence of this ‘tourist Other’ culminates in culturally Michelle and environmentally Matthew ruinous relations with others: Michelle: It can be, but then again, tourists can ruin places in a way because people go, ‘I love it here. I want to buy a big house here’. You don’t want them to think, ‘Oh God, the English are coming’. They’re going to take over and make it like the riff raff. Matthew: I don’t want to be seen as trampling all over their environment. You know, here come the tourists ruining it and littering it and everything else.

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In different ways, ‘tourism’ becomes a generic marker of morally suspicious relations with others. While some respondents’ use responsible tourism simply to elevate their category of tourism over others, e.g. ‘I am not the archetypal selfish tourist’, other respondents further elaborate on the how these category distinctions contribute more directly to types of relations available with others, e.g. friend, service provider, participant as we now elaborate. Encountered others

In the narrative below, the respondent conveys their own experience of both categories that is, ir/responsible tourist, emphasising the importance of scale on relations with others. Contrastingly, the commercial trappings of a big luxury tourist hotel kept them ‘out-of-touch’ disengaged with local others, whereas the ‘really small’ responsible hotel run by locals enabled real, hands-on ‘participative’ relations with encountered others: Krishna: we stayed in two hotels and one of them was quite luxurious. It was alright but we felt very out-of-touch and the next one was a really nice hotel but it was really small. It was run by locals and it just felt far more a real experience, I suppose.

In constructing idealised relationships, Paulo below draws an explicit relational dichotomy between the types of relations that responsible self and tourist others can subscribe to. He unravels contradictions surrounding the ‘voyeuristic’ tendencies of tourist–touree encounter. In doing so, the respondent exhibits a level of self-consciousness and reflexivity in their account of their responsible encounter with others, which they simultaneously deny for those whose would, in contrast, arrogantly impose upon locals the terms and conditions of the tourist–touree relation without a thought: Paulo: You’re allowing what you’re trying to see to dictate the situation, as opposed to imposing yourself on a situation and saying, ‘I’m here now. I want you to perform’.

Paulo: As I said before, the dangers at the moment, it’s like a circus. You go to a circus and you are imposing yourself on the animal and you are expecting an animal to perform for you.

Where the tourist imposes himself upon local people, demanding some kind of inauthentic performance – ‘staged authenticity’, responsible tourists move freely among the people, experiencing authentic relations with others from their morally superior position of reflexive insider. Interestingly, while the marketplace myth of responsible tourism focuses on participation/immersion as a conduit for sustaining culture or an ethical objective, our respondents commonly repurpose this immersive practice in moralistic contrasts between their own, and other tourists’ relations. Arguably, cultural immersion in local communities requires of the responsible tourist a kind of risk-taking propensity, aesthetic appreciation and cultural skill of blending in, unattainable by the lower moral voyeurism of the disengaged, enclaved, ‘outsider’ tourist.

Responsible tourism as ethical praxis

This second section focuses more specifically on the ethical dimensions of tourists’ experiences, where their narratives emphasise more specifically perceived impacts on and/or responsibilities to others. Here the marketplace myth of responsibility is evidently a cultural resource that respondents draw upon but is again re-worked and repurposed to achieve particular ends. Respondents’ narratives are more explicit in their acknowledgement of cultural and

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environmental contradictions of responsible tourism, suggesting that while the market myth contextualises the tourist experience, e.g. in terms of identity positioning against other tourist, it doesn’t remove anxieties from the experience. Moreover, the section shows the processes by which respondents themselves mediate such anxieties, working within, while extending beyond the normalising ir/responsible juxtapositions of the responsible tourism myth. Neutralising practices

Aware of the potential contradictions of taking an environmentally and socially ‘responsible’ holiday, consumers’ narratives regularly portrayed strategic rationalisations that ostensibly highlight and then repair disconnections. The neutralising practices of environmental ‘offsetting’ and cultural ‘reciprocation’ most closely echo the responsible tourism myth, but also elaborate more on the contradictory conditions that make neutralisation necessary. As we now see, these neutralisations focus upon cultural and environmental practices at the destination, as compensations of a kind, and for spatially wider practices that are ring-fenced such as the necessary high carbon flight: Gavin: Once we got there, we didn’t use the car. We took the bikes, the kids have got bikes, we’ve all got bikes. Wherever it was possible, we would use our bikes.

Asked why walking is a form of responsible tourism:

Jenny: Obviously for the using no petrol. Obviously the flight over there might have not helped but I suppose we didn’t use petrol and fuel … Because if I’d have got my flight over there and then took a taxi around all of Manhattan or whatever, then it’s worse, isn’t it? And the plane that I came over was a really big plane with – it was all full, so it’s not like there was just me on the plane wasting all that fuel.

This environmental tension, where raised, was often explicitly attended to by the respondent who worked to manage impacts, rather than ignore or remove them. In fact there are two elements to this neutralisation narrative above, one where the impact of the flight is offset by the practices of walking once there and two, where the efficiency of the plane large and full normalises the decision – that is, it was going anyway and was full. Our respondents also articulated neutralisations surrounding perceived socio-economic tensions. Again, while this is an explicit feature of the responsible tourism market myth, respondents’ narratives are rather more intricate in both contextualising, organising and addressing such tensions: Dev: I said the activities. Well, yes, and the activities that we were doing were with people who were happy to do it. It’s not that, how to explain it, profit sharing? They’re like partners, they weren’t staff, they were like partners, everyone, the horse-riding guys and the hair-braiding girls and the poolroom attendant, they all seemed to get, the more people they served. It wasn’t a flat salary. The more they did, the more they did and it, you know, seemed they were all happy.

Respondents’ narratives recast the relationship between tourist and touree as one of partnerships, neutralising any perceived negative impacts on locals by emphasising the consequential benefits for them in terms of increased wealth and happiness. In many cases, the very viability of locals and the health of their economy are portrayed as contingent upon the presence of a visiting, responsible tourist: Gavin: Plus you’re keeping local people employed, if the local businesses are continuing to produce food, it keeps the business going, it feeds the community, it sustains the community, and it encourages people to come in.

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When describing experiences of their responsible holiday respondent’s commonly referred to encounters with local people as exchanges of some kind. The nature of these ‘reciprocating practices’ varied from mutual learning, to working together to more general comments about common values: Jeremy: But yes, and working with people, as I say, with volunteering in any way is a good way of sharing our skills and learning what skills other people have and learning how to work together.

Here Martha underlines the outcome of encounters with locals as a mutual learning experience: Martha: Having a window in to the African way of life in that village and realising that, okay, it looks very poor but actually, it’s very rich in a different way. So it’s a learning for both parties. You can see that the family, they really care for the whole extended family. You can learn about the woman’s role in there, the kind of food they eat … interacting literally in a real family home.

What might be considered as quite an intrusive interaction – living in someone else’s home as a tourist, and watching them live – is recast as a necessary and valuable education, ostensibly for both parties. Although what the local person ‘learns’ from this is rather silent here, the emphasis on ‘interacting literally’ in a home naturalises their insider position, collapsing social distance to the family unit. In the extended passage below, the respondent also underlines the reciprocal nature of the interaction with locals: Gavin: So they were asking for our input, ‘What do you think about over here?’, and we were like, ‘What if we have it over here’, and they were explaining that we have possible sightings of an owl or something over there, that you wouldn’t see on the beaten track. I said to my kids, ‘Do you think that’s cool?’ and they said, ‘Yes, that’s really cool’, because it’s stuff that you don’t see in the city. They were asking our input. I don’t know anything about owls, except they can turn their head right around, but they were asking our opinion, valuing our input. Interviewer: What did it feel like, to be asked by a local to give your … Gavin: It felt like our opinion mattered … So it just made it all feel like part of the big family.

Also of note in this passage is that social reciprocation helps positions them in a ‘responsible’ tourist destination and firmly away from the city and the ‘well-beaten-tourist-track’ where such practices and outcomes supposedly can’t occur. Such sentiments are elaborations of the responsible tourism myth to a degree, but bring to our attention the varied ways in which respondents appropriate and rework them into personal accounts. However, as we illustrate in the final section below, such accounts extend beyond the responsible tourism marketplace myth and in fact situate it in wider social and ideological discourses contextualising the tour experience. Levelling

The normalising discourse of the responsible tourism myth focusses principally on the role of the responsible tourist in sustaining the authenticity of indigenous cultures, otherwise rendered ‘vulnerable’ to irresponsible forms of tourism. This is partly reflected in their moralising identity

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work, for example, around ‘encountered others’ but it is also clearer a dimension of their ethical praxis where there are perceived ethical tensions in self–other relations. While our respondents’ narratives echo the marketplace myth to a degree, they are far broader and more intricate in their articulation of relationships with others, collapsing wider societal myths that would otherwise intensify anxieties in the encounter for example, wealth. Clearly concerned about their proximity to potentially vulnerable others, respondents’ narratives displayed a range of ‘levelling’ rationalisations that attempt to concede and transform power relations they perceive to underlie the construct tourist–touree encounter. Note how these levelling rationalisations are contextualised by respondent’s access to broader tourism and social discourses, for example, about happiness, tradition/primitivism, family, freedom and, as here, work and structural wealth: Dev: They’re like partners, they weren’t staff, they were like partners, everyone, the horse-riding guys and the hair-braiding girls and the poolroom attendant, they all seemed to get, the more people they served. It wasn’t a flat salary. Not second rate. Not third world.

Here Dev reorganises two dimensions of the relationship between herself and local people. First she reclassifies them from worker to partner, collapsing the consumer/servant dichotomy in the process. Second, she underlines the economic benefits of local people in the responsible tourism industry, proposing that here the more people worked, the better off they were. This, coupled with the explicit ‘not third world’ assertion, has the effect of placing locals in more level socio-economic relations. While the responsible tourism myth equates the transfer of wealth into local communities to responsibility, the passage below shows the respondent working at the socio-ideological level. Here in Krishna’s extended account, the Western ideological equation of higher material wealth with greater happiness provides the broader structural context for addressing and resolving perceived economic tensions: Krishna: There’s also the question of what impact do you have on their lives. I was very aware of this when I went to Congo because they’re very aware of you’re rich while you are … or you are happy. There is this direct correlation between you are happy while you are slightly richer than somebody else and the fact that we could turn up and have all the stuff that we’ve got, is that unhelpful? Does that just breed dissatisfaction because they want what we’ve got? I discussed this with people and they’ve got television. They know what life is like so it’s not as if you turning up is going to suddenly be, ‘Oh. That’s what life is like’. They know that so they do tend to appreciate you being there’.

In this passage, Krishna flags up the critique of tourism as economic imperialism, proposing that locals might be dissatisfied unhappy by a visit from a materially wealthy and powerful Westerner ‘just turning up’ imposing. Krishna then works to resolve the tension she sets up. On one level, she creates a more level economic playing field by asserting that they’ve got televisions, i.e. they too have access to ‘luxury’ material goods. The problematic image of a ‘primitive’, pre-consumption culture naïve to Western materialism is rather dampened here. This reinforces the ‘slightly richer’ economic levelling that ostensibly narrows the wealth gap. On another level, much is made of the awareness of the Other about wealth and its contribution to the relative happiness of the ‘slightly richer’ tourist and locals. In this reflexive knowledge, locals are portrayed as appreciative of their visit. Along similar lines, Martha problematises the ideological equation of wealth with happiness by de-coupling the former from the latter and re-connecting happiness to having less – the simple life:

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Martha: That’s one of the things, isn’t it? People see people coming in with all this sort of flash stuff and we can go there and see the opposite and realise that a lot of happiness can be had just living a more simple life.

This functions in two key ways. The narrative certainly speaks of the tourist’s own self-transformation in their movement from a complex, modern life to a simpler but happier life minus the material trappings. Yet, this equation of simple = happy which the tourist experiences as disburdenment; freedom is extended to stakeholders in the locality of the destination. In this context, local people are cast as happy with traditional, folksy, familiar patterns and routines, undistracted, unimpressed and importantly, undisturbed by incoming commodity-based cultures that is, who can only earn/buy happiness. The function of the narrative is in the rebalancing of cultural and economic relationships underlying the tourist–touree encounter. This kind of socio-economic levelling of tourist–touree relations thus enables respondents to ‘go there in that equal way’ Martha. These rationalisations are motivated by persistent anxieties around the tourist encounter. Such anxieties draw their semantic fuel from both tourism and social discourses such that structural inequalities social, economic, political are seen to be normally heavily skewed in the tourist’s favour. Largely absent from other tourism myths, the responsible tourism myth makes these inequalities visible, and, crucially, ‘transcendable’ only for responsible tourists! These anxieties, and the work of the tourist to overcome them, persist beyond the purchase and even consumption stage, where even when considerable time has elapsed since their responsible holiday, the resolution of imbalances remains of value. Tourists themselves are rather more varied and creative in how they construct and set about to address such tensions than the marketplace myth. In the two passages below, ‘levelling’ occurs in a number of key ways. Both passages assert the vested interests of tourist and local in being responsible and sustaining the environment and a common resistance to destructive forms of tourism; a kind of cultural levelling around shared values: Michelle: They don’t want anything to change, if you get what I mean. They want to keep selling their olive oil, they want to do the fish and stuff like that. They’re not getting roped in to – they don’t want to be commercialised like Blackpool. It’s just horrendous. It’s just horrible.

Jordan echoes this cultural levelling, and in a slight twist, underlines the mutual respect for proprietary rights over land and home, and the empowered voice that locals have in hosting the tourist ‘guest’: Jordan: Speaking to them, they’re trying to keep that area as natural as possible for their future generations as well, which again is responsible. It is so important. I was talking to one guy and he said, ‘You are in my home. You are now coming into my home, my land’. I can appreciate that.

Conclusion

While marketplace myths provide a useful cultural resource for consumers to interpret the meaning of responsible tourism, there should be no expectation that this maps smoothly onto consumers’ own experiences. Moreover, while a key function of myth is to provide a coherent identity position for consumers to adopt in the tourism market – one that ostensibly helps transcend anxieties about impacts on others – consumers put the myth to work in divergent ways and for different ends. These augment mainly around moralistic identity-work and ethical praxis. Through processes of demythologising and moralising, neutralisation and levelling, consumers recast marketplace myths of responsibility into highly personal, moralised accounts

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of their product experiences, while intricately collapsing wider mythic elements that contribute to the subjugation of other stakeholders. Several observations emerge from this study. First, rather than aligning strongly with the mythic archetype responsible tourist, consumers experience this subject as an ethically idealised, self-sacrificing character, incongruous with their own self-conceptions and in conflict with other pleasure-orientated holiday goals. Here, the myth of responsibility is demythologised, creating a less contradictory, more flexible and achievable identity space in relation to this myth. The notion of ‘conscious hedonism’ here provides an integrative metaphor that allows consumers to experience responsibility for others alongside personal escape, pleasure and authenticity. Second, the myth of responsible tourism is put to work extensively in moralistic identity work. This unfolded along different relational dimensions where the relative moral worth of the consumer could be articulated. Here the term ‘responsibility’ is appropriated as a general moral marker of the consumer’s relations with others. Positively, a responsible holiday can come to represent a parent’s care for a child or partner. Negatively, it can be used to adopt a superior moral position in relation to non-reflexive colleagues, for instance, or morally redundant tourists. Third, respondent’s narratives were found to be explicit in acknowledging the cultural and environmental contradictions underlying the responsible tourism experience. While the normalising force of the marketplace myth of responsibility offers consumers a way of transcending holiday impacts, it doesn’t remove these anxieties altogether. Through processes of neutralising and levelling, respondents intricately invoke and mediate persistent anxieties throughout and beyond the experience. Not only do they continue to re-appropriate elements of the market myth but they carefully produce narrative constructions that draw on wider tourism and societal discourses. These processes suggest consumers’ interpretations are not necessarily limited in scope or nature by marketplace myths. References

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Myth spinning in an ideological community: A Barthesian analysis Katherine Casey, Maria Lichrou and Lisa O’Malley University of Limerick

This research emerges among calls for ‘contextualisation of contexts’ (Askegaard and Linnet 2011) and a greater understanding of groups of ideologically motivated consumers (Papaoikonomou, Cascon-Pereira and Ryan 2014). This work responds by focusing on the members of Cloughjordan ecovillage, a community of socially embedded consumers. Described as a shared system of beliefs belonging to a certain collectivity, ideology is core to many intentional communities. Furthermore, ideology is transmitted through myth; myth being shaped to communicate desired messages (Barthes 1972). This interpretivist work offers insights into community myth-making and shows how the same discourses are appropriated by this diverse community of consumers and used to mobilise their individual ideological positions.

Marketing has embraced a constellation of consumption communities (Schouten and McAlexander 1995; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001; Kozinets and Handelman 2004), however they remain an ‘epistemological exotica’ (Askegaard and Linnet 2011). Traditionally intentional communities have emerged as a reaction to changing social mores (Ergas 2010). Brand communities, subcultures and intentional communities share a common trait, they are bound by shared experience, similar world views and a collective identity – a ‘consciousness of kind’ (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001; Burgh-Woodman and Brace-Govan 2007; Ergas 2010). This research emerges among calls for ‘contextualisation of contexts’ (Askegaard and Linnet 2011) and a greater understanding of groups of ideologically motivated consumers (Papaoikonomou, Cascon-Pereira and Ryan 2014). In so doing, it addresses the ideological workings of a group of socially embedded consumers. Ideology is axiomatic; it functions to organise social attitudes and behaviours. Described as a shared system of beliefs belonging to a certain collectivity, ideology is core to many intentional communities. Furthermore, ideology is transmitted through myth; myth being shaped to communicate desired messages (Barthes 1972). This work offers insights into community mythmaking and shows how the same discourses are appropriated by this diverse community of consumers and used to mobilise their individual ideological positions. Communities make myth to reconcile the contradictions inherent to human life (Lévi-Strauss 1978), myth purifies (Barthes 1972). Myth makes human life meaningful and represents collective attitudes (Mosco 1998).The analysis reveals that this seemingly ideologically aligned community could more accurately be described as a symbolic point of convergence for a milieu of ideological strands, and that myth enabled this union. The first section addresses current ecovillage research; the second is a methodological review. Following is a Barthesian analysis, at the denotative level discourse analysis is drawn upon in order to reveal the discourses which the members draw on, and how they make sense of them. The second level of analysis demonstrates how stories were used to convey this myth and its ideological implications. Thereafter the analyses are discussed and the sixth section concludes.

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Ecovillages and alternative activism

Ecovillages are commonly defined as ‘human scale and full-featured settlements (food, leisure, social life, education, business, residence) in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world (principle of ecology) in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future’ (Gustack-Delambre 2010: 3). Much extant literature concerning ecovillages addresses technological and materialistic aspects of the ecovillage (Woolley 2009). This has been critiqued as incomplete, failing as it does to explicitly incorporate community (Kasper 2008; Meijering 2012). However, recent work that conceptualises ecovillages as intentional communities built around the concept of sustainable living (Moisander and Pesonen 2002) offers some insight in this regard. For example, the sociological aspects of living in an ecovillage have been explored (Miller and Bentley 2012; Nathan 2012; Cunningham and Wearing 2013). This rich and diverse research stream spans a number of disciplines including psychology (Copeland 2013), computer science (Woodruff, Hasbrouck and Augustin 2008) and marketing (Moisander and Pesonen 2002). Recent research looking at intentional communities built around the concept of sustainable living revealed similar motivations pertaining to a wish to connect with other like-minded individuals, a space in which to deviate from the accepted social mode, to live as moral agents, concern for the environment and to reconcile with their sense of identity as environmental citizens (Moisander and Pesonen 2002; Kirby 2003; Meijering, 2012). Here, the idea of ‘consciousness of kind’ (Weber 1978) characterised as a collective sense of differentiation from those outside the community – a feeling of belonging and likemindedness – distinguishes members of this intentional community from others. As such, there may be some resonance with subcultures of consumption or brand communities (Schouten and McAlexander 1995; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001; Burgh-Woodman and Brace-Govan 2007) in the sense that community history and culture are reproduced in rituals and traditions and the final indicator is a sense of duty towards the community and its members (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001: 413). For members of intentional communities, their way of life is offered as a model of successful alternative ways of living for the rest of society; they termed this ‘resistance by not resisting’ (Moisander and Pesonen 2002: 338; Ergas 2010; Meijering 2012). Participants often construct identities which are actively differentiated from the wasteful masses and society as a whole and living by example. For example, participants in Woodruff, Hasbrouck and Augustin’s (2008) study believed that their decision to allow others to view their green home would influence others to follow; this was termed as ‘activism by example’ (2008: 318). Prima facie the movement is a reaction to the reality that many of the ecological challenges faced by society are the result of unsustainable consumption patterns (Kirby 2003). Cloughjordan ecovillage has been designed as a ‘model of sustainable living’ (The Village 2010) in which the way of life is described as being ‘healthy, satisfying and socially-rich while minimising ecological impacts’ (The Village 2010). The ecovillage boasts a permaculture landscape design, low energy homes, a renewable energy centre, several civic spaces, woodland gardens, a community farm, a green enterprise centre and an educational centre. At present the ecovillage comprises of 53 sustainable homes; however, they have planning permission for a further 132 units. The ecovillage is ‘owned’ by all of its members; they are shareholders in company called Sustainable Projects Ireland Limited (SPIL) trading as ‘The Village’. SPIL, a registered educational charity, is limited by guarantee and bound by articles of association which ensures that it acts as a cooperative. It should be noted that many of the ecovillage members have a dialectical relationship with academic research, both engaging with, and contributing to, relevant literature streams.

Methodology

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Data collection and analysis

Three hundred years after its coining, ideology is still a deeply contested concept. From a Marxist perspective it is the means by which the dominant classes exert power. A more recent perspective sees ideology as a worldview or belief system belonging to a collectivity (van Dijk 2006; Machin and Mayr 2012). Consumer research has traditionally taken a Marxist or Hegelian approach (Hirschman 1993; Crockett and Wallendorf 2004). The Marxist approach to ideology functions in a doctrinaire fashion (Snow and Byrd 2007), in following Crockett and Wallendorf (2004) we are taking a more benign, normative approach deemed appropriate when addressing an assemblage of diverse individuals with a common ideological base but varied approaches (Crockett and Wallendorf 2004). Drawing on Van Dijk (1995: 248) ideology is defined as the: basic frameworks of social cognition, shared by members of social groups, constituted by relevant selections of sociocultural values, and organized by an ideological schema that represents the self-definition of a group. Besides their social function of sustaining the interests of groups, ideologies have the cognitive function of organizing the social representations (attitudes, knowledge) of the group, and thus indirectly monitor the group-related social practices, and hence also the text and talk of members.

In order to understand how ideology is mobilised within the ecovillage it is necessary to draw on a methodology which would demonstrate how this ideology is ‘lived’. We needed entrée to their everyday life, it is in this context that ‘society’s norms are made relevant to people; this is where they become concrete and manifest themselves as a form of lived ideology’ (Askegaard and Linnet 2011: 396). Methodologically, an ethnographic approach enabled access to the members’ everyday life, eight in-depth, unstructured interviews, participant observation, the ecovillage website and autoethnographic field notes which generated rich narrative data and encouraged critical and sociological thought (Denzin 2003: 206). In order to reveal the community’s ideological underpinnings, we turned to stories. As units of analysis, stories offer researchers a unique opportunity; differentiated from other rhetorical devices by a clear structure (beginning, middle and end), stories are easy to identify within the flow of discourse. In addition, because stories report a specific set of events different versions of the same story can be compared, thereby revealing the story’s career, how it came to be authoritative and how it impacts the culture in which it takes hold. Stories can perform as cultural schema, models of behaviour. Finally, and perhaps most importantly stories are always ‘motivated’, they conduct ideology (Poletta 2006). Barthes’ approach to myth is therefore appropriate; his framework uncovers ideology transmitted through mythical objects, such as stories. Barthes (1972: 113) perceives myth as a metalanguage, a second language which speaks about the first. This framework calls for a double interpretation of the text in question, the first identifies the denotative meaning (the first descriptive level of analysis); the second reveals the wider connotative meaning. The second level of analysis is the interpretation of ‘completed signs in terms of the wider realms of social ideology – the general beliefs, conceptual frameworks and value systems of society’ (Hall 1997: 36). Barthes refers to this second level as rhetorical code; the perspective or the ideological signs (Allen 2003: 51), which the myth-maker wishes its adherents to accept. Myth does not discriminate, nor is it defined by the object of its message, but rather by the way in which this message is uttered (Barthes 1972: 108). Thus, a Barthesian analysis is conducted on a story – told three times – which addresses one event; where two members imbue it with a meaning not present in the third telling.

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The first level of this process, analysis at the level of linguistics required that discursive analysis (DA) be applied to the relevant texts. DA is an appropriate approach as it operates to expose ideological workings within text (spoken or written), drawing attention to how some texts are marked by ideology. Following (van Dijk 1993a) and Wodak (2001), discourses are described as the broader ideas which are communicated by a given text or as ‘models of the world’ (Machin and Mayr 2012: 20). Language does not merely reflect social life, it (re)produces, it is constituent of social processes and structures (Machin and Mayr 2012), put simply discourse is shaped by, and in turn shapes, ideology. Once the stories were identified in the interview data, they were isolated and a critical approach was taken to their analysis. The transcribed passages were copied into a spreadsheet, each clause onto a separate line for analysis. In this case the relevant narrative was isolated and further examined using Gee’s seven building tasks: significance, activities, identities, relationships, politics, connections and sign systems and knowledge (Gee 2005: 11–13). Then the remaining data was re-explored in order to expose how the members engaged with the exposed discourses, this data was subjected to DA. Ideology is a coherent set of beliefs and values which can be accessed through the discourses and social practices which express, reproduce and enact them (van Dijk 2006). Thus DA unearthed three discourses in the texts, and demonstrated how the ecovillage members used these discourses ideologically. Whereas the linguistic analysis focuses on the language used by the members both in the stories and in the other passages, the Barthesian analysis perceives the story, as a whole. As a signifier/form it is raised to the second level of this semiological system, this analysis addresses the story’s connotative meaning, unveiling the myth or signification. At this level of analysis the myth is studied in context of the discourses which inform it, and the motivation behind this story is revealed. The research context

The Village is ostensibly a highly democratic organisation which engages in consensus decision making. In addition, the members have subscribed to the paradigm of self-organisation and therefore share all the responsibilities associated with the ecovillage (The Village 2010). Life in the ecovillage is characterised by sustainable community living. Concern for the environment is at the core of this community’s belief system, it is deeply entwined with the lives of the ecovillagers; it is nurtured through educational forums, the alternative systems of production, consumption and organisation which they employ and the discourse of the members: I think we share a common vision and a common purpose. Likeminded and I suppose is very varied we want to do things differently we’re concerned and care, concerned about the earth and concerned about one another because I don’t think you can separate the two. (Noreen)

This community embodies a distinct culture and value system, a community with a common, unifying vision. Noreen speaks for her community; she describes a shared interest in ‘the earth’ and in ‘one another’, she reveals a notion of sustainable community which goes beyond environmental concern. This text is ideological in nature, the use of word ‘we’, as a plural pronoun, the expression of certain ideological positions in relation to the earth and community and finally in the way in which an she emphasises the positive aspects of the community (van Dijk 2006). These features recur in the talk and text of ecovillage members. Here, Chris defines an ecovillage as: An ecovillage is where people come together with the intention of forming a community to uphold certain beliefs they have, to forge a certain lifestyle among themselves. The beliefs in an ecovillage would generally be those involved in protection

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of the environment ecology, an interest in ecology and generally green matters, I guess just in general. (Chris)

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Both data excerpts revolve around the notions of community and environmentalism; these are the ecovillage’s founding tenets. Chris’s evaluation of what an ecovillage is reflects his experience of life in this ecovillage, he foregrounds intentionality and the communal aspect of the ecovillage. Chris’s description portrays a community bound by a specific system of beliefs, thus it a community born of ideology. His phrase ‘beliefs in an ecovillage would generally be those involved in protection of the environment’ is especially powerful. In this sentence he names object of the ideology which draws these ecovillage members together. Chris offers a very real situated description of the context in which this research takes place. Mobilising discourse

This section presents a discursive analysis of three accounts of the same story some of the discourses. Each of the three discourses is then discussed and contextualised, using excerpts from interviews in order to demonstrate how the discourses are used in the service of diverse agendas. The people who started this used to be tree huggers in the Glen. When they tried to preserve the oaks that they were going to bring the road through. They got talking and said ‘we’ve been doing this sort of thing for years and it never works you know, we always lose. So then the idea came that ‘do you know what? Instead of telling them what not to do we’ll show them what they should be doing’. So that’s how it came about. (Keith)

Now so a group of people came together in 1999. They were finding they were coming together for a lot of ‘anti’, like anti-nuclear in Carrick-on-suir maybe? The Glen of the Downs, anti the road and the trees there. So they said ‘we’ll come together to do something positive’ so they formed an educational charity. (Noreen)

This story presents a report of the exact moment the ecovillage came in to existence in the realm of political imagination, the circumstances which motivated the founders to take action. Both accounts make reference to the first Irish anti-road protests in the Glen of the Downs. One of the most publicised and long running political protests in recent Irish history, the debacle received a great deal of media coverage, before being brought to an unsuccessful end in the High Court at the turn of the century (Leonard 2008). The birth of the ecovillage is an event within an event, drawing on this history allowing the members to temporally locate the ecovillage’s naissance at the dawn of a new century. In addition, it provides a point of resonance; the audience is reminded that this is an Irish endeavour, the product of a familiar story. A third version of the story emerged in a different context – the personal history of one of the founding members: So we learned a lot about working with people, the idea of cooperatives challenging the way things were being done that we felt weren’t healthy or weren’t contributing to community and or the environment. We were also a few of us very involved in protesting I suppose we protested GM in 98/99, we protested against the roads expansion schemes. And I suppose it came in 1998, early 1999, we realised ‘we actually have to be standing for what we’re for and not just opposing what we are against. So I mean getting involved in the food coop was the start of that. (Enda)

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It is evident that the facts are similar; however the version told by members is abridged, simplified. Enda is clear in his portrayal of this event that it was a moment of transformation, however the result was involvement in a food coop (an activity which cultivated the ecovillage). Often people simplify events in order to control meaning (Machin and Mayr 2012), myth distorts (Barthes 1972). This version has strong political content, the ecovillage is a form of protest, designed to challenge the status quo. When analysed discursively, three discourses were identified: ‘transformation’, ‘education’ and ‘ecovillage as model’. In turn these discourses revealed a pioneering community of environmental educators endeavouring to achieve social transformation through modelling alternative ecological systems, alternative political/market systems and a community-based lifestyle. However, members have contesting agendas, thus they appropriate the discourses, interpreting them, and enacting them in different (sometimes conflicting) ways. An analysis of interview data revealed these appropriations, the related agendas and the resultant internal discord.

Transformation discourse

At the beginning of the story (in both accounts) the founders are struggling protesters. However, they emerge transformed as the founders of the ecovillage. For both members this is a story of transformation. All stories are evaluative in nature; in fact it is this function which motivates their telling (Poletta 2006). There is no neutral way in which to represent a person (Machin and Mayr 2012: 77), the referential strategy which is chosen determines how the audience thinks about the subject (van Dijk 1993b), it speaks to their ‘values, ideas and activities’ (Machin and Mayr 2012: 78). In the first extract Keith distances the ‘founders’ from their previous identities as ‘tree huggers’ and Noreen refers to their activities as being ‘anti’ (nuclear, roads). ‘Tree-huggers’ is an evaluative term, bearing negative connotations, thereby indicating that the founders were involved in problematic behaviour, and creating a sense of moral ‘otherness’ (Machin and Mayr 2012: 78). Enda’s version supports the transformation, however he sees it is a progression as opposed to a more worthy pursuit. Keith activates the subjects (previously they ‘tried’ but failed: ‘Instead of telling them what not to do we’ll show them what they should be doing [and then they successfully established the ecovillage]’); in addition they are given a voice, thus they are elevated. Both participants represented this speech as direct discourse, meaning that the words represented are quotes, taken, unaltered, from the original text, thus they retain the original grammar and deictic (Fairclough 1992: 57). In doing so an explicit boundary is drawn between the voice of the reporter and the voice of the subject (Fairclough 1992). The participants are actively not taking responsibility for these words, they are relinquishing the parentage of the ecovillage to these ‘tree huggers’ turned leaders. ‘Functionalisation’, a linguistic feature, is when people are referred to in terms of what they do as opposed to who they are (Machin and Mayr 2012: 80). It legitimatises the actors, it positions them as the visionaries who created this community – its founders. This is a double-edged discourse (social/personal); it is closely related to the ecovillage as model discourse (which is discussed in the following section), and it is as a model that the ecovillage is at its most transformative. Social transformation from the ‘bottom up’ is a strategy often espoused by the ecovillage movement; this ecovillage’s website is no exception: Over the last number of years, much of our cooperative spirit and sense of community has been lost [in the world generally]. Western-style capitalism can weaken social capital – the ‘glue’ that holds our communities together – to the extent that it promotes competition and individualism as the ultimate goal, at the expense of cooperation and community. The Cloughjordan Ecovillage, under the banner building sustainable community, is a people-led attempt to reinvigorate some of the most important concepts

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of community and collective action. It is a recognition that we urgently need to take an evolutionary leap in the way we do things and to design systems from the bottom up in ways that fit this planet’s carrying capacity, and we need to do this together, as communities. (www.thevillage.ie)

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This extract from the ecovillage’s website describes a society in crisis – the project is offered as an alternative to ‘Western-style capitalism’, community and collective action will suture the torn fabric of society. The extract defines the problem and offers an ameliorative action. Social transformation via ‘bottom up’ lifestyle change is a global ecovillage discourse (Bates 2003: 2). Intentional communities, such as the ecovillage, are generally bound to socially responsible objectives (Kasper 2008) and many of the members feel strongly about similar issues. As an activist, founding member Enda’s motivations mirror the transformative goals of the ecovillage: So my journey was from awareness of sustainability, to activism into sustainability, to then looking at how we create new structures and systems that will allow us to almost ‘short circuit’ the things we were opposed to without confronting them face to face. You know, so for GM, organic food cooperatives or community gardens and organic farms and community supported farms all challenge that model without going and picking sugar beet out of the field. There is something about walking our talk more with the eco-village rather than just shouting about what we were against. (Enda)

In this extract, modelling is allied with social transformation; for Enda the ecovillage offers an alternative approach to the current regime. He uses GM food as an example of a model which the ecovillage is ‘short circuiting’, through allotments and organic community supported agriculture. For him, the ecovillage is a form of protestation, source of community activism (demonstrated through the use of the word ‘we’). These ‘new structures and systems|’ are transformative – they facilitate a bloodless coup. The fact that at an organisational level the ecovillage pursues social transformation, while its members desire personal transformation, is unsurprising. Kasper (2008: 13) lists ‘a yearning for political and economic reform and a desire for self-fulfillment’ as key motivations for ecovillage membership. This is echoed in Chris’s account: I was working in Dublin and I sold a house in Dublin, and I wanted to get away from the kind of rat race that living in in Dublin, I was pretty ... I was working in the center of the city and I was commuting eh, I was commuting maybe three hours, at least three hours a day, most of the time spent sitting the car and I really at the back of the mind I always had an interest in a rural life and in rural life in general I would have experienced rural life during my summer holidays as a kid. My father grew up on a farm and my uncle ran the farm. We would’ve spent our summer holidays down there so I always liked the idea of a rural living. When I sold my house, I chucked my job the next day and I bought myself a camper van and hit the high road with the intention of finding somewhere to settle … The project wasn’t, the project was in development at the time there were no buildings there was actually nothing. It was green field site so I came down and I met the community, or who was involved with the community at the time. I came down on a good few occasions and generally liked the whole idea of what was going [on] ... being created is here and being planned for here. And decided that yes perhaps I would like to join the community. (Chris)

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Transformation, both social and personal, is an important discourse within the ecovillage movement (Andreas and Wagner 2012). On joining members are often motivated by dual desires to pursue self-actualisation and to act as social change agents (Kirby 2003). Chris is delivered from the ‘rat race’, the long commutes and the city life which he had grown to abhor. Chris’s narrative documents a desire to return to a simpler time, childhood memories and country living are entwined and resuscitated in this project. For him the ecovillage offers a mode of personal transformation, this discourse is mirrored in Noreen’s narrative: And I think there was an exhibition of an ecovillage, and it didn’t kind of click with me, but beside me was a form ‘Become a member of the Ecovillage’ and I looked at it and I said ‘that’s it’. And it kind of fitted in with me finishing in school, and then I came down here for what they called a Saturday and experience day, just to find out about it, but I didn’t need to know anymore I had decided ‘that’s it’. That was how I joined. (Noreen)

Noreen’s description of her decision to join the ecovillage resembles the myth in form, it details her instant transformation from retired teacher to ecovillager. Many decisions around the simplification of life are provoked by a traumatic or life altering experience, such as divorce retirement or bereavement, just prior to joining an ecovillage (Fernandez 2014), a trend which is closely reflected in this ecovillage. The subtle tensions around these discourses emphasise the plurivocal nature of the ecovillage (Brown 2006). Members are clearly drawing from the same discourse models, however, they are mobilising different agendas. For example, Thomas speaks of ‘future’ and sustainable ‘development’, whereas Enda is patently more interested in challenging an oppressive unhealthy system. Education discourse

So they said, ‘we’ll come together to do something positive’ so they formed an educational charity. (Noreen)

Noreen reports the educational charity’s formation as the product of cynical protesters disenchantment. For her, education is ‘something positive’, standing in stark contrast to their previous behaviour. Education has a strong role in the global ecovillage movement as such it is represented in this ecovillage’s stated mission statement: ‘To serve as an education, enterprise and research service resource for all’ (The Village website). On purchasing a plot in the ecovillage, members automatically join Sustainable Projects Ireland Limited, the educational charity which Noreen referred to. Despite this being one of the strongest discourses within this organisation, there is some contention around what that membership means. Maura’s comment reflects a widespread attitude within the ecovillage: I am very aware that I joined an educational charity that was established to demonstrate principles of sustainable living to the mainstream. Not everyone joined that organization. Even though they joined, not everyone understood that. (Maura)

Maura positions herself as a protagonist of this organisational objective; she takes her responsibilities in earnest, her membership of this charity is a meaningful association. She differentiates herself from the members, who have, in her view, failed to understand the importance this charity’s ideological role, and presumably have, as a result failed in their duties. This is not the only instance where ecovillage members have expressed an opinion as to how members are ‘supposed’ to behave/think. This is another example of ideologically motivated speech:

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I don’t know, but the official future, so to speak, is for this place to become a centre for environmental education, educating in sustainable living, we have a very successful model for future development so we have every intention that this place is going to run a lot of courses, bring a lot of people in bring a lot of visitors to the village, etc. etc. (Thomas)

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Thomas presents the ‘official future’ of the ecovillage in terms of education and development. He sees education as an economic resource with an illuminatory function. He stresses the fact that as a centre of education, there will be an influx of ‘visitors’. In contrast, Enda’s interest lies in the pedagogical methodologies applied: Some of them are future things that are in emerging, all brand-new new approaches, others are things that our grandparents and great grandparents could do, that we can’t do, that we’re going to have to relearn. So there’s a few things that are coming together. I think education is the key, not just secondary, primary or third-level, but what I work at – is community education or a lifelong learning … I saw this quote there the other week, I love it, we grow old because we stopped learning. (Enda)

Enda marries nostalgia with novelty, old with new. The revival of forgotten skills is an important aspect of ecovillage education (Ergas 2010), and while cutting edge technology and alternative approaches to modern life form the basis many ecovillage courses, the manner in which these are taught harks back to an earlier time. As community education and lifelong learning, Enda sees education as another avenue to challenge the status quo, another remit in which he can practice his political beliefs. This discourse is closely related to the ‘ecovillage as model’ discourse.

‘Ecovillage as model’ discourse

So then the idea came that ‘do you know what? Instead of telling them what not to do, we’ll show them what they should be doing’. (Keith)

Modelling alternative systems as opposed to protesting the current regime represented a new approach for the founding members of this ecovillage. Whereas previously they had addressed political issues through demonstrative protests, the ecovillage challenges the system without confronting it, it is a ‘rejection of the outmoded ‘dominant western worldview’ (Kasper 2008: 12). Modelling, as opposed to proselytising, is a tactic commonly used by environmental influencers (Lorenzen 2014: 3). The ‘model discourse’ thrives at every level of the ecovillage; it regularly emerges in general conversation and is heavily quoted in their literature. For some members this approach is extremely important: I put a higher priority on it [ecovillage as model] than other people do. I think that there are a lot of members of the ecovillage who, am, I think, a lot of people have come down here with some idea that it’s going to be a rural idyll of some sort and they are very protective of their privacy and the rest of it whereas I would have a very, quite a clear view that we’re actually a goldfish bowl. That we’ve set ourselves up as a goldfish bowl and that’s what we are because we’re, the way we live is part of the message and in order to transmit that message, now I’m not talking about absolute out and out rudeness, people coming up and peering through your windows and the rest of it. We as our educational remit, we want people to come down and we want them to tour around, to see the things, we want them to become

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involved, if they wish. So yeah, it is a very high priority with me and it would be one of the reasons that particularly attracted me to the whole project. (Chris)

Chris prioritises this activity over perceived rights such as privacy; he refers to the ecovillage as a ‘goldfish bowl’, a medium for the project’s message. He problematises other members’ lack of commitment to this overarching objective, drawing attention to the ideological tensions which exist within the ecovillage. Again we are reminded that this is not ‘just a green building site’ or an ecological housing estate, that there is a ‘message’. Ecovillage as model is a cohesive discourse, a thread which runs through the ecovillage drawing it together, holding it in place. Chris never postulates as to whom the ecovillage is modelling, Thomas clarifies: But ours is educational. The project was set up to provide a model for future development specifically for Ireland although hopefully some of the lessons will be for other places as well and, am, that’s what the whole thing is designed around that’s what drives it. (Thomas)

In contrast to past intentional communities which sought solitude and social isolation (Schehr 1997), ecovillages actively engage with the dominant culture advancing alternative environmental, social and political systems (Ergas 2010). Thomas speaks of a desire to interact with society, ultimately the effect of such discourse locates the ecovillage within a broader context – that of Irish society. Thomas privileges the ‘ecovillage as model: discourse; for him, the whole project is propelled by this objective. Enda specifically discusses what the ecovillage is actually modelling. He foregrounds the intangible, highlighting the political aspects of the ecovillage: Now, I think is interesting what we’ve done a lot of the systems and methodologies and approaches that we put together are very developed in their own right – even the visible things, renewable energy, organic farming, growing it ourselves, allotments, eco-design, eco-building and high-performance houses. They’re all developed in their own right but not brought together in the living community [with the exception of this ecovillage] and somewhere where people can see them all working. And then of course there is so much more to this than visible things, things that you can see. The eco buildings, the renewable energy, the farm, I think the biggest learning will be how is structured, how we came together and financed, without getting grants, how we avoid conflict, how we encourage self-organization, rather than command and control, a small group driving and steering everything. So it’s an experiment in some ways we’re working in other ways it’s not working. (Enda)

Enda argues that the ‘biggest learning’, or most important lessons, concern the alternative approaches to governing, financing and decision making processes within the ecovillage. He specifically draws attention to the political processes within the ecovillage. The way in which decisions are made, self-organisation, the lack of central leadership is referred to as ‘consensus decision making’ (Cunningham and Wearing 2013). A common feature of ecovillages, it this approach which challenges the ‘characteristics that make bureaucracy undesirable to them: a strict hierarchy, an imbalance of power, impersonality, and inflexibility’ (Kasper 2008: 15). It’s clear from this excerpt that, for Enda, the context of this learning (the living community) is as important as the actual systems and methodologies. Modelling behaviour such as this has been identified as a form of activism by both Woodruff, Hasbrouck and Augustin (2008) and Moisander and Pesonen (2002). This pursuit can be described as a repertoire of protest, in other words, a form of political demonstration associated with social movements (Dubuisson-Quellier, Lamine and Le Velly 2011). How the members engage with the discourse differs dramatically from individual to individual, and is very much

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dependent on their ideological position. Chris views the availability of the ecovillage to the outside as important – other members offset this with their right to privacy. Thomas advocates future development – Enda is actively rejecting western style capitalism. All are valid interpretations of this discourse. These are the discourses which are produced and reproduced. In the next section, a Barthesian analysis demonstrates how myth takes hold of this story, and how in turn these discourses belong to the realm of ideology.

Myth spinning

Stories are always motivated, they convey a larger message than that which exists in their syntax, fated to social usage, they are ‘vehicles of ideology’ (Poletta 2006: 6). Their telling presupposes a signifying purposes (Barthes 1972: 108). Drawing on Barthes’ (1972: 8) framework, which ideologically critiques the language of the mass culture, while analysing the mechanics of the language semiologically, this work seeks to explicate this story’s utility within this cultural context, to understand how it used by the ecovillage and to what end. Here, this structuralist approach is adopted as a tool with which to access the myth as opposed to conduct a scientific analysis of the myth. Myth is not borne of nature; it is manmade, purposely shaped to communicate the desired message (Barthes 1972). Three versions of this story were available for analysis. The first two told the story of how the ecovillage came to be, they had a shared timeline and recounted similar motivations (Noreen’s and Keith’s). Enda’s personal anecdote describes the same event, however its connection to the birth of the ecovillage is unstated. The material which myth works upon is not chosen arbitrarily; it reflects aspects of the message which motivates the myth. This story is replete with references to subdued activism, transformation and ideological positioning. However, some elements are dropped, and it is in this sense that myth glosses. The story is imbued with further meaning, reworked to reflect the ideological position of the ecovillage. This analysis of these stories reveals the myth induced ‘nature’ of the ecovillage. The first reading regards the oral text as a signifier of an event (the signified), the sign which results from this relation, the story, represents the origins of the ecovillage, the political leanings of its founders, their histories, the location and circumstances in which the ecovillage was conceived. Myth takes hold of the sign and the story is raised to the second order level. The sign becomes signifier and is imbued with new meaning. It is now viewed within a larger ideological framework; the young men lose their rich personal history of agitation and activism (in their original form they were not symbols). The concept, in this case the discursive bundle, overwhelms the event, the story recedes and the ecovillage is relocated to broader cultural contexts and histories. The ecovillage’s emergence is placed on a national timeline of activism, aligned with the first steps towards sustainability and alternative thinking (Leonard 2008). The message, greater than the story, belongs to the realm of political ideology. See Figure 1.

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The myth which emerges is a ‘harmonious display of essences’, reducing the founding tenets of the ecovillage to three, digestible bites, ecovillage as model, education and transformation, thus despite being not of nature itself the ecovillage, as an entity, is given a ‘nature’ (these discourses are social constructions, distorted by myth, they are transformed and appear as natural characteristics of the ecovillage). This ‘nature’ is the signification of this semiological system – it serves as a point on which the differing ideological positions can agree and around which its members can coalesce. The linguistic analysis revealed strong political content, however myth undoes this, once uttered the story freezes, and it is depoliticised thus allowing the members to step outside of the political arena. Myth makes the story look innocent, unmotivated, ‘just the way it is’. It is this feature which allows ideology to subsist ‘entirely in its myriad networks of cultural mythologies’ (Hendy 2002: 290). Discussion

The first part of this Barthesian analysis was conducted discursively, revealing three prevailing discourses prevalent within this community, and thereby granting access to the mythical systems connotative meaning. All mythical speech is motivated (Barthes 1972). In this case it is an exposition of the ecovillage’s nature, and that nature is ideological. Members are bound by this ideology, expected to behave according to norms and values (Oliver and Johnston 1999) which exist within an ecovillage of this nature. It is an environmental ecovillage: education, transformation and modelling behaviours are common traits of this form of intentional community (Kirby 2003; Ergas 2010). This research reveals how different members draw on the same discourse models to activate different agendas; in addition the members demonstrate different levels of commitment to the espoused ecovillage ideologies, and are critiqued on their level of participation. We are reminded that ‘ideologies have the cognitive function of organising the social representations (attitudes, knowledge) of the group, and thus indirectly monitor the group-related social practices’ (van Dijk 1995: 248). Thus it would appear that ideology has not quite abandoned its pejorative legacy (Oliver and Johnston 1999). The mythical analysis explains this phenomenon to some degree. The act of telling of this story, using these words, in this context serves to create an ideological nature which allows members of that community to mobilise the myth in service of tailored and multi-faceted agendas (Thompson 2004). This is made possible by the fuzzy nature of the concept, although the form is solid (and credible as an independent whole), the concept (the discourses) are shapeless, malleable. Thus they are ripe for appropriation: Chris prioritises modelling the systems and buildings within the ecovillage where other members moderate this with the boundaries of their privacy; Thomas advocates future development; Enda is actively rejecting western style capitalism. Despite appearing to be in conflict, these agendas all belong to a broadly environmental ideology, they share an objective – environmentalism protectionism, despite having additional or supplementary objectives (Oliver and Johnston 1999). This trait is discussed in terms of ‘motivations’ – contrasting objectives such as self-fulfillment and political reform compel ecovillage membership (Kirby 2003; Kasper 2008). Political science aids in this explanation by prescribing that ideology be treated as a ‘variable phenomenon that ranges on a continuum from a tightly and rigidly connected set of values and beliefs at one end to a loosely coupled set of values and beliefs at the other end, and that functions, in either case, as both a constraint on and a resource for constructing and making sense of the so-called “imaginary”’ (Snow and Byrd 2007: 123). This framework gives the members agency, allowing them to use the available discourse models to serve their personal agendas and to ‘live’ ideologically within the confines of their personal beliefs. Thus members have a dyadic relationship with their community’s ideological tenets, simultaneously drawing on them to form as a basis for this intentional community, a bond with other members a distinct identity (van Dijk 1995), and in turn

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they are tasked with reproducing these ideologies in their everyday lives and be bound, to some extent, by a set of community norms. Members of this ecovillage exhibit a wide range of ideological beliefs, bound by a common environmental theme. This understanding of ideology and its parlance with myth exposes how such a community ‘works’. Ideologies are learned, and taught (Oliver and Johnston 1999). This myth serves as an educational tool, it links the ecovillage to environmental politics, thus lending the ecovillage credibility: it educates new comers as to what’s important to this ecovillage and it creates a history which can be drawn on to create new meanings, as required.

Conclusion

Drawing from political science and linguistics, this paper has explored the connection between myth, ideology and community. In the first instance, a discursive analysis reveals three prevalent ecovillage discourses. These are then interrogated in the context in which they subsist. The findings indicate that members mobilise these capacious discourses in service of varied ideological objectives. A Barthesian analysis examined the story as myth. Myth is a system of communication, it exists at two levels (denotative and connotative), the message it carries hovers above the object which transports it; in this case, the founding story. The analysis demonstrates how the story, as myth, is used to locate the ecovillage in broader discourses, to give it a sense of history within a national context, and to endow it with a truly activist origin, while maintaining an appropriate distance from any ‘negative’ politics. Initially it appears that this community is ideologically aligned, but closer inspection reveals nuances made manifest in how the members ‘live’ the discourses. It is at this point that myth interjects; it soothes over these differences and creates a vacuum which can contain these differences. Thus myth, in its capacity as a ‘harmonious display of essences’, connotes a nature, a shared ‘sign’, around which these members coalesce; it presents as a point of convergence for an assortment of heterogeneous ideological strands. This study contributes to research streams interested in micro-societies, ecovillages, alternative consumption and community mythmaking. Ideology and myth are employed to peer beyond the boundaries of this community, bringing a depth of understanding to how communities such as this are actualised and then maintained. References

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Creating harmony in crisis periods: Exporting cultural values through Yin-Yang mythology Amee Kim

University of Leicester

Europe is currently living through some of the repercussions of the financial crisis from 2007/2008, and its seriousness now is apparent. Yet in 2007 it was much less obvious what the outcomes would be, and broadcasted and printed media struggled to communicate the importance of what was happening. This was even more so in South Korea, which was and is peripheral to the financial institutions that propagated the crisis and had endured a more visible crisis in its recent history. The cultural values in Korean everyday life are strongly linked to the principles as Yin-Yang mythology, which are assumed to have created the world, keep the world in balance, and guided people into a specific way of life. These principles can be found in financial crisis media coverage, and impact people’s reactions to specific events and the future. This paper examines how the financial crisis was represented on front covers of printed media in Korea, specifically using Yin-Yang mythology that permeates Korean life, and how this representation affects the view of people towards the crisis.

Introduction

Front covers of economic magazines have been used to saturate a certain character with mythological aura in which economic actors are purposely formed to become mythic characters in financial channels or markets. Economic forces are perceived to form these crisis events of meaningful proportions, nearly unreal and otherworldly in nature. They are certainly imbued with deified characters by their appearances and also by reason of the fact that they are recognised within the mythical space created by front covers. In Korean culture, these characters can be perceived according to their Yin-Yang positive-negative content (that is, containing dual characteristics). In previous work (Kim 2012), the content of front covers from Korean weekly magazines over the period 2007–2013 was analysed by using Yin-Yang semiotic quantitative codes. Quantitative analysis was performed by grading the background colour, headline text colour and vowel structure according to their Yin-Yang content. The sum of the three values was then compared with an economic timeline of the financial crisis. Trends in opportunity and disaster were further investigated by determining the moving average of the sum. Results suggest that during severe global financial crises, such as the Northern Rock crisis, statistically significant peaks towards Yin can be found in the front covers. This shows the possibility of using Korean economic magazine covers for analysing the impact of not only financial events in Korea, but also worldwide events. However, as abruptly as these peaks occur, they also disappear. Therefore, the influence of media on the general public’s psychology and behaviour was further investigated. It is proposed that, although media presents itself as an isolated, objective observer of crisis events, it is actually an integral element of these events. Significant crisis events typically happen only if there is similar thinking among large numbers of people, and media is an essential vehicle for spreading these ideas. Over the years, the urge to maintain sales in a growing competitive media environment has forced media professions to be rather skilled at claiming public attention. To keep the public’s attention, in many circumstances, manipulation of facts occurs. Media 232

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can therefore ‘create’ crises, but also opportunities. In this sense, even though the Yin-Yang analysis as described above gives a consistent, global overview of the financial crisis and people’s reaction to it, a more detailed understanding could be achieved by a deeper analysis of the front covers. The analysis beyond the literal investigation of the front covers can be achieved by also analysing connotative and mythical structures within front covers. The mythological and connotative analysis of Korean front covers was performed by discussing the contents of 45 covers with four designers working for Korean economic magazines. Designers of economic magazines build up an intended relation between signs and their signification, for capturing social identities or values of the audience. This study shows how front covers use specific signs to represent crisis. These signs are linked to the Yin-Yang mythology. As these particular kinds of signs arise from the Korean culture, they show difference in interpretation compared to Western culture. The difficulty of Western semiotic analysis will be contrasted to the Korean semiotics with its defined relationship between colours/vowels and positivity or negativity. The study also shows that Korean magazines tend to use specific signs for specific crisis ‘clusters’, i.e. bankruptcy, debt, unemployment, depression and survival. For each cluster, an attempt was made on a selected front cover to link the mythological world created by designers to real-life events in the financial crisis. Western perspectives in semiotics

The idea for this type of analysis was influenced by the spread of ‘meaning as being a process of negotiation’ for understanding signs (Fiske 1990: 85). Barthes (1973) argued that a sign produces distinct levels of signification based on denotation, connotation and myth. Denotation means that illustrations can be literally accepted or seen as common sense within a community, society or country. The second level of signification corresponds to the layer of connotation, in which images represent ideas, values or an ideology articulated through cultural associations or representations (Barthes 1973; Williamson 1978; Hall 1998; De Cock, Fitchett and Farr 2001; Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001; Cock et al. 2005). A clear distinction between the connotative and mythic level exists, since the former represents cultural values in a natural, realistic context (Williamson 1978; Hall 1998; Emmison and Smith 2000). Bearing these levels in mind, Barthes (1977: 15–31, 32–51) stated that ‘in photography connotation can be analytically distinguished from denotation’. Fiske (1990: 86) argues that ‘denotation is what is photographed, connotation is how it is photographed’. Put simply, the denotative level is defined by those structures, text and/or images in cover images that straightforwardly express the current issue. The level of connotation describes the use of hidden meanings, which can only be understood if one is familiar with the same cultural values as the author of the text or the designer of an image. An image, the famous Paris-Match front cover (Barthes 1973: 116), shows how Barthes’ semiotic analysis can be understood in relation to three levels of signification. The image shows an Algerian child soldier saluting, probably to the French flag. France was a great empire. Everyone should show loyalty to the national flag, regardless of any colour discrimination. The implication of this image captures the colonialism situation, by showing a young African. In relation to a denotative meaning, an African young soldier in a French uniform salutes the French flag. In relation to a connotative meaning, an intended combination of Frenchness and militariness is hidden in the image. Connotation could go further than in this image. In some cases, mythological figures relative to the ideology of the image’s public can be included in the image to convey hidden messages (Williamson 1978; Du Gay 1997; Hall 1998; Emmison and Smith 2000). These denotative and connotative meanings help reach the mythic level of how the world could be reflected by means of a specific ideology: French imperiality. In such a way, mythical analysis does away with complication of human acts, awarding them simplicity. It thus creates a world without any contradictions.

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On the other hand, it has been argued that Barthes’ semiotic analysis shows some weaknesses in the sense that there is less possibility to look at any pure denotative meaning in pictures or images. When people take an image or picture at a certain time, they tend to choose a particular angle and capture certain objects which they want to grasp in a particular frame. In this sense, pictures or images are inherently subject to convey connotative meanings, because they exist in a certain frame and capture a certain object from people’s own reasons. As Entman (1993: 52) suggests, ‘To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient’. Correspondingly, photographers tend to choose particular aspects of an intended reality and make it prominent, resulting in connoted meanings (Lockwood 2007). According to Scannell (1998: 256), ‘pictures are both systems of representation that, in ordinary practice and use, misrepresent the reality which they re-present’. The limitation of images which are distorted or have biased perspectives on the reality of the financial or economic crisis can also arise from financial markets by means of the overwhelming power of media. A deluge of images or pictures could compete with the financial crisis: the financial crisis could promote or encourage the media to stimulate people’s perception, and vice versa. Marazzi (2008) emphasised that media have been a dominant engine for exaggerating the financial market bubble. Baudrillard (1995) makes a similar point in relation to the feature of the media during the first Gulf War: the media promotes the war, the war promotes the media, and eventually media pictures compete with the war. In relation to financial channels, the role of media lies in propagating speculative bubbles, fostering stronger feedback about prices changes (Shiller 2005). A huge number of pictures have been shown in which Northern Rock’s retail depositors are queuing to withdraw their deposits, implying how media use the unwelcome and chaotic situation, and influence an individual’s behaviour during a crisis. In fact, retail deposits are the most stable arrangement of funding available to banks (Shin 2009), and the retail depositors’ savings accounts were not at risk. Certainly, media stimulate the ‘irrational exuberance’ in financial markets, and spread intended ideas or thoughts, inspiring herd behaviour, where a group of people behave together while lacking expert direction. The representational world can be mediated and portrayed by selected pictures (Baudrillard 1995). The media can convey a distorted representation or misrepresent the current circumstance in crisis times. It thus governs the production and meanings of sign systems and discourse in crisis times. Besides this, signs are used to represent culturally something specific in a certain economic period. In such a way, semiotic analysis does not perceive any universal form of signs in language, and alternatively it lays down significance on limited examples of a culture in a period. Although economic and social life was marked by unrest at a certain moment, universal language would not change easily, and connotative meanings attributed to language would stay in the same condition (Rodger 2010). As Barthes emphasised, if connotative meanings are culturally laid down, the universal code would not be suitable. People in different cultures would live in their unique agreement of sign languages and accordingly they recognise it would be difficult to understand another with different culture values, social practices and class systems (Rodger 2010). Nevertheless, Barthes agrees that ‘connotations will be read differently by different individuals and groups, depending on factors such as social class, education, political orientation and so on’ (in Leak 1994: 22). It indicates that cultural differences in certain values correspond to different interpretations of a sign system. Misunderstandings are drawn from the result of different meanings (Lockwood 2007). It is thus clear that Barthes’ semiotic analysis is too fluid in terms of meaning production. In terms of visual language, semiotics itself slightly emphasises Latin-based Western language or non-pictorial language. However, Yin-Yang, which stands for the Chinese pictogram, can be less fluid and codified.

Mythology in Korean culture

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One particular difference is that, in Western culture, individual letters are not directly perceived as positive or negative, whereas the structure of Korean letters specifically defines a letter as being Yin or Yang (Wright 2004; Harkness 2012). Eventually, the hidden codes correspond to unique yet peculiar cultural values which are engaged in, from a Korean perspective, the YinYang mythology. The mythology of Yin disaster and Yang opportunity is strongly embedded in the Korean culture: ‘human beings, organisations, and cultures, like all other universal phenomena, intrinsically crave variation and harmony for their sheer existence and healthy development’ (Fang 2011: 34). The Yin-Yang influence can be found in, for example, colours, such that specific colours are considered Yin (blue), Yang (red) or intermediate (yellow). A similar characterisation can be found in the structure of vowels, especially in the orientation of the substructures which build up vowel lines, circles, and so on. Studying the Yin-Yang contents in magazines provides an opportunity to analyse the influence of the crisis on Korean society, as it allows a quantification of the general view of the public and its behaviour during the constant fluctuations in financial disaster and opportunity. Analysing various aspects of crisis events on front covers reveals that media draw special attention to cultural differences in crisis situations. If media, for example, emphasise serious or disastrous aspects of a crisis that could affect people through unemployment, debt, bankruptcy and depression, it would use various signs – colour, text and theme – to represent negative impressions. These signs are broadly established in individual, organisational, social values and finally created into a cultural product, since all forms of economic activities or events are tied into, and rely on, cultural context. By combining these aspects, designers can create a mythological world of financial Yin-Yang, which can be easily interpreted by Korean readers. It also allows designers to communicate a strong message, by manipulating real-life pictures such that they become part of the mythology. Contrastingly, the interpretation of colour in the Western world is much more ambiguous, and highly dependent on the context in which the colour is represented, as well as the mood of the person exposed to the context. To give some examples, red could be interpreted as a colour of danger, i.e. the red stop traffic sign, but also courage and love (red heart). Yellow could be linked to happiness (sunshine), but also to warning and betrayal (bees and wasps). As a last example, blue could be seen in a context of confidence, blue sky or harmony, but also coldness or sadness, i.e. feeling blue. The context and other colours which are co-represented might help in the interpretation, as well as the tendency of a colour to a more light or dark tinge. For key text vowel analysis, a similar problem arises in that in most cases there is no direct positive or negative feeling with most letters. A couple of interpretations could be put forward: ‘o’ being perfectly round and therefore perfect, and ‘x’ as a signifier of error. To circumvent this problem, the cover title is more generally analysed as conveying a positive or negative message on a particular background. From a Western perspective, it becomes therefore difficult to develop a quantitative analytical system for the interpretation of the general mood represented by the media. Commonalities in different clusters of front covers

The interpretation of colour in the Western world is much more ambiguous, and highly dependent on the context in which the colour is represented. However, the Korean culture of YinYang allows for an independent analysis of colours and text as being positive, negative or neutral. Besides this, it can be seen that specific aspects of crisis will be represented differently in Korean magazines. It becomes therefore possible to analyse ‘clusters’ of front covers depicting for example bankruptcy, debt, unemployment, depression and survival. The following paragraphs will give an overview of some clusters.

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Figure 1 Examples of the world economy represented on Korean magazine covers

In this sample, Korean designers want to immediately clarify that the cover news is of international consequence. In all images shown in Figure 1, a direct or denotative representation of foreign countries can be seen. For example, geographical landmarks are aptly used to signify world news, i.e. Japanese islands, a globe and Niagara Falls, as well as foreign currencies, i.e. Japanese Yen, Chinese Yuan, US dollars, national flags, (for example the US flag), or symbols (Chinese dragon). For national news, there is no geographical link to Korea, see examples below. Upon one look of the cover, the reader can make a distinction between national and international problems. The representation of bankruptcy

Figure 2 An overview of representations of bankruptcy on Korean magazine covers: (a) industrial bankruptcy, (b) governmental bankruptcy

(a) (a)

(b) (

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Figure 2 shows examples of how Korean designers represent bankruptcy in government and industry. A very clear resemblance can be seen in the various images: something is breaking down or on the verge of breaking down, being it a champagne glass, a battery almost at the limit of energy consumed or a cell phone falling on its side. The similarity of the cover images concretises a contrastive use of colours: something bright or dark, i.e. red vs. blue and yellow vs. blue. This shows the clear link between bankruptcy as the cause or consequence of uncertainty in business and a warning that business is breaking down.

The representation of debt

In both images of Figure 3, the issue of debt is shown as an unFigure 3 Examples of the representation of debt in certainty. The eraser tries to erase Korean economic magazine covers the LH debt, but the debt is not erased fully. It is unclear how much effort has been given to erase the debt, which leads to the following uncertainty: if people put more effort into it, can debt be erased, or will it always exist? For a company, the answer to this question will guide the future of management. This uncertainty can also be seen from the eye of the employee, knowing what is going on with the company. These many questions will increase pressure in the company. For the half-open door, a similar idea can be seen. The door is still half open, and a bright light is showing outside, but in the room it is dark. Will the door be completely opened at some time, or will it be completely closed? Only time can tell. The representation of unemployment

Figure 4 Unemployment as represented in Korean magazine covers. All images are reproduced with permission

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Although only two images are shown in Figure 4, both represent the idea of employees or unemployed trying to climb up a wall or ladder to reach the top. In both cases, it is also shown that climbing to the top is a difficult process, and not everyone will make it. Another idea is that, in both cases, ‘cartoon’ versions of humans – drawings of humans or joint puppets – are used to represent the news. In one aspect, it conveys a message that companies or the government might be laughing with lower-ranked employees, and use them as puppets to run the economy, work hard, have a tough life, pay many taxes. Additionally, these cartoons do not have a face, which can be interpreted in two perspectives. First, it is not always easy for a government or employers to identify people in trouble needing to find a job or make money. These people are often overlooked, or even neglected on purpose. On the other hand, the unemployed themselves feel overlooked by the government, as they feel that nobody cares for them or looks after them: they are alienated from the rest of the world. Also, employees working in multinational companies might feel like being a ‘number in the list’, and therefore feel as if their identity is taken away from them. Nobody from the board is looking at the employee’s personal talents, they are treated as a group and will be analysed as such. Employees therefore feel that there is no way for them to improve their quality of life. Here, climbing the ladder comes into play again. If one wants to be identified as an individual, one should not only be working in the factory, but try to do an excellent job to become a board member or CEO. Compare this, for example, to the silhouette climbing the money mountain in the outdoor clothing cover in Figure 5, middle image. Although also anonymised, he more clearly has the morphology of a man, not a cartoon version. He can be and is identified as an individual. Besides this, he is already very high on the mountain, indicated by the height of the buildings in the background. He also seems to have good climbing gear, and is therefore in very good shape to climb all the way to the top. The representation of survival

Figure 5 An overview of the representation of survival in Korean magazines

In the five images shown in Figure 5, one could argue from a Korean point of view that people trying to survive have reached the ‘halfway point’, but ‘they are not there yet’. To clarify this further, looking at the cover images with the ships, Korean people will see it as if the man in the rowing boat was able to make it alive out of the sinking Capitalism ship and he is going to the New ship. However, he is not on the ship yet, and many things can still happen before he reaches the ship, e.g. his boat could be turned over by the waves. For the image of the tap, Korean households are reducing the use of water, and they are doing quite well. However, some water is still dripping out of the tap. A lot of money can be lost by leaving your tap to drip, so the Korean people will have to turn the tap a bit tighter to avoid big losses. In terms of the horse race, the number 2 has taken the lead from number 1, however, the finish is not in sight yet, and number 1 can still beat him to the finish. In the next, the climber

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has gone quite high onto the mountain, but he has not reached the top yet and might not get there. Finally, the person has reached the emergency exit, but he is still in the building, trying to get out, what if the roof should suddenly collapse above his head? In a more general view, one could see this as the designers being cautious about conveying good news to the people. They do not want to be too optimistic and claim that the financial crisis has finished. They want to show that people are on the right track, but still have to work hard to get out of the crisis completely. Based on the representation of different crisis clusters, the following section illustrates six examples of front covers which were discussed with designers. It will show how the designers use signs in creating cultural products and what kinds of cultural differences are engaged in economic magazine front covers in crisis periods in Korea. Four interview participants are abbreviated as follows: Senior Designer of MK Economy – SdMK; Junior Designer of MK Economy – JdMK; Senior Designer of Economy Insight – SdEI; and Senior Designer of MoneyWeek – SdMW. Cultural products

Korean economic depression: doubtful ascension which the dragon is overwhelming on the globe

In Figure 6, a world map is shown with all countries shown in red and a dragon on top of it, indicating that China has taken over the world. At the moment many people would agree that China is indeed becoming the world’s economic superpower, albeit because of the many Western companies having facilities in China and the huge production of goods in China. The people on the front cover seem very unhappy, and are travelling into a dark tunnel, indicating that Chinese employees are sad and have a bad life. In relation to its connotative significance, SdEI reports: On the image, even though the five people on the left bottom look fine, a series of people of the right bottom go into the dark tunnel, just like manufactured products in factories. The idea of the cover is drawn from the movie Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which people were described as bolts with constant physical work. The red colour and dragon of the front cover represent China. The dragon is holding the Chinese currency Yuan in the mouth. The cover indicates that China is developing, but industry employees, who play a crucial role in the process of economic development, are unhappy. The working people are concentrated on automatically managed jobs or physical work without any creativity in workplaces, they have no future, they are getting used to the stable life, and they are losing their own dreams, so the entire social atmosphere is getting gloomy and dark.

The economic news of the cover story helps further understanding of the denotative and connotative meaning. In the decade before the global financial crisis, the world economy grew at an unprecedented rate, forced by continuous economic development without any inflation. Just as a mirage, the US did not Figure 6 ‘The unstable ascension’, July 2010, from Economy Insight

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only enjoy the prosperous circumstance, but also other countries received economic recovery in the Middle-East, South America and Botswana. The truth of their recovery, however, was that employees produced and globally supplied cheap goods in international factories for a low salary and in poor working environments. Due to the global financial turmoil, the US started neglecting these countries’ industry, and their recoveries faded. Meanwhile China increased its global influence. The value of Yuan increased, and the level of salaries was also increased in order to support an economy which was becoming more consumer-centred. Chinese industries, which were much closer to the left or communism than capitalism, are changing into market-centred principles which are the core engine of capitalism. The Chinese economy has therefore grown significantly, even during the financial crisis. The humanity of the working environment in China has, however, suffered from this increase. SdEI claimed, ‘Chinese economic development would not be possible under condition of most of people’s sacrifice and hard-working, since the globe is full of thick blood from the working people’. The front cover is thus illustrated as full of Yin-characteristic features in the blue and grey background of the globe and white coloured key text, along with the overwhelming red blood on the globe. Governmental bankruptcy: crisis of Korean Electrical Power Industry

Figure 7 ‘The crisis of Korean Electrical Power Industry’, October 2011 front cover of MK Economy In terms of a denotative significance, in Figure 7, a huge battery with several buildings which are blurrily lightened is placed in a black background colour. A very small portion of the red part of the battery implies that the power of the battery is getting diminished. The text on the battery conveys two different signs: ‘Wee-Ki’ referring to crisis and ‘Korean Electrical Power Industry’. The latter is linked to the diminishing battery by using the red as the text colour. The first line of the headline text ‘Wee-Ki’, meaning crisis, is differently coloured in black. The movement of the vowel structure is also perceived as being down. Linking the denotative meaning of the cover to this connotative interpretation, JdMK said: Although our magazine is unlikely to use black colour on front covers, it is difficult to make it bright because of ‘The crisis of the Korean Electrical Power Industry’. It is non-sense to use bright colour for the headline, because it literally represents ‘Crisis’. Due to the characteristics of the industry, a low red battery power providing many buildings is shown as a metaphorical concept of warning message.

This story claimed the impossibility for economic activities to continue without a stable electricity supply. Korea has been proud of its economic and stable electricity supply. Even though the cost of electricity was estimated as half the price of developed countries, the quality of the electricity was not far from the developed ones, which was a very huge credit to the Korean government and Korean Electrical Power Industry (KEPCO). However, due to the chaos of a

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blocked electric supply on 15 September 2011, the myth of low price and good quality electricity collapsed. Since electric power was suddenly cut off in 212 million households, it raised a series of concerns which were centred on risky, non-professional management, poor reporting systems and the reality of electric power cost. This led to a disastrous situation in the electrical industry. As ordinary people’s voices were getting loud and critical, the government attempted to punish 17 people who took responsibility for the chaos, but the angry voices towards the fundamental problems did not disappear. This front cover originated from these structural problems in KEPCO. As a result, the unlit and low-lit flats indicate poverty, which is also symbolised by the nearly empty battery. It further shows that not much energy is left, and it will not take a long time for all the lights to be shut. There is a danger of battery death, which could symbolically mean the death of the electrical power industry. The black, grey and red colours also show the signs for this approaching danger or Yin. Industrial bankruptcy: collapsing entrepreneur businesses

In Figure 8, one thing immediately drawing attention is the apparent lifelessness of the buildings. There are no windows or signs of activity. The sky is grey, and the city seems abandoned by people. Some buildings are aslant. This gives the feeling that the city and the businesses are being neglected and are at risk of collapsing. The sunset enhances the idea that the end of these businesses is near. The yellow and red colours also do not look vivid, which could give the idea of lost hope and danger, businesses going into the red, etc. The very bright white colours in the left of the image could, however, give a sign of hope for the future, albeit little. The grey buildings give a feeling of uncertainty. Figure 8 ‘Is the entrepreneur business collapsing?’ May 2008 front cover of MK Economy

Contrasting colours can be used to augment extreme crisis times in business. SdMK said, ‘The buildings represent different statuses of entrepreneur businesses in the economic crisis. There is a clear distinction between well managed entrepreneur businesses in red and poorly managed entrepreneur businesses in grey and blue’. Another aspect is the background onto which the buildings are projected. Buildings that are positioned within a bright red background are an important influence on the national or even global market, whereas the buildings with a grey background are self-centred businesses. This shows four different situations in which a business can be. First, it can be badly managed and selfcentred, which will lead to a collapse of the business in the short term. On the other hand, currently well-managed businesses which are too self-centred will also collapse, be at a more prolonged term. The designer added:

The red colour of the image represents overheating, including other similar colours for conveying a variety of events on the entrepreneur businesses. Although there are some well-managed entrepreneur businesses, they don’t give any huge impacts to others, and they are on the border of collapsing themselves, indicated by grey colour background. Thus, the cover image shows the glowing sky, rather than clear sky, and the sunset, rather than sunrise as the opposing nature.

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Third, the cover implies that badly managed businesses with a high influence might find ways to restore their businesses. Lastly, well-managed, highly influential businesses have a good chance of long-lasting survival, even though the current financial situation is uncertain. Unfortunately, not many buildings are shown as such on the image. In connection with the distinct colour code, Korean letters were also used for conveying the disastrous event. The second line of the cover’s headline, muneojina – meaning collapsing – is slightly aslant. ‘If it is texted in upright, it looks too formal, but if it is aslant, it can be wellconveyed to people how seriously the self-employed business is collapsing’, claimed SdMK.

Debt: inerasable debt

In Figure 9, an eraser was used ineffectively to try to erase the word debt. The ineffectiveness might indicate one of two problems. First, it could be that the people trying to erase the debt did not put sufficient efforts in their attempt. On the other hand, it could be that these people are doing a great job, but there is just so much debt that it seems impossible to erase all of it. Depending on which of the problems is happening, a company would have to decide to further reduce the costs, firing people or complete shutdown. This indicates uncertainty, which is also indicated by the grey colour. Additionally, the headline of the cover image uses the English word ‘debt’ written in grey. In October 2012, the governmentally run LH Korea Land & Housing Corporation had lots of debts. According to the Korea Times (2012), LH’s debt came from undertaking lots of projects which would not return profits. The cover story mentioned this as a warning to Korean fiscal stability due to its snowballing debts. In relation to a denotative significance, SdMK said: LH tried to pay back the debt, and to erase the debt, but it could not remove all debt. The concept of the cover image draws special attention to the ‘eraser’ used by LH to erase ‘Debt’. After much rubbing, the letter ‘t’ on ‘Debt’ was gradually erased, but it was not perfectly erased.

From the perspective on a connotative meaning, a hidden code on the cover is that LH tried to erase some unprofitable business areas, but it did not work at all. It seems to pay back for the ‘Debt’, but the process of paying back is not clearly sorted out. This induced suspicion that the company could have been involved in illegal business. Embedded in this economic news, the concept of ‘Debt’ itself is always negative. Besides this, writing ‘debt’ in English gives the idea that people are unfamiliar with it and might not understand it completely, similar to Korean people being not familiar with the English language. As a result, the front cover contains many Yin-characteristic features in which the text is coloured grey, as well as the background which can easily convey the catastrophic circumstance in LH.

Figure 9 The October 2010 front cover of MK Economy

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On Figure 10, people are looking at or climbing into a blue funnel. They are dressed up, but the black faces indicate that they remain undistinguishable. The ladders indicate that people have to climb up to reach an important goal in their lives. The setup of the ladders shows that the climb is complicated. The funnel indicates that people are filtered drastically. People are also not identifiable, as they are just cartoon versions of humans. However, from their expressions it looks like they are confused about something. In general, the cover conveys a message that hard times are occurring. The blue colour of the funnel could indicate the boldness of companies in filtering young people for getting a job, and the yellow could indicate the envy or jealousy among young people for having or not having a job. From a perspective on a connotative or symbolic meaning, JdMK said: This image conveys a huge difficulty to get jobs for young people. The blue funnel, which makes youth employment up from the bottom, signifies a needle’s eye which implies how tough it is for job seekers to get though the eye. It is turned over for emphasising how competitive the job market is. Figure 10 ‘The society in which half of young people have no jobs’, March 2013 cover of MK Economy

Correspondingly, two hidden codes were used to represent the seriousness of the youth employment: first, the funnel refers to a kind of passage where the job seekers want to achieve the higher social position or classes with building up their careers in Korea. Second, the blue colour of the funnel represents gloomy or depressing moments in economic crisis, because it is currently really competitive for young people to find jobs. Importantly, while the total level of employment was steadily increasing, youth employment steadily decreased. In 2005, the rate of Korean youth employment reached about 50 per cent, and it was 40.4 per cent in 2012. In this situation, when this demographic did not find any part-time or low-salary jobs, they were forced to enter the NEET group – Not in Education, Employment or Training. According to the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training, ‘In a disastrous environment where getting a job is very difficult, young employees having jobs far from their level of education is increasing’ (Park 2013). As a result, the blue funnel, representing Yin, corresponds to the gloomy society which fails to get jobs. However, the background colour of the cover is in neutral yellow or Yin-Yang intermediate, even though the economic news of the cover corresponds to the catastrophic circumstance in society: ‘The economy magazine is sold in a public stall. The bright colour should be stunning to draw a close attention to people’, claimed JdMK. It implies that the front cover is continuously communicating with Yin-Yang harmony by using the dual crisis times which can be represented as the dark society and the hope for the future, including the increase of magazine sales.

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Depression survival: collapsing capitalism, but approaching something new

The front cover of Figure 11 focuses on opposing characteristics of two different occasions: collapsing Capitalism, but approaching New. SdEI said, in a connotative significance, but a different perspective from the Western idea: Firstly, the huge ship of Capitalism is collapsing into the sea, and one man on the rescue boat is rowing to the red ship New. The red ship hangs down a ladder, and two birds are sitting on the ship. He is getting close to something new and the red ship seems to be almost ready for allowing him to take him on board. Secondly, the English text Capitalism is using the calligraphy of a bubble drink company which is obviously a symbol of capitalism. In this sense, this Capitalism has not proved any impact on the current economic environment. Lastly, the representation of the ladder means that a ‘new’ economic system is ready for being accepted. There are also two birds from Noah’s Ark, on the red ship. The doves brought leaves to Noah’s Ark after the flood according to Bible, and they are a kind of hidden code which represents that better times will be starting.

Figure 11 ‘Exodus from Capitalism: An experiment for a happy economy’, January 2012. Reproduced with permission from Economy Insight

In terms of Western perception, however, the cover can be interpreted from three features. First, the direction of the rowing ship could be ambiguous as it seems to head for the collapsing boat rather than something New (as claimed by the designer). This could indicate that people are refusing to leave the capitalistic idea, although new and better ideas exist. Besides this, the new ship is only partially visible. This might convey a message that although people are working on new ideas, they are not yet finished or ready to be used. Second, the expression on the rower’s face is illustrated as half-regret about ‘capitalism’ and half-fear about the ‘new’ economic system. Lastly, Western people could perceive the birds on the New ship as seagulls, since the background of the cover happened in the sea. However, they are doves according to the designer’s explanation. In particular, the motivation of the doves comes from Judeo-Christian religion which could show a different perspective from religion tendencies in Korea. According to South Korean National Statistical Office, in 2005, about 47 per cent of the population considered themselves as non-religious, 23 per cent followed Buddhism, about 18 per cent was Protestant and about 11 per cent Catholic, with about 2 per cent following other religions. From this perspective, the doves which were used to represent hope drawn from the Bible deeply rooted in Western culture could be seen as rather ironical since YinYang, Confucianism or Buddhism receive much higher priority in Korean everyday life. Nevertheless, the cover image is deeply engaged in two contrary structures or the opposing nature of Yin-Yang, which can easily convey the purpose of the economic news. First, the collapsing ship of Capitalism corresponds to coldness and negative events or something disastrous, and simultaneously the boat of New is approaching from left to right with red-colouring as warmness and a positive event or something opportunistic. This duality on the cover represents Yin-

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Yang harmony in crisis times: it is clearly engaged in this parallel composition between Capitalism as something tragic and New as something hopeful, based on Korean colour codes.1 Conclusion

These findings suggest that the characteristics of financial breakdown show interconnected patterns in harmony with crisis events. During long-standing crisis peaks, the mythology of Yin-Yang balance highlights both sides of disaster and opportunity in crises. One can observe that during crisis these signs are not always interpreted similarly from a Western point of view. Economic magazine front covers are dominantly used to represent the seriousness during crisis periods. Nevertheless, they show crisis times not only as disastrous occasions, but also as opportunistic times. Even during the darkest hours of crisis, economists and business-related people want to see bright sparks of hope for a better future. For example, Korean companies do not particularly think of financial crisis as a situation that places them in such dire circumstances they cannot respond to. Crises also contain opportunities to compete against monopolistic companies. When a market falls and assets lose value, it could be a good time to invest. The characteristics of financial breakdown show the same polar but interconnected patterns as the opposing nature of Yin and Yang harmony, and this in turn gives rise to representations that highlight both sides. Importantly, if cover images are designed to represent the dual characteristics of crisis times, the mythology of Yin-Yang harmony is constantly appearing either negative or positive coverage in what can be called cultural products of Korea. It is also important for magazine designers to try to give a positive twist to a crisis (and vice versa), which then leads to improved sales of the magazine. The interaction of colours with the message, be it a positive or negative one, is crucial. In connection with the selection of colours, cover images in crisis times reflect disastrous and depressive occasions or opportunistic ones linked to economic recovery. It draws special attention that cover images can be manipulated by designers for creating a seemingly real world. They obviously can include fake images, and hidden codes which are involved in describing the opposing nature of crisis times embedded in both disaster and opportunity. The analysis therefore provides a specific angle on a semiotic system of explanation and promulgation of that explanation of the Korean financial crisis that is relevant to socio-economic life in a country and culture that has a different set of representative codes. Acknowledgements

The author deeply appreciates her supervisors Dr Geoff Lightfoot, University of Leicester and Dr David Harvie, University of Leicester for their suggestions and comments. The author would also like to thank editor-in-chief Namki Jeong, The Hankyoreh, journalist Ingui Kang, MoneyWeek, journalist Kyungmin Kim, MK Economy, junior designer Yuntaek Hong, MK Economy, senior designer Kyunghoon Kim, MK Economy, senior designer Byungkon Lee, Economy Insight, senior designer Kangjun Lee, MoneyWeek, and chartered accountant Seungki, Min Samduk of Accounting and Consulting Firms, Seoul for their collaboration to the interviews and for providing the data. Lastly, the author would like to thank Frederique J. Vanheusden, University of Leicester for proof-reading. All figures were reproduced with permission.

1 In Korea, there are five elemental colours which are tied to particular natural themes. Negative or Yin colours correspond to white, blue, grey and black, particularly in relation to metal and water (Kim 2006; Kim 2010). Positive or Yang colours correspond to red, green and orange, particularly in relation to wood and fire (Kim 2006; Kim 2010). Yellow contains negative-positive Yin-Yang intermediate. It corresponds to earth.

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Ére – Introduction Aidan O’Driscoll

Dublin Institute of Technology

Seamus Heaney, the Irish Nobel Prize winning poet, suggests that if the American national myth is the frontier, the Irish national myth is the bog. Commenting on this observation, Aine Mahon, a philosophy lecturer, contends “Our literary consciousness is characteristically inward-looking, in other words, preoccupied with past experience and injustice.” (Irish Times, 23 May 2014, p. 12) These papers address issues of Irish myth making in three domains: the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), the recent financial austerity project, and the sectarian wall murals of Northern Ireland. The three papers are indeed “preoccupied with past experience and injustice”. This preoccupation is, as we shall see, justified, indeed liberatory, and contributes manifestly to a sense of national self. Dee Duffy’s paper explores how young men’s engagement with the Irish sporting and cultural organisation, the Gaelic Athletic Association, plays an important role in constituting their identity. Her research suggests an important difference in this identity narrative between peripheral members and more embedded members within the GAA community. The latter in effect commit their lives to this amateur sport and tend to resist mythic rhetoric. They engage ‘demythologising practices’ to distinguish their immense investment from a (potentially) devaluing marketplace, commercial myth. Fiona Murphy’s paper examines consequences of the arrival of financial sobriety in Ireland over the past number of years. In the face of welfare rollbacks and cuts, parents and families are increasingly being attracted to discourses of thrift and frugality in Irish consumption spaces. Her ethnographic case study of ‘baby goods markets’ exemplifies this. Murphy argues that while the myth of austerity is a potent one, particularly when viewed through the lens of sustainability or leftist politics, it will not bring about a worthwhile commitment to sustainable consumption without a firmer grasp on issues of social justice and societal well-being. Hilary Downey and John Sherry’s paper contends that the dynamics of myth market are reflected in the sectarian wall murals of Northern Ireland. During the ‘troubles’, these wallscapes celebrated historical events, heroes, and martyrs in a Catholic or Protestant community. With the coming of peace, these murals move from a private to a public space and speak to wider constituencies, including overseas tourists. Downey and Sherry examine the decommissioning of murals in the wake of the peace accords, and speculate on the implications of the creation of a shared mythology for the future of mural painting and the state - in essence, how such muraling might survive the process of peace on the island of Ireland. The three papers reflect on past, and more recent, Irish experience and on injustice. In doing so, they imaginatively link myth making with identity creation, consumption practice, and civic ideology. Their focus may indeed be inward-looking, trawling the parochial, the local, and the community. But their lessons about myth and the market have universal resonance. Another Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, who knew a thing or two about bogs, was fond of arguing that the universal was only found in the local. The local story always carries universal import. Perhaps this is true of myth making also?

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Commercial mythmaking and the Gaelic Athletic Association: Exploring Irish men’s identity work within influential social networks Dee Duffy

Dublin Institute of Technology

This paper explores young men’s engagement with Irish sporting and cultural organisation, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), to show how the interrelations and influences of one’s social network or human interdependencies all serve as potential cues on which individuals learn to construct their identity projects. This research engages Foucauldian theory to consider the effects of power emanating from multiple sources (to include the influence of peers, family, community, mass media and social institutions) on the individual. By looking at the intricacies of mundane everyday practices, such as the participation in sport, allows a better understanding of how individuals actually come to constitute their sense of self. In particular this paper explores how young men use commercially mediated mythologies to negotiate their membership with the GAA social network. Findings show a marked contrast in men’s engagement with mythical GAA mediated material across the membership spectrum. Peripheral members invest more readily in the ideological narrative and utilize the marketplace articulations in their own narratives of identity. Whereas embedded members, those men who actually commit their lives to this amateur sport, resist mythic rhetoric and engage ‘demythologising practices’ to distinguish their immense investment in this consumption field from a (potentially) devaluing marketplace myth. Keywords: practice theory; Foucault; masculine identity project; commercially mediated mythology; Gaelic Athletic Association

Introduction

This paper is a part of a larger project that explores how young Irish men construct their masculine identities and come to know themselves through their engagement with consumption and leisure practices. In relation to consumer research, (Thompson 2004) has for some time argued for a consideration of the socialised nature of consumption beyond the lived experience of the individual consumer. (Askegaard and Linnet 2011) assert that while there is much focus on the agency of consumers and their identity projects within consumer culture research, there is a dearth of work that considers the social and cultural context within which these identity constructions take place. A significant exception is the work of (Dolan 2009) and his study of consumer subjectivity development within the context of increasing social interdependencies, functional specialisation and social integration. This research makes a further contribution towards addressing this gap. Using the Irish national sporting body of the Gaelic Athletic Association as an exemplar, I show how the interrelations and influences of one’s social network or human interdependencies all serve as potential cues on which young men learn to construct their masculine identity projects. This approach contributes to the advancement of consumer culture research by inscribing the micro-social context described by the consumer within a larger socio-historical context (see Askegaard and Linnet, 2011). Taking a poststructuralist perspective, this research follows the later works of Foucault to explore the collective structures of knowledge or discursive practices through which social actors 251

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come to know themselves. Engaging Foucauldian theory allowed me to conceptualise men as intertwined within their social environs, the recipients of socio-cultural inscription. Through consideration of the body as produced through discourse as well as disciplinary practices, Foucauldian theory facilitates exploration of the effects of power (to include the influence of peers, family, community, mass media and social institutions) on the individual. The subject remains discursively and socially conditioned in power relations, yet within this configuration the individual’s agency to ‘define their own identity, to master their body and desires, and to forge a practice of freedom through techniques of the self’ (Best and Kellner 1991) is upheld. To understand how men’s bodies are inserted in a complex web of norms and social relations, I look at the commonplace practices of the everyday life. Exploration of these wider social and cultural conditions adds depth to the understanding of how the individual and the social are intertwined: in particular, how men construct their masculine identities within these sociocultural frameworks. This paper focuses on the discursive context of Irish national sport and the adaptation of commercially mediated mythology within the Gaelic Athletic Association. The context: A history of the GAA organisation

At the time of the foundation of the GAA organisation in 1884, its intent was clearly outlined by its founding fathers. In relation to sport, these motivations included a re-establishment of Irish national games, a standardisation of the games’ rules and the co-ordination of one body to govern Irish sports. From its inception and despite some protestations to the contrary, the GAA organisation was politically driven, being closely associated with Irish nationalism. The founders, driven by a nationalist agenda, sought to create an Irish sporting body that would halt the spread of British games in Ireland and eventually replace them altogether (Cronin 1999). As sports historian Richard Holt comments, the GAA ‘is arguably the most striking example of politics shaping sport in modern history’ (Holt 1992). However, according to Cronin, to view the GAA as solely a political organisation supporting only one form of nationalism would be misguided. Instead he suggests that the GAA should be considered as a chameleon of Irish nationalism – ‘at times it has been able to stress a strident political nationalism, at others it has retreated to the invaluable role of supporting a cultural nationalism’ (Cronin, 1999: 80). Given the many factions of Irish society’s active resistance to British Rule at this time,1 a more holistic conception of the GAA was as a ‘nation-wide campaign to resurrect the physical stature of the manhood of Ireland, which was deemed debilitated because of the combined effects of British rule and the Great Famine’ (McDevitt 1997). The cultural revival during the late nineteenth century, from which the GAA emerged, was deemed necessary to provide the Irish with a distinct Gaelic identity separate from all things British including ‘British habits, customs, language and their sports’ (Cronin, 1999: 78). And so, in conjunction with the founding of this sports organisation, a ‘Gaelic Renaissance’ was happening in Ireland at this time – an ideological movement with ambitions to build the Irish nation from the bottom up, including creating ‘a new Irish man’ (McDevitt, 1997: 264). It is said that it is the unique structure of this wholly amateur sports organisation, which began by infiltrating small parishes in rural locations that allowed the GAA to induce a ‘tribal loyalty’ in its members. Ferriter cites this ability to instil passionate commitment to parish identity as the GAA’s greatest success (Ferriter 2004). Humphries quite romantically captures the aura of the GAA– ‘its impact is emotional, visceral … the GAA is more than a sports organisation, it is a national trust, an entity which we feel we hold in common ownership. It is there to administer to our shared passion’ (Humphries 1996). 1 e.g. Michael Davitt/the Land League/United Ireland newspaper, Charles Stewart Parnell/the Irish Parliamentary Party/Irish Home Rule Bill 1886.

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It is such deep-rooted affinity to a national ideology that Holt maintains is imperative to sustaining the national ideal. One needs to feel it and ‘take it for granted as a natural truth’. In particular he insists that ideologies are conveyed through myths, ‘usually constructed around ideals of individual success and manhood – what it takes to be a man’ (Holt 2004). One such myth propagating the GAA organisation is its unmitigated support for and involvement in the Irish struggle for independence from Britain in the early twentieth century. Cronin documents how the GAA in fact split during this political period of upheaval, with many members rejecting the physical violence at the time. However, post-independence, GAA members and custodians began to focus on the connection between nationalist violence and national sport, thus allowing for ‘martyrdom and legendary status’ along with a ‘romantic and mythic notion of nationality which stressed sporting physical fitness as a route to securing national self determination’ (Cronin, 1999: 88-90). As the GAA is typically discussed in the context of ‘political upheaval, emergent nationalism and state building’, less attention has been paid to its operation in other contexts (Cronin, 1999: 92). Another interesting contradiction to the rationale of setting up an organisation motivated to expel British sport and influence from Ireland is the mode of operation adopted to initiate the GAA. Sport historian (Mandle 1983) records how the development and implementation of this Irish sporting body was inspired by the process of codification and organisation of sporting life in Britain throughout the nineteenth century. He writes, ‘not even the GAA, founded, manipulated and sustained, first by the IRB, later by the nationalist movement as a whole, could escape the wider influences that came from its being located within the United Kingdom. The sports revolution that codified and organized so many traditional games, and invented new ones, was British, even an English phenomenon’ (Mandle, 1983: 105). The ‘new Irish man’ that McDevitt alludes to above is a reconstruction of the cult of muscular Christianity and embrace of manly values that actually originated in British public school sport fields (Cronin, 1999: 107-8). The aforementioned examples suggest an organisation fraught with complex contradictions throughout its 125-year history. The recurring ambiguities or consumer myths may be what has sustained the GAA brand over time (Brown, McDonagh, and Shultz 2013). Or it could be the GAA organisation’s ability to adapt its commercial narratives when necessary in order to sustain and enhance membership (Connolly and Dolan 2012). Significant and controversial decisions made in more recent times include the opening up of Croke Park to ‘foreign sports’ of rugby and soccer in 1997, and more imminently the negotiation of a 3-year pay-per-view media deal with Sky Sports. The deal is met with great criticism by many factions of Irish society however the GAA contend the strategic aim is not primarily financially motivated but rather aims to project the game to the greatest possible overseas audience (Keys 2014). Commercial mythmaking and the GAA

Having briefly considered the socio-historic, cultural and political factors surrounding the foundation and evolution of the GAA organisation, the next section relates commercial mythmaking to the continuing circulation within the media of specific values and meanings stereotypically associated with Gaelic Games. Arnould defines commercially mediated mythology as the practice of ‘harnessing myth to commercial purposes via the marketplace’ (Arnould 2008). Thompson and Tian describe commercial mythmaking as ‘the efforts of advertisers … and other marketing agents to situate their goods and services in culturally resonant stories that consumers can use … to construct their personal and communal identities in desired ways’ (Thompson and Tian 2008). Thompson points out that to gain an understanding of how marketplace mythologies gain a foothold within a given interpretive community, cultural meanings can be disseminated through the ‘meanings, metaphors, and ideals diffused through advertisements’ alongside other commu-

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nications within the community such as ‘practitioner narratives, conversational discourses among consumers … and the information and beliefs diffused through … media via stories, news reports, and expert columns’ (Thompson, 2004: 170). In her study of US cattle trade shows and rodeos and her exploration of the commodification of America’s Wild West, Peñaloza examines how marketers forge links between images and narratives of a mythology with their products and services, and in so doing they not only disseminate cultural ideas but also contribute to culture’s very production (Peñaloza 2000). In considering the mythological US cowboy hero and the Wild West, Peñaloza draws upon Campbell’s assertion that ‘myths represent long-standing, relatively resilient, popular ritual traditions that perform important cultural functions …’ (Campbell cited in Peñaloza, 2000: 86). A case study carried out by Meenaghan (2003) illustrates this exploitation of commercial mediated mythology by the Gaelic Athletic Association and its sponsors in an effort to promote the games and increase revenue. Meenaghan documents the GAA’s successful marketing partnership with renowned Irish drinks brand Guinness and highlights how the advertising material, which draws on revered Celtic folklore connected to ancient Gaelic games, forges an opportunistic albeit fictitious continuity between the Guinness brand, the GAA organisation and a past mythical Ireland (Meenaghan 2003). Such lucrative sponsorship deals are plentiful in the GAA organisation. While the rationale for establishing the GAA (including religious, political and nationalist goals along with games co-ordination) has been discussed, a coinciding commercial element to the organisation has existed since its inception in 1884, despite its amateur status. From promotional tours to the US from as early as 1888 through fundraising events in the UK in the 1950s to the introduction of jersey sponsorship in 1991, the GAA has continued to flourish and grow by embracing marketing and promotional opportunities where possible. At present, the GAA has approximately 15 commercial partnerships with major Irish and international brands along with numerous jersey sponsorship deals and a multitude of provincial sponsorship deals at club level. These partners, some as banal as insurance or telecommunication providers, all invest heavily in linking their brand to their support of Gaelic games, particularly during the Gaelic sporting season. What is of interest here is to consider the ‘relationships between these different market place articulations and consumers’ lifestyles and narratives of identity’ (Thompson, 2004: 170). Such advertisements considered to ‘mythologise’ their promoted brands/products/services are said to be ‘constructing an ideal consumer lifestyle’. From a Foucauldian perspective these GAA sponsors are promulgating a ‘discourse of power; that is, a discourse that seeks to channel consumers’ identities and lifestyles in a particular ideological direction’ (Thompson, 2004: 170). Research approach

The purpose of this research is to understand how men’s identity projects take form and how they are produced through (institutional) practices and discourses operating within the discourse of national sport. In particular this paper attempts to elucidate how young Irish male sports players use marketplace mythologies to negotiate their involvement with the GAA and how these negotiations in turn shape their selves. This paper draws primarily from data collected following in-depth qualitative interviews. In addition, to gain a better understanding of the discursive regime of Gaelic sport, further data was gathered through participant observation at Gaelic football matches, reviewing online Gaelic sport websites, newspaper articles and blogs, close reading of Gaelic sport advertising material, researching history books recording the history and social significance of Gaelic Sport in Ireland, visiting the Croke Park GAA museum and conducting an informal meeting with the GAA sponsorship manager. It is such cultural resources that aid the diffusion of ‘meanings, metaphors and ideals’ and in turn allow marketplace mythologies to develop (Thompson, 2004: 170).

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The GAA Fellas group comprises five interviewees between 22 and 27 years of age, all hailing from North County Dublin. It was decided to interview men with varying levels of commitment to the sport of Gaelic football. Each man was to be a member of a GAA club; however, the commitment ranged from playing County level football, to playing at Senior level, to playing primarily for recreation and the social involvement. One rationale for this approach was to ‘try and get a range of views on the topic of [my] research’ as this may proffer a more insightful range of data (Rapley 2004). Four respondents are discussed in this paper2, using pseudonyms at all times for names of people, clubs and towns mentioned in the data. All four men have been playing Gaelic football at local clubs since the age of six or seven years. Peter and Dan are childhood friends, having met through Gaelic sport. Eamon and Kevin grew up together on the same housing estate and both started football on the same day, when Kevin’s father brought them to the club at the age of seven. The latter two are the eldest of this group, having only returned to Gaelic football in the past year for recreation more than the competition. Of the four men, Peter would be well known to GAA followers as he is in the Dublin squad. He is revered in particular by the older two men, who see him as a local hero and as an example to all young players of what can be achieved if one fully commits to the game. Respondents were asked to familiarise themselves with five particular GAA advertisements3 before the interview, to aid the discussion. The ads were emailed to each via a YouTube link. Additionally, during the interview process we looked again at a number of these GAA sponsorship advertisements and newspaper photographs4 to consider their reaction as Gaelic sport players and as consumers to current GAA advertising material in circulation. These interview tools helped to animate the interview talk. From her own close reading of these GAA adverts (for examples see Appendices 2 and 3), the author identified a number of recurring themes within the narrative and imagery of the ads’ content. Virtues exalted include ‘Community Spirit’, ‘Commitment’, ‘Perseverance’ and ‘Respect’. Also, themes of ‘GAA Father and Son ties’ and ‘The Disciplined Athlete’ abound. Such commercial narrative developed by marketers and circulated in the Irish media marketplace can be considered disseminators of the cultural meanings and values conventionally associated with GAA sport. What is of interest is whether viewers of these adverts integrate the narrative and mythology into their own narratives of identity. As Thompson states, should consumers integrate aspects of marketplace mythology into their self-conceptions, in doing so they are ‘also constructing a relationship to the multiple discourses of power that circulate in their everyday lives’ (Thompson, 2004: 170). In order to analyse the interview data a constructionist approach is followed with the understanding that a consumer’s narrated experience is embedded in a social web of possible interpretation. Rather than seeking to discover a respondents ‘essential self’ within interview data, this research takes a narrative analysis approach, considering individuals storytelling within the context of circulating discourses and power relations. Taking this approach allows us to consider identity projects as ‘enmeshed in – and produced within – webs of social relations’ (Lawler 2008). While there are a number of ways in which one can analyse a narrative text, to include thematic analysis and structural analysis, the method most appropriate to this study is dialogical or performance analysis. Dialogical analysis is interested in how social reality is constructed 2 For a more detailed profile of the four respondents see appendix 1. 3 In order to give an insight into the type of ads in circulation in the Irish media, a description of two of the GAA ads viewed are outlined in the Appendices 2 and 3). 4 See Appendices 4–8.

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through interaction, whereby what we take in everyday culture to be ‘true’ is actually produced in daily exchanges. The close narrative analysis of even a single case can display ‘how larger social structures insinuate their way into individual consciousness and identity, and how these socially constructed “selves” are then performed for (and with) an audience’ (Riessman Kohler 2008). This analysis aptly lends itself to the Foucauldian theoretical framework followed in this research study. Findings

The parish dream

The advertisements analysed and described in Appendices 2 and 3 capture various idyllic, parochial GAA scenes heralding moments of almost surreal camaraderie and community spirit. Kevin, as previously mentioned, recently returned to play for a neighbouring Gaelic club in a more rural location in North County Dublin after a six-year break from the game. His childhood club, Finian’s, is situated in Scotstown, one of Dublin’s larger commuter towns. He found Finian’s too big, cliquey and lacking parochial atmosphere. His rationale thereafter for seeking out an alternative club reveals an idealism reminiscent of the Gaelic folklore depicted in the GAA ads. He recalls his college days when fellow footballers from rural communities in County Tipperary recited stories laden with tremendous pride in their club and their parish collectively. Kevin envied the sense of community these young men got from being a part of their club and lamented how Finian’s did not instil in him a similar sense of honour. And so, when he returns to play football at the age of 26, he chooses the Shamrock Gaels in the neighbouring village of Ongartown over Finians. Kevin: ... Because I suppose, like, when I was in college in Waterford, there was, my mates were from Tipperary and all they talked about was the parish, the pride and the, I swear to God, about the pride in the club and all that and I never felt that playing for Finian’s because it was just a club I played with, like … But it was only when I went out to Ongartown that you really got a sense of what it meant to the parish, like, you know, ’cos it’s such a small place … And everything is built around the Gaelic club out there, like, you know and it’s, like, the whole community come out to watch the games and stuff like that and everyone gets to know you …

Kevin is seeking a community within which he feels a sense of belonging, and from the stories he’s been regaled with by past college friends he concludes that membership of a small parish team will help him feel that sense of kinship. Kevin: but I wanted to play with a parish team, I always wanted to … Dee: Do you not see Finian’s as being a parish team? Kevin: No, I see it as, I don’t really see it as being a parish team, I see it as being a big town team … You know, that’s a big club or, well, what I wanted to feel was the way the lads talked about in college … That they had that sense of community and that sense of you know, just that parish feel, like, you know? Dee: And do you get it out there? Kevin: Yeah, you do get it out there, a lot. Dee: Like, what do they do around the club that makes it …? Kevin: Just, just on a Sunday everybody comes out to watch the games, young, old, children, all that sort of thing, and everybody, like I’m only there like six months but like, everyone knows you, like … All the kids would be shouting your name and stuff like that and it’s, and then we go to the local for a few pints afterwards

Commercial mythmaking and the Gaelic Athletic Association

and it’s just like, it’s really good for a town, like, for a small town like that … And when the town, the parish succeeds, everyone kind of, they put up flags and all that sort of thing but you wouldn’t get that in Scotstown like, you know, ’cos Scotstown is too big, like, you know?

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Within the interview Kevin was asked to take a look at various GAA media photographs and the adverts discussed above. Kevin describes some of the photos using a phrase that cropped up in a number of the interviews – ‘putting their bodies on the line’. This is terminology used by coaches to describe the level of commitment the players need to put in to win the ball. Certainly from the images used in this interview, to throw one’s body on the line is to put one’s body at risk of grave injury, as players are seen contorting their bodies gymnastically in heroic efforts to secure the ball. Relating the phrase back to his own club team talks, Kevin explains how before matches the coach would reinforce to them that they are playing for their parish and their jersey: Kevin: No, yeah, ah you just go for it, I suppose, and, but you would be aware of it as well, like, you know, that, you know, when the team talks before the game, that you’ll be told, you know, to put everything in it, you know, it’s all about winning and pride in again the parish and the county as well … Yeah, you’re doing it for the jersey and be proud and all that sort of thing, yeah.

Here the football coach can be said to be instilling the players with traditional GAA values of parochialism and utter dedication to the cause through reciting speeches laced with mythic rhetoric lauding pride in one’s jersey and parish as motivation to put one’s body ‘on the line’. Clearly the irony in Kevin’s situation is that Ongartown is not his parish, and he has acquired the Shamrock Gaels jersey only in the past six months. Yet he is nonetheless captivated by the lure of a close-knit community and his infiltration of it to belong among them. To support his stance on what the GAA represents to him, he draws upon a line from the Vodafone GAA All Stars ad: Kevin: Ah, they definitely do, yeah, like even stuff like the first ad, with like, ‘It’s in the DNA, it’s in the GAA’, all that sort of thing, and that’s what it’s about, like, you know, it’s about, like ...

He unquestionably borrows from the cultural rhetoric provided by Vodafone’s sponsorship advert, this ‘GAA truth’ and recites the phrase to articulate his ‘own’ thinking on what the GAA signifies to him. The GAA father and son ‘truth’

Likewise Eamon, who also has recently returned to play for his local team, Finian’s, after a 10year sabbatical, embraced the GAA imagery of the newspaper photos and the sponsorship ads and identifies with the various scenarios depicted. More than this, when Eamon refers to the ads in conversation, rather than simply read the ad, he inserts his self and his own life story into the ad’s story. In recalling how he got into Gaelic sport, Eamon recites a well-rehearsed story of how it was inevitable he play given that his father and grandfather are keen supporters. His explanation is littered with extracts that somewhat dramatically suggest that playing football was his predetermined destiny: Eamon: There was, well, having this conversation before with … some, you know, loved ones and family members, it was never an option not to be involved in it because we always, Sundays were spent going to Croke Park when they used to play

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the league matches, so there was never any doubt that that was what I was always going to go and play in any sport because Dad’s from Tyrone and big into his GAA and so, and my grandfather on my mother’s side is big into it as well, and all of the time would have been, GAA would have been spoken about so then, that would have been, I suppose, the aspiration then ... GAA was always going to be the goal …

He goes on to describe various days out with his father to matches, ‘triple headers’, ‘All-Ireland Sunday’ and other GAA events through the years that led up to his fated subscription to a club. He describes Gaelic sport almost as a conversational tool that he and his father used to communicate with one another throughout the years. By way of summarising his story of how he joined the GAA, he turns back to the adverts previously viewed. In particular he makes reference to the Vodafone GAA All-Stars advert to illustrate his own father-and-son story. He unquestioningly accepts the generational transition of Gaelic sport from father to son as a ‘GAA truth’, something that has always been and always will be – in saecula saeculorum. Eamon: And even still, the sporting discussions that we have are sometimes related to other sports but predominantly GAA. That’s it. That’s pretty ... like it’s ... and, but even though, that’s kind of one of the things that I see with all of those for example, the ads ... It’s the transition between generations that has just continued and it’s something that’s always there so, if you say, oh if you had a son, could I, I would want, like I’d much prefer to see him win an All-Ireland medal than an FA Cup medal. Dee: You would yourself? Eamon: Myself. If I, that’s one thing, if I had an option of going back and doing it again, that’s what I would want to be – an All-Ireland winner. That’s the honesty ’cos I think it’s massive.

In using the advert as a prop in his story, his own story becomes intertwined in the advert narrative. He first puts himself in the stance of father looking with aspiration on an imaginary son, projecting his wish to win an All-Ireland medal unto him. However, he shifts the storyline back in time and perhaps more aptly places himself as the young boy with aspirations of achieving this goal of All-Ireland medallist. It is significant that while Eamon undoubtedly was surrounded by GAA narrative in his family when growing up, and his father conversed with him at length about the sport and brought him to watch various tournaments, it was not actually his own father who brought Eamon to join the local football club. It was Kevin’s father that enrolled him at Finian’s GAA club. In fact Eamon goes on to reflect how his father never came to the clubhouse when he was training. Given his recital of GAA being a generational unifier, this admission was probed further. Eamon quickly asserts that it was he who did not ‘let him go down’ to watch him play rather than any lack of interest on his father’s part. As we talk about this, Eamon becomes pensive as he tries to remember why he did not want his father around the club – ‘this is very, Jesus, this is very deep and meaningful, I never thought I’d open these … doors’. At first he proffers that perhaps he would have felt external pressure to perform should his father have been there and he’d be distracted, thinking ‘Jesus, I’d better not make a balls of this’. However, he is not fully satisfied by this and pauses many times in deep reflection struggling to find a reasonable answer given his previous lengthy narration alluding to his identification to the ‘GAA Father and Son Truth’. He goes on to recall how he had no objection to his father attending his school debates or swimming galas, therefore he cannot accept his first suggestion of his father being a distraction as a credible answer. He eventually arrives at a more satisfactory rationale as he suggests that playing football is an outlet for him, a domain wherein which he can let go, have a laugh, curse, and perhaps display aggression uncharacteristic of him in his work and family roles.

Commercial mythmaking and the Gaelic Athletic Association

Eamon: … you see because again like you curse a lot when you’re playing football and stuff like that, you know, maybe I’m just not into my Dad hearing me curse or something like that, I don’t know, it just, I’ve always found it maybe a little bit just more pressurised when he was there, when I’ve not the freedom to play.

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His justification eases his melancholic mood; however, he is conscious that his answer is not in line with his previous convictions of the GAA providing a platform that unites father and son, nor his recital of the discipline and respect required in this sport. He concludes: ‘But, maybe that’s just, I’m a contradiction, you know?’ Investing in the commercial myth?

Kniazeva and Belk assert commercial myth making is open to ‘multiple interpretations by consumers depending upon their desires, backgrounds, and aspirations’ (Kniazeva and Belk 2010). Interviewees’ responses to the GAA sponsorship adverts within this discursive regime of Gaelic sport differed in accordance with their level of commitment to the game. Interestingly it is Kevin and Eamon, the players that have only recently returned to playing football for their local club and who have devoted least physical and emotional time and effort, that invest the most highly in the ideological GAA imagery, as we have seen in the previous discussion. Peter and Dan, both playing football consistently for 17 years and both privileged in their selection to play for their county – Dublin – don’t engage as readily with the mythic connotations suggested in the advert material. Indeed, Peter refers to a Guinness ad and notes warriors with shields (a play on Gaelic folklore linking Gaelic football to Gaelic warriors of old), but he cannot ‘buy into’ the advertisement as he cannot see the relevance to the game, and so he dismisses the ad with accusations that it is ‘only trying to sell’. It is not that the mythic socio-historic content is lost on Peter. In fact it is he who best narrates the story of the GAA grassroots: Peter: Because like back then it was about being Irish, like, you know and being Republican and being just not British, you know, and just that distinction there between foreign sports and soccer and being Irish, you know, and the Gaelic League and being like an Irish sport and all like you know, so that was, back then, you know, for big games in Croke Park like Michael Collins would be throwing the ball in to start off the game or the parish priest, you know, those ... like them links with the church and the Republic Army and being Irish, you know, that’s just – that’s gone now. It’s all about, I still think, I just think, like everything now it’s just all driven by money you know and trying to generate money which is not – at the end of the day, like, the players don’t get that or anything like that but it’s just, the GAA get it to make themselves more powerful, you can see, it’s a powerful organisation …

Peter has a good knowledge of the GAA foundations, but produces a nostalgic narrative for a simpler time in the games when the GAA was not so commercially motivated. And so, when Peter views GAA ads, only those with any realism or connection with the playing of ‘a pure game of football’ reach him. It is the ads that feature actual star GAA players that hold his attention – players that he admires enacting ‘real’ GAA moments rather than fabricated tales of a mythical Irish past. Additionally it is adverts capturing match day at Croke Park that are revered by Peter: or the ones, you know the ones where – I think these are the best ones, you might have a girl from Roscommon and a boy from Sligo and they’re married or whatever like that and then they say “separated by county but married for life” or something like that [Super-Valu ad] … They’re good ones because it’s true, ‘cos how

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many times have you gone to Croke Park and you see different couples and they’re wearing different jerseys, you know and … they really kind of capture the kind of, the sense of like …

Likewise, Dan is more focused on the realities of the game that are portrayed in GAA advertising material. He diverts from the ads circulated by the interviewer when asked his opinion of GAA advertising and instead draws upon an advert from his own recollection. He recalls an ad for Lucozade energy drink featuring a top Gaelic player educating young players as to the importance of hydration for peak performance: Dan: I didn’t really, but there’s one I think is good, it’s just about Colm Cooper, it’s about another part of the sport, making, for young people coming up, to make them aware of hydration, like just the Lucozade thing … But you know, he was saying, explaining how important it is to be hydrated, to be at your peak performance and for younger people to listen, you know, I think that was a good thing, you know, ’cos as you get into a higher level, you realise how important nutrition and hydration and all that sort of thing is and you know, when you’re coming up to club level, it’s not put across to you so much, but like as you go on, it’s one thing that’s really drilled into you how important that sort of stuff is so …

Both Peter and Dan have invested heavily in the GAA organisation. Their entire lives are oriented around the game, from the physical practicalities of training nearly every night to scheduling their family life to fit into the football calendar. Being a Dublin County GAA player is central to their identity project. The sacrifices and commitments are very real to them as individuals. And so, borrowing from Arsel and Thompson’s recent redefinition of demythologisation in a consumer culture context, it can be said that Peter and Dan are creating boundaries between their living existence as ‘real’ GAA players and the fabricated tales spun in marketplace mythologies that may serve to undermine their identity projects (Arsel and Thompson 2011). As Kniazeva and Belk (2010) affirm, it is the consumer who will decide whether marketing cues to authenticity resonate with their own lives. In the cases of Peter and Dan, there is an authentic GAA story to be told and so they do not need to invest in mythic rhetoric or ‘invented tradition’ available in adverts. In contrast, Eamon and Kevin embrace the advertisement’s folklore and make grand proclamations as to the importance of the game, giving an abstract and ideological rationale rather than reasoning grounded in their day-to-day existence. They eagerly utilise the marketplace articulations in circulation as they complement their narratives of identity, the comforting stories they have constructed to insert their life stories into the traditional, rose-tinted narrative of the GAA organisation. Conclusion

This paper takes the Irish national sports organisation – the Gaelic Athletic Association – to act as a lens on the discursive practices in operation within the community of Gaelic sportsmen. In particular, commercially mediated mythologies surrounding the GAA were considered in order to understand how young Irish men use these circulating meanings, metaphors and ideals diffused through GAA advertising material when negotiating their own identity projects. It reveals how those participants with the least vested physical time and commitment to the GAA as an organisation, what I call peripheral members on a membership continuum, were more likely to invest highly in the images and narratives of the GAA advertising mythologies produced by marketers, and accept their stories as ‘GAA truths’. These men have constructed their GAA identity on the ‘narratives of socialisation’ that surround them, through their family and friends. Through hypothesising the game and the traditions and folklore surrounding it they

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have been socialised into a GAA identity built primarily on ideology and stories. They use these commercially mediated meanings in their identity projects constructs (Arnould and Thompson 2005). On the other hand, participants whose life stories have in a very real and physical sense revolved around the sport of Gaelic football and the GAA organisation, what I call the embedded member, resist identifying with GAA marketplace mythologies. Mediated virtues such as ‘perseverance’, ‘commitment’, ‘discipline’ and ‘respect’ are not just abstract rhetoric for these men, but part of their daily lives as footballers, and incorporate the real sacrifices they make as dedicated county players. Their personal commitment to the GAA social network is central to their identity. And so these men engage in what Arsel and Thompson (2011) refer to as ‘demythologising practices’ to distinguish their hefty investment in this consumption field from a (potentially) devaluing marketplace myth. If a story is to be told, these men would like it to resonate with the realities and mechanics of the game rather than harking back to a fictitious yesteryear. In relation to the continuing circulation of advertisements heralding stereotyped conceptions of Gaelic sport, Dolan suggests that branding managers, market researchers and magazine editors are strategic in disseminating discursive appeals only when ‘the potential customer already feels receptive to such discursive practices’ (Dolan, 2009: 138). Thus it remains the romanticism and mythic ideology attached to the game seemingly appeals to a broader audience. Through exploring how discursive regimes order individual’s lives, be they mediated or otherwise, the self emerges and one gains a better understanding of the individual subject intertwined within societal networks. More so, by looking at individuals’ practices we see that within a specific group various forms of a particular identity can take shape through differential power relations. An embedded member of a social group will experience power differently to those on the periphery and otherwise engage with circulating discourse. References

Arnould, Eric. 2008. “Commercial Mythology and the Global Organisation of Consumption.” Advances in Consumer Research 35:67-71. Arnould, Eric J., and Craig J Thompson. 2005. “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research.” Journal of Consumer Research:868-882. Arsel, Zeynep, and Craig J. Thompson. 2011. “Demythologizing Consumption Practices: How Consumers Protect Their Field-Dependent Identity Investments from Devaluing Marketplace Myths.” Journal of Consumer Research 37. Askegaard, Soren, and Jeppe Trolle Linnet. 2011. “Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory: Phenomenology and the context of context.” Marketing Theory 11 (4):381-404. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. 1991. “Foucault and the Critique of Modernity.” In Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, 34-75. New York: Guilford Press. Brown, Stephen, Pierre McDonagh, and Clifford J. Shultz. 2013. “Titanic: Consuming the Myths and Meanings of an Ambiguous Brand.” Journal of Consumer Research 40 (4):595-614. Connolly, John, and Paddy Dolan. 2012. “Sport, media and the Gaelic Athletic Association: the quest for the “youth” of Ireland.” Media, Culture & Society 34 (4):407-23. Cronin, Mike. 1999. Sport and Nationalism in Ireland: Gaelic Games, Soccer and Irish Identity since 1884. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Dolan, Paddy. 2009. “Developing Consumer Subjectivity in Ireland: 1900-80.” Journal of Consumer Culture 9 (1):117-141. Ferriter, Diarmaid. 2004. The Transformation of Ireland 1900 - 2000. London: Profile Books. Holt, Douglas B. 2004. How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Holt, Richard. 1992. Sport and the British: A Modern History. London: Oxford University Press. Humphries, Tom. 1996. Green Fields: Gaelic Sport in Ireland. London: Weidenfeld Nicolson.

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Keys, Colm. 2014. GAA faces backlash over Sky Sports deal. Internet: Independent.ie. Kniazeva, Maria, and Russell W. Belk. 2010. “Supermarkets as libraries of postmodern mythology.” Journal of Business Research 63 (7):748-753. Lawler, Steph. 2008. Identity: Sociological Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mandle, W.F. 1983. “The GAA and Popular Culture. 1884 - 1924.” In Irish Culture and Irish Nationalism, 1750-1950, edited by O. MacDonagh, W.F. Mandle and P. Travers. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McDevitt, Patrick F. 1997. “Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884-1916.” Gender & History 9 (2):262-284. Meenaghan, Tony. 2003. “From Sponsorship to Marketing Partnership: The Guinness Sponsorship of the GAA All-Ireland Hurling Championship.” Irish Marketing Review 15 (1):3-23. Peñaloza, Lisa. 2000. “The Commodification of the American West: Marketers’ Production of Cultural Meanings at the Trade Show.” Journal of Marketing 64:82-109. Rapley, Tim. 2004. “Interviews.” In Qualitative Research Practice, edited by Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium and David Silverman, 15-33. London: Sage Publications. Riessman Kohler, Catherine. 2008. Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Thompson, Craig J. 2004. “Marketplace Mythology and Discourses of Power.” Journal of Consumer Research 31:162-180. Thompson, Craig, and Kelly Tian. 2008. “Reconstructing the South: How Commercial Myths Compete for Identity Value through the Ideological Shaping of Popular Memories and Countermemories.” Journal of Consumer Research 34:595-613.

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Peter: On the cusp of his 21st birthday, Peter arrived at the penultimate rung on every aspiring young Gaelic player’s ladder – a place on the County Senior Football team. Twenty-three years of age at the time of interview, he has a number of Gaelic achievements under his belt. Peter served his apprenticeship as a plumber before being awarded a scholarship to study at a nearby university. Much of Peter’s life to date has been shaped and guided by the GAA, with his daily routine centring on football training, competitions and matches. Since our interview in Summer 2010, Peter has won an All-Ireland football medal with Dublin.

Dan: At 22 years of age, Dan is also on the Dublin squad; however due to injury he has not been available for selection. Despite this setback he continues rigorous training schedules and undertakes physiotherapy to return to a similar level of fitness as his teammates. He describes 6.30am training sessions on snow-covered beaches in January as tasks laid down to challenge both physical and mental strength, but ultimately he concludes that these training sessions unite the players and spur team morale. Dan has a deep sense of commitment to the GAA, appreciating all it has given him, and reiterates his desire to ‘pay it forward’ through means such as voluntary coaching at his club. While Dan served for a time as a carpenter, he recently has found himself unemployed. He carries out odd jobs here and there, but has no steady work at present. Again, since our interview, Dan too, is the proud holder of an All-Ireland football medal.

Eamon: is an Economics and Politics UCD graduate now working as a careers and communications consultant. He returned this year to play Gaelic football at 27 after a 10-year sabbatical. He blames booze and lack of dedication as key determinants in his withdrawal from the team at 17, after 10 years’ previous service. One of his key motivations for rejoining the club was to immerse himself in local North County Dublin community life. Eamon trains with the local intermediate team but has to overcome internal politics and seniority of membership in order to secure a place on match day. However, and much to his surprise, it is not the competition of a game, but the fun and comradeship to be had at training that he enjoys the most.

Kevin: at 27 years of age, Kevin has also recently returned to play Gaelic football. From the age of six, his father brought both Kevin and Eamon to the local GAA club to enlist with the Juveniles. A promising player, Kevin’s ultimatum came at age 20 when he was torn between playing for his college team in Waterford while his club coach was insisting he make training twice a week in Dublin. Frustrated at the time with management and their demands, a broken collarbone helped decide his fate, and he took the opportunity to hang up his boots for six years until he joined a new local Gaelic club this year. Interestingly, Kevin chose to join the Shamrock Gaels GAA club, rather than return to his childhood team in Scotstown, as he preferred the sense of parochial community and support offered by this small North County Dublin parish over the large, ‘cliquey’ club in the inhospitable town of Scotstown.

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Appendix 2: GAA All Stars TV ad sponsored by Vodafone (www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1e32p7KkPo)

The ambience of this advert, created with epic instrumental background music, shot in black and white, to include eight picturesque scenes, is resonant of a bygone era. Each scene depicts earthy, rugged Irish men in various parochial settings. The narrative of the ad is provided through questions scripted on each screen frame shot, rather than a vocal narrative. The music complements the written narrative, crescendoing at instances of tension within the advert. Each shot develops the story and so an outline is provided below to consider the written narratives provided alongside the images setting the scene.

‘What makes a GAA All Star do it?’ Against a dark backdrop, with just the hint of cloud outlined, the opening scene reveals a single, athletic and strong GAA player with hurl in hand as he gradually raises his head and concentrates his gaze at what the viewer can assume is the focus at hand – the goalposts.

‘Is it the glamour?’ Scene one fades out to lead into an action shot of a football player getting stampeded upon by fellow players as he falls to the ground, sliding head first through pools of muddied water, the pitch clearly waterlogged, yet the game carries on. A close-up shot of the player raising his hand in slow motion dramatically indicates he has received a blow to the mouth. The written narrative ‘Is it the Glamour?’ is clearly ironic, in stark contrast to the rough and tumble scene portrayed.

‘The social life?’ The next scene cuts to a lone figure set in a countryside landscape practising his hurling in the field. The sliotar ricochets off a homemade swing – a car tyre tied to a rope and fixed to a tree, perhaps suggesting that this young man is honing his hurling techniques in the place of his childhood play. The camera pans out to show the young man off in the distance perhaps making his way home, the journey ahead entailing a large mountain that he must ascend to reach his destination. At this point in the scene the text ‘The Social Life?’ appears. The lonely figure making his way across the stark countryside is the antithesis of what one would consider a sociable occasion.

‘The respect?’ The countryside landscape fades out to cut in to a close-up encounter taking place at the sidelines of a match. A young player hangs his head as a more senior male manager gestures animatedly and shouts into the player’s face, clearly reprimanding him over a recent play made on the field. Though the player looks to be about 30 years of age, he heaves his chest and lowers his eyes to the ground like a young schoolboy as the text appears: ‘The Respect?’. Clearly in this scene the player, a GAA All Star perhaps as the ad suggests, is the subordinate. Rather than being portrayed as a man worthy of admiration, in this exchange between player and manager, the young man shows his humility in the face of authority. It is not the GAA All Star that commands the respect; rather it is he, despite his mastery of the game, that must show respect to his coach and manager.

‘The fame?’ This fifth frame shot opens to reveal an empty stand bar one young son standing proudly as he holds up his homemade banner reading ‘Come on Da’ as his father wearily makes his way off the pitch with his fellow crestfallen teammates at the end of a match.

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‘Or is it something that runs deeper?’ The father raises his head and a slight smile crosses his lips on sight of his young son with his hopeful banner still raised high. On reaching his son, he places his own hurl into the boy’s hand as the son beams up in admiration at this father.

‘Call it DNA, better still call it GAA’ The silhouette of father and son walking out of the stadium with father’s hand supportively on his son’s shoulder nears the advert to a close. ‘Call it DNA’ text appears, suggesting that the will to play Gaelic sport is in an Irishman’s blood and has been passed on through the generations. This is followed by ‘Better still call it GAA’ which provides the dual answer to the question posed ‘What makes a GAA All Star do it?’ – the answer being a combination of inheriting the tradition of the game, and the ongoing support and perseverance of the GAA institution which facilitates these players to excel and go on to receive the accolade of an All Star, desired by every GAA county player.

‘Vodafone. Proud to sponsor the GAA All Stars’ The storyline is intercepted briefly by a quick flash of commercial realism. Telecommunications company Vodafone take a screenshot to communicate their proud sponsorship of GAA sport with the specifically designed Vodafone GAA All Stars logo displayed onscreen to illustrate to viewers their solidarity with the association.

‘Strictly for the glamour, of course’ Following the commercial sound bite, the advert returns to the narrative of the story for the final scene. An extreme close-up imposes upon the screen a rugged, earthy looking GAA player peering out at the viewer. The Irishman has weather beaten skin and detailed crow’s feet framing his eyes, he sports a crooked nose from perhaps many clashes on the pitch and wears a broad smirk across his face revealing a wide gap where once his front tooth was lodged. The viewer can assume he is the young man from earlier who was slide tackled to the ground. Rather than fretting over his aesthetically displeasing dentures, the ad suggests a real GAA man takes the knocks and tumbles as part and parcel of the game as the injured player beams almost proudly displaying his ‘war wound’ for all the world to see. The final written narrative satirically concludes ‘Strictly for the glamour, of course’.

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Appendix 3: Vodafone GAA TV ad (www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjiS5yqjcqk)

This 40 second advert aired in the summer of 2009 on Irish TV with the aim of introducing Vodafone’s sponsorship of the GAA Football Championship. The ad is narrated by Sean Boylan, a former county football manager of 23 years, a lengthy service earning him induction into the GAA Hall of Fame. Boylan, a native of County Meath, came from a family actively involved in the Irish independence movement in the early twentieth century. He narrates excerpts from Rudyard Kipling’s 1895 poem ‘If’, with the words of the poem providing meaningful captions to the many GAA scenes captured throughout. As an aside, ironically Kipling was a staunch supporter of British Imperialism and supported the Ulster Volunteers in their opposition to Home Rule in Ireland. Choosing a poet with beliefs antithetical to those of the founding fathers of the GAA organisation may have been an oversight by Vodafone. Alternatively, as imagery we shall see within the ad suggests, perhaps to use this poem heralds a new era of the GAA, one in which political and historical differences can be put to the sideline, and opposing views can coexist without conflict. The following describes the ad as it unfolds to the words of ‘If’: Extract One: IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too

The scene opens with Dublin and Meath players running onto the pitch to the background roar of excitement from the stands. The Dublin player is knocked to the ground by two opponents and the referee calls for a free kick to be taken by Dublin. The young Dublin player raises his head from the ground and looks upwards towards the goalposts, contemplating the task at hand – he has been granted a free kick in the final minute of the game. The viewer can assume given the tension created in the advert that to score this point could be the winning of the game. A shot of Dublin supporters with their blue jerseys and angst-ridden faces captures the significance of this free kick. The narrative at this point is a poignant message to the young player to focus on his game and not succumb to the apprehensive mood of the crowd – ‘If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you’, a familiar instruction no doubt delivered many times by their coach and manager. The young man takes his kick decisively and with confidence; we see him proudly walk away as the linesman waves his flag to indicate the point is to be awarded. The once tense Dublin crowd erupt into a wave of cheering and chanting – their team has won. Extract Two: If you can dream – and not make dreams your master; If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;

The next scene focuses on a dilapidated scoreboard in a field which bears the score ‘Wicklow 9–26, Kerry 0–0’. By any GAA standard this is an unrealistic score to achieve in a game; what is more farcical, however, is for Wicklow – a mediocre team at best – to have achieved this lead against Kerry – the most successful county in the history of football. When the camera pans out we see, rather than a game in progress, just a lone spectator in the field looking up at this score, and perhaps dreaming of the day when it may become a reality. Extract Three: If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;

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The third scene captures a small crowd of spectators of all ages, in what looks like a local community hall watching excitedly as a football game is playing on the TV. At first they all look to be supporting the same team; however, on closer examination some supporters are sporting orange and white jerseys indicating their support of the Ulster county of Armagh, while others are wearing red and white jerseys – the colours of County Tyrone. These two Ulster counties are renowned as bitter rivals in GAA games, with clashes on and off the pitch not uncommon. The camera focuses on two middle-aged women sitting side by side in the community hall in their opposing team colours watching the TV screen with great trepidation. As the small crowd cheers, it is clear that one team has scored, but not at first which team, as one woman remains open-mouthed while the other holds her head in her hand. The Tyrone supporter eventually raises her head from her hands to reveal a broad smile, indicating her happiness rather than despair. The ambiguity is likely to be intentional as the scene cuts to both women hugging each other and laughing, as if to suggest it was not of great significance after all which team scored, as they both embrace in friendship. This scene capturing the women’s enduring camaraderie in the face of potential conflict takes place to the apt narrative counselling one to meet ‘Triumph and Disaster’ equally. Extract Four: If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

The final extract from the poem is illustrated with a scene capturing a sea of blue-and– yellow-clad Wicklow county supporters (the dreamers from Extract Two) departing from Dublin’s Croke Park stadium – the home of GAA football – after a big match. The camera focuses on a young boy looking up at presumably his father, both in their county jerseys, walking hand in hand as the narrator emphasises the final words of the poem – ‘And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!’ This scene clearly highlights the GAA as a unifier of generations and facilitator of father and son bonds. Additionally, showing the Wicklow followers persevering in their support of their county, despite their notoriously poor performances (Wicklow is one of two counties in the 32-county championship never to have won a provincial title) displays dedication and pride, even when the odds are stacked against them. These are qualities the GAA extols and virtues that encourage young men to continue to strive in order one day to achieve their dreams. The closing frame of the advert has the famous Croke Park stadium – the GAA ‘field of dreams’ – elevated in the background with the text ‘Proud sponsors of the GAA Football Championship’ mounted on the easily recognisable red colour used in all Vodafone branding alongside the GAA logo. The narrator concludes with the final words ‘Vodafone. Make the most of now’ as the entire screen is painted in the trademark red of Vodafone and the Vodafone logo pops up in the last screenshot, to ensure the linkage between the GAA and its new sponsor is apparent to the viewer.

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Appendix 4

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Appendix 7

Appendix 8

The austerity myth: Parenting and the new thrift culture in contemporary Ireland Fiona Murphy

Dublin City University

This paper considers the emergence of a new thrift culture in the context of austerity Ireland. It examines how notions of parenting and the family are refashioned through the myth of austerity due to widespread welfare rollbacks and cuts. It also reflects on how Irish parents and families are increasingly being attracted to discourses of thrift and frugality in Irish consumption spaces by looking at the very particular ethnographic case-study of ‘baby goods markets.’ The paper thus argues that while the myth of austerity is a potent one, particularly when viewed through the lens of sustainability or leftist politics, without a firmer grasp on issues of social justice and societal well-being, it will not bring about a generalized or lasting commitment to sustainable consumption in Irish society.

Keywords: Thrift culture, austerity, ireland, consumption, sustainability, parenting Introduction

I wear your granddad’s clothes I look incredible I’m in this big ass coat From that thrift shop down the road I wear your granddad’s clothes (damn right) I look incredible (now come on man) I’m in this big ass coat (big ass coat) From that thrift shop down the road (let’s go) Thrift Shop-Macklemore

A young girl dressed in baggy pants and an oversized shirt presents me with a cup of coffee as I sit waiting to interview the manger of one of Cork’s newest flea markets. With a lyrical Cork accent, she starts to tell me about her excitement at having procured a job serving coffee in the market. As a college student in University College Cork, she said this part time job offers her the opportunity to work in a space that offers people the opportunity to be more ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’. Her younger colleague joins the conversation after persuading me to try one of the delicious pastries on offer, also a student, she tells me that when her peers ask her where she works that they all become very interested and ‘join in the debate about how to be green’. Clearly passionate about the topic of sustainability, I ask the girls whether there is a shift in the mind-sets of their peers. In response the younger girl starts to snap her fingers while bursting into song, “Hey, Macklemore! Can we go thrift shopping? (…) I’m gonna pop some tags. Only got twenty dollars in my pocket. I’m hunting, looking for a come up, this is fucking awesome”. Together, the girls snap their fingers and laugh out loud, their joviality is stirring. “Have you 271

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seen how many hits this song has had on you-tube? Of course there is a change in how people see things” the younger girl insists. As the market starts to buzz the girls run off to serve coffee and pastries to hungry Saturday shoppers, whilst a band begins to play in the corner. (Fieldnotes, 2013)

Flea markets, charity shops, swap shops, baby goods markets, community gardens, TV shows called ‘Diol E’ (the Gaelic for ‘for sale’), barter projects in Southern Ireland, novels on recession Ireland, the sharing economy (the list can go on) have all evolved and proliferated since the beginning of Ireland’s economic crisis. Austerity Ireland where men in suits stand in charity shops buying suits looks radically different to Celtic Tiger Ireland. The flea market depicted in the opening field-notes, a site of colour, of jumble and paraphernelia, of collector’s items, good coffee and inspiring music is one such example of how Irish consumption spaces during economic crisis have started to change. With widespread unemployment, emigration, crime and a decline in mental health statistics, Ireland as a country in crisis has become deeply anchored in discourses of loss, failure, and indeed, nostalgia. This politics of nostalgia has led to an embrace of the old, of thrift, even frugality as a possible pathway out of current economic malaise. This paper will consider a moment in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger where noncommensurate ideas of prosperity, religion, and politics have ignited deep debate, one which is in danger of characterizing contemporary Ireland’s struggle as a philosophical postscript to the failings of neo-liberal economics. A general sense of disenchantment and malaise is also part of the current zeitgeist, anchored in a broader crisis of faith, identity, and community. In an ‘age of austerity’, Irish society has been subject to widespread fiscal cuts and ‘moral panics,’ even scapegoating of particular segments of society (in particular migrants, ‘single’ parents, the working class). The myth of austerity has, I argue, created new cultural formations wherein notions of the good life, value, and well-being have accrued a revalorized potency. We live in a moment where economic crisis and environmental crisis have become intersecting discourses to the extent that some commenters believe we might well be moving into what Peter Wells (2010) has called an age of “eco-austerity.” This paper utilizes the new thrift culture (which has emerged as a result of austerity measures) as a conceptual frame in which to explore broader socio-cultural change in an Irish context with regards to parenting. By tracing well established work on consumption and sustainability (see Mcdonagh, P. et al 2011) and by conducting ethnographic research into the lived experience of thrift culture; this paper will ask how the “deep structures” (Levi Strauss 1995) of the austerity myth appropriate the tropes of romance and nostalgia in an attempt to rewrite what Tracy Jensen (2013) has called the “affective dimensions of citizenship,” and in particular of ‘parent-citizens-consumers’. Herein, I argue that in as much that the “politics of finance capital are reliant on a powerful mythology,” (CFP) so too is the politics of austerity, wherein the visions of austerity are harnessed through the ‘myth/s’ of an ‘authentic’ past, one which ordinary citizens are asked to return to. This paper connects to an extant literature which questions the relationship between consumption and parenting in Ireland and further afield. It is also influenced by a body of work on sustainability practices in Ireland (Mcdonagh, P. et al 2011). In their important work on consumption and motherhood, the Voice group (Andrea Davies, Susan Dobscha, Susi Geiger, Stephanie O’Donohoe, Lisa O’Malley, Andrea Prothero, Elin Brandi Sorensen, Thyra Uth Thomsen) have sought to understand how consumption plays a somewhat ambivalent role in transitional phases of our life course (Voice Group 2010). The object of their research is of course, motherhood, but I argue here, taking their study as an anchor point, that larger societal transitions (such as that of economic crisis) also produces an ambivalent relationship with consumption. In the transition from the age of affluence to the age of austerity (and indeed memory), Irish citizens have found themselves re-evaluating their society. The constraints of austerity and accompanying fiscal cuts have engendered a new discourse of motherhood, par-

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enting, and the role of family in society and this paper hopes to bring fresh analysis to bear on existing theoretical positions. Through an ethnographic analysis of the particular case study of the proliferation of what have been called ‘baby goods markets’ ( i.e. second hand markets selling goods for babies and young children) alongside the moral discourses around the nature of Irish parenting (produced in no small part by the austerity myth), this paper will engage with a number of key questions. It asks whether particular kinds of citizen-consumers, in the case of this paper-parents, see their relationship with this new thrift culture as transitional, or as a new way of being in the world? Whether the scapegoating of single parents, cuts to maternity payments, and the re-imaginings of ‘parents’ and the ‘family’ through the austerity myth (as key agents in both the economic decline (poor parenting, spendthrift-overconsumption, spoilt children, social debt) and as the solution to recovery (good parenting, the stay at home mother, frugal)) has changed the way Irish parents see both their roles and their consumption practices? In work on ‘ritualized markets’, Wherry (2012) argues that ritual often has unanticipated outcomes in the market space, can we then conclude that this new ritual of thrift shopping might bring with it a broader cognizance of sustainability politics or ignite a movement towards what Keith Hart (2010) calls ‘the human economy’? Or are we simply creating new myths from old ones in our quest for national transformation? Austerity myths and thrift culture

“I said pretend you’ve got no money, she just laughed and said oh you’re so funny. I said yeah? Well I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.” “Common People”, Pulp

Austerity Ireland has seen widespread deficit-cutting, reduction of benefits and State public services, tax increases (but not on the corporate sector) and an overall reduction in general spending. Austerity, as Mark Blyth puts it, is a “zombie economic idea” (Blyth 2013, 10) which has further entrenched societal inequalities and has been widely critiqued as a failed remedial action with questions of sovereignty remaining at its core. But austerity is also happening at a critical juncture where the environmental crisis is proving more urgent than ever. The intimate coupling of austerity politics with environmental politics evinces the way in which austerity works as an important nodal point for the intersection of right and leftist politics. As a potent, even hegemonic myth, austerity harnesses myriad tropes, images, and narratives which reanimate more conventional readings of both economic and environmental crisis (see Bramall 2013). This is a myth with sacrifice as its central trope, a workmanship of certainty at its heart. It is a myth which in its ritual re-enactments produces a creative tension (Janus headed) between the poetic act of imagining a ‘sustainable,’ even green, debt free future and a re-examination of a recent past riddled with overconsumption and debt. Within the austerity myth there is a Heidegerrian ‘bringing forth’ of a mythic temporality, a place and time when we were different, a more authentic reality where life was simpler, better. A time to which we should all now yearn to return to. The symbolism of this simple, potentially more austere and yet somehow better life appeals in particular to sustainability politics as myriad authors have illuminated (see Bramall 2013; Hinton and Redclift 2009; Jensen 2013). The return to ‘frugality’ and ‘thrift’ in the context of austerity has been posited by more hopeful environmental advocates as potentially carving out a route to a more sustainable way of life. Reconfigured as the, “environmental debt economy” by commentators such as Andrew Simms (2001) who argues that the current global crisis can potentially open a space wherein human wellbeing (globally) can be improved. Others, however, such as David Evans (2011) do not posit such a neatly interwoven relationship between practices of thrift in austerity and a more sustainable future. As a subject making discursive

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frame, the link between sustainability politics and eco-austerity (Peter Wells 2010) is an important political and rhetorical strategy, it is the operationalization of an austerity myth with forceful symbolic properties. This is indeed a form of ‘cultural poesis’, which Kathleen Stewart (2005) deems generative and emergent, an encounter of force between different temporalities, an interplay of historical and contemporary voices, at once an unravelling and a re-imagining. It is what makes the austerity myth so persuasively appealing and yet repulsive (depending on one’s politics) in the same moment. As a myth, austerity when read through the lens of sustainability politics, acts as a charter for social action, it also provides somewhat of a foundational narrative urging us to return to nature, to frugal and simple living. But while the mythic properties of austerity are so visible, it continues to be a site of discursive struggle (see Brammall 2013) in particular for those concerned with the inequities it generates. The austerity’s myth discursive repertoire emanates from the notion of ‘blame’ and ‘irresponsibility’ thereby constructing ordinary citizens as ‘wasteful,’ ‘greedy,’ ‘vulgar’ and as such, responsible in no small part for the economic crisis. Large developers and banks notwithstanding, it is therefore ordinary citizens who need to suffer, to ‘share in the pain’ in order to move out of crisis. While many Irish citizens are aware of the contradictions inherent in this pan-European austerity myth, income cuts and taxation levies have seen a high percentage of the population struggling to live on a daily basis. Writing of austerity Britain, Tracy Jensen (2013, 10) has argued that: The austerity narrative perhaps coalesces more substantively and intensively around the institution of the family and parenting than any other site. The current austerity regime - a lattice of reduced public spending, welfare benefit restrictions and sanctions, together with precarity and escalating living and housing costs - is effecting an economic squeeze on families, and particularly on families with low incomes, single-parent families, families with disabled children, large families and families who are precariously housed. Jensen’s argument pertains very closely to austerity Ireland, where we have seen a number of substantive attacks on the family. She argues that feckless/bad parenting is set up as a form of scapegoating for both economic and moral decline while good parenting (in the form of sacrifice) becomes the solution to the current crisis. In spite of the centrality of the family in the Irish constitution, we have seen a number of cuts to one parent family benefits, maternity payments, child benefit as well as widespread emigration of our youth. It is the family in Irish life who have been asked to become the sacrificial icons. The bracket of people in their mid-30s to mid-40s, the age most impacted on by the economic crisis (see ESRI 2013), are also the same group of people who tend to have younger children, thereby tending to have higher expenditures and costs. The Austerity myth means that belt tightening has become a moral imperative as well as a real necessity, in particular for families. But as Mark Blyth (2013) highlights the problem is not necessarily belt tightening as such, it is simply that we are not all wearing the same trousers. What Clarke and Newman (2012, 300) call the, “alchemy of austerity” produces then new cultural formations which are embedded in ideas of the authentic, ‘who we once were’ before events like the Celtic Tiger and its associated links with greed and corruption changed the society we live in. Within these limitations, the trope of the ‘authentic’ past, of the ‘good life’ so convincingly seeded by the myth of austerity has been widely adopted. Ireland’s broad acceptance of austerity and lack of protest politics has been questioned with some commentators positing the belief that Catholic values of austere living have been regenerated (see Kenny 2012). Since 2008, Irish society has seen the rise of a revitalized thrift culture with the proliferation of second hand markets, charity and second hand clothing stores, community gardens and the grow it yourself movement. Some of this has grown from necessity, some of it from the austerity ‘myth,’ making thrift culture into a fashion, a reasoned state of ‘austerity chic’. The benefits of this new thrift culture are widely lauded, it makes us more authentic, more ‘green and sustainable’, and improves our overall well-being. While some of this could be deemed

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‘magical thinking’ there are, however, numerous positives to the emergence of this new thrift culture. Soper (2013, 249) argues that austerity Ireland now has the space to, “denounce the puritanical and socially conservative aspects of traditional cultures of resistance to modernity, and argue for the importance of associating avant-garde social policy with a post-consumerist politics of prosperity” all with the potential to forge a new pathway to sustainable living. The age of austerity is of course in the same moment an age of nostalgia and memory work. Rebecca Brammall (2013) argues that the response to austerity in the UK might be best characterized as a form of Bergsonian “habit memory.” In the UK images of the second world war, of rationing and scarcity, have been widely drawn on to support the view that austere living is a commendable form of sustainable living. ‘Keep calm and carry on’ in spite of the rolling back of state provision and the welfare state has become the mantra of austerity politics and nostalgia. In Ireland, a period of intense commemoration (an age of memory) has coincided with the age of austerity. The 1913 Dublin lock out, Easter 1916, the Battle of Clontarf, and in Northern Ireland, the second-world war and the signing of the Ulster Covenant loom large as commemoration exercises. Economic recovery and austerity has been accompanied therefore by the reassessment of Irish societal beliefs about the nation’s past, the Celtic Tiger and the crisis itself. In 2013, on Dublin’s SIPTU building, a large banner commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1913th Dublin lockout reminded passer-by’s that 1913 was a time when, “thousands lived in poverty trapped by low pay and few jobs.” It seemed to be a case of plus ca change for Irish citizens in 2013 subject to austerity cuts. While commemoration or acts of recovery create numerous ontological challenges and provide (potentially) a site of contestation and reimagining in the context of economic crisis and indeed, recovery such acts also feed into what Tracy Jensen calls, “the romances of austerity” (2012, 17). Irish citizens in 1913 were hardworking individuals, proud of their nation, who readily made sacrifices (even with their own lives) for their families and communities, in 2013 in the age of austerity (so the myth goes) we too must also under-go the necessary evil of austerity measures. The austerity myth is a moralizing one, harnessing an era of commemoration to better its own end, to redefine the blemished Celtic Tiger society. In 1913, it was the family who had to make so many sacrifices and in 2013, the family should also learn to tolerate the material squeeze of austerity for the greater good. The mainstreaming of a ‘make, mend and do’ culture should of course also ignite real concerns about who is being asked to simplify their lives and for what ultimate ends. While what Clarke and Newman (2012) posit is the ideological reworking of austerity for different ends, the sustainability interpretation of austerity focuses on the value of thrift and frugality as generative of sustainable consumption and living. However, as Daniel Miller (1998, 25) argues in a Theory of Shopping ‘thrift’ is open to multiple interpretations and often signifies the ability to buy ‘more with less,’ thereby ultimately being a, “ritual transformation of shopping’ from the fantasy of spending to the fantasy of saving,” and not necessarily conducive to sustainable living. Coupled with the proliferation of second hand shopping and community gardening in Irish society, we have also seen the rise of stores such as Primark, Dealz as well as supermarkets such as Aldi and Lidl (with a visible, rapid expansion). We see then that the global recession as Kim Humphrey (2010, 188) argues, “does not simply confirm anti-consumerist critique, nor unproblematically move us towards anti-consumerist goals.” Nonetheless, the austerity myth’s rhetorical persuasiveness has seen new articulations of value, quality and worth in Irish consumption spaces. One of my research participants, a flea market stall holder and shop owner, puts it thus, “Out with the old, in with the new, the Celtic Tiger was nothing but a ‘throw away culture,’ now we have this resurgence of thrift, everywhere people looking for value.” (PC, 2013). The resurgence of such a diverse array of second hand consumption spaces in Irish society might certainly confirm this. Constrained financially and perhaps motivated to live differently, are Irish parents and families turning towards the new thrift culture for purely economic

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reasons? Or will these changes have lasting impacts on the nature of Irish families and our consumption habits?

Thrift and parenting

I sell nostalgia products; you know the games or toys you would have played with when you were a child yourself. I see parents coming to the market now more and more looking for toys for their children, the same ones they used to play with themselves. I guess that’s what happens during a recession we all want a bit of the past. (Interview with seller, Cork, March 2013)

I only wear second hand and vintage. Second hand markets and vintage stores somehow disappeared during the Celtic Tiger. In the 1980s there were quite a number dotted around Dublin, but for a long period there I had to find everything online or when I went to Britain I would hit the second hand stores, post Celtic Tiger I am delighted to say that this is all starting to change. I think it’s all for the better. (Interview with Annette, March 2013, writer and second hand shopper)

In the proliferation of second hand consumption spaces in Ireland during the economic crisis, in particular we see the growth of second-hand baby goods markets. Since 2010, ARIS (the Irish word for ‘again’) started to operate and trade in second hand baby goods. ARIS was modelled after the British National Childcare Trust second-hand markets for baby goods, and intends on giving parents the opportunity to sell and buy second-hand baby goods, particularly clothes and equipment. Since Aris opened its doors in Dublin, a number of other second-hand markets for baby goods have started in the South and West of Ireland, as well as a number of large ‘competitors’ in the Leinster region. As part of a larger Irish research council research project working with Pierre Mcdonagh (DCU) and Sofia Lopez (Skema Business School) on sustainable consumption in economic crisis, the second-hand baby goods markets stood out as potentially interesting sites of research in the context of the relationship between parenting, austerity, and sustainability. Hence, I started the process of interviewing the operators of a number of these baby goods markets as well as conducting ethnographic research at four of these markets. While still in the preliminary stages of this research what is striking about these markets is the broad demography of its sellers and buyers, and the widespread success of the model, in spite of numerous successful online operators such as ‘baby-bay’. The operator of Aris explains it thus: There is a cultural thing of passing on in Ireland which is totally acceptable, but with friends and families, not strangers. When I had the boys even though it was in the Celtic Tiger I didn’t fall into the trap of buying everything new. I just want safe and clean, I don’t care what version of bugaboo Gwyneth Paltrow is wheeling down Notting Hill. I don’t like the online markets for baby goods because for baby’s it is all about touch, feel, smell. It is such a personal thing. The online baby shopping is not a model that works for me. When I set this market up in 2010 it was the first one in Ireland, I based it on the British National Childcare Trust model, initially the idea was met with a somewhat muted response from people. (Interview with founder of Aris, Dublin, April 2013)

Similarly, the operator of one of the newer markets says:

When I was pregnant, I had no intention of buying everything new. I shopped around online, but it is a pain, like you want everything in the one place, just walk

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in and see what’s there and buy it. It didn’t exist in this area so I just set it up. (Interview with baby market operator, Cork, March 2013)

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What many of the operators point to is the affective dimension of these second-hand markets, the buying and selling of baby goods (above many other kinds) is articulated as deeply sensory: I can’t go and buy something online for my baby, I don’t know if it will work or how it might smell. I think a face to face thing is better that is why these second hand markets have been successful. (Interview with baby market operator, Wicklow, March 2013).

Sellers particularly get very emotional – emptying out your attic is such an emotionally laden process. I see mothers who perhaps have had difficulty having their child and they can’t believe that part of their lives is all behind them as they sell on the goods. You see some parents delighted ‘no more babys, no more babys’ and others who can’t believe that part of their life is over. (Interview with baby market operator, Dublin, May 2013).

In addition to the sensory aspects of the trade of second hand baby goods, a number of the market operators have indicated a shift in the kinds of individuals attending the markets in conjunction with the deepening of the economic crisis: You can see that the profile of the sellers in particular has changed. When we first set up the sellers were people who knew and understood market culture, people who were interested in sustainability etc, but as the crisis worsened then you would see people rock up who were selling because they really needed the money. I would tend to treat these sellers a little differently to the other types, you have to be sensitive, but you can see from the goods and the 2005 jeep that they arrive in what they used to have. I pay attention to these kinds of things. (Interview with baby market operator, Dublin, May 2013).

We are booked out months in advance with our stalls, and the demand seems to be getting greater all the time. You can see the quality of stuff people are selling, it is great. But people are needing to sell this stuff more and more, you can see and it’s sometimes surprising the kinds of people who show up. (Interview with baby market operator, Cork, March 2013).

Attending the markets and speaking to both buyers and sellers one becomes cognisant of the diverse motives for attending the markets. In my discussions with the sellers in particular, economic motives seem primary: I do a lot of these markets, it’s increasingly about value, I mean look around –do you see the quality of the stuff. People are here because it is a recession and they can get good value for their money. I’ve never heard any of the sellers or buyers give other reasons. Sustainability certainly isn’t ever mentioned. (Seller, Dublin, April 2014)

This is my first time attending one of these. I am into recycling, I’d never throw anything out, I would give it away if I can first, and then I heard about these markets and said why not? Why not try make some money from everything I have stored in my attic (Interview with seller, April 2014)

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We are both major clothes lovers, during the boom we would have only bought the best. We are both single mothers, and even though we would have had excellent jobs during the boom we are no longer working. We decided to give this market a go and see how it goes, I think it is better than online as you can see what you are getting straight away. We are also both into upcycling and are environmentally aware, but we are primarily here for the cash. (Interview with seller, March 2013).

The markets are a busy hive of activity, some housing entertainment for kids and trial classes for baby massage or information booths on breastfeeding. Sellers, buyers, and market operators all point to the pressures that the contemporary Irish parent is under due to austerity. It’s all this pressure, no money, big mortgages, in the Celtic Tiger people went mad, it was all new, new, new- especially for babys. You wouldn’t have dreamt of saying you bought something second hand a while back. I think we are going back to better times now-things are a little simpler (Buyer, Dublin, April 2014).

I’m here because I can get value for money, have you seen some of the stuff in here? There is a trunki over there for 13 euro and a bugaboo down there like new. I came here because my boss was here a while back and he got a load of stuff, and he is not badly off. (Buyer, Dublin, April 2014).

I think I would have probably been too embarrassed to admit to being somewhere like a second hand market especially for your children during the boom, now it’s all different. Penny’s-no problem, second hand-no problem. I think we are all different and maybe even though we find ourselves quite stretched we are somewhat more appreciative of what’s important in life. (Buyer, Dublin, April 2014).

In my conversations then with buyers, sellers and market operators, the word ‘sustainability’ or ‘environmental’ tends to only appear in a secondary capacity to monetary concerns. All of the market operators have a keen awareness of the sustainable impact of what they are trying to do, but see the model in an Irish context as having a finite lifespan. Nonetheless, sellers and buyers continue to return to the markets in different capacities and have begun to embrace the culture of second-hand, with some claiming that they are now inspired to shop second hand in other domains. Parents are shopping in second-hand baby goods markets predominantly because they are seeking value for money in a world where they are under great financial pressure. Some, however, see some societal redefinition or shift in this move towards second-hand, particularly in the context of baby goods. Moral understandings of societal change are posited in the desire to return to a better, simpler past, and some of my research participants articulate this as a reconstitution of the individual, the parent and indeed, Irish society. ‘We are better for it,’ one of my research participants puts it, but this has become somewhat of a catch-cry in some sectors of Irish society-the notion that we will somehow emerge from this crisis as better people no longer beleaguered by the excesses of the Celtic Tiger. Perhaps then this is the successful workings of a subject making, morality imposing, stigmatizing austerity myth? But in extricating ourselves from the circularities of these fragmented, even conflictual discursive frames can we truly say that an Ireland post-crisis will be any different?

Conclusion

The island of Ireland is a land disenchanted by the all-pervasive myth of austerity, it is also however, a nation seeking transformation. Within this discourse of transformation, a certain hopefulness abounds. Examining new articulations of parenting, thrift-culture and sustainability

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through the lens of the austerity myth does much to help us clarify the mythology of the market economy and the failures therein. It points to the role the austerity myth plays in interpellating ordinary citizens into thrifty consumers (see Jensen 2013). It remains to be seen, however, whether these idioms of thrift and frugality will bring lasting benefits of any kind in our role as parents or citizen-consumers. In the Expanding World Towards a Politics of Microspection, Michael Cronin argues that the green agenda cannot be truly envisioned without recourse to, “a robust sense of social justice” (2011, 64). When examined through the lens of sustainability politics, one might have a sense that the austerity myth is working to achieve some new found respect for notions of ‘thrift’ and ‘frugality’ which coalesce with forms of sustainable consumption. But this is a thrift culture created by the rolling back of important welfare and institutional supports, it is a thrift culture grounded in deep societal inequities unmoored from the premises of social justice and thus not a progressive form of sustainability politics. But perhaps, alongside anthropologist Keith Hart (2010), it might present us with an opportunity to think about the important implications of what post crisis a ‘human economy’ might look like and what steps we might put in place to arrive at such a transformation. In the ancient Irish myth ‘Tir na N-Og’ (the land of the youth), Oisin son of the legendary Fionn McCumhail, leaves Ireland to go to the land of eternal youth with the beautiful Niamh. There he is happy, unaware that some 300 years has passed. Feeling homesick, Oisin persuades Niamh to let him return to Ireland, a land now much changed with the passing of time. Leaning from his white horse to help some work men shift a large boulder, he falls, hitting the Irish soil, he ages some three hundred years and dies soon thereafter. The story of ‘the land of the youth’ beckons towards the important questions of longing, nostalgia and belonging. I finish with it because I believe it neatly underlines the role of myth in the Irish imagination, further it points to the co-existence of incompatible myths, thereby resonating with the concerns of this paper. There is a danger in seeking transformation through the austerity myth, it is just this urge that feeds the fantasy that austerity and crisis seed the opportunity to be somehow more creative, more imaginative than an era of prosperity could allow for. Like Oisin, many of us find ourselves attracted to the promises of another land, in the context of austerity that being the fruitfulness, even productiveness of thrift culture, but once the road to recovery has become more than a promise, will we languish? Feel homesick like Oisin? Perhaps desire a return to a land of prosperity and all that comes with it? And finally, what new myths will we use to convince ourselves and others that this is the place we should return to? References

Bramall, Rebecca. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cronin, Michael. 2012. The Expanding World: Towards a Politics of Microspection. Washington: Zero Books. Clarke, J., and J. Newman. 2012. “The Alchemy of Austerity.” Critical Social Policy 32 (3): 299-319. Evans, D. 2011. “Thrifty, green or frugal: Reflections on sustainable consumption in a changing economic climate.” Geoforum 42 (5):550-557. DOI:10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.03.008. Hart, Keith. 2010. The Human Economy. Polity Press: UK. Callan, Tim, Brian Nolan, Claire Keane, Michael Savage, and Walsh, John R. 2013. ESRI “The Great Recession, Austerity and Inequality: Evidence from Ireland” Intereconomics 48 (6): 335-338. Hinton, Emma and Michael Redclift. 2009. Austerity and sufficiency: the changing politics of sustainable consumption. King’s College London. Jensen, T. 2013. “Tough Love in Tough Times.” Studies in the Maternal 4 (2) Available online at http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/Jensen_SiM_4_2_2012.html. Levi-Strauss, C. 1995. Myth and Meaning. New York, Schocken Books. Soper, K. 2013. “The dialectics of progress: Irish ‘belatedness’ and the politics of prosperity”. ephemera 13(12): 249-267.

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McDonagh, Pierre, Susan Dobscha, and Andrea Prothero. 2011. “Sustainable Consumption and Production: Challenges for Transformative Consumer Research”. In Transformative Consumer Research for Personal and Collective Well Being: Reviews and Frontiers, edited by Mick, David, Simone Pettigrew, and Pechmann, Cornelia, 263-277. UK: Routledge. Miller, Daniel. 1998. A theory of shopping. UK: Cornell University Press. The VOICE Group (Davies, Andrea, Susan Dobscha, Susi Geiger, Stephanie O’Donohoe, Lisa O’Malley, Andrea Prothero, Elin Brandi Sorensen, Thyra Uth Thomsen). 2010. “Buying into motherhood? Problematic consumption and ambivalence in transitional phases”. Consumption, Markets and Culture 3 (4): 373–397. Kenny, Mary. 2012. “Ireland faces a choice between lucre and liberty.” The Guardian, May 25th. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/25/ireland-faces-choice-lucre-liberty-eu Simms, Andrew. 2001. An Environmental War Economy. UK: NEF Foundation. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1988. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. USA: University of Chicago Press. Stewart, Kathleen, 2005. Cultural Poesis: The Generativity of Emergent Things. In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd Edition, edited by Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln 1027-1042. USA: Sage Publications. Turner, V. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Wells, P. E. 2010. The Automotive Industry in an Era of Eco-Austerity. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Wherry, F. 2012. Ritualized Markets: The Culture & Economics of Budgeting and Consumer Demand.http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/workshops/orgsmarkets/past/pdf/Ritualized% 20Markets%20Manuscript%20v2.pdf. Humphery, K. 2010. “The Simple and the Good: Ethical Consumption as AntiConsumerism.” In Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction, edited by Tania Lewis and Emily Potter, 40-53. London: Routledge.

Modulating mythology in a post-traumatic era: Murals and re-imagining in Northern Ireland Hilary Downey and John F. Sherry, Jr.

Queen’s University Belfast; University of Notre Dame

Arguably the most ancient of the social media, wall paintings have been a persistent vehicle of cultural meaning management. The dynamics of myth markets are reflected in the sectarian murals of Northern Ireland. In this paper, we draw from consumer research literature on mythology and street art to explore the continuous revision of these wallscapes that seeks to address the enduring contradictions of civic ideology in contested political space. In particular, we focus on the use of classical, historical and pop-cultural mythologies to transform private space into public place. We examine the decommissioning of murals occurring in the wake of the Peace Accords, and speculate on the implications of the creation of a shared mythology for the future of mural painting and the state.

Keywords: Mythology, street art, public place, political contestation Introduction

In this paper, we draw principally from the consumer research literature on mythology (Brown et al. 2013a; Levy 1981; Stern 1995; Thompson 2010, 2008; Arsel and Thompson 2011; Venkataraman et al. 2001), retroscapes (Brown and Sherry 2003), and street art (Visconti et al. 2010; Borghini et al. 2010) to explore the ways in which two brand/fan communities have altered their respective mythic iconographies both to accommodate and resist the supra-local process of reconciliation aimed at creating a common or shared sense of civic community. We employ the images themselves and an analysis of their agency to illustrate the complexity of re-imaging. This paper is excerpted from a larger ethnographic/netnographic study of the redaction of sectarian murals in Northern Ireland. While the long-term project is focused primarily on the changes in painting that followed in the wake of the Good Friday Peace Accords of 1998, our paper offers more of a historical perspective on the murals, and we draw principally from archival sources and our own photographs for our analysis. We concentrate on the use of mythic motifs in the creation and maintenance of brand or fan community, and the conversion of public space first to private place, and thence to public place, as the forces of sectarian integrity are shaped toward common civic ends. We describe how public space can be contested as sectarian, or returned to a prospective community as a collective good, promoting a feeling of belonging and encouraging dialogue in the service of restorative meaning. We trace the evolution of the murals, from once hidden visual narratives of identity to the spectacle of the public domain, illustrating how the dialectical and dialogical interaction of stakeholders drives a type of layered agency. Distinct communities are given the opportunity to learn from the ‘Other’ in terms of ability to comprehend images in the language of the ‘Other’ (Penaloza and Venkatesh 2006, 307). Public space is cocreated out of private place, for example, compare cave paintings to murals, where mythic iconography builds mythic identity. Intimate space is opened out to public exposure and con281

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flictual narratives and ideologies of identity consumption are reconfigured. Murals comprise a kind of insurgent public space (Hou 2010), an alternative repurposing of the urban landscape for common cause. While our study unfolds in a Northern Irish setting, it is important to recognize that murals have contributed to the process of nation building in a number of cultures around the world. Murals are monumental works of public art (Greeley 2012). “Muralisms” and “muraling” imply both an image of aesthetic value and a coherent vision of the world – an art object and a cultural practice (Campbell 2012, 263). The complex is enmeshed in a politics and poetics of national identity. Muraling has flourished throughout Latin America (Chaffee 1993) and, in particular, Mexico (Anreus et al. 2012; Coffey 2012). It has figured prominently in such places as South Africa (Marschall 2002), Palestine (Huda et al. 2014), Sardinia (Rolston 2014), and on the former Berlin Wall. Muraling has thrived in the urban enclaves (Cockcroft et al. 1998), revitalizing central business districts (Fleming 2007) and small towns (Marling 1982) of the United States.

Street art and brand community contexts

While it may seem ironic, if not wholly inappropriate, to speak of civil-religious factions in the language of the marketplace, as publics counterpublics (Warner 2002) or as brand and fan communities (Schau et al. 2009), we find many of the same processes and features at work among these groups that the scholars of the sacralization of the secular (from Belk et al. 1989 through Muniz and Schau 2005, for example), the materiality of association (from Muniz and O’Guinn 2001 through Schouten and McAlexander 1995, for example), and the tribalization of consumption (from Maffesoli 1996 through Cova et al. 2007, for example) have found in theirs. To treat ideology or religion as a consumption experience is to return much of this earlier scholarship to its roots (Kozinets 2002; Sherry and Kozinets 2007). Cultural branding (Holt 2004; Holt and Cameron 2010) posits the existence of myth markets that arise in response to and attempt to resolve contradictions in civic ideology. Civic ideology (in competition and concert most strikingly with religion and ethnicity) bridges the gap between the moral consensus a nation requires to function and the everyday identity projects of its citizens. This ideology is embodied in myths, which draw upon populist worlds for sustenance. Myth markets are “implicit public conversations” about civic ideology that are enacted through cultural production by a host of stakeholders (Holt 2004, 56-59). The riven nature of our field site provides a fertile field of inquiry into myth markets. Moral consensus is a turbulent, fragile, negotiated, emergent enterprise with the civic ideology being contested by republican and loyalist communities (each of which has internal rifts on matters of means and goals. Civic, religious and ethnic discourses are thoroughly interpenetrating. For example, one commentator (Tanner 2001, 2, 8) juxtaposes the absence of art in Protestant churches with the profusion of florid iconography on the gable walls of the North, and the realist nature of republican painting with the implied mystical and allegorical art in catholic churches. Each is a way of sacralizing and appropriating public space. Individual identity projects are further complicated by the globalization of consumer culture. The mural, as both material artifact and social process, is a powerful example of vernacular culture shaping civic ideology. Murals are embodiments and emplacements of myth markets. Murals have existed in a state of revision since their inception, with pieces being repaired, refreshed, replaced and retired over time (Rolston 1991; Woods 2008). They have commemorated folkloric conceits (Cuchulainn and the wolf hound; the Red Hand of Ulster), specific historic moments (the Battle of the Boyne; the Battle of the Somme) and contemporary flashpoints (the hunger strikers and the blanket men of Long Kesh). Murals have long been vehicles of eternal and empirical truth (May 1991), which have represented sectarian perspectives. Source material itself has been problematized, as in the case of the culture hero Cuchulainn, or of the Red Hand

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of Ulster, each of whose images have been incorporated into republican and loyalist murals. Cross-cultural borrowing has also occurred, as mythic images from South Africa, Cuba, Palestine and Native America are interwoven with republican symbolism to dramatize similarity and solidarity with other populist movements. But the current trend of producing larger civic (rather than explicitly sectarian) themes that subordinate ancient enmities to the goal of joint nation building portends an especially interesting era of modulated mythology in the evolution of Northern Irish murals. What joint myth can be called upon or created to forge common cause? The nature of public commemoration

Alderman (2000, 658) considers ‘public commemoration’ as a socially directed process. People have to share in the value of such visual memorialization as being ‘commemorable’ (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991, 382) in order for it to command attention. Memorial spaces do not simply reflect public attitudes; they shape how we interpret and value the past, ‘Memorial sites solidify historical heritage in terms of location, architecture, and ritual activities,” (Azaryahu 1999, 482). Even more importantly, such sites mythologize moments and movements, instanciating the people, events, values and ideas memorialized. Like brandscapes, the sites embody the mythic meanings of their co-creators, and provide a mythic charter for the ritual activity they underwrite (Sherry 1998). Mythology is encoded in contemporary urban streetscapes every bit as much as it is in aboriginal landscapes (Chatwin 1998), and remains a potent cosmological lodestar in ostensibly secular settings. Just as mythology has always been revised (Leach 1973) and tradition (re-)invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012), memorial landscapes are in a constant state of redefinition as the heritage and cultural tourism industry continues to expand, and as marginalized populations seek public recognition. Social actors and groups experience and construct the past in different ways and seek to establish the legitimacy of their different historical visions by maintaining memorial landscapes or by creating new ones. This is much in evidence through the evolution of the once hidden brand(ed) community murals that decorate gable walls in brand community enclaves (housing estates). By contrast to other geographic displays of public ‘visual materialized discourses’, the Northern Ireland context has offered up private galleries and changing canvases for public gaze where mythic identities can be reworked, regenerated, renewed in the safety of ‘intimate intensity’. Commemorative sites as visual “materialized discourses,” lend themselves to become “value-charged symbolic space,” (Hönnighausen 1999, 80). Memorial sites do not just provide the narrative backdrop; rather the spaces themselves represent both a physical location and a sight-line of interpretation (Johnson 1995). Maurice Halbwachs (1992) observed in early religious rituals, the most successful ones had a ‘double focus’—a physical object of veneration and a shared group symbol superimposed on this object. Murals offer this ‘double focus,’ elevating the hand painted memorials to sites of worship within defined ‘brand’ communities. The shared group symbol, takes on a more sinister form of visual narrative (i.e. a flower, symbolic of each community, lily and poppy) can be discretely embedded within this form of co-created visual discourse. The symbolic dimension of memorial sites and their obvious connections with social memory and identity politics have garnered much interest in recent times. The ‘unveiling’ of these once private galleries to public gaze has initiated intra and inter brand community exploration and discussion. These ‘sites of memory’ (Nora 1989) are considered, ‘the dynamic process by which groups map myths (in an anthropological sense) about themselves and their world onto a specific time and place’ (Till 1999, 254). This mapping process is responsible for creating mythic (whether individual or group) identities, which inevitably become symbolically coded and ritualized in such art memorial landscapes (Johnson 2002, 294). Commemorative practice in Northern Ireland has become a means

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for nationalists and unionists to compete in the ‘Olympics of suffering’, and as the state continues to fund so-called ‘single-identity’ commemorative work (recent re-imaging of the murals); commemoration is set to retain its divisive characteristics. Commemoration, because it clearly articulates identity, can be the target for defacement, desecration and violent attack from the ‘Other’ (Nagle 2008, 34). Doss writes that the ‘Symbolic Memorial’ contains ‘no references to why the bombing occurred and who was responsible or to the nation’s history of catastrophic violence’ (2002, 74). Rather than ‘opening a window’ on traumatic events, easing the process from mourning through to acceptance, these symbolic art forms – the murals are an, ‘anaesthetic because the historical and political context of why these deaths occurred has been effaced,’ (2002, 78). We situate the shifting identity politics of the current era in the contesting ideologies of public space identified by Visconti et al. (2010) in Table 1. (Table 1) A brief history of change

Table 1 Re-IMAGING PUBLIC U SP PACE

Individualistic appraisal of public spacee Collectivistic appraisal of pub blic space

Street Arttists

In ndividualistic appraisal of public spacee

-

DWELLE LERS

Collectivis v tic appraisal of pub u lic space

Priv ivate appropriatiion of Public space

ǁĞůůĞƌƐ͛ ƌĞƐŝƐƚĂŶĐĞ ƚŽ ƚŚĞ Alienation of public space

Dialec a tical confrontation

Dialectical a confrontation

Contestiing hypocrisy Self-affirrmation Market exploitation ǁĞůůĞƌƐ͛ Ɛ ƉƌĞƐĞƌǀŝŶŐ ƉƌŝǀĂƚĞ ƉƌŽƉĞƌƚLJ

- Enchanti t ng urban space via gift - Enchanti t ng urban space via vitalizing

- Contesting street e art locations, forms and intents - Defending the authentic voice of o the place - Dialogical recrea e tion of publi - Sense of place and feeling t community

Dialec a tical confrontation

Dialogical a confrontation

ƌƚŝƐƚƐ͛ ĐůĂŝŵ ĨŽƌ ƐƚƌĞĞƚ ĚĞŵŽĐƌĂĐLJ

Striving for o common place

After Viscon o ti et al. (2010)

The murals comprise an example of urban space as cultural fields and texts that shape and reflect community (Visconti et al. 2010; Warner 2002). Murals are a form of mass communication that help publics – or counterpublics or split publics – to know themselves and act as political subjects (Cody 2011). Relations among members of these groups are mediated materially by the apparatus of communications (Latour 2005). Murals are not merely the passive outdoor billboards of the myth market. They are agentic in their own right (Rolston 2003). As such, they may be understood to exist in a perpetual state of transition. Unionist mural painting is a century-old tradition, grounded in historical celebration of empire and ascendancy, commemorating such events as military battles and coronations and embedded in a larger ceremonial complex of pageantry, processional marching, bonfires and symbols of affiliation with Britain. Republican mural painting has a much shorter history, originating in graffiti-type sloganeering and rare depictions of historic Irish revolutionaries, and emerging as memorial portraiture in the wake of the Hunger Strike of 1981 (Rolston 1991,

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2003; Vannais 2001; Woods 2008). The former florescent tradition arose out of a position of political dominance and territorial security, the latter clandestine tradition out of political suppression and territorial insecurity. During the era of the civil rights struggle (aka “The Troubles” or the “Thirty Year War”), unionist murals emphasized paramilitary themes almost exclusively (Rolston 1991, 2003; Vannais 2001). While republican murals also reflected paramilitary themes, it further incorporated content emphasizing the political aspirations of the movement (including solidarity with other revolutionary movements around the globe), as well as ethnic identity motifs rendered in “Celtic Kitsch” (Rolston 2003; Vannais 2001). Following the ceasefires of 1994, loyalist murals remained bellicose in a defensive key, grew increasingly segmented by paramilitary group, and focused on the release of loyalist prisoners and memorials to slain comrades. Little proactive embrace of the potentialities of peace was evinced. Republican murals increasingly emphasized political over military approaches to the future, as well as historical and traditional cultural themes. Unionist murals mirrored the threat level perceived by the paramilitaries, and the republican murals, the optimism that the promise of a larger share of political voice engendered (Rolston 2003; Vannais 2001). The decommissioning of murals currently being promoted by government and cultural authorities (Keenan 2007; 2010) has the potential of accelerating the rate of change in mural styles in sectarian communities toward themes of the common good and joint prosperity. Divergence from paramilitary style is occurring among unionist painters, with a return to historic themes being a notable trend. Republican murals have adopted more of a commemorative attitude. This change reflects the shifting identity politics at work among the groups as they negotiate the emerging nation (Rolston 2003; Vannais 2001). While government funded Council murals of the late 70s and early 80s “neither encouraged nor quelled” the local political upsurge (Rolston 1991, 68), the current sociopolitical climate may produce different results. Many of the motives Chaffee (1993, 10-20) has identified as drivers of street art around the world are at work in Northern Ireland. Street culture promotes popular attention to billboards. The act of painting itself is both a protest and a means of catharsis; it may also “cool out” (Rolston 1991) potential miscreants, which makes government funding an attractive if ultimately ineffective vehicle of social control. Murals promote cultural and ethnic identity, and may serve as an alternative medium for marginal groups deprived of access to official or formal communication channels. Murals are used to define territory and intimidate political rivals. The propaganda value of murals is widely acknowledged (Woods 2008). Painted images are also inspirational, serving to boost morale within the community (Chaffee 1993, 10-20).

Mythic modalities

For brevity’s sake, we offer a simple typology of modalities to describe the mythic dimension of the Northern Irish murals. Classical mythology, drawn from the realm of traditional Irish folklore, employs deep cultural symbols to evoke in beholders a sense of belonging to the land in a primordial manner, a mystical participation in the cultural ethos that is grounded in place. The use of deep cultural symbols persists throughout the eras of muraling. Historical mythology is used to exalt an actual human being, promoting that real-life personage into the realm of the hagiographic, and, often, martyrologic. Even when this trend is temporarily displaced, as in the 70s, heraldic and nationalist symbols are still used to evoke reverence (Rolston 1991). A precursor to and embodiment of the inexorable subsumption of culture by marketing, popcultural mythology has been used to infuse murals with a currency and relevance, so that their subject matter may speak to younger generations perhaps less familiar with or committed to the civic conversation, in a way that invites fresh engagement, whether with sectarian or post-sectarian values. This trend began in the late 80s, as young muralists began to break with traditional forms to embrace such pop cultural forms as album covers for inspiration (Rolston 1991). Fi-

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nally, we identify an emerging post-traumatic mythology devoted to a transcendent theme of reconciliation, which promotes a tentative, utopian civic ideology of cooperation across factions in pursuit of peaceful prosperity. The sacrificial myth of martyrdom (Kearney 1985, 66) may well be a unifying motif across all of these forms. In the short term, we expect this strategy of accommodation to provoke a counter-strategy of resistance and re-membrance in some quarters, fuelling a refreshing and refurbishing of traditional murals. The historical forces giving rise to post-traumatic mythology are situated in the context of a nascent “Brand Belfast” (Brown et al. 2013b) that seeks to pacify and incorporate an “Olympics of suffering” ethos into its emerging image as a cultural (including pop-cultural) center. Commodifying the martyrological moment in a way that supports the local heritage industry without inflaming or devaluing sectarian sympathy will become Belfast’s 21st century mythological challenge. The conversion of contested sites to tourist attractions will require an enlightened mythopoeic marketing to prevent a proliferation of Demiurgic Disneylands on the order of LA/NYC gang turf tours. The “dark tourism” option (Brown et al. 2013b, 1262) may not be as officially uncommodifiable as theorists imagine. The murals

The murals define individual community suffering, fears and trauma. This challenges collective identity and, in doing so, reinforces division through the ownership of restrained colour palates and symbols. Spectators can ‘live through’ painful episodes clothed in the raiments of ‘Others’, just as the Pre-Raphaelites ‘murals’ of the suffering Christ, conjure up a sense of time, place and space. Mythology is embedded into the creation of this form of urban art, played out in ritualized fashion at these sacred sites of commemoration. Murals are examples of ‘collective action’, especially in their re-imaging. Paramilitaries, community members, artists and government funding bodies’ negotiate the aesthetics of the final work to be hung in the private gallery of the housing estate, now open to public gaze. The consociational model of government in place currently in Northern Ireland has afforded opportunities for exposure of these private ‘tribal’ galleries not only to the ‘Other’ but also to the world stage, which in turn has been instrumental in driving forward an evolutionary phase of re-imaging evidenced within the two communities’ canvascapes. Murals as living tapestries reflect consumer culture in artistic hangings, where the ‘sharing out’ of the private to a more public showing helps to bring about the transformation of this place of consumption. Murals are largely painted by the communities they speak to (Rolston 2003). As such, they sustain a visual rhetoric, which can evoke a diversity of responses in the community. Murals, considered as brand community rhetoric, speak essentially to those already brand-loyal to one ideology. Murals have afforded a blank canvas on which to create myths and legends of the past; evidenced by an evolving kaleidoscope of moving images portraying a mix of, ‘myth-symbol complexes and mythomoteurs,‘ (Forker and McCormick 2009, 425); where legitimacy of identity has its origins in religious and political ideology of the past. The storytelling of myths through constrained colour-palettes helps to reinforce concepts of victimization, sacralization/demonization of the brand legacy. Murals are the storybook depiction of key events that continue to shape our present understandings of imagined/liminal communities (Turner 1969). The ability for murals to summonup ‘gods’ and re-connect disparate tribes (Cova 1997) is reflective of the symbolic strength inherent in these visual brands, understood as, ‘significant ideoscapes,’ (Askegaard 2006, 84). The conjuring-up of mythical heroes; devotees of good over evil have long captured the imagination of adult and child alike, in such popular film culture as Superman, Spiderman and Batman. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings draw heavily on heroic myth-making to instil moral concerns and it is perhaps not surprising that paramilitary murals routinely depict ‘heroes’ devoted to a morally legitimate cause; the fight for good over evil. The crusade-like religiosity of

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these particular forms of murals serve to authenticate the brand identity and fortify brand community membership (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Belfast; Figure 2. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Belfast

Brand legitimacy can be pursued through recalling key events in the brand’s life-history (Figures 3 and 4). The capacity to engage global conversations in the storytelling mythologies, serves only to add another layer of authenticity to the brand community identity communicated (Figure 5). These murals serve a different function than the other more openly political ones; instead of being agents of documentation for the change in political brands, they display con-

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Figure 3. An Gorta Mor, Ardoyne Avenue, Belfast (1999); Figure 4. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012 Belfast) nectedness to the global brand community experiencing similar brand narratives and evolution (Figure 6). Although the murals limit explicit commentary on the severity of the foreign/local problems depicted and avoid direct comparison with brand Northern Ireland, they nevertheless communicate solidarity with other suppressed brands. The diversity of storytelling from the occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel to the more historical connections and lineage are given mythical status through the utilization of artistic license, because they incorporate external thematic elements which makes either/or community seem more secure; using the plight of external ‘others’ as surrogates/missionaries of the brand, ‘avoids reinforcement of ethnocentric competitiveness,’ (Forker and McCormick 2009, 436). Hutchinson and Smith (1996, 7) define ethnie as, ‘a named human population with a myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one or more el-

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Figure 5. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Palestinian prisoners’ mural on Falls Road. Figure 6. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) reference to WW1 Battle of the Somme Sandy Row Belfast. ements of common culture, a link with a homeland and a sense of solidarity among at least some of its members.’ This common ethnie of ‘shared memories, myths, values and symbols woven together and sustained in popular consciousness,’ according to (Featherstone 1990) is becoming diffused across the general population and no longer forms a common bond shared uniquely by members of the culture. Craig and Douglas (2006, 322) consider this a form of cultural contamination. This is evidenced in the mythical narratives pedalled in the evolving Muralscapes of N Ireland; especially in the blurring of the stewardship of particular myths. The use of mythological imagery in murals creates an equivalence between current affairs and the past; the linking value that Cova (1997) alludes to. Mythical characters utilized within murals offer a classical/ historical mythological quality to ailing brands purely on their associative values (Rolston 2004, 42). In particular, Cú Chulainn or St. Patrick are symbolic of high

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Figure 7. Loyalist sharing in St Patrick cultural attainment and as a consequence become desirable, iconic brands, ripe, ‘for trans-sectarian poaching,’ (Forker and McCormick 2009, 433). Cú Chulainn, traditionally considered as of Irish descent, has been embraced by the UDA as ‘a defender of Ulster’ within a broader narrative of the Cruthin mythos (Moore and Sanders 2002, 12). The Cruthin narrative overturns the strongly held view that the Irish are the true inhabitants of Ireland; rather the loyalist brand is the indigenous group (Buckley and Kenney 1995, 49). Although this myth is centred on more fact than myth; it is for the most part discarded as inauthentic by both brand communities (Rolston 1991, 36). The ‘plagiarizing’ of myths from one brand community to the other, harks back to an earlier traditional marketing narrative; where a ‘one myth fits all’ understanding is at play (Allen 2002). Other examples of this ‘sharing in’ of historical narratives/figures include St. Patrick (Figure 7), who has been dually-claimed by both communities. Belk’s (2010, 730) recognition of ‘sharing in’ within consumer research also calls for research on ‘sharing out’, which murals have easily embraced in terms of public space. The transformation of Cuchulainn into the ‘other’ brand symbol is heavily reliant on Adamson’s notion of a Cruithin pre-Celtic civilisation (Adamson, 1974). As an invented piece of myth-making, Kaufmann (2007, 3) asserts, ‘this is a flimsy construct which is easily lampooned by opponents and has failed to take root even amongst its target audience.’ Santino (1999) asserts that loyalists have poached Cuchulainn, a nationalist symbol, known in ancient myths as the Hound of Ulster. Beyond the experience economy, consumers are seeking authenticity (Gilmore and Pine 2007), from which to build connections. If one considers the two murals closely (Figures 8 and 9), it should be noted that the pose offered of Cuchulainn, is fully duplicated in the loyalist mural. The past and present, depicted running left/right in each tri-palette. The heavy, religious undertones, of a Christ-like Cuchulainn, sacrificed at Calvary is potent in both mural offerings; right down to Christ’s shrouds, rent and torn about his emaciated body and the phoenix rising atop the right shoulder. The symbols that mark the identity of each community are the canna lily (nationalist) and the poppy (loyalist) emblazoned on each. The heady mix of religious rhetoric entwined in these murals can, ‘serve as a catalyst for mobilization and social change,’ (Izberk-Bilgin 2012, 680) and this, ‘religiosity in consumer research is increasingly understood as a totemic expression of extreme

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Figure 8. Source: Sherry, J. (2012) Cuchulainn (republican) Figure 9. Cuchulainn (loyalist) Belfast brand loyalty,’ (ibid, 665). The murals that adopt such religious patois and myth-making can be understood in terms of community mobilization, as Wald (1987, 29-30) posits, ‘human beings will make enormous sacrifices if they believe themselves to be driven by a divine force.’ The nature of murals as powerful narrators, exhibit varying degrees of ability to sustain/ oppose marketplace ideologies and brand meanings (Izberk-Bilgin 2012, 665); when heavily laced with nuances of religiosity (Luedicke et al. 2010). The literature on the symbolic attributes of brands suggest that brand stories increasingly structure the way we understand our identity, relationships, social conflicts, and global events. Symbols are ‘the building blocks of myth and the veneration of symbols is a significant aspect of ritual; a ritual observes the procedures with which a symbol is invested–nations are themselves myths,’ (Fulbrook 1997, 72). The murals (Figures 10 and 11); are a potent mix of loyalist and nationalist ‘mythomoteur[s],’ which include Bobby Sands (an iconic brand) Holt (2004). Iconicity of a brand can provide high value to a community, where such murals are seen to address, ‘the collective anxieties and desires of a nation,’ (Holt 2004, 6). It is in their ability to perform the identity myth, to fire the imagination of individual brand communities. Identity myths have the wherewithal of ‘patching’ together, otherwise torn life-tapestries; myths can smooth these tensions. The murals are set in the populist world (Holt 2004, 9) where a distinctive ethos can be shared out in that community, which can be the driver for particular collective (Thompson and Tian 2008, 596) actions. The few masterful performances enacted through an iconic brand (i.e. Bobby Sands) are sufficient to carry that brand legacy forward. Such great myths have the potential to augment the brand’s reputation and charm its audience. It has been theorized that we are symbolic creatures and we inhabit our own symbolic worlds (Cassirer 1944). Myths and symbols are not inert but recurrently re-imagined to sustain currency with popular culture; as such, murals, ‘will change, both to those who produce or own it, and to those who view It,’ (McCormick and Jarman 2005, 51). Symbolism, therefore has the ability to define community borders and territorialize brand communities (Kuusisto 2001, 62). Ethno-symbolism suggests that nations reach back to the myths and memories of the past to

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Figure 10. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Belfast Figure 11. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Belfast

(re)construct, (re)invigorate, or transform a brand community (Githens-Mazer 2007, 4). Classical ethno-symbolism, defined by Smith, speaks of ‘shared memories of golden ages, ancestors and great heroes and heroines, the communal values that they embody, the myths of ethnic origins, migration and divine election, the symbols of community, territory, history and destiny that distinguish them.’ (Smith 2001,119). It should be noted for the most part, these shared myths associated with Cuchulainn and St Patrick, attend what Holt and Thompson (2004, 425) argue in their study, ‘[American] mass culture idealizes the man-of-action hero-an idealized model of manhood that resolves the inherent weaknesses in two other prominent models (the breadwinner and the rebel).’ These dual roles are identifiable across both communities and why to a greater extent, the ‘sharing-in’ process translates easily to each brand community (Belk 2010). The murals offer opportunities for heroic masculine consumption, depicted in the strongly militarized or mythical hero-style figure illustrated on gable walls. These forms, offer a vicarious form of agency, as they, ‘are imagined to live free of societal authority and can be understood as rebelling against the constraints and conformist pressures of modern life,’ (Holt and Thompson 2004, 436). In the context of N Ireland this narrative sits quite neatly within both brand community histories. Pop-cultural myths

The music culture touched on by both brand communities adopts very different, yet subtle forms. The Harp and Pikesmen mural (republican) draws extensively on the legacy and meaning of the harp as synonymous with the motto of the Society of United Irishmen, ‘It is newstrung and shall be heard’ adopted as their official insignia (Figure 12). However, in modern culture, this has been updated to, ‘It is new strung and shall now be heard.’ For the Eddie mural (loyalist), the strong sense of fighting forces of darkness is reflected in the strong association with heavy metal band, Iron Maiden (see Figure 13), which depicts an apparitional figure, Eddie, waging war through an apocalyptic battlefield (Kuper 1990). Such murals reveal evi-

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Figure 12. Source: Sherry, J. (2012) Harp and Pikesmen, Carrickfergu 1798– 1998, South Link, Belfast. Figure 13. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Figure x Eddie dence of stereotyping (Allport 1954) and the concept of the psychological enemy; in Northern Ireland strong evidence exists to support ‘us and them’ narratives (of Pink Floyd fame), which fits with what Allport (1954) recognizes as an inherent need to dichotomise conflicts in terms of ‘forces of light’ versus ‘forces of darkness’ (Kuper 1990). The more recent additions in the shared space of the Cathedral Quarter, Belfast, draw on local/global brands to reinforce the ‘togetherness’ of the musical heritage emanating from both ethno-nationalist communities in N Ireland; but whose voices speak across both boundaries. The ability of music to progress a shared cultural identity is captured within the iconic brands, which are Rory Gallaher and Van Morrison (Figures 14 and 15).

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Figure 14. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Belfast Figure 15. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Belfast

Refurbished

These historical events, Act of Covenant and Titanic (Figures 16 and 17), have celebrated their centenaries in 2012, as part of that legacy they were given a more permanent form of exhibition. Instead of the traditional uni-dimensional mural display, flat on the gable wall; these are now 3D shapes that are fixed to the wall, yet still retain an ability to evolve should the occasion necessitate. This historical murals have certain mythical undertones, but for the most part are factual representations whose narrative is somewhat fixed. For other murals, the re-imaging process has been instrumental through the Peace Programme to initiate narratives of change; in most cases away from the militarized visions (Figure 18) to more palpable images, considered as interchangeable between the two communities (Figure 19). The re-imaging process has continued to effect change, albeit at a slower pace than possibly anticipated. Re-imaged

Other forms of display/exhibition have been proffered as a means to inject a lighter touch to these messaging forums. In particular the peace wall, offers an opportunity to herald in ‘street art’ in a recognized global form (Figures 20 and 21).

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Figure 16. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Belfast Act of Covenant Figure 17. Belfast Titanic

Figure 18. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Figure 19. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Shankill, Belfast

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Figure 20. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Peace Wall Belfast Figure 21. Peace Wall Belfast Street art (politicized in terms of public space) Street art (depoliticized)

These examples of street art (Figures 22, 23 and 24) are indicative of the more common forms of street art composition evidenced in the study by Visconti et al. (2010) across global contexts. These art offerings are situated in areas abandoned in run-down city centre sites. The obvious intention is to reclaim, reinvigorate those public places/spaces that bring urban deterioration.

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(Above and Right) Figures 22, 23 and 24. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) City centre, Belfast

(Below) Figures 25 and 26. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012)Wall Near Kelly’s Cellars, City centre Belfast

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Community art (Figures 25 and 26)

Rebirth of a politicized mural

The ‘Resistance breeds Freedom’ mural (Figure 27) removed and reborn to accommodate the latest political event (1 May 2014) in N Ireland (i.e. Arrest of Gerry Adams). This action supports the evolving nature of the ideoscape (Askegaard 2006, 84) in order to mimic the imagination of the people and their current anxieties (Figure 28).

Figure 27. Source: Sherry, J. (Nov 2012) Falls Road, Belfast Figure 28. Re-imaging of George Best mural (East Belfast). Source: Belfast Telegraph (1 May 2014) http://cdn1.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/ article30240153.ece/eb50e/ALTERNATES/h342/ULSTE

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Figure 29. George Best Mural (East Belfast). Source: The Guardian (3 September 2013) Conclusion

Murals effectively create a storied product that carries distinctive symbolic armoury through which communities imbibe, to identify with that myth (Holt 2004, 36). The concept of iconicity fits with the mural narrative, where the historical entity and ultimately the murals’ success emanates from a position where mythical ability and historical demand align. The iconic brand (mural) targets the most appropriate ‘community’ myth; but remains highly responsive to cultural interruption. Periods of relative stability in N Ireland have afforded opportunities for some communities to radicalize their ideology and myth-making; identified by the Re-imaging programme. New myths are promulgated in these interrupted life-history spaces; however, not all new myths have the ability to address the anxieties of its community and as such do not capture the imagination of its audience. For some communities this is a welcome change; for others the ‘letting go’ of an iconic myth can have a profound and disturbing effect (Figures 29 and 30), accompanied by an almost immediate retreat back to the safety of the original myth (i.e. the re-militarization of the George Best mural in East Belfast, 2013). Here Socrates (via Plato) describes humans as prisoners who have been chained all their life in a cave, able to perceive the world only via shadows cast on the wall in front of them by the light of a fire behind them. In other words, they see shadows rather than reality, indeed, the shadows are their reality. The philosopher’s role in society is to leave the cave and finally see the world for what it is (Levene 2010, 36). As Holt (2004) argues, populist worlds breathe life into iconic myths; the linkages, imaginary connections afforded by such contexts, afford an authenticity in its being, ‘Myths… are the primary medium through which we participate in the nation’s culture,’ (Holt 2004, 59-60). Iconic brands are therefore considered as those who draw from existing myth-culture to initiate the process through building on already acknowledged mythical markers. In contradiction

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to Holt (2004), the myth market constitutive of the murals, has not succumbed to ‘crumble’ when charged with cultural upheaval; rather there exists opportunities for symbiosis for both changed/unchanged myths despite cultural constraints and resistance evidenced in some brand communities (i.e. Eddy mural Carrickfergus, unwillingness to change). Here, too, we have instruction from Plato, who does indeed teach that, at first, we are in darkness concerning the Good; but once led out of this darkness into the light, our perception does not take well to the origin of its source; rather we think our sight is somehow damaged or incapacitated, (Celsus 1987, 104). Bhattacharjee et al. (forthcoming 2014) draw attention to the storying of brands that have the capability to invoke identity in the community and demonstrate fit (Reed et al. 2012). In this case the mural of George Best, considered a neutral and a shared iconic brand across the two ethno-communities in N Ireland; but considered the ‘local boy’ from East Belfast; this narrative did not obviously hit the ‘connect’ button with home community. As such, the mural was not taken-up as expected; the ability for self-agency, as Moller, Ryan, and Deci (2006) argue plays a vital role in whether a ‘marketing message’ is adopted, coupled with the agency (Visconti et al. 2010) inherent in that choice. The murals highlight the important role that brands play in the expression of the historical and spatial dimensions of ideological consumption (Varman and Belk 2009), where past, present and future narratives mediate their respective community’s consumption (i.e. dual representation of Cuchulainn). This aspect of mural disconnect, contributes to an emergent literature that recognizes the social linking value of brands (Cayla and Eckhardt 2008). In the words of Bauman (2005, 77); public places that, ‘recognize the creative and life-enhancing value of diversity, while encouraging the differences to engage in a meaningful dialogue,’ are the sites for the future of urban life,’ as cited in Visconti et al., (2010, 526). To the extent that a “shared future” agenda of subsidizing the re-imaging of murals (Arts Council of Northern Ireland, n.d.) remains a top-down rather than grassroots initiative, myth markets will reflect an on-going tension between civic ideology and those of the populist worlds in search of reconciliation.

Acknowledgment: All images are the work of John Sherry unless otherwise specified References

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VI

Oc ól chorma

Oc ól chorma – Introduction Andy Prothero

University College Dublin

The theme for session 6 of the conference refers to a test placed on Conchobar, king of Ulster to spend one third of a day drinking ale. And while the session will not be focusing on the drinking of ale (at least not to my knowledge!) it is nonetheless an apt title as we explore the role of brands, markets, communications and consumption in the realm of the myth. Drinking ale may, of course, become part of the nostalgic myth of the conference as participants reminisce in the … The four papers in the track take us on four story-telling journeys that explore myths from the perspective of the industrial revolution in England, the Remington firearm, convenience in domestic consumption, and the relationship between marketing and myth through the lens of the modern day ‘celebrity’ as hero. Theoretical lenses explore these topics from a number of perspectives including Marxist, post-modern, utilitarian, and consumer culture theory. The role of marketing, markets and consumers in helping to create and perpetuate myths is evidenced in each of the papers. The Goulding and Saren paper considers how an historical event has been re-created and reimagined via a living museum (Reinventing the English Industrial Revolution as Myth and Heritage). Witkowski’s paper (Mythical Moments in Remington Brand History) explores three moments in history that contributed to the brand meaning of the Remington firearm within the context of American gun culture. Davies, Fitchett and Ostergaard examine convenience in everyday life and the role myth has played in everyday domestic consumption practices (The Ideologies of Convenience in Myths of Domestic Consumption). The authors take us take us on a journey that considers how consumed material objects aid with domestic chores and convenience. Hackley and Hackley (Branding Narcissus: Marketing Myths in Contemporary Celebrity) explore the modern day celebrity using a mythic hero narrative within the context of a convergent media landscape. All papers rely on secondary sources from the historical periods they are examining. Goulding and Saren explore a contemporary living museum, which re-enacts the Industrial Revolution in England. Witkowski utilises ads and magazine articles from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Davies, Fitchett and Ostergaard consider inter-generational interviews with daughters-mothers-grandmothers, as well as an analysis of key literary texts from the 16th to 18th centuries – I am curious as to the use of male literary texts to discuss female accounts of domesticisation. Hackley and Hackley consider contemporary celebrities, their production via modern day social media – and explore these by considering the role of myth in the branding strategies of said celebrity culture. Thus, each of the papers has a strong focus on history – and the role of the past in (re)creating the present! Goulding and Saren consider a moment in time as myth, Witkowski the firearm as a material object, Davies, Fitchett and Ostergaard use female oral histories to explore domesticisation, and Hackley and Hackley consider how the historic mythic hero narrative has been used in the “cultural production of celebrity.” The historical focus opens up a series of critical questions about the relative insights and constraints offered by mythological analysis on the on hand and historical analysis on the other. These papers offer a relatively unproblematic synthesis between the two analytical approaches and this speaks against historical critique of myth. Myth is often thought of as being ‘a-histor307

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ical’, even timeless in its structure, whereas historical analysis has an ambiguous relationship to mythical text. An interesting question then is to discuss whether these papers treat mythology as a kind of surrogate historical record, or whether historical accounts are rendered and treated as mythical sources. From this perspective a series of critical issues arise, including the extent to which historical sources can be evaluated as more than text (or myth) and whether mythologies are legitimate as sources of historical insights into the past, whether real, imagined or re-invented.

Branding Narcissus: Marketing myths in contemporary celebrity Chris Hackley and Amy Rungpaka Hackley

Royal Holloway University of London; Queen Mary University of London

A public need for hero myths is reflected in the werewolves, vampires, angels, demons, Norse gods and comic book heroes that increasingly populate movies and TV series aimed at adult as well as adolescent audiences. But to satisfy the demand there is also an increased cultural production of celebrity, in which hero myths are faintly inscribed. This serves not only as a source of projective identification, but also as a driver of market demand within a convergent media landscape. Under this process, the narrative of the hero myth has been reduced to an edited vignette, and the distance between nonentity and quasi-heroic celebrity has been collapsed. This paper explores aspects of the interplay between marketing and myth within the dynamic of a convergent media landscape, noting that the dynamic of marketing may degrade hero myths but deprives them of little of their cultural force.

Introduction

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949: 28)

The spiritual force of the mythic hero might be largely forgotten in contemporary life, but its influence remains. How else can the burgeoning use of mythical hero narratives in entertainment and media be explained? Movies and TV drama aimed at an adult audience are replete with characters with supernatural powers, comic book heroes, vampires, werewolves, angels and demons. TV shows like Game of Thrones, Sleepy Hollow, True Blood and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D occupy the top 20 US TV shows at the time of writing (US TV Guide 2014), while the top 50 movie releases in 2013 included Thor, The Hobbit, Carrie, The Mortal Instruments, Superman: Man of Steel, Riddick, Epic, and of course, the quintessential mythical hero, the Great Gatsby (IMDB 2013). Celebrity in the convergence era might appear a debased form of heroic representation, but the cultural force it holds reflects the eternal collective memory of heroic narratives in which some of those among us are elevated through our personal trials to the role of hero or heroine, sage, unifier, peacemaker and magnanimous presence to light up the blighted lives of those of us left behind. Social media seem to have collapsed the space between celebrity and nonentity by, on the one hand, making media celebrity seem just one viral video clip or news story away for anyone, however talentless, obscure or charmless, and, on the other, allowing fans intimate daily access to the quotidian activities, thoughts and opinions of their celebrity heroes and heroines. There seems nothing aloof or enigmatic about contemporary celebrities, unlike the movie icons of the 1950s and pop stars of the 1960s, yet the cultural status of celebrity is by no means diminished – far from it. Celebrities, from A to Z list, seem to occupy a position of secular sainthood, such is their power to command huge followings on social media (e.g. Colleen Rooney – 1.09 million Twitter followers and counting), masses of column inches of press, and ex309

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traordinary fees for personal appearances, PR stories, books and DVDs or any number of other income stream-generating activities. It may seem preposterous, on the face of it, to link the mythical narratives of the ancients to the pathetic pantheon of preening reality TV stars, witless footballer-turned TV pundits, hopeless talent show winners (not to mention those placed second, fourth or tenth in the first semi-final) and gormless fruitcakes who did something ridiculous that went viral. Nonetheless, as the cultural production of celebrity has surged in the era of media convergence, we are reminded that, still, there is a sense that celebrity binds us all through our spiritual yearning for a life more creative, more dangerous, more vivid and more recognised than the one we have. A rejection of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002) perhaps, but the turn to myth also reflects a timeless impulse that we cannot deny. Few of us have never dreamed, even in passing, of a life of deep fulfilment that would bring us the respect and recognition of our peers, and perhaps even the adulation of strangers. The mythic narrative of the hero remains faintly inscribed in contemporary celebrity stories. The mythic hero seeks a higher way, and embarks on a quest for truth, often after first rejecting or not recognising the call. The tribulations and entanglements the hero faces against dark and mysterious forces yield insights that deepen the meaning of the hero’s liminal journey. Campbell (1949) used the term ‘monomyth’, borrowed from James Joyce, to refer to the spiritual unity shared by human beings through heroic myths. The seemingly trivial problems and anxieties of daily life resonate with the dramatised troubles of soap opera stars or actors, since they are suggestive of a greater purpose and they connect subjective experience to universal mythic narratives. Just as Hollywood developed techniques of economical storytelling to portray the mythic journey of the hero in a few short scenes or a blurry montage, contemporary cultural production makes use of devices of narrative and representation to ramp up the productivity of the celebrity assembly line. Note, for example, the scaled-down liminal ritual in reality TV shows (Hackley, Brown and Hackley 2012) that cuts the narrative length between nonentity and hero, or the endless appetite in popular media for PR stories of celebrity tribulations, as if an addiction to prescription drugs or a fast-food problem can be cast as a metaphor for the mythic hero’s struggle. It may seem absurd, put in this way, to see a talent show novelty act like Rylan Clark or a pretentious stand-up comic like Russell Brand as modern-day heroes, but the media dynamic that has projected their earning capacity into the stratosphere ineluctably draws on elements of the mythic hero narrative. Contemporary celebrity is often portrayed as low culture, low-brow and low life, yet, deserving though it may be of such a characterisation, the faded spirit of mythic heroism invests it with a powerful cultural resonance. There are some strange new dynamics around the discourse of celebrity. Through social media, fans can enter the quotidian realm of the Über-celeb as if they were hanging out together at a virtual mall (Banister and Cocker 2013). Many ‘slebs outsource their social media persona to a junior copywriter but some choose to personally take the reigns of their social media apparatus from time to time, to offer personal insights on a one-to-one level, thereby deepening the sense of brand engagement of their grateful fanbase. Happily for the celebs, their Twitterings are also poured over by showbusiness journalists and often provide the hook for a nice PR story. The accessibility of celebrities through social media is matched by the accessibility of the discourse, and the technologies, of celebrity itself. Fans and aspiring self-promoters can deploy their own social media strategies to achieve a quasi-celebrity identity positioning. For some YouTube performers, bloggers, reality stars, amateur video producers, and random attention-seekers, this turns into the real thing. For example, Canadian teen pop sensation Justin Bieber used YouTube as his audition reel before achieving global domination, no doubt to be rapidly followed by personal implosion, while scores of unknowns have launched careers as celebrity authors, journalists, style leaders and public speakers simply through the social media buzz created by their blogging (Dunlop 2014).

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This amounts, in effect, to a disintermediation of the cultural production of celebrity, in the sense that where, once, hero status had to be conferred by forces beyond the control of the tyro hero, now, a mastery of social media and a flair for PR can place the hero’s destiny in their own hands. The heroic narrative of Jason’s Odyssey with the Argonauts has become condensed into half-a-dozen prime-time TV shows by the distilling effect of social media. Millions of views and shares can elevate a nonentity to celebrity status within weeks. Just as postmodern identity has become detached from the traditional markers of social class and race to be mobilised through the symbols of consumption (Elliott and Wattanasuwan 1998), celebrity no longer has the necessary precondition of long-sought and hard-earned high achievement and gradual recognition in an extraneous field of endeavour. It has become, well, Kardashianised, as a kind of discourse, detached from actual achievement and articulated through and mobilised by, social media. Most importantly, it is attainable almost instantly. As we note above, though, the ostensible proletarianisation of celebrity does not reflect a lessening of its cultural or economic importance. Celebrity has extraordinary scale and reach as a characteristic of cultural production in the convergent economy (Jenkins 2006). Media channels, entertainment, information, retail marketing and branding are all converging within the unified field of communications technology, and, in turn, marketing has become the black hole pulling all this communications technology together. Celebrity has, indeed, become central to the re-invention of global capitalism (Lasch and Lury 2007; Kerrigan et al. 2011), a branch of branding in itself (see Schroeder 2005) and a prime vehicle for consumer myth-making. As such, it has been absorbed seamlessly into media marketing systems, driving sales of magazines, fashion and retail, movies, fragrances, sports merchandise, luxury brands and, increasingly, any other brand category including groceries, motor vehicles, tourism and more. This paper, then, explores some of the techniques of the cultural production of celebrity and, in particular, focuses on the collapse of the discursive space between non-celebrity and celebrity in the convergent media universe. The notion of celebrity has become diffused across various media and discourses, and we suggest that celebrity offers a prime example of what Lasch and Lury (2007) characterise as a shift in cultural production from representation, to mediation. The paper first introduces the topic by highlighting the changed dynamic of the production of the celebrity hero in social media. We then turn to the mediating role of celebrity in brand marketing before exploring some of the techniques of production of celebrity. Finally, we discuss implications for the theorisation of celebrity as a manifestation of the narrative of mythic heroism.

When will I be famous? The disintermediation of the celebri-tisation process

Celebrity has not always been so easy to obtain. Martin Kelner’s (2003) affectionate account of the low-rent entertainers who wait in the green room of fame awaiting the ‘big break’ that never quite arrives, somehow reveals the sadder side of celebrity and demonstrates the lengths to which some will go to fulfil their need for a sense of existential liminality (Turner 1969; 1974). Kelner’s dreamers subsist in a realm in which profound personal transformation is a constant, though latent, possibility, or so it seems to them. They spend their time in the gritty outer fringes of showbusiness, playing sparsely attended gigs in pubs, end-of-pier dives, holiday camps and the last resort of the down-at-heel entertainer, the cruise liner. These inhabitants of the entertainment netherworld are as plentiful as ever today, but the digital resources at their disposal have transformed their ability to position their identity within a discourse of celebrity. Indeed, a putative celebrity identity positioning no longer requires the tangibles of an entertainment career at all. There is no need for the neophyte fan-magnet to actually have experienced a ten-year apprenticeship playing dingy pubs, to have an agent or even to have an act. Rudimentary social media and self-presentation skills, and a voracious lust for fame, can be enough to bring real, revenueearning celebrity within reach through just one viral story or one reality TV appearance.

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Appearing in a reality TV show, for example, can quickly generate a social media profile that fuels paid pubic appearances and PR features on national newspapers and magazines, ownbrand fashion, model shoots, TV show hosting jobs and sponsorship deals, as for recent UK reality stars like Lauren Goodger, Joey Essex, Rylan Clark and Amy Willerton. If you’ve never heard of any of them, well done. For some others, social media leverage media presence achieved in mass media. For example, anodyne child star Hannah Montana re-branded herself as wicked sex goddess Miley Cyrus through her infamously effective ‘content’ marketing strategy. Cyrus is now feted as a heroine, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Not only do social media apply a collective effect, but they also operate as a collection of free-standing media platforms that can boost the aspirant towards genuine pseudo-celebrity. Arguably, the reality TV route is best for those without any talent other than the ability to be quirkily engaging (Stacey Solomon), mind-bendingly disconnected (e.g. Joey ‘I never learned to blow my nose, never needed to’ Essex), argumentative (Jade Goody) or photogenic (Amy Willerton), while social media acts both as a 24/7 global audition reel and a market testing laboratory for writers or performers whose talent can generate the kind of social media traffic that makes their celebrity brand glow with a golden hue in the convergent media firmament. In a sense, the celebritisation process has collapsed in on itself, in a two-way effect. Celebrities who boast actual accomplishments, like movie stars, sports heroes, singing performers, best-selling authors and, erm, TV chefs (Brownlie and Hewer 2011), do not seem to be the inaccessible, distant and god-like beings they once were in Hollywood’s heyday. Social and digital media, the cult of celebrity gossip and changing PR practices among the celebriscenti (clebri-arti? celebritariat?) have egalitarianised the celebrity persona so that celebrities today use social media to parade their credentials of ordinariness, thereby simultaneously closing the discursive space between themselves and their fans, and also accentuating it. For example, Jennifer Lawrence, the hottest female Hollywood star of the moment for her roles in Hunger Games, X Men and American Hustle, felt moved to complain in an interview that her arm fat gave her ‘armpit vaginas’ (Daily Mail 2014). This self-deprecation, from someone who might be considered to represent the apotheosis of physical perfection, at least after her publicity shots have been duly photoshopped, won media approval, yet it is striking how unlikely it is that this comment could have come from an old-style movie star like, say, Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich. Similarly, one cannot imagine Vivienne Leigh courting public sympathy by parading her personal mistakes or unhappiness on social media, as pop mega-star Rihanna and others have been wont to do on occasion. The discourse of celebrity has shifted since the days of Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart and now the gods and goddesses of entertainment are expected not to protect their own mystique, but to debunk it. Of course, the fact that someone with physical imperfections and a studied gaucheness can also be the biggest female draw in Hollywood, like Jennifer Lawrence, is itself an assertion of the power of celebrity. Social media, then, have become a significant tool of the cultural production of celebrity, and they have been placed in the mucky hands of the many-headed unwashed, the proletarian hoards, the celebritariat, who can now assimilate and deploy the discourse and technologies of celebrity through social media. The fact that Western celebrities now use social media to portray themselves as people who are ordinary, but for the incidental facts of their ravishing looks, astonishing wealth and global recognition, facilitates this migration of entrepreneurial zeal from producer, to consumer/producer. Indeed, as we note above, this quasi self-deprecation is an essential part of the PR strategy of the contemporary star, since to appear aloof or arrogant would, today, result in a social media backlash, when in the past it was a strategy that worked very well for enigmatic and reclusive stars like Greta Garbo or Marlon Brando. Even boorish behaviour can elevate the subject to a heroic status: consider American football star Richard Sherman, of whom no one beyond the Seattle Seahawks fanbase had heard before his ill-considered post-game rant on live TV when he mocked his losing opponent and claimed that he,

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Sherman, was the best cornerback in football. The clip of Sherman’s tirade went viral and he subsequently found himself invited on to prime time national news shows as a leading item to discuss sport, race and being American. Agents queued up to commission Sherman’s previously ignored thoughts for magazine features, TV interviews and more. All this, and the foulmouthed spleen that gained him such media notoriety, elicited just one solitary viewer complaint out of the scores of millions of Americans watching the game (Eaton 2014). Meanwhile, back in the usually piously politically correct world of UK media, revelations about TV cook Nigella Lawson’s drug habit and financial extravagance seem only to have increased her celebrity cachet, against the backdrop of her divorce from an abusive husband. Conventional marketing management theory has little to say about the profound changes in the public relations dynamics behind celebrity consumer culture, but we suggest that marketing is central to these changes.

The power of celebri-marketing

The convergence of media channels through the digitisation of communication has connected market segments and provided a powerful space for leveraging brand equity (Powell 2013). Conventional wisdom in branding holds that extending brand strategies across new markets and new audiences carries risks (Aaker 2004), principally the risk of confusing consumers by diluting the brand positioning, but these risks seem to be at least partly ameliorated through the connection with celebrity. We suggest that the powerful currency of celebrity in brand marketing rests partly on the mobility it can confer on brand positioning across disparate media channels and incongruent market segments. Celebrities have become nodes connecting and materialising marketed brands across the digital media landscape. Celebrity articulates the liminality of brands by making tangible their anthropomorphic (Brown 2010) characteristics, thereby enhancing their transformational properties. Celebrities, like invented brand characters (Hosany et al. 2013), facilitate consumers’ quasi-relationships with brands and populate consumers’ own mythic narratives through projective identification with real-life (pseudo) heroes. Conventional celebrity endorsement (Erdogan 1999), whereby a famous figure poses in advertisements as an ostensible user of the brand, remains a popular marketing tool in South and South East Asia, but in the West the technique has generally moved on to encompass less salesoriented PR. The conventional logic of celebrity endorsement holds that the celebrity must be ‘aligned’ with the sponsor or product to be endorsed, so that the positive attitudes elicited from consumers will transfer from the celebrity to the endorsed brand (Aaker 2004. In this way, celebrity endorsement is seen to ‘back up other elements in the marketing mix such as product design, branding, packaging, pricing, and place decisions (distribution channels and physical distribution) in order to attempt to create positive effects in the minds of consumers’ (Erdogan 1999: 291). The basis for this approach appears to be the assumption that the celebrity acquires positive associations through success in an exogenous field of endeavour before becoming linked through advertising and PR to the brand, creating a current along which congruent forms of likeability flow from the celebrity to the brand and back again. This ‘meaning-transfer’ (McCracken 1986; 1989) is said to ‘circulate’, from the exogenous arena (say, film or sport) to the emergent celebrity, then to the brand to be endorsed, and from there to the consumers who enlist the associated meanings into their own identity projects (Tom et al. 1992). There is, though, more than a hint of linearity in this theorisation,in the way that the celebrity element is assumed to be logically prior to the endorsement. This gives the subsequent transfer of meaning to the brand and, then, to the consumers, a sequential character. We suggest that celebrity is thing-ified (Lasch and Lury 2007) through social media and does not conform neatly to a linear process model in the convergent global economy. Rather, the mediation has become ontologically prior to the status – or, to put it another way, if it quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it probably has a social media strategy and an agent.

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One might argue that where the celebrity’s brand is neatly aligned with that of the sponsor, the psychosocial elements of trust in the brand (Elliott and Yannopoulou 2007) may be deepened, even though the managerial notion of alignment presupposes a degree of precision in the consumers’ understanding of the brand values that might be unlikely. Self-report surveys do suggest that alignment of celebrity with brand values enhances perceived fit (Buil, de Chernatony and Hem 2009) but there may be some circular logic in this supposition. Asking consumers if an endorsement should fit invites a conventional answer, and there are many endorsements designed on this basis to reassure risk-averse consumers. But does it account, for example, for the outrageous marketing heft of footballer-turned-underpant model David Beckham? Celebri-marketing: the archetype

As an example of an archetype of celebri-branding it is difficult to overlook the erstwhile soccer player, model and tattoo canvas that is David Beckham. The iconic Beckham image acts as a symbolic point of connection for many different market demographics across the world and his activities translate easily across media channels. Beckham’s appeal, in fact, extends to the point where the merest association guarantees acres of positive PR coverage, hence his value as an (unpaid) ambassador for the London 2012 Olympics and the UK’s failed bid for the 2022 World Cup. Beckham has had commercial contracts with Sainsbury’s, Adidas, Breitling, Armani, H&M, Samsung, Diet Coke and many more, and, according to Steve Martin, Chief Executive of M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, his retirement from football will increase his earning potential to upwards of £15–20 million a year (Said 2013). For cynics, Beckham was an underachieving footballer who was past his best at 26 and reserved his sharpest turn of pace for the goal celebrations, usually jumping on the scorer’s back while gurning straight to camera. Since his early days when his petulance and inconsistency occasionally marred his football career (including an ignominious sending off in a crucial England World Cup match), style coaches and public speaking training, allied to his carefully tended good looks and anodyne geniality, have created a persona befitting a head of state, Hollywood movie star, paradigm-busting scientist and literary giant, all rolled into one. Beckham’s carefully articulated yet instantly forgettable words drip like glottalstopped golden nuggets from every artfully conceived media appearance. To be fair, as footballers like to say, our David does seem to be a nice enough chap, but the celebrity status of this affable Narcissus seems founded on little more than his looks, his moderately successful football career, and appearing not to be an arse, the latter quality a particularly hard one to find among the ranks of major professional footballers. Brand it like Beckham might have become the first and last commandment of sports PR, but his is a triumph of emptiness. The self-referential cycle of celebri-marketing

Beckham may be the Daddy of vacuous celebrity but he is merely the most vivid example of the turn to celebri-marketing in the convergence economy. Such is the prestige of major brands today, the celebrity’s celebrity might actually become enhanced in a self-referential cycle through association with the brand. The more prestigious the endorsements, the higher the celebrity’s celebrity brand equity rises. As we note above, it is sometimes forgotten that David Beckham’s football career was no more successful than that of many other British players of that era, such as Steve McManaman, Ian Rush, Michael Owen, Paul Scholes or Mark Hughes. Beckham is a handsome fellow, to be sure, and his lavishly photographed underpants advertising campaigns have been part of his elevation to becoming the celebrity brand icon’s icon. Contemporary celebrities like Beckham and, before his spectacular fall from grace, Tiger Woods, have stretched the celebrity brand into new techniques of execution beyond wooden and patently insincere personal product endorsements or demeaning spokesperson gigs (McCracken 1989) but can now encompass any form of media ‘content’, from Tweets to viral films and PR

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puff features in the burgeoning showbusiness and celebrity-driven media brands. Indeed, the celebrity’s everyday activities can constitute brand ambassadorship, to the extent that their brand partnerships are well known and their everyday activities are covered by the media, thus reflecting implicitly on the brand. Some, like Coleen Rooney, who was turned into a celebrity by grateful paparazzi who were tired of taking pictures of potato-faced husband Wayne, have got into some trouble for excessive sponsored Tweeting to her million plus followers (Lowe 2013). But, in the new publicity-driven social media marketing scene, Brendan Behan’s counterintuitive axiom that ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity (except your own obituary)’ has become a truism because celebritisation often transcends negative publicity. The cultural knowledge consumers bring to our mediated encounters with celebrity can mean that the brand endorsement leaks across into other genres. Colleen now sponsors anything from perfume to bikinis, while Beckham, for instance, starred with rugby player Johnny Wilkinson in a video made especially for sports fans by Adidas, but there was no explicit promotional element. The viewer could infer that Beckham was working for Adidas, and that was all that was needed. Consumers, well-tutored in reading promotion culture (Wernick 1991) are left to infer the intertextual reference to Adidas. Likewise, child-star-turned-sex-goddess Miley Cyrus’s infamous appearance at the MTV awards not only introduced a new word into the global lexicon (twerking, of course) but acted as a powerful yet entirely implicit promotion for her single, released (coincidentally) shortly after her performance had generated seismic social and mass media reaction. Sometimes, the endorsement itself appears to be reciprocal, such as where celebrities are appointed to quasi-official positions as creative directors for major brands. Fashion designer Mark Jacobs moved into a successful perfume line before being appointed as creative director by Diet Coke, Stella McCartney was given a similar title to design athletes outfits for Team GB and Adidas and none other than Lady Gaga took a (no doubt 9–5 with lunch vouchers) post as creative director for Polaroid (Shayon 2013). These show appointments might be nominal, but they represent a mutual accommodation between the creative ego of the artist and the commercial imperative of the brand. The artist and the brand (Schroeder 2005) now work on the same place, using the same media materials. Brand ambassadors and match-up congruence

The match-up between celebrity and brand is hard to ascertain in some of the above examples. Conventional marketing wisdom may hold that match-up is essential to the success of brand extensions (Kamins 1990; Kamins and Gupta 1994) but this depends on the brand and the sector. For example, according to Byrne et al. (2003), advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers chose TV chef Jamie Oliver as a celebrity spokesperson for Sainsbury’s because of his reputation at the time for high quality food. This may be a standard rationalisation for a process that can be serendipitous: some famous celebrity-driven advertising came about because the creative team happened to be drinking buddies with the celeb. Industry gossip has it that creatives do tend to establish relationships with celebrities that may be mutually fulfilling rather than strategically planned. Nonetheless, one can imagine that the match-up between Jamie Oliver and Sainsbury’s might have been easy to justify at the time, before Jamie became better known for his campaigning, not always well received, for healthier school meals. As another example of the clumsiness of the match-up approach, Hollywood star John Travolta was chosen as brand ‘ambassador’ by watch maker Breitling (before they matched up with David Beckham) and they played up his skills as a pilot in their advertising, assuming there to be some sort of reinforcing conceptual link between the precision of Swiss watches and air travel (Lamb 2012). Beckham, of course, transcends the match-up hypothesis. For some brands, the ‘family’ values espoused by the celebrity are an essential element of the congruity with the brand since they want their endorsing celebrity to personify the values they claim for the brand

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itself. So, for example, Michael Jackson, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and other celebrities such as Kobe Bryant, Madonna and Magic Johnson were all dropped by most of their sponsors as soon as criticism of their morals hit the press. This negative PR was not, however, regarded as sufficiently asymmetrical with the brand positioning for Kate Moss’s sponsors to drop her after she’d been exposed in the media for (allegedly) taking illegal drugs. The world of high street fashion was presumably indifferent to the challenge illegal drug taking posed to ‘family’ values. Of course, Moss is British, and the others listed here American, so perhaps she is not expected to hold moral standards as high as, say, Tiger Woods or Michael Jackson. In contrast to the sequential model of celebrity endorsement in which the cultural status of the celebrity is logically prior to the endorsement, celebri-marketing in the era of convergence uses the symbolism of celebrity to constitute the celebrity brand in a mutually reinforcing cycle. Rather than a transfer of meaning, there seems to be a mutual constitution of meaning in which the celebrity element is not necessarily logically prior to the endorsement relationship. For example, minor celebrities can leverage the PR of being appointed by a prestigious brand to increase their own celebrity, while the brands win both ways because they get a relatively cheap ambassador whom they know will be elevated into the realms of major celebrity by association with the brand. For example, in 2010, L’Oreal appointed a relatively unknown actress as brand spokesperson (Hoyer 2013). ‘Major brand hires unknown ambassador/spokesperson’ is in itself a PR story that was, predictably, reproduced by celebrity and showbusiness-oriented media vehicles. Brands, in turn, might hitch their wagon to someone who has the potential to become a big name in the future, as Nike’s Phil Knight did with middle distance runner Steve Prefontaine, long before Prefontaine became a track legend and tragically died young, propelling him to even greater fame. Similarly, when Nike signed up Michael Jordan in 1984, Jordan was by no means the iconic sporting hero he was later to become (McCallum 2012). In an even more clairvoyant piece of sports branding, the founder of Adidas, Adi Dassler, persuaded Jesse Owens to wear Dassler Brothers track shoes before the 1936 Berlin Olympics. After Owens won four gold medals as Hitler looked on from the stands, German Dassler reportedly had to explain his endorsement strategy to the Gestapo. These examples illustrate the two-way dynamic of sports endorsement when genuine heroes are used to burnish a neophyte brand. The effect of celebrity culture in social media, though, has been to blur the connection between heroism and its mythic narrative, so the hero subsists only through its system of representation. This is the effect we call celebri-marketing, whereby celebrity is both produced and demanded by the same media complex. The production of celebrity through social media

The process of celebri-marketing seems most clearly illustrated in the production line approach to TV talent show contestants, some of whom are fixed up with cosmetic dentistry, personal dieticians, makeovers, wardrobe consultants, PR agents, personal websites, voice and public speaking coaches even before they’ve released their first recording. The machinery of celebrimarketing grinds into motion before the nascent celebrity has created any conventional creative output in the form of, say, hit songs, successful gigs or acting jobs. Although few talent show contestants become real stars, many are able to make a living as minor showbusiness celebrities simply because they have been sprinkled with the magic dust of celebri-marketing (Hackley, Brown and Hackley 2012). The mutual constitution of celebrity and brand does not stop with reciprocal deals in which each party reflects the other’s glory in the brand/celebrity/brand firmament. Perhaps deals such as these are less a case of celebrity endorsements than a creative artist’s brand extension (Schroeder 2005), and some, like Katy Perry’s deal with makers of The Sims, Electronic Arts, might seem more meaningful as partnership than others, such as Madonna’s with Diageo (Reed 2012). While these deals do not rely on social media for their cultural resonance, the communication of the deals via social media is central to their marketing rationale. They are done, ob-

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viously, to drive PR and facilitate brand extensions by building on social media shares, likes and comments. Brands want recognition and advertising campaigns strive for social media buzz. The presence of a celebrity in a commercial agreement with a brand guarantees a certain level of recognition with specified target groups along with an order of social media buzz, at least in showbusiness media vehicles. Populist media vehicles such as celebrity gossip magazines like Closer, Now and Heat span the divide between ostensibly authentic and inauthentic celebrity since they legitimise the celebrity status of the person featured by their presence in the magazine, whether they happen to be a soap actress touting her name through a helpful PR agent, a fading cabaret star plugging diet videos or a mum on benefits who buys cosmetic surgery to help her 16-year-old daughter to get work as a topless model. There are stories featuring people for their gross obesity or for having children with their grandfather, for which the subject is paid, and other stories created in partnership with PR agents to leverage the minor media presence of has-been pop stars or daytime soap actors. Personal crises stories of weight gain, depression, marriage break-up and suchlike, perhaps framed as inside scoops and contoured with staged paparazzi pictures of the overweight celeb running along the beach in a bikini, cellulite quivering, can act as promotions for self-help books and weight-loss DVDs, while presence in the public eye through media exposure, even for just a week, sharpens the celeb’s brand and hikes up personal appearance fees. In these ways, celebrity becomes defined by itself – an appearance in a celebrity magazine signifies the subject’s celebrity. The PR agencies, celebrity management and showbusiness gossip media vehicles have, together, appropriated the cultural notion of celebrity for their own ends. TV talent shows, notably the X Factor and Got Talent global franchises, have become quintessential examples of the production of celebrity. Real celebrities are sometimes invited to become judges on reality shows, while being appointed as a judge can be a route to real celebrity, as it was for one music industry Svengali who had no public profile at all until his appearance on an early TV talent show: Simon Cowell (Brown and Hackley 2012). True, the dynamic of media celebrity in marketing does not emerge in a vacuum – there are other economic forces at work. For example, well-known but fading stars might accept talent show judge positions to earn a new recording contract or to broaden their appeal and leverage other work. Three months’ prime-time TV is a high profile gig. The contestants, too, are ready to milk their fifteen minutes for all its worth. While they are media items they might be invited to premiers, featured in paparazzi shots lurching out of nightclubs or quoted uttering vacuities in gossip magazines, but this does not mean they will be surrounded by admirers every time they exit their front door. Far from it – some, like 2012 X Factor finalist Christopher Maloney, find the public less than welcoming. Maloney is reported to be regularly greeted with hostility when out and about in his native Liverpool. Nonetheless, the exposure has a commercial value, such is the demand in every level of marketing for the PR fairy dust of celebrity.

Celebri-marketing mythologising and anthropomorphising the brand

Social media offers a route into the minutiae of celebrities’ lives (or into their PR officer’s imagination at least), as they adopt the strategy of putting the starch of fake authenticity into their fake media personae. The medium has become the message (McLuhan 1964), meaning has imploded (Baudrillard 1994) and we can all become celebrity simulacra if we appropriate the relevant signs. Anyone with a smartphone can create a persona, promote it and share their ‘product’ whether that be blogging, singing or taking a selfie of yourself while farting La Marseillaise and juggling a set of chainsaws. Some YouTube performers, including the aforementioned Bieber, have earned major press coverage, recording contracts and TV appearances, while some bloggers are now regarded as celebrities within their milieu, whether that be fashion, film criticism or travel writing. Most strikingly of all, a relatively minor and serendipitous media appearance can, with the help of some astute PR, be leveraged into a lucrative career as a professional celebrity.

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Typical examples include numerous ‘reality’ show contestants, who, like quirky singer Rylan Clark, can end up as TV hosts, make a fortune and become the subject of countless showbiz media stories in a very short space of time. Clark came fifth in the X Factor 2012, subsequently won Celebrity Big Brother and became a regular TV panel guest and show host. Clark’s profile grew to such an extent during X Factor (partly because of excoriating social media appraisals of his dreadful singing performances or his melodramatic behaviour) he became a useful asset guaranteeing PR and viewers for the minor TV shows that hired him. The mechanism through which celebrity enhances brands is perhaps hinted at when fictional characters assume the role, since they fulfil the key purpose of anthropomorphising the brand (Hosany et al. 2013). Given that anthropomorphism based on cartoon characters or actors in animal costumes seems to elicit the desired emotional response from consumers, how much more effective could it be to use an actual human? Anthropomorphism’s value to brands, though, is not only based on cueing the responses of human inter-action, but also on its intimate connection with myth. For Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘Enlightenment has always regarded anthropomorphism as the basis of myth’ (2002: 4). The turn to myth in consumer culture can be seen as a manifestation of the dialectic of enlightenment, and anthropomorphism in branding through celebri-marketing is the brand strategy that taps into this dialectic. Our rationalised lives are functional but spiritually unsatisfying, and celebri-isation is one of the methods through which our yearning for myth is realised and marketised. Hence, whether a celebrity endorser is a media persona of a real person, or the animated product of an ad agency creative’s 3 a.m. lightbulb moment, the cultural force of celebrity as a branding tool might be seen in terms of the embodied articulation of brand anthropomorphism. As material product, service or organisation, the appeal is limited to utility and value. As myth, the brand’s appeal is unlimited, as the celebrity casts a liminal glow over the immutable reality of the brand. The brand becomes transformative, and thereby indispensible to identity projects, and to the experience of existential liminality (Turner 1969: 1974). The role of celebrity in this process is also mutable, because social media and populist ‘reality’ mass media enable the ordinary to materialise celebrity, by appropriating its mediated forms of signification. In many cases, this strategy fails and ordinary individuals are unable to master the nuance of the social media celebrity production process. But, in many other cases, it succeeds, either through elevating the individual to an inauthentic authenticity as a genuine pseudo-celebrity, or by enabling the individual to perform celebrity through their mastery of the materialisation of that status, even if they may not necessarily enjoy the economic benefits. In this category, for example, fall many former reality show contestants who do not win major endorsement deals or major TV presenting jobs, but who continue to appear on TV to sullenly reprise the role that won them fame initially, as for example where past finalists are herded on to the set of The Voice for a contractually demanded group song prior to the series final. They stay in character through social media and continue to be available for the limited economic opportunities that fall their way. Concluding comments

The techniques of the cultural production of celebrity through PR and social media have become more transparent. They have also become more accessible, since private individuals can use essentially the same resources and techniques for self-publicity and self-presentation as the professionals. The production of celebrity has been increased to meet the demand for a watered-down mythic heroism to sell brands, and the marketing industry has exploited this demand for the purpose of anthropomorphic brand promotion. The wider context in which this is taking place is the shift in cultural production from representation to mediation (Lasch and Lury 2007), a shift facilitated and amplified by convergence. Media representation has become atomised and fragmented into multiple forms of representation that subsist in a flux of iteration and contingency in social media. This mediation, and the editing of mythic narrative into vi-

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gnettes that it entails, has not resulted in a reduction of the fascination with celebrity, but rather in the opposite. The desire for and fascination with celebrity drives the production of ever more celebrities as a necessary and inevitable dynamic of the culture industry. Yet, since this form of cultural production trades in myth, the phenomenon speaks to the central contradiction of Enlightenment to which Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) alluded: the deployment of myth in branding strategy is an ineluctably rational exploitation of market demand.

References

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Reinventing the English industrial revolution as myth and heritage Christina Goulding and Michael Saren Keele University; Leicester University

Taking the case of Blist Hill Industrial Museum in Ironbridge, UK, this paper examines the reinvention of the role of labour and work in the industrial revolution in England from the perspective of the commercial heritage industry. This reduces the historical conditions of the working class in the industrial revolution to a mythology of a community working in harmony, which we suggest sanitises the past through a series of absences or the ‘politics of invisibility’. The paper deconstructs and reinterprets the Blist Hill museum in terms of reinvention, national identity, work and industry, history and heritage. Finally, we explore three alternative explanations of the myth of the industrial revolution in England.

Introduction

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. William Faulkner (1950), Requiem for a Nun, Random House, New York

In this paper we examine the reinvention of the role of labour and work in the industrial revolution in England from the perspective of the commercial heritage industry. This reduces the historical conditions of the working class in the industrial revolution to a mythology of a community working in harmony, which we suggest sanitises the past through a series of absences, or the ‘politics of invisibility’ (Goulding and Surman 2013). According to Nimmo and Combes (1980) modern myths have five characteristics: 1) They should be believable – regardless of whether they are true, partly true or fake (Barner-Barry and Hody 1994); 2) Myths are created through social processes; 3) Myths, like dramas, have a beginning, middle and end; 4) Once the drama has attained mythical status it is seldom questioned; 5) Myths have a practical purpose, they can persuade people to hold particular beliefs. Therefore myths are far more than just stories – they contribute to our sense of who we are (Selwyn 1996) and who we are not (Palmer 2005). They can be attached to people, places and times in history and can be altered with the passage of time (Brown, McDonagh and Schultz 2013). Myths can also be assigned to objects which when analysed as myths may provide artificial resolutions to real contradictions in society (Miller 1987). These characteristics of myth are all evident in the role of labour and work in the English industrial revolution as represented by the heritage industry. This paper takes as its case Blist Hill Industrial Museum in Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK. Today, Ironbridge is situated in a beautiful gorge, split by the River Severn. With its historic buildings, restaurants, quaint shops and winding ancient jitties, it is a major tourist attraction. The iron bridge spanning the river was first in the world and the gorge was once a hive of iron smelting, trade and transportation. It is hard to imagine today’s picturesque tree-populated scene as the birthplace of the industrial revolution when the gorge was barren and mud soaked, and every second house was said to be an inn or a brothel. The very name ‘Bedlam Furnaces’ hints at what life was like. Of the six museums in Ironbridge, the most popular is Blist Hill, a living museum featuring a reconstructed industrial town where visitors can experience nineteenthcentury life. Or at least a partial and mythical reconstruction of a community void of political opinion or voice. 321

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In the following sections we return to the title of this paper and deconstruct it in the light of interpretation at the museum. This comprises four core elements of ‘reinvention’, ‘national identity’, ‘work and industry’ and ‘history and heritage’. ‘Reinvention’ is central to the myth of the industrial revolution in several different respects. The process of reinvention constructs the modern myth of the industrialisation in England and also technological inventions are themselves a central part of that myth. In addition, the manner in which Blist Hill museum is presented and interpreted today is necessarily a reinvention of the original phenomenon as it existed in the nineteenth century. National identity is part of the mythical England that is represented in the Ironbridge museum today. Visitors from all countries are presented with a selected ‘picture’ not just of industry and work at Blist Hill, but also of the nationhood of England. The industrial revolution transformed the nature of industry and work. Yet the social and political implications for workers and the labour process are not explored in the museum in which an overwhelmingly harmonious picture is painted of work and social conditions of the time. Finally, we argue that in marketing terms, history and heritage are treated as commodities to be sold as part of the Blist Hill retail experience. Reinvention

The first concept in our analysis is that of ‘reinvention’. The term is usually defined as an improved or modernised version of the original. As such is essentially derivative, inauthentic or unreal. While we do not intend to cast aspersions on the integrity of those who manage and work for the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, a trust that enjoys a widespread reputation, we do highlight the significance of what is not portrayed or incorporated into the visitor experience. Blist Hill is a reconstructed nineteenth-century industrial town which has been redesigned and rebuilt with meticulous attention to detail, using authentic materials. Where possible, original dwellings and shops have been transported to the sites, rebuilt and finished to exacting specifications. These buildings and the material objects they house act as signs and markers (MacCannell 1976) that enable the visitor to visualise and imagine the scenes, the settings and the stories. It is important that the place is perceived as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’. Grayson and Martinec (2004) argue that authenticity can be both a social construction and a source of evidence depending on the application of belief or through the use of imagination. Moreover, perceptions of authenticity are influenced by the perceived links to a particular time, person or place. Blist Hill claims to portray a picture of industrial life in the nineteenth-century English Midlands, which it does through material objects, buildings and volunteer actors. It is authentic in the material sense (Jones 2010) but it fails to highlight the social relationships between the owners of industry and the workers, the relationship between workers themselves, economic deprivation, the physical conditions and the prevalence of diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera. This flawless attention to materiality may serve to mask historical social processes and lead to a partial interpretation of a unique period in English history which may not be the objective behind such visits. However, it does need to be recognised that possibly not all visitors desire a truly ‘untainted’ experience. As Rose and Wood (2005), suggest, while authenticity is desired and earnestly promoted, consumers often revel in the ironic mixture of fact and fiction. On a contrary note, MacCannell (1973) places the visitor in a quest for authenticity

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and introduces this notion in relation touristic settings. Influenced by Goffman’s (1959) ‘front back dichotomy’, the visitor is said to try and penetrate the false fronts of stage settings in order to reach the back region of authenticity. Failure to do so is more a consequence of the manipulated structural features of created space, which may often be mistaken for the genuine article and leads to touristic false consciousness. In effect the flawless attention to materiality offers only a partial interpretation and masks important social processes. Although visitors may not want a truly ‘untainted’ experience, what they are offered is a series of staged authenticities (MacCannell 1973; Cohen 1988; Wang 2000), a kind of performance that defines the authentic and invites the visitor to engage in the script. This constitutes a kind of performance that lies somewhere between the constructed reality of existential feeling and the authenticity of the object/display (Zhu 2012). English identity

What does it mean to be English and how is Englishness manifested in heritage sites? Palmer (2005) shows how the national identity of ‘Englishness’ is constructed through tourists’ experiences at three heritage sites: Battle Abbey, Hever Castle and Chartwell. She finds that these sites signify core aspects of Englishness, presenting the nation variously ‘as a family, a group of relations with shared history, values and beliefs, and common characteristics’ (Palmer 2005: 7). The following extract cited in Wright (1985: 76–77) appears to capture the essence of a mythical England: I had just (after 12 months) convinced myself that I was well rid of the rotten weather, football hooliganism, unions, dirt, inflation, traffic – and suddenly it’s back to square one. The grimy facade is lifted and the real England comes flooding back. Long winter walks through the Wyre Forest ending at the George in Bewdley, chestnuts roasting on an open log fire and swilled down with a pint of mild, hunting around Ludlow for the mythical half-timbered home, the joy of finding one at a price I could afford. Summer evenings at the Royal Shakespeare, scents wafting across the river .... scenes of England.

This is an England that is divorced by time and space. Of course, no matter how well it is reconstructed, the past is always divorced in time and space. Park’s (2010) study of Korean nationhood shows how heritage is not just a tangible manifestation of the past represented by

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artefacts and physical sites, but also encompasses intangible elements of symbolic meanings and spiritual embodiments. ‘It may be asserted that heritage tourism is inextricably bound up with experiencing both material (tangible) and socio-psychological (intangible) remnants of the nation’s past. Therefore, heritage can be better understood as both a material and socio-psychological testimony of identity’ (Park 2010: 133). Myths take on greater significance with the distance of time, space, place and people. Yet our sense of who we are is tied into the grand myths of nationalism which act as a unifying force for the symbols and stories which shape perceptions of antiquity and community (Smith 1986; 1988). Nationalism is not a sociologically ‘natural’ phenomenon like tribalism or regionalism, but the result of the deliberate efforts of the dominant political power to form a single, homogenous nation from a territorially located, but often culturally diverse population (Mosse 1975; Hechter 2000). The notion of national identity has a long history going back before the emergence of the modern nation state in the nineteenth century (Nairn 1997); however issues of national identity have acquired a new significance in the context of globalisation, consumer culture, social media and the fragmentation of social structures (Spillman 1997; Mitchell 2001). According to Smith (19896) it is ‘myths of origins’ frequently based on historical narratives that ‘form the groundwork of every nationalist mythology … telling us who we are, whence we came from and why we are unique’. Because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members, the nation has been described as an ‘imagined community’ (Smith 19896: 121). The past has a pervasive appeal and can be used to enhance concepts of the self or can reinforce bonds through a common experience. Consumers seek experiences to confirm their social identities through a better understanding of their heritage (Goulding 2001). Museums such as Blist Hill suggest a simpler, more collective way of living; nostalgic offerings of a past that, if it existed, has long since disappeared. Ultimately they are an ‘aesthetic hallucination of reality’ (Baudrillard 1983: 148) or an illusion of reality (Allen 1995). Indeed nations are ethnosymbolic communities shaped by shared, often illusionary myths of origins, history and territory (Smith 1986; Langlands 1999). They are also ‘imaginary’ communities because members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-citizens. ‘Englishness’, some argue, is a construct that has been selectively generated by political elites to counteract the divisive tendencies of modernity (Langlands 1999), yet at Blist Hill, despite the growing trend towards social stratification during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only two classes are in evidence – workers and the merchant middle classes. Neither the very rich nor the very poor feature in the narrative regardless of the poverty, the proliferation of workhouses and mass migration into cities and industrialised areas. The composition of these classes is also entirely ‘white English’, despite the widespread immigration from Europe at the time. Palmer (2005) suggests that, through heritage interpretation, Englishness has assumed the role of a cultural ideology. ‘It is a hegemonic discourse of nationhood reflecting the values and agenda of those organizations that own and manage the sites’ (Palmer 2005: 8).

Industry and work

With the decline of heavy industry in the UK, Hewison (1987) argues that the only place to experience it is in living, industrial museums such as Blist Hill, The Black Country Museum in the Midlands and Beamish in the North East. Nevertheless, despite the promise of a real ‘industrial experience’, often the hard labour inherent in mining, iron smelting and manufacturing is eclipsed by another history – the history of retailing. Moreover, while recognising that scholars of class formation theory struggle to recover the meanings behind working-class social action of the eighteenth and nineteenth century there remains a fascinating social history that goes beyond the physical labour process itself. As Somers (1992: 26) points out ‘in the midst of the worse economic distress of their lives, English industrial families based their protests not on economic demands or those of a “‘moral economy”’, but on a broadly con-

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ceived claim to legal rights to participation, substantive justice (Poor Laws), local government control, cohesive family and community relations, ‘modern’ methods of labour regulation (trade unions), and the right to independence – be it from capitalists, the state or other workers..’ Yet these narratives remain invisible in the telling of the story within the boundaries of living industrial heritage museums (Goulding 2000; 2001). All too often, displays claiming to represent the subordinate classes are little more than shallow, picturesque, sentimentalised versions of a bygone period (Bennett 1988). They are imagined communities (Anderson 1983) of the mind in which the working and middle classes seem to live harmoniously side by side, each accepting their allotted place in life. Furthermore, Chabot (1990) suggests any discussion of gender in the museum is almost accidental where women are either portrayed as ‘ladies’ engaged in genteel tasks set against the backdrop of the Victorian parlour, or as servants or shop girls (Porter 1988). Overall the general atmosphere reflects an apolitical population inhabiting an ‘ambiguous mythical’ (Brown, McDonagh and Shultz 2013) place in which the social and working relationships are forgotten in a fog of ‘nostophobia’ (Goulding 2001; Chhabra 2008; 2012). History and heritage

Of course, to paraphrase David Lowenthal (1986) ‘the past is a foreign country’ and we can never truly know it in its authentic form. It is gone, it can never be relived, and our accounts of it are often attributed to the experiences of the educated elite who took the trouble to document the social, political and economic events of a given period in time. Our critique lies mainly in regard to how the past has been increasingly treated as a commodity to be sold in the marketplace. This involves a process of transformation whereby culture becomes popular culture and in the process certain significant meanings are lost (Cohen 1988). Proesler (1990) maintains that museums have three effects: they transform culture, they generate new forms of culture and they destroy other cultural forms. This is achieved through the selection, value given and meanings attached to the objects on display and in this case it is historical materiality that acts as a marker of authenticity (Jones 2010). As such we question the notion of museums as memory containers (Crane 2000) and suggest that they can also be sites of social amnesia depending on what is ignored, hidden or forgotten. We contend that this practice constitutes a politics of invisibility that is the product of dominant sociocultural discourses which support the shaping of perceptions of social class and gender. Essentially, reconstructed heritage is related to the general paradox of memory which equates to the overlapping states of consciousness regarding time, past, present and future and the ability to connect these in a meaningful way. Citing Husserl, Bohn (2007) refers to this process as ‘retention’ and ‘protention’, a process which necessitates selective abstraction from the dialogue or involves ‘absences’ related to the past; a form of ‘absence management’ (Heatherington 2004), or the mobilisation, ordering and arrangement of the agency of the absent. As such, heritage involves a form of social and historical amnesia. The harsh reality of how life actually was has little place in the reconstruction. In this sense heritage is not just a reconstruction of the past, it is a myth built around an absence of history which in turn distorts memory, conceptions of time and reality.

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Discussion and conclusion

Christina Goulding and Michael Saren

Our focus in this paper has been on Blist Hill, a living museum that claims to offer trips back in time to experience a working industrial town that would have been at the centre of the industrial revolution. Yet, we suggest, what this meticulous reinvention really represents is a mythical illusion of this past time where authenticity is ascribed to physical materiality at the expense of the somewhat darker realities of the period. We began this paper by suggesting that Blist Hill fulfilled the characteristics of a mythical place or story and we conclude with a review of these characteristics. To begin with, the narrative presented at the museum is believable, and it is believable because it is true. Nobody could fault the historical accuracy of the buildings, objects or the stories told by the volunteers and demonstrators. But, it is a half told rose-tinted story and through the erosion of the realities and hardships, the mythical community takes on the mantle of nostalgia. On the second point, that myths are like dramas, at Blist Hill the story starts with the early days of the industrial revolution, proceeds through the history of retailing and concludes, through markers, with the end of the First World War – for some the end of England’s ‘glory age’ of empire and industrial world domination. Third, the idea that myths are created through social processes is equally evident in the Blist Hill story. This is the product of different agendas – market driven forces, the drive towards consumerism, management, volunteers, available resources, demonstrators, the chosen narratives, interactions between visitors themselves, levels of engagement between visitors and resources and demonstrators and the ultimate story that visitors take away with them. This relates to the forth characteristic, that once created, the myth is seldom questioned. Sites such as Blist Hill have genuine legitimacy. The museum holds both charitable and trust status which in turn validates its authenticity and credibility. Finally, myths are practical. The story told at Blist Hill may be linked to feelings of national pride, provide a sense of history and identity, of continuity between past and present and even act as a retreat from the stresses or anxieties of modern life. Finally, what explains the nature of this myth of the birthplace of the industrial revolution in England? Taking into account the reviewers’ comments on the abstract of this paper, we postulate three possible explanations for the particular historical narrative which is presented at Blist Hill, i.e. postmodern, Marxist and utilitarian. Simply put the postmodern views consumption as the master narrative of consumer society and the dominant rationale of consumption as hedonism, fantasies, feelings and fun (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982). Therefore, heritage is reconstructed for visitors as a consumer experience which is primarily created for the excitement and pleasure of visitors. The past is reinvented as a simulacrum, a simulated representation or ‘imitation which in what he calls its ‘2nd order form’, Baudrillard (1994) associates with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity’s ability to imitate reality claims to replace the authority of the original, because the copy is just as ‘real’ as its prototype. Some say it is ‘better than the real thing’ and accords with the tenets of marketing itself that ‘consumption is the sole purpose of production’. A Marxist interpretation takes conditions of production and the inherent working-class struggle as the primary motive force of history. When reinvented as a mythical heritage, the industrial revolution is disengaged from its central economic and political context. It is thereby ‘decoupled’ from history by the dominant capitalist ideology and reformed as a story which ‘cel-

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ebrates’ the birth of modern capitalism. This necessitates the omission from the historical record of the full horrors involved, the human misery and the exploitation of labour and the working class in the interests of capital accumulation. In this respect Blist Hill is not an exceptional case, as Shackel, Smith and Campbell (2011) observe: The heritage of working class people has been significantly neglected within heritage research and practice. The sites, places and intangible heritage of working class people are often underrepresented in national and international heritage lists and registers. Moreover, when the sites of labour are present on such lists, they tend to be celebrated for technical or industrial innovations and often have little to say about the people whose labour underwrote those industries and their achievements. (Shackel, Smith and Campbell 2011: 291)

The utilitarian perspective (Mill 1863) would emphasise how producers use resources efficiently in order to achieve profitability, maximise returns (of various types) and integrate materials and functions in order to produce desired outcomes, i.e. ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (including for future generations). For the representation of Blist Hill as a heritage site the application of utilitarian ideology results in a myth of rapid economic progress, material abundance and increased manufacturing efficiency through technologically driven innovation in production systems. The social and cultural developments in people’s lives are portrayed as necessary and resulting features of the drive for greater material efficiency and the operation of the global (imperial) free market. References

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Mythical moments in Remington brand history Terrence Witkowski

California State University

To investigate the brand history of Remington firearms, this paper introduces and applies a historiographical construct, the mythical moment, which is defined as an episode when the course of brand myth making quickens and has greater cultural resonance. Three such mythical moments are examined: the Remington founder myth of 1816, the Remington sharpshooter myth of the 1870s, and the mythic world of Remington storefront windows in the early twentieth century. This history extends theories of cultural branding processes and advances understanding of US gun culture as consumer culture.

Introduction

Brands have cultural histories. Their different markers – brand names, symbols and other identifiers – acquire (and sometimes lose) cultural meanings and identities over time, just as do the goods and services they represent (McCracken 1986). Processes of myth building and accumulation, where ‘myth’ refers to stories, narratives and discourses about a brand, are of signal importance to these cultural histories. Brand myths often originate with company advertising and public relations, but are also produced by other ‘authors’ including ‘the culture industries, intermediaries (such as critics and retail salespeople), and customers (particularly when they form communities)’ (Holt 2004: 3). Some parts of these mythic stories may be literally true, other parts exaggerations or speculations, and still other parts completely fictitious. Whatever the literal truth component may be, the importance of brand myths is in their collective memory, re-telling, visualisation and how they were and are culturally relevant. Myths help resolve social contradictions and cultural tensions and, when loaded into brands, naturalise the consumption status quo (Holt 2006). This paper deploys the concept of a ‘mythical moment’ as a historiographical device for examining and organising brand cultural history. It is proposed that during the life of a brand episodes transpire when the course of myth making quickens and has greater cultural resonance. These periods can take place over a few weeks, months or even last for years, but are noteworthy events and distinguishable from other stretches of brand history. As McCracken (1988) reminds us, the development of consumer culture has not been a steady, inexorable march toward modernity. Consumer history has been punctuated by a series of ‘revolutions’, episodes when marketing institutions, buyer behavior and the culture of consumption changed more quickly and with greater public self-awareness than at other times. An analogous episodic nature applies to the mythological evolution of individual brands. To explore the mythical moment concept, the paper investigates three episodes in the long cultural history of a venerable brand of American firearms – Remington. The first mythical moment, the founder myth, refers to events during and after 1816 when brand namesake Eliphalet Remington II allegedly assembled his first rifle and started his gun making business. The second moment, the sharpshooter myth, takes place in the 1870s when E. Remington & Sons advertised its rifles in association with the then popular American shooting competitions. The third moment, the mythical world of storefront windows, entails the visual merchandising contests Remington Arms sponsored in the 1920s and 1930s. 329

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Researching and writing about mythical moments in Remington brand history advances two areas of consumer culture theory. First, Remington is one of the older American brands and thus its cultural analysis covers a much longer time period than the late twentieth-century examples of iconic branding discussed at length in Holt (2004). By tradition founded in 1816, the Remington name began appearing on gun barrels by the 1820s and on fully assembled military arms in the 1840s (Hatch 1956; Marcot 2005). The family company, named E. Remington & Sons from 1856 until 1888, started advertising its pistols, revolvers and rifles nationally in the 1850s. When it was liquated in 1888, the new owners named the business Remington Arms Co. and kept using the Remington brand for the product lines and in the promotion mix (Henning and Witkowski 2013). Despite subsequent changes in ownership, the Remington brand has continued to maintain a respectable share of the US firearms market. Analysis of cultural branding over extended time periods adds breadth and depth to consumer culture theory. Second, historical research on Remington brand mythology furthers understanding of US gun culture as a consumer culture. Like the Apple and Saab brand communities studied by Muñiz and O’Guinn (2001), the US gun culture shares consciousness, performs consumption rituals and traditions, celebrates the history of firearms, and tells stories about experiences hunting and shooting. Along with Colt, Smith & Wesson, and Winchester, Remington is one of the four major firearms brands founded in the US in the nineteenth century and still on the market today. These brands continue to boast enthusiastic consumer communities, such as the Colt Collector’s Association (www.coltcollectors.com) or the Remington Society of America (www.remingtonsociety.com), that constitute an integral part of America’s formidable gun culture. As Holt (2004: 37) puts it, brands often play a signal role ‘as a historical actor in society’ and this proposition certainly can be applied to firearms brands in American life. The role of brand history and mythology in US gun culture has received only limited attention from marketing and consumer researchers (Witkowski 2013). The following section discusses the historiography of mythical moments, as well as the primary and secondary data sources for this study. Next will come the three narrative histories of the Remington mythical moments. Finally, the discussion section will present a cultural analysis of the Remington brand in historical perspective. Historiography of mythical moments

History is a branch of knowledge dealing with past events, as well as with the evolution of ideas within their larger societal contexts. Sometimes, academics in marketing and consumer research regard history as a methodology. This view is mistaken. History is a subject area in the same sense as advertising, retailing and services marketing are topics of study. Although historical data can be used to investigate theories developed by the social sciences, history as a discipline is very much concerned with addressing historical questions. So, when discussing methods for researching the past, the appropriate term is historiography, which refers to the principles, theories and methodologies of historical writing. Note that the term ‘history’ also refers to a chronicle or narrative of the past and the term ‘historiography’ too has a second meaning, as a body of literature. Mythical moments entail story telling about specific events at particular times from several different sources. Their study thus falls within the domain of cultural history. As theoretical and historical constructs, mythical moments serve as points of departure for data collection, analysis and narrative writing. Hypotheses about mythical moments typically emerge from reading the secondary literature on brand, product and company histories and then serve as guides in the search for relevant primary data sources and other documentation. Through the research process, assumptions about mythical moments can be confirmed and challenged as historical understanding grows.

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Mythical moments also can be used as a basis for periodisation, the methods used by historians to divide time into discrete and more coherent units for analysis and writing (Hollander et al. 2005). Sometimes the choice of periodisation is based on little more than narrative convenience, such as the way chapters of a novel help to convey a storyline. Marketing and consumer historians also succumb to the convenience of dividing history into decade long segments, such as the classic account of marketing thought in Bartels (1962) or the investigation of the ‘good life’ in twentieth-century advertising by Belk and Pollay (1982). But at other times periodisation is based upon significant historical events and other critical turning points that arguably launched new eras. This approach is historically more defensible (Hollander et al. 2005; Fullerton 2011). Mythical moments are noteworthy cultural events. Primary data sources for this study include period advertisements, magazine articles and assorted Remington promotional ephemera from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some have been published and other material was located via Google and eBay auction searches. Visual data sources are very important for this research because brand myths are created as much (if not more so) by pictorial means as they are through text and spoken words. In addition, original Remington rifles and revolvers, three of which are in the author’s collection, have been directly examined. Holding, aiming and working the action of an antique firearm provide a connection with past consumers and how they may have related to the product and brand. The secondary literature consulted consists of books and articles on Remington firearms history written for gun collectors, dealers and enthusiasts. These sources are useful for forming preliminary ideas about the past, but have shortcomings that hinder serious cultural branding research. They focus upon Remington arms as collectibles, as objects of desire that have market values and historical associations. Special attention is given to identification and manufacturing, but relatively little material is devoted to Remington business, marketing and brand history. The tone of these works is frequently celebratory and the narrative writing can lack scholarly rigor. For example, the books on Remington history by Hatch (1956) and Peterson (1966) have no supporting footnotes, citations, references or photo credits. Kirkland (2007) liberally adapted a great deal of material from Hatch, again with no documentation. This lack of detailed scholarship makes it difficult for later historians to separate facts from interpretive license from outright historical fiction. Remington founder myths

Telling stories about brand founders is one of the hallmarks of an iconic brand (Holt 2004). In the first part of the twentieth century, for example, the lives of Henry Ford (1863–1947) and the Ford family became inextricably linked to their eponymous company and its product lines, most notably the Edsel, named after Henry’s only son. Later, Steve Jobs’ (1955–2011) biography was an important part of Apple computer brand equity almost from the company’s startup in his parents’ garage in 1976. The story of his ouster in 1985, subsequent ventures (NeXT Computer, Pixar and Disney), and return in 1996 as Apple CEO, who then saved the company and initiated a series of transformational products, has an epic arc. In the firearms industry, much has been written about company and iconic brand founder Samuel Colt (1814–1862). Colt was an inventor, industrialist, frequent litigator, super salesman and contributor to America’s western expansion and mid-nineteenth century national identity (Edwards 1953; Wilson 1985; Hosley 1999; Houze 2006). Over a century later, Gaston Glock (b. 1929) lent both his surname and Austrian persona to the innovative automatic pistols that arguably became ‘America’s Gun’ following their introduction to the large and lucrative US firearms market in the 1980s (Barrett 2012). The Remington founder myth takes place in the year 1816 when brand namesake Eliphalet Remington II (1793–1861) is said to have made his first gun barrel at the age of twenty-two.

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According to tradition, he wanted a fine hunting rifle, but lacked the money to buy one and could not get a loan from his father. So ‘Lite’ (as he was nicknamed) went to the family forge, which the Remingtons had built in 1810 (Marcot 1998: 7). Lite carefully welded a barrel by himself, and then walked 11–12 miles or so (accounts of distance vary) to Utica, New York, where another gunsmith did the reaming and rifling. The gunsmith allegedly gave him a lockplate and when Lite returned home, he forged some additional pieces for the lock, carved a stock and assembled the firearm. Other stories tell of young Eliphalet travelling to a shooting competition and placing second with his homemade rifle. Impressed with the rifle he had built, several men asked him to build barrels for them. Remington was in business and a brand name was born.

Figure 1 Eliphalet Remington II (1793–1861) Source: Wikipedia Commons from Wildman, Edwin (1921), Famous Leaders of Industry. Harvard University, p. 260.

Hatch (1956) provides the most embellished modern telling of Remington’s founder story. The origins of this myth can be traced to 1872. Marcot (1998) cites the History of the Remington Armory. E. Remington & Sons, Proprietors, published in Ilion, NY in 1872. A similar narrative appeared in a chapter on the Remington Armory in the History of Herkimer County, N.Y. (1879). This history purports to have been ‘taken from an article which appeared in the Iron Age in 1872, revised and corrected by Mr. D. D. Devoe, who has been for the most of his life connected with the institution’. Unfortunately, efforts to locate the Iron Age reference have not been successful. A still earlier account of Remington’s formative years can be found in A History of American Manufacturers from 1608 to 1860 (Philadelphia 1861). Author J. Leander Bishop may have gathered his information directly from Eliphalet Remington II, who did not die until the summer of 1861, but Bishop may have talked to one of Remington’s three sons or perhaps to some other employee who knew the founder well (Swinney 1987). No earlier written evidence of Remington founder myths has been found. Some Remington historians have doubted the veracity of Hatch’s (1953) romanticised version of the tale (Peterson 1966; Swinney 1987; Marcot 2005; Flayderman 2007). Given that the

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Remington family was relatively well off with its successful farm, forge and other sources of income, Peterson (1966) believed that Lite probably rode a farm horse to Utica. Marcot (2005) questions whether Remington actually made that first rifle. Fabricating an entire gun – lock, stock and barrel – was a complex task probably beyond the abilities of this young man. These points are well taken, but the larger truth is that Remington founder storytelling resonated with American cultural values in the middle part of the nineteenth century, a period that celebrated young men taking individual initiative, doing something well and achieving success (Hosley 1999). It also complemented Remington brand advertising that in 1859 had begun to appear in the new and popular national magazine, Harper’s Weekly (Henning and Witkowski 2013). Eliphalet Remington II appears to have been an active marketer. As the company’s sole salesman, he travelled all over New York State selling his products and purchasing supplies and likely had printed or handwritten price sheets to show prospective customers (Hatch 1956). However, relatively little known source material documents his activities. Remington and his family were devout, but plain, unassuming Methodists (Hatch 1956). In 1837, Eliphalet’s oldest son Philo (1816–1889) joined the business, followed by son Samuel Remington (1819– 1882) in 1839 and Eliphalet Remington III (1828–1924) a decade later. The firm of E. Remington & Sons was officially formed in 1856. Eliphalet’s three sons brought fresh ideas and a strong work ethic that helped Remington become the largest and one of the most reputable American arms producers by the end of the Civil War (Marcot 1998). Philo contributed much to Remington technology and oversaw manufacturing, while his brother Samuel became the company’s chief salesperson, especially in working the South American militaries for contracts. Eliphalet III handled the accounting and finance (Hatch 1956). As a result of of financial reversals, the family liquidated the firm in 1888, but the power of Remington as a brand name had been established. It was applied to a wide range of products beyond firearms and ammunition to eventually include agricultural implements, sewing machines, typewriters, cash registers, bicycles, cutlery, electric shavers and hair care products, and apparel and accessories. E. Remington & Sons divested some of these product lines (e.g. typewriters) to other firms that retained the Remington brand name. These companies and their successors (e.g. Remington-Rand) later applied the name to new product lines (e.g. Remington shavers in 1937). Interestingly, Philo E. Remington (1869–1937), the wealthy grandson of Eliphalet the founder, lent the family name to a series of automobile ventures – Remington Automobile and Motor Company (1900–1902), Remington Motor Vehicle Company (1903–1904), and Remington Standard Motor Company (1910–1913) – all of which failed (Eddy 2011). In 1912 Remington firearms combined with the Union Metallic Cartridge Company, renaming itself Remington UMC. For its centennial in 1916, the company sponsored a poster contest. The winning poster shows a suitably attired hunter of 1916 shaking the hand of Eliphalet from 1816 (see Figure 2). Between them, an anvil symbolises the Remington forge. This is the earliest use of the 1816 myth for promotional purposes located so far. Advertising taglines of the 1920s (e.g. ‘Established 1816’ and ‘113 Years of Quality’) made further reference to the founding date (Marcot 1998: 181, 192). As will be discussed below, the Remington Arms Company still manipulates its founder myths in the twenty-first century. Remington sharpshooter myths

Informal target shooting was a popular American pastime in the nineteenth century, especially on the frontier as illustrated in the 1850 painting, ‘Shooting for the Beef’ (see Figure 3) by the acclaimed Missouri genre artist, George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879). As Gilmore (1999) describes, ‘Competitors usually fired three shots apiece at twenty rods (about 110 yards), each measuring the distance of his bullet holes from the target’s center with a piece of string. The shortest string won cash, whiskey, or beef’ (Gilmore 1999: 106). Competitive target shooting also had an urban following. New York City firemen formed organised ‘target companies’ start-

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Figure 2 Remington Centennial Poster Source: Remington Museum Collection (Marcot, 1998: 174)

ing in the 1830s and by 1850 some 10,000 men from a variety of trades had become members. Meanwhile, German immigrant communities in New York and other cities began to establish their own local Schützenbünde (shooting federations). Target competitions took place at Schützenfeste where attendees drank beer, danced, rode merry-go-rounds and listened to Tyrolean music (Gilmore 1999). The English language press tended to look down on all this Gemütlichkeit socialising, but these groups remained popular from the time of the Civil War until the early twentieth century. Taking a cue from the Germans, parading Irishmen in New York began holding ‘target excursions’ (Gilmore 1999). This culminated in the July 1871 Orange Riot when rival Catholic and Protestant Irish groups confronted each other and shots rang out, eventually leaving at least 50 dead and wounding many more (Gilmore 1999). A few months later, lawyer and New York National Guard Captain George Wood Wingate, along with William Church, editor of the Army and Navy Journal, launched a more serious shooting organisation: the National Rifle Association (NRA). Wingate and Church were dismayed by what they considered a steep decline in American shooting skills and wanted to pro334

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Figure 3 ‘Shooting for the Beef’, 1850 by George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879) Source: Brooklyn Museum, New York mote marksmanship among the general public. Wingate introduced a British system of rifle training and, after receiving grants from the State of New York, Brooklyn and New York City totaling $35,000, the NRA purchased land on Long Island and started building the fine Creedmoor rifle range, which opened in 1873. It was named after the Creed family, who once owned a farm on the 70-acre site, and its flat, grassy expanse allegedly resembled an English moor. The longest range was 1000 yards (Rose 2008). The following year, a team of Irish marksmen trounced the competition at Britain’s Wimbledon match and became putative world champions. Looking for further victories, but unaware of the newly formed NRA, on 22 November 1873 the Irish publicly challenged the Americans to a shooting contest in an open letter printed in the pages of the New York Herald (Rose 2008). The Americans accepted and were quickly supported by the Remington and Sharps arms companies who offered them target rifles and put up a $500 stake (Gilmore 1999). The competition was scheduled for 26 September 1874 and on that day thousands of people arrived at Creedmoor to observe the shoot off. To everyone’s surprise, the underdog American team bested the highly rated Irish on the very last shot (Whittaker 1876; Gilmore 1999; Rose 2008; Henning and Witkowski 2013). This caused a sensation and the outpouring of patriotism and shooting fervor was widely covered in the America press (see, e.g. Harper’s Weekly 1874). New shooting clubs were established in cities and at universities across the US. E. Remington & Sons was well positioned to take advantage of this cultural phenomenon. In the mid-1860s, the company had perfected the exceptionally sturdy ‘rolling block’ singleshot, breech loading action for metallic cartridges in various calibers (illustrated in Figures 4 and 5). The Civil War had demonstrated the superiority of loading self-contained metallic cartridges from the breech over loading powder and ball from the muzzle end and igniting the charge with a separate percussion cap. Between 1867 and 1888, the company sold over a million rolling block military rifles, carbines and pistols to the US government and, in much greater numbers, to at least 15 foreign governments (Marcot 1998: 90–98). Remington also sold about

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Figure 4 Remington Creedmoor Advertisement Source: American Agriculturalist, November 1875 (from Henning and Witkowski 2013)

13,000 rolling block, ‘No. 1 Sporting and Target Rifles’ in various models over the same period (Marcot 2005; Flayderman 2007). One of the finest lines, the long-range ‘Creedmoor’ target rifle, was introduced in 1873, the year the NRA range opened. Appropriating the Creedmoor name showed good brand management (see Figure 4). Remington advertising began to connect with target shooting. An August 1872 advert placed in the American Agriculturalist for the first time used an image of a target grouping made by one of its rifles and boasted ‘Best in the World’ (see Figure 5). Published in New York, American Agriculturalist was the leading farm publication of the day and had a high reader confidence, being the first to guarantee its advertisements (Presbrey 1929). Remington ads frequently repeated this trope over the next few years (Henning and Witkowski 2013). Both examples shown in Figure 5 instructed readers to cut out the ad and send to E. Remington & Son’s New York office on 281 and 283 Broadway to receive a free illustrated price list. Remington also touted the results from the 1874 shooting match with the Irish where half of the underdog American team had fired Remington rifles. This messaging was placed in the

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Figure 5 Remington Adverts Tied into Competitive Shooting Source: American Agriculturalist, August 1872 and January 1873 (from Henning and Witkowski, 2013) American Agriculturalist and in the Army and Navy Journal, another publication where Remington also was advertising frequently (Henning and Witkowski 2013). This independent weekly, whose full title was The United States Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces, gained a large number of subscribers from the US military and circulated overseas (Henning and Witkowski 2013). Figure 6 shows two heroes from the American team, Major Henry Fulton and Colonel John Bodine, in their shooting positions. Note Fulton’s unusual back position. Bodine favoured lying prone and in this position fired the very last shot that decided the match. Immediately before taking his shooting position, Bodine’s hand had been cut by a shard from an exploding ginger beer bottle. He calmly wrapped his bloody hand with a handkerchief and went about his business (Gilmore 1999; Rose 2008). The mania for target shooting reached a crescendo in the 1880s and even inspired popular tunes including: ‘The Gallant Rifles Parade,’ (a jaunty quickstep), ‘Maguire’s Rifle Corps’, the ‘International Rifle-Match’ (a waltz sportingly dedicated to the English team), the ‘National Rifle Quickstep’, the ‘American Rifle Team March’, and, of course, the ‘American Rifle Team Polka’. (Rose 2008: 201)

By the end of the decade, however, shooting fever started to subside and assume a lower profile in American life compared to other spectator sports, such as baseball, boxing, college football

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Figure 6 Remington Advert Tied into Competitive Shooting Source: Army and Navy Journal, 5 June 1875 (from Henning and Witkowski, 2013)

and lawn tennis, which began drawing bigger and bigger crowds. The Schützenbünde kept at it into the early twentieth century, but took a low profile in 1917 because of rising anti-German hysteria (Gilmore 1999). Remington continued to make the expensive Creedmoor rifles until 1907 (the Remington-Hepburn model), but total numbers sold were only in the hundreds (Flayderman 2007). However, the cultural impact of target shooting and its imagery persisted. Interestingly, the fields of advertising and marketing have long made use of shooting terminology. They regularly describe strategies for taking aim at and hitting ‘target audiences’ and ‘target markets’ with ‘rifle’ (narrowly focused demographics) or ‘shotgun’ (broadly delivered) strategies for media planning and delivery. The use of these metaphors may be due to the development of the early marketing field in the gun crazy United States. Had the discipline been invented elsewhere, perhaps different terms for marketing strategies would have been invented.

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The practice of visual merchandising – putting goods where shoppers could easily see them – began to emerge in the eighteenth century (Parker 2003). Using windows for display may also have started about this time, but the promotional and myth-making powers of storefront visualisations were greatly enhanced by the introduction of plate glass in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Pioneered by France’s Bon Marché in 1877 and quickly adopted by counterparts in the US and elsewhere, plate glass windows became vital to the success of department stores as well as to many smaller retail concerns. They presented a clear visual expanse to draw in passers-by to do some ‘window shopping’. They also were easier to clean than traditional divided-light windows comprised of multiple panes of glass. Combined with new electrical lighting, windows could dazzle at all hours and stores started to compete to create the most elaborate window displays (Mosher 2012). Store windows became a popular subject for early twentiethcentury photographers and through this medium their mythic properties were enhanced (see Rose 2012: 20–23). A new profession of window dresser began to emerge. On 1 November 1897, writer and editor L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) of Chicago launched a new monthly trade journal titled The Show Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and the Professional. Baum had never worked as a window trimmer, but had had experience in the theatre, in the dry goods trade and in newspaper publishing (Rogers 2002). He wrote most of the copy for The Store Window and illustrated the magazine with photos of window displays, some of which he took himself. In 1898 Baum was elected secretary of the National Association of Window Trimmers of America, a group he himself had founded that year. He published two influential books in 1900. One was The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors, a compendium of practical advice for attracting attention and selling goods. Baum advised against cluttered displays, discussed colour theory and harmony, and gave instructions for ‘draping and building backgrounds, creating mechanically operated moving displays, and procuring dazzling effects with electric light’ (Burns 1996: 55). Baum’s other book from 1900 was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the fairy tale that made him famous. In their emphases on stagecraft and the power of illusion, these two books share some common themes. Baum’s contribution to visual merchandising was significant and striking window displays became ever more common in cities across the US Baum sold The Show Window in 1900 and henceforth devoted full time to writing children’s fiction (Rogers 2002). In the 1860s Remington sold civilian arms (and obtained foreign contracts) through primary dealers such as Schuyler, Hartley & Graham in New York City (Marcot 1998). Because of a paucity of surviving company records, we do not know the extent to which Remington also sold directly to local sporting goods and hardware stores. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the popular catalogues of Montgomery Ward & Co. (1895) and Sears Roebuck & Co. (1897) featured, respectively, 10 and 16 different types of Remington rifles, shotguns and pistols. By the early twentieth century main street retailers definitely were carrying Remington firearms and ammunition (Fosburg 2012). Sales representatives visited these dealers and, in addition to pushing guns and ammunition, supplied them with advertising signage and other ephemera to place in their front windows. The earliest known photograph of a storefront featuring Remington firearms and ammunition dates to 1912 (Fosberg 2012). Remington ramped up production during World War I. Between 1915 and 1918, at its factories in Ilion, New York, and Eddystone, Pennsylvania, Remington produced 1,737,449 M1917 bolt action rifles for the US government, 450,000 Enfield rifles for the British, and over 650,000 Berthier and Mosin-Nagant bolt action rifles for the French and Russian governments (Hatch 1956; Flayderman 2007). After filling these very large contracts, Remington now depended upon the much smaller civilian market. Its product lines included hunting and target rifles, double barrel and pump action shotguns, automatic pistols and double-barreled derringers. Remington

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Figure 7 Hardware Age, 13 December 1923 (from Fosburg, 2012) also manufactured large quantities of ammunition and, in 1926, introduced new, non-corrosive bullets sold under the ‘Kleanbore’ trade name (Hatch 1956). To utilise some of its excess manufacturing capacity, the company established the Remington Cutlery Works in 1919 to make a wide variety of pocketknives (Hatch 1956; Marcot 1998). The company and its brands needed to woo the interwar consumer market through magazine advertising and retail promotions. In 1922, in conjunction with Remington’s ‘Sportsmen’s Week’ held about the second or third week in October near the opening of the autumn hunting and trapping season, the company began sponsoring store window competitions and publishing photographs of the winners in trade magazines such as Hardware Age and Hardware Retailer. Figure 7 shows a page from a 13 December 1923 piece in Hardware Age reporting the results from the previous October’s contest. Dealers had submitted some 35,000 photographs of their displays (Fosburg 2012). In the 1924 contest, Remington distributed $5000 in cash prizes in three categories: retailers in cities of 5000 and under, 5001 to 10,000, and over 10,000 in population (Fosburg 2012). An advert for the window display contest in Hardware Age, 24 September 1925 (see Figure 8) was

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Figure 8 Hardware Age, 1922 (from Fosburg, 2012)

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headlined ‘Inviting Your Town to Your Store’. The body copy promised a national sales campaign with tie-in ads in the Saturday Evening Post and Country Gentleman. The illustration (signed by artist Mayo Bunker) shows a storefront window with Remington guns, knives and ephemera; an archetypical hunter cradling his shotgun (on a public sidewalk), a pointing retriever; and two boys, one of whom may be wearing a Boy Scout uniform. This homey image was also used in a two-page spread seen on eBay (date and magazine unknown). Store windows can re-assemble and re-deploy myths for commercial purposes. Parker (2003) discusses how visual displays in department stores exploited major types of sign-values – wealth and luxury, the exotic (i.e. Oriental), and abundance, prosperity and plenty – that could be attached to products. McCracken (1986) refers to this process as the creation and movement of cultural meaning. Most Remington displays were not as thematically sophisticated

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Figure 9 Hardware Age, 1922 (from Fosburg, 2012) and visually compelling as those created by professional window dressers for major urban department stores. Nevertheless some of them took on the characteristics of tableaus that invited passers-by into their miniature worlds. Remington window trimmers would dress mannequins as archetypical hunters and sportsmen and, in at least one instance (Figure 9 bottom), included a female nimrod sitting next to a cut-out of a Native American Indian wearing a full war bonnet! Other displays developed visual power through repetition by stacking box after box of ammunition, by lining up numerous rifles and shotguns, and by spelling out the brand name through an arrangement of pocket knives (Figure 9 top). Chromolithographed images of hunters, dogs, ducks and other wildlife supplied by the company were also included (Figure 8). Although photos of Remington store windows from this period were in black and white, surviving guns, cartridge boxes and ephemera document the various original colours of these objects. The marketing impact of these windows on consumers is difficult to assess, but they must have seemed worthwhile since Remington kept the contest going at least until 1935 according to examples in Fosburg (2012).

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Discussion and conclusion

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As historical phenomena, the three Remington mythical moments share some commonalities. They were primarily creations of the company itself, albeit assisted, in the case of the storefront window contests, by the creative efforts of participating hardware and sporting goods dealers. No evidence has been found of consumer authorship of these particular brand myths. Equally important, the three moments were all linked to broader values and lifestyles in American culture. These include the individual initiative shown by the young founder, the personal competence and competitiveness of the target shooters, and the nostalgia, masculinity and hunting life portrayed in the storefront windows. These values continue to resonate in late twentiethand early twenty-first-century American culture (see, e.g., Belk and Costa 1998; Hirschman 2003; Holt 2003; Littlefield and Ozanne 2011). On the other hand, the three mythical moments can be considered as unique ‘historical individuals’. The founder myth begins with specific date, but written accounts did not appear until at least 45 years after the events of 1816. In contrast, company advertising propagating the sharpshooter myth appeared almost simultaneously with the craze for target shooting. Founder myth making has had a long history, becoming embedded in Remington marketing by at least 1916 (see poster in Figure 2), whereas the mythical world of storefront displays lasted a couple of decades and the heyday of the sharpshooter had an even shorter run. The founder myth was originally disseminated through a handful of written accounts in the 1860s and 1870s, whereas the sharpshooter myth emerged through both text and evocative images in popular magazines. Pedestrians and shoppers encountered the Remington store windows directly and visually, but their mythology also was spread through marketing promotions including paid coverage in trade journals. The history of these mythical moments has not ended. In September 2013, Remington Arms Company seriously recycled them by launching ‘1816 by Remington’, a ‘curated collection’ of upmarket apparel and accessories for the modern sporting generation sold exclusively online and via direct-to-consumer catalogues. According to Ross Saldarini, senior vice president for accessories and lifestyle: The 1816 brand celebrates the Remington lifestyle with clothing and accessories designed for the field and beyond. We’ve combined the very best of Remington’s rich heritage with the modern tastes of today’s sporting generation. It’s a unique blend of history and quality that stands alone in today’s marketplace. For generations, Remington has represented a sporting legacy passed down from father to son to grandson. Now we’re building on that rich history with the 1816 apparel brand. The 1816 line is built around signature pieces that, like so many classic Remington products, will endure the test of time and be a part of family traditions for generations to come. (PRNewswire 2013)

Heritage and historical references permeate the website and catalogue, which feature ‘1816 Ilion’ and ‘UMC’ jackets, ‘Rimfire’ wool vests, ‘Creedmore’ and ‘Rolling Block Shawl Collar’ sweaters, and an assortment of bags, belts, and hats with the 1816 designation (see Figure 10). Creedmoor is the correct spelling, but this name is controlled by another company, Creedmoor Sports (2013), which itself sells ‘Creedmoor Deluxe Shooting Jackets’. 1816 by Remington apparently needed to change the spelling to avoid infringing upon an existing trade name. The website also contains a gallery of vintage photos, advertisements and other historic ephemera (1816 by Remington, 2014). Promotional videos and social media reinforce the brand positioning and, in effect, serve as a virtual store window. This recycling of mythic Remington history serves the immediate promotional purpose of captivating retail consumers, but myths associated with firearms brands also have become interwoven with larger cultural narratives. American gun culture is deeply infused with myths,

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Figure 10 1816 Ilion ($395) and UMC ($245) jackets, Creedmore ($195) and Rolling Block Shawl Collar ($155) sweaters, and Rimfire wool vest ($130), and 1816 ($430) laptop bag

some of which serve political purposes (Witkowski 2013). Other gun myths, such as the ‘winning of the West’, appeal to the consumer imagination. In the mythical re-telling, the single action Colt .45 revolver and Winchester lever action rifles became essential tools for fighting off savage Native Americans, hunting wild animals (some species nearly to extinction), and defending against assorted lawbreakers. Commercial advertising, dime novels, Wild West shows, movies, and radio and television shows have disseminated these myths about how guns helped transport the benefits of American civilisation across a continent. The Remington brand has played a lesser role in the western saga. Remington advertising has generally focused on hunting sports and target shooting (see examples in Marcot 1998), as did the window displays of the 1920s and 1930. However, Remington rolling block rifles have appeared in western films, such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Legends of the Fall (1994), as well as on television shows and even in video games (IMFDB 2014). Thus, different culture industries have further disseminated the mythical and iconic meanings of the Remington firearms brand. Primary sources

1816 by Remington (2014) ‘1816, First in the Field’, www.remington1816.com (accessed 15 April 2014. Advertisements from American Agriculturalist, August 1872, January 1873, and November 1875; Army and Navy Journal, 5 June 1875; and Hardware Age, 1922, 13 December 1923, and 24 September 1925.

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Anonymous (1879) History of Herkimer County, N.Y., New York: F. W. Beers & Co., www.herkimer.nygenweb.net/remington/remingtonfam6.html (accessed 8 March 2014). Bingham, George Caleb (1850) ‘Shooting for the Beef’, oil on canvas, Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum. Bishop, J. Leander (1861) A History of American Manufacturers from 1608 to 1860, Philadelphia. Harper’s Weekly (1874) ‘The International Rifle Match’ (10 October): 838. Montgomery Ward & Co. (1895) Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue and Buyers’ Guide 1895, 2008 unabridged facsimile edition, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. Sears Roebuck & Co. (1897) 1897 Sears Roebuck & Co. Catalogue, 2007 facsimile edition, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. Whittaker, Frederick (1876) ‘The Story of Creedmoor’, The Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading, 22 (August): 258–267.

References

Barrett, Paul M. (2013) Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun, New York: Crown Publishing Group. Bartels, Robert (1962) The Development of Marketing Thought, Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin. Belk, Russell W. and Costa, Janeen Arnold (1998) ‘The Mountain Man Myth: A Contemporary Consuming Fantasy’, Journal of Consumer Research, 25 (December): 218–240. Belk, Russell W. and Pollay, Richard W. (1985) ‘Images of Ourselves: The Good Life in Twentieth Century Advertising’, Journal of Consumer Research, 11 (March): 887–897. Burns, Sarah (1996) Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Eddy, Mark (2011) ‘Rem-Facts’, The Remington Collector’s Journal (4th Quarter): 34–41, www. remingtonsociety.com/rsa/journals/Automobiles (accessed 20 April 2014). Edwards, William B. (1953) The Story of Colt’s Revolver, Harrisburg, PA: The Stackpole Company. Flayderman, E. Norman (2007) Flayderman’s Guide to Antique American Firearms and Their Values (7th edn), Iola, WI: Gun Digest Books. Fosburg, Gordon (2012) ‘Remington Storefront Displays’, The Remington Collector’s Journal (1st Quarter): 30–46, www.remingtonsociety.com/rsa/journals/Storefront (accessed 20 April 2014). Fullerton, Ronald A. (2011) ‘Historical Methodology: The Perspective of a Professionally Trained Historian Turned Marketer’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 3 (4): 436–448. Gilmore, Russell S. (1999) ‘Another Branch of Manly Sport’: American Rifle Games, 1840–1900’, in Jan E. Dizard, Robert Merrill Muth and Stephen P. Andrews (eds), Guns in America: A Reader, New York: New York University Press. Hatch, Alden (1956) Remington Arms: An American History, New York: Rinehard & Company, Inc. Henning, Robert A. and Witkowski, Terrence H. (2013) ‘The Advertising of E. Remington & Sons: The Creation of a National Brand, 1854-1888’, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 5 (4): 418–438. Hirschman, Elizabeth C. (2003) ‘Men, Dogs, Guns, and Cars: The Semiotics of Rugged Individualism’, Journal of Advertising, 32 (Spring): 9–22. Hollander, Stanley C., Rassuli, Kathleen M., Jones, D. G. Brian and Farlow Dix, Laura (2005) ‘Periodization in Marketing History’, Journal of Macromarketing, 25 (June): 32–41. Holt, Douglas B. (2003) ‘What Becomes an Icon Most?’, Harvard Business Review, 81 (3): 43–49. Holt, Douglas B. (2004) How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding, Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Holt, Douglas B. (2006) ‘Jack Daniel’s America Iconic Brands as Ideological Parasites and Proselytizers’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 6 (3): 355–377. Hosley, William (1999) ‘Guns, Gun Culture, and the Peddling of Dreams’, in Jan E. Dizard, Robert Merrill Muth, and Stephen P. Andrews (eds), Guns in America: A Reader, New York: New York University Press. Houze, Herbert G. (2006) Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. IMFDB (2014) Internet Movie Firearms Database, www.imfdb.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 1 May 2014). Kirkland, K. D. (2007) America’s Premier Gunmakers: Remington, East Bridgewater, MA: World Publications Group.

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Littlefield, Jon and Ozanne, Julie L. (2011) ‘Socialization into Consumer Culture: Hunters Learning to be Men’, Consumption, Markets and Culture, 14 (4): 333–360. Marcot, Roy (ed.) (1998) Remington: America’s Oldest Gunmaker, Peoria, IL: Primedia. Marcot, Roy (2005) The History of Remington Firearms, Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press. McCracken, Grant (1986) ‘Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods’, Journal of Consumer Research, 13 (1): 71–84. McCracken, Grant (1988) Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mosher, Max (2012) ‘Window Dressing: The Art and Artists’, Utne Reader (March/April), www.utne.com/media/window-dressing-zm0z12mazsie.aspx?PageId=1#axzz2ye9EYBtr (accessed 8 April 2014). Muñiz, Albert and O’Guinn, Thomas C. (2001) ‘Brand Community’, Journal of Consumer Research, 27 (March): 412–432. Parker, Ken W. (2003) ‘Sign Consumption in the 19th Century Department Store: An Examination of Visual Merchandising in the Grand Emporiums (1846-1900)’, Journal of Sociology, 39 (4): 353– 371. Peterson, Harold L. (1966) The Remington Historical Treasury of American Guns, Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons. Presbrey, Frank (1929) The History and Development of Advertising, New York: Greenwood Press. PRNewswire (2013) ‘Remington® Launches 1816™ Collection To Outfit The Modern Sporting Generation’ (June 20), www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/remington-launches-1816-collectionto-outfit-the-modern-sporting-generation-212312111.html (accessed 4 April 2014). Rogers, Katharine M. (2002) L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz, New York: St. Matin’s Press. Rose, Alexander (2008) American Rifle: A Biography, New York: Delacorte Press. Rose, Gillian (2012) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, London: Sage. Swinney, H. J. (1987) ‘New Notes on Remington’s History’, The Gun Report (April): 14–24. Wilson, R. L. (1985) Colt: An American Legend, New York: Abbeville Publishing Group. Witkowski, Terrence H. (2013) ‘The Visual Politics of U.S. Gun Culture’, in Russell W. Belk, Linda Price, and Liza Peñaloza (eds), Research in Consumer Behavior (Vol. 15), Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing.

The ideologies of convenience in myths of domestic consumption Andrea Davies, James Fitchett and Per Ostergaard

University of Leicester; University of Leicester; University of Southern Denmark

Introduction

The comforts of life are so various and extensive, that nobody can tell what people mean by them, except he knows what sort of life they lead. The same obscurity I observe in the words decency and conveniency. Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1705)

Our paper represents an attempt to show how enduring mythologies can be shown to structure everyday consumption practices and meanings. We propose that mundane marketing categories such as convenience are informed by deeply resonating mythologies. These have analogies to the religious and economic ideologies that define early modern thought. As ideological transformations are historical artefacts that continue to structure social relations, a function of these marketing myths is to structure the meanings that consumers ascribe to explain and understand not only their consumer behaviour but their social and family relations more broadly. We suggest that contemporary mythologies of convenience are modern re-articulations of enduring cultural categories. Our analysis also tries to show how myths are used by consumers to maintain and differentiate their family subjectivities. Alternative and competing mythologies of convenience are shown to be continually re-positioned and re-valued in everyday consumer discourse within families and across generations. The meaning of convenience has been an important construct for marketers because it helps to partly explain the operation and structure of free markets and the behaviours of consumers in markets (Kelley 1958). One of the ways that markets develop and evolve is by making life more convenient through market transaction, and marketing theory assumes that convenience is at the forefront of customer and user evaluations (Davies 2004; Dawes Farquhar and Rowley 2009; Moeller, Fassnacht and Ettinger 2009; Goebel, Moeller and Pibernik 2012 ). Market exchange is assumed to be structurally more efficient in terms of resource allocation and acquisition than rival alternatives, such as barter or coercion for example, because it allows buyers and sellers to meet their respective needs and requirements more conveniently than alternative systems of exchange. In more specific terms we can observe that convenience is implied in much marketing discourse. Brands, for example, can be understood as valuable marketing technologies because they function as convenience devices that reduce consumer risk and facilitate the transfer and reception of detailed and complex information. Many product innovations are desirable and valuable because they offer greater convenience to consumers over existing and less convenient alternatives. Convenience brings together notions of time and out-sourcing, located variably with practices of saving time and effort, time-shifting, avoiding unpleasant or undesirable tasks and making life easier and more comfortable in fulfilling obligations or tasks (see Shove 2003b for review). Today this discourse of convenience is most often incorporated into discussions about the ‘cash-rich time-poor’ consumer who is for ever in need of products and services that make everyday life more convenient (Reilly 1982; Nickols and Fox 1983; Oropesa 1993; Thompson 1996). Examples such as the rapid adoption of modern domestic appliances (the freezer, microwave and video recorder), modern consumer technologies (especially information technologies), the burgeoning fast food and convenience food industry, and the growth in online shopping (e.g. Gofton 1995; Ward 1999; Shove 2000; Ling, Yang and 347

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Minjoon 2013) all seem to further justify this simple theory of markets and marketing in which convenience is understood as a force that drives market innovation and development. To suggest that convenience in the market is a ‘myth’ runs the risk of invoking a now somewhat prosaic debate about the efficacy of many marketing claims about the apparent convenience of products and services by highlighting their inconvenient consequences. The car, that most convenient of all devices, is also a cause of much inconvenience and extra work (Reimers 2013). While the car allows the consumer to go where they want when they want as compared to public transportation systems for instance, they also require maintenance, fuelling, financing, insuring and many other kinds of work, not to mention the inconvenience of congestion and perhaps even the inconveniences caused by climate change for which car ownership and use is no doubt a contributory factor. These technology devices are not purely responsive but bring with their use a script (Akrich 1992) that sets in place a series of obligations on the user, giving at the same time the illusion of choice but also structuring, often foreclosing, other avenues of practice (Shove 2000; Kinney and Lyon 2013), making more work (Cowan 1989; Wajcman 1995) and escalating the need for more convenient products and services (Shove 2003b). These debates about the inconvenience of products and services that are marketed and consumed for their apparent convenience do not, however, undermine or challenge in any way the simple theory of convenience and marketing innovation. Critical observations such as these are entirely consistent with a theory of convenience in markets because they point to marketing as one, if not the most appropriate, response. Marketing will and is able, in theory at least, to respond to emerging/unintended inconveniences through ever more convenient product and service innovations. Convenience myths in memories of domestic consumption

In approaching the analysis of myth in marketing we are alert to an understandable tendency to identify myth with particular objects, whether this is a material object, a concept or an idea. While there is a seductive logic in the notion, for example, that particular brands, products or service propositions function as modern myths there is a risk that this obscures the function of myth as communication. The object is not mythical or otherwise, but rather it is through certain mythic forms and means of communication that it becomes so: ‘for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the “nature” of things’ (Barthes 1972: 108). The classic application of Barthes’ semiology of myth supposes that one of the functions of myth artefacts is to naturalise ideology as a form of communication, but more importantly myth discourse is inherently and always adaptable as a form. In Myth Today Barthes outlines a theory of myth whereby ideological discourses are reproduced as natural justification: myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made. (Barthes 1972: 142)

Aspects of consumer culture then can be read as simultaneously ideology and myth. Our analysis shows the memory of myth in the everyday. The ideologies of convenience that we have described above have become embedded in consumer culture; they have become naturalised as part of everyday consumer discourse and it is possible to observe these ideologies at work through the modern reproduction of mythologies of convenience. The data we utilise here was collected as part of a project examining intergenerational dynamics within families. It consists of sets of interviews with women about everyday consumption and provisioning. The data consists of interviews with women from the same family across three generations (daughter– mother–grandmother), and covers the period from the 1920s to the present. Twenty-three families were recruited in the Midlands, UK. The sample includes families who are geographically distant and ones that live near to each other in the same or adjacent town. All the participants were white and were born in the UK. Although the families comprised of three

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generations the data accounts for much longer intergenerational periods. The grandmothers recall their childhoods and talk about their own mothers, and the younger generation often were new parents and talked about their children. In some family sets four or even five generations are present in the data. Critical oral history was used to frame the empirical data collection and analysis. It is a multi-level narrative approach that is able to give visible testimony to changing cultural discourse as it is lived and remembered by individuals, families and community. Memory and remembering (individual, public, community and generational) is key to an oral history approach. Through memory the past is viewed only through the lens of the present, and anticipated future (Davies 2011). As Portelli (1997 50) reminds us, oral sources ‘tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing and what they now think they did’. In an earlier analysis we used the data to document consumer culture as it emerges through the twentieth century and is storied in families. This was achieved by locating generational memory within 23 family chains that formed our sample. In generational memory we locate unique family signatures which operate as organising and relational devices. Family signatures such as being progressive, in control and being innovative structured the meaning of the everyday practices of shopping and household management work across the generations. Portelli (1997: 6) tells us oral history is ‘the search for a connection between biography and history, between individual experience and the transformations of society’ and we found similarities across generations but also saw how each generation is positioned differently as a consequence of the small shifts in discourse over time. We build on this earlier analysis to focus on the myth-ideologies of convenience that were present within family and incorporated into their everyday practices of shopping and household management. We show convenience as it is narrated by different generations in family chains, and reveal how convenience is reproduced, transformed and reconfigured between the generations. Categories of convenience are most explicit in descriptions of shopping, provisioning and household management during the late 1960s and 1970s when retail innovations such as the supermarket first appear in England (Humphrey 1985; Bowlby 2000; Usherwood 2000). At this same time there began an interest in convenience in marketing theory (Kelley 1958). In this period the ‘mother’ generation were first setting up home, getting married and had young children, and they reflect on how the perceived convenience of new ‘modern’ consumer technologies at the time were then seen as a significant difference and improvement on the practices of their mothers – the ‘grandmother’ generation. The ‘mother’ generation utilise convenience myths to explain their consumption during this period, although they are often highly self-critical of these practices and behaviours now. While modern domestic appliances and the supermarkets were liberating because of convenience, the risks and sacrifices are now more easily recognised and articulated (Shove 2003a). The ‘daughter’ generation in the data were themselves children during the 1970s and so their reflections recount memories of these innovations through a child’s perspective. As young adults the ‘daughter’ generation are often critical of their mothers now, reflecting on how the desire for convenience seemed to take precedence over food quality and variety, and imply an erosion of domestic expertise and skill. The daughter and grandmother generations have a greater tendency to emphasise that there is too much choice, and that in some ways supermarkets are (paradoxically) less convenient than some alternatives that existed before (such as home deliveries for the grandmother generation), and which are now re-emerging (such as farmers markets and local retailers) (Cowan 1989; Wajcman 1995).The daughter generation evoke different, often negative convenience myths to explain these differences, whereby their mothers’ enthusiastic acceptance of convenient shopping practices and domestic technologies is reflected on as an illustration of lacking consumer sophistication and knowledge. The daughters have a more ambivalent attitude towards convenience now that they are young adults themselves with childcare responsibilities. They recount many negative attitudes about consumer conveniences 349

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while accepting that these also bring necessary benefits and advantages. Daughters can be characterised as begrudgingly accepting convenience, while at the same time aspiring for more localised, authentic and diverse consumption experiences. We can say that relative ‘inconvenience’ is reconstructed by this daughter generation as progressive and more legitimate by drawing parallels between their own values and those of their grandmothers who did not have all the conveniences of modern consumer culture. It is important to not lose sight of the fact that these accounts are not historical records of prior consumption norms and practices but are recounted memories. While the accounts, especially from the grandmother generation, offer some fascinating descriptive insights into everyday life prior to the emergence of supermarkets, washing machines and fridge-freezers for instance, the interviews really only show us how these experiences, whether imagined or remembered, are utilised now to make sense of the present. We read the data as showing how different types of myths of convenience are employed by generations of women in the same family to make sense and justify their own attitudes about consumption. More importantly though, convenience mythologies can be seen as devices through which the women position and situate their own self-identities within and alongside their family identities. Convenience myths are used by the women to both differentiate themselves from their mothers (and daughters), but also at the same time to reinforce common family signatures and family traditions. Thus the women discuss how they are at once both different from their mothers and daughters and how they share common values and practices. Alternative, sometimes competing, mythologies of convenience are found between women across the generations, showing them to be continually re-positioned and re-valued in everyday consumer discourse within families and across generations. While mythologies of convenience are present in family, our analysis also shows that they are transformed and are reconfigured across generations. Oral histories of family consumption

To explore some of these themes in more detail we will now present summaries of oral histories from 4 of the 23 families who contributed to the research project. In accordance with the oral history approach we analyse each family group as a discrete narrative, generalising within each case rather than looking for codes or themes across disparate family histories. Each family story is not a single or unified narrative but a collective and at times contested account that is remembered and storied from different perspectives by family members. These accounts are necessarily partial, in that some family voices are necessarily absent but nevertheless inform the accounts in different ways. In the UK maternal/marital customs mean that women in the same family do not share surnames, and so are referred to here by an index number identifier. The index numbers refer to the contact/recruitment schedule and were retained as we could not find a more appropriate or meaningful way to identify them. Three generations of women from each family agreed to participate but in the course of the research the eldest woman from Family 10 died. She is nevertheless very much present in the accounts provided by her daughter and granddaughter. To represent the interrelations between the women of each family participants are referred to as grandmother, middlemother or new-mother/daughter. Pseudonyms beginning with the either ‘G’, ‘M’ or ‘N’ are used to aid navigation around the data. The families were white and broadly what we would refer to in contemporary terms as upper ‘working class’ or lower ‘middle class’. The class structure of British society has changed significantly over the period of the research (which takes in most of the twentieth century) and the families reflect this fluidity of class relations. Family 10: A story of consumer convenience, intergenerational conflict and resolution

Family 10 are Greta (grandmother), Maureen (mother) and Nicola (daughter). Maureen is divorced from Nicola’s father and now remarried, and Nicola is recently married and has young children herself. Maureen’s earliest memories of shopping and provisioning describe a localised system of

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distribution based on weekly deliveries from local sellers. Maureen recalls how her mother, Greta, made very occasional trips into the local town for provisions. She remembers that the back garden was used for growing vegetables and that rationing was in place for many essentials. Although Maureen’s memories refer to a period that was only around 60 years ago, they recall an idyllic/mythical past where communities and neighbours worked and socialised together, and where provisioning and consumption were part of the broader social fabric of daily life. The modern conceptions of consumer choice, variety and convenience, so important to Nicola’s generation, are almost without referent or meaning in these accounts. Maureen narrates her childhood in terms of relative innocence and simplicity compared to the industrialised, standardised and expanded expectations of shopping and provisioning that came to define her own experiences as a young adult, wife and mother in the 1970s. Maureen describes the transition to more organised forms of retail in the 1960s. She recalls early supermarkets that were partly self-service. Her accounts of shopping as an older child/young adult contain little or no notion of individual preference for anything other than the product ranges that were, and had always been, on offer. Early experiences of supermarkets and self-service in the 1960s are described in terms of newness, novelty, excitement and freedom: it was fairly narrow aisles, but it was very bright and lots of Formica, plasticy surfaces. And you had middle pyramids of things, and I think there was a cheese counter along the back with the cooked meats and the cheeses on. And I think there you still had to ask somebody to give you those, but everything else you could help yourself. (Maureen)

Nicola’s earliest memories of shopping at the supermarket bear considerable similarities to her mother’s account, although there are also obvious differences in terms of the way these experiences were valued and understood: they used to have just like plasticy floors, vinyl floors, with maybe those really tiny mosaic tiles on them, but in greys and blues. But I remember stuff like that … they just were really bloody dreary to be honest with you … that’s probably why children hated shopping. (Nicola)

Themes of convenience, ease and practicality are prominent in Nicola’s account, both in the positive sense that modern consumer technologies (e.g. supermarkets) help to make everyday life manageable and ‘easier’ but also in the negative sense that product proliferation creates task proliferation – and more work. As a mother of a young family Nicola regards value and convenience to be important considerations and this typically involves using supermarkets. She shops around at different supermarkets for value on products such as nappies, and although Nicola likes the idea of buying from local providers, the higher costs and relative inconvenience are powerful disincentives. Maureen and Nicola have a shared commitment to discontinuity. Nicola is confrontational and antagonistic when describing her childhood, although nowadays she says that she enjoys a good relationship with her mother. Nicola is highly critical of the way her mother sacrificed the provision of ‘good food’ for the ease and convenience made possible by having a deepfreeze for the first time, allowing her the opportunity to bulk buy and store convenience foods available from the supermarket. The main consequence of getting a freezer in the mid-1980s was, according to Nicola, that it allowed her mother to buy ‘loads of crap’. Maureen is equally critical of herself as a young mother/consumer, confessing that the types of food practices she used to engage in when her children were in their early teenage years were ‘rubbish’. Maureen and her second husband have changed their ways nowadays, they do not own a freezer or eat frozen food. Echoing her memories of provisioning as a child, she now adopts a dif-

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ferent lifestyle that prioritises localism, more restricted provisioning, and healthy choices. Nicola identifies the food ‘depravation’ she experienced as a child as one of the reasons why her own attitudes now are so different to those that Maureen, her mother, held in the past. Nicola considers her mother to be responsible for her own poor experiences with food as a child. Nicola’s articulations of difference from Maureen are set against a context that shows many of her practices to be similar. Maureen and Nicola use similar terms to describe and frame different products. Both describe using supermarkets and convenience foods as ‘a bit naughty’. They also apply a similar moral discourse around notions of guilt to frame aspects of consumption and both affirm positive consumer identity around anti-supermarket sentiments. They both ‘admit’ to using supermarkets and both rationalise it as a last resort or because of the lack of a viable alternative. As a mother of a young family Nicola regards value and convenience as important considerations in consumption and this typically involves using supermarkets and some convenience food. Nicola is afraid of becoming what she recalls as the Maureen of the 1980s – the seduction into the ease, convenience and lack of imagination that remains an ever tempting prospect in consumer culture. Family 13: A story of consumption work and propriety, family outside the market

All the women in Family 13 were or are working mothers. They all refer to the importance of hard work as a source of self-respect and family identity. Gina describes her life as a young mother when money was short and where maintaining family values, discipline and proper conduct had to be constantly worked at. Gina’s provisioning and shopping skills involved being able to utilise the somewhat limited consumption opportunities available to her, such as rummage sales, second hand and informal markets, to achieve her social expectations and high standards in terms of dress, appearance and conduct. For Gina aspects of consumer culture are framed as potential threats to the sanctity of family life unless managed and contained through domestic management. This required her to practice strategies to limit the reach of what she sees as incursions from market contaminants. There is a need to teach children about the dangers of the market so that they can avoid the seduction of consumer lifestyles which might threaten and erode family cohesion. The allocation and completion of everyday household chores and tasks were shared out among all family members with everyone, including the children, having their jobs to do. Hard work and discipline were moral necessity, even in the present day when easier, more convenient opportunities might be available. Gina talks about how much work was involved in provisioning and household tasks but points out that it should be done, even when you do not feel like doing it. Self-reliance should not be sacrificed to others or to the market. This Protestant work ethic is contrasted with a lack of discipline fostered by morality of the market place. Gina considers that today, children are given too much and mothers are not looking after their children properly. There is a lack discipline, with children being allowed to watch too much TV and eat snack and convenience food, instead of proper meals. Like her mother Maria is critical of modern social norms and the incursion of consumption practices into domains that were previously outside of the market. She describes the reduction in family time that many other families seem to be prepared to accept in order to consume. She rarely shops at the weekends but on one occasion when she did have the need to visit the ASDA supermarket on a Saturday she describes her dismay at the number of children in the store, that it would be better for them to be doing other things instead. The lure of consumer opportunities have marginalised the time that families have together. Maria has worked in retail for most of her working life as a shop assistant and discusses the changing values and attitudes that she has experienced. The work ethic is present here to, with a critical description of the decline in standards, that meticulous attention to one’s appearance and manners are no longer seen as important as they once were.

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For Gina the discipline of family life enables the family to resist the lures of consumer culture. She describes how life was hard when her children were young. There was only carpet in one room, and the other rooms in the house had bare concrete floors that were painted red and which needed to be polished. There were hardships but with hard work comes family, being in family, working for family and enjoying family. The hard work allowed for great pleasure. Family and doing things as a big family resonates strongly in her memories. The moral certainty of hard work and its satisfactions are translated into kitchen management, the valorisation of thriftiness and ‘eeking things out’. These values, Maria laments, are in decline in her daughters’ generation, if not lost altogether. The ritual of the weekly Sunday roast not only structured family togetherness, providing regularity and routine, but it also demonstrated (and taught) the importance of thrift. Maria’s critical attitude towards the ease of modern consumer lifestyles is reinforced in her attitudes that it wasn’t necessary to buy and have things – real pleasure came from the family and not from buying and consuming. Natalie, Maria’s daughter and Gina’s granddaughter, remembers shopping at Tesco as a child with her mother. Natalie describes her mother’s rebuke that she always spent more if the children were with her. While Maria was trying to be economical and not be excessive the children tried to encourage their mother to try and buy new things. Concern over the value in thrift and frugalities permeate all three generations and form part of this family’s signature. Two particular examples are useful to demonstrate the centrality of thrift and frugality in their common family practices and how these link the women together as a shared logic. The first is their preference for premium brands and the second is their resistance and use of pre-prepared foods (processed or convenience foods). All three women articulate a belief that cheapness and value for money should not be confused. Manufacturer brands are usually more economical in the long run over own-label and cheaper substitutes. Now that the family have more disposable income than in the past it pays to spend more for the quality of premium brands. The justification for these preferences is made not on the grounds that they prefer to indulge in the variety and quality offered by premium brands but rather that it represents their superior knowledge that in order to be thrifty and economical it makes sense to spend a little more – to avoid a false economy offered by the seduction of low prices. When Maria and Natalie do purchase own label and other brand substitutes it is because the premium brand equivalent is deemed to no real additional value, so the premium brand is expected to ‘work hard’, be economical and offer real value. Attitudes about convenience and pre-prepared food are discussed by all three women. Gina insists on doing her own cooking, never buying a ready-made dinner. She goes on to describe occasional exceptions to this self-imposed discipline, but these instances can be justified on the grounds that it saves time, avoids ‘unnecessary work’ and avoids waste. As a widower she is able to incorporate into her moral position some pre-prepared products on the grounds that it means that she does not have to throw food away or waste food unnecessarily. Maria frequently describes the market as unreasonable and inefficient, something to be vigilant of in order to maintain thrift, healthiness and economy. She is critical of products like breakfast cereal that offer families a cheap and easy option. Whereas Gina and Maria are often sceptical of modern marketing and shopping attitudes that promote and encourage the proliferation and normalisation of waste, excess and poor quality products, Natalie is more enthusiastic about the possibility that markets instil competition and innovation, and that this will promote improved efficiency and better products. Maria talks positively about the fact that her mother only bought what she could afford and is fairly critical of the free and easy access to credit that characterises modern shopping. This availability of credit had encouraged more and bigger stores, more debt and a ‘have it now, pay later’ culture. Like her mum, Maria describes how she learnt to buy and cook what you could afford, rather than use credit or over extend yourself – you lived within your means. The cash economy rather than one of credit and ‘swipe’ cards has been lost.

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Nowadays Maria tries to shop just once a week, and tries to stay away from supermarkets and their temptations to spend more than necessary, limiting her visits to once a week if possible. One example of this that is discussed by all three women is the problem of local shops being too accessible. Maria says: with it being up the road, is sometimes you think, ‘oh I haven’t got anything in for dinner’. And instead of making it yourself, making something from an egg, or that tin of corned beef, or that tin of salmon. You could make something, which I’ve been taught how to. [Instead] you nip out, and then you end up spending more money, so you might have spent your £90 or £100 at, on Thursday, or Friday, when you had to go shopping, but now, you are spending more I think. So they aren’t always that good, cos you do spend more money, cos you get up there and you think, ‘Well I’ll just go and look at the reduced’ and ‘I’ll just have a look and…’. Yes, you could, you’ve got to be strong, I suppose, and say, no I can’t afford it, if you couldn’t afford it then you’ve got to be strong.

Like Gina, Maria describes how it is useful to have shopping strategies that limit exposure to more and more buying opportunities and temptations. Although Gina sometimes acknowledges the benefits of supermarkets in terms of the ability to bulk buy and to spend wisely and prudently, it is necessary to be wary of the lures they can offer. Family 12: A story of control and liberation convenience

In Family 12 there is grandmother Gwen, middle-mother Mary and new-mother Naomi. They are a close family who live in adjacent towns and shop together, usually once a week. Each articulates an intention to be ‘alike’ and use shopping and household provisioning to maintain their closeness. This is performed across a range of domestic and provisioning contexts: home baking, storing, preserving, embracing new domestic technologies – and using the same brand of soup. They all organise their kitchens in identical formats despite having kitchens of different sizes, and they all have an extremely well-(over)-stocked store cupboard. They attribute their own practices to a perceived similarity with their mothers showing a conscious intentionality across the family chain. Their family signature is one of being in control. This is an organising principle that binds the generations together. Gwen, Mary and Naomi narrate different reasons for their well-stocked pantry. Stockpiling controls against a notion of scarcity (actual, perceived or imagined) – not having a cake for a guest (Naomi), ingredients for a recipe (Gwen) or a meal to serve (Mary). The women in Family 12 have practices that are carbon copies. Others are modified in each generation to accommodate changing times, such as ready meals and buying fish and chips to have a ‘night off from cooking’. An enthusiastic and eager adoption of a range of domestic technologies is significant to realise their shared family signature of control. Their stories chart the introduction and acquisition of the fridge, freezer, washing machine, microwave and ready meal. Each new technology enables the women to take more command over their domestic responsibilities, allowing them to move away from dictated routines of washing days and meals for certain days of the week. Modern innovations bring convenience, easing the burden of domestic chores. Gwen, Mary and Naomi welcome the opportunities that new technologies bring. Perceived convenience liberates them from strict time obligations (inconveniences) traditionally associated with domestic tasks. For the women in this family convenience is progressive and productive. It brings them time off to enjoy the leisure of a consumer society, watching TV or taking a film, and time efficiencies that enable opportunities for paid employment. In this sense convenience saves, stores and makes time. Mary talks about how the ready meal, like the freezer and the microwave, make putting a dinner on the table easier:

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women always cooked every single meal that you ate. Now, they don’t. I mean I’ll go and get something off Tesco’s shelf, don’t I. For our dinner tonight and whatever. Which makes life a lot easier. Whereas a woman was tied to the kitchen, very much so, making everything. Whereas hang that. Not going to do that forever now.

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Domestic technologies are described as freeing them from the time constraints associated with traditional household chores, allowing time-shifting and the outsourcing of work. For Gwen and Mary innovations in domestic technology made domestic work easier, less rigid and more flexible. Naomi adopts the same practices but does so without the same experience of gaining control. For Naomi many of domestic appliances were always there and she uses them to manage and organise cooking for her family in the way she has seen her mother and grandmother do before her. Before the freezer and microwave Gwen and Mary had little choice in when they cooked. They had little ability to cook in advance and store food without spoiling it. Gwen and Mary re-tell a common story of Christmas. It is a rehearsed and shared story of an idyllic traditional Christmas Eve scene in a large family. The women are in the kitchen baking a whole range of pastries, cakes and dishes for the festivities the following day. Their story emphasises that there was no choice in when the baking could be done. It had to be done that day. Even the arrival of Mary’s second child was governed by the priority of the baking task. And we made all this and after making this pastry, mum said, ‘This is ridiculous. We’ve got to look and see if we can get a freezer for next Christmas and see if there’s something we can do to make life a bit simpler and it can all be done so much earlier‘. But anyway, me, who was very pregnant at the time. She said, ‘OK, that’s it now, you can go and have that baby. We’ve done all that’. Thanks mother! So I went and collapsed in the chair for the evening and literally, about three hours after saying that, I went into labour. (Mary)

I never really thought about having a freezer, but a girl who came to help me at the surgery, she’d just had one, and she said, ‘Oh they’re fantastic, you’ve got to have one’. And anyway we always used to have all the family for Christmas. A lot of people. And what really made me want one – she said, ‘Oh I’ve got one already‘, and this was two or three weeks before Christmas, she said, ‘I’ve already made all my pies and things and my stuffing, it’s all in the freezer!‘. And I thought, ‘Oh gosh that would make life easier‘ because I had, all the family used to come. So we used to have about 12 … Oh it was just fantastic! (Gwen)

For Gwen and Mary the freezer ‘totally transformed life’. Naomi also bakes, cooks and then ‘batches and freezes’. They use their freezers in an identical manner but are careful to emphasise that they use their freezers differently from other people, who they describe in the negative as filling their freezers with ready meals purchased at the supermarkets. The conveniences of using modern domestic technologies are morally progressive but there is a moral anxiety about devolving/outsourcing all of the cooking. The microwave was the next modern innovation adopted in the home which gave control over cooking and providing meals. It was not used to substitute or replace her cooking but as Mary explain, it alleviated the need to cook on demand, cook late or try to keep food warm: In fact the kids thought it was so fantastic. Yet again, another thing in your life. And it was fantastic. Yeah, cos you could just do so much. And my biggest thing I do now with it, and I still do … I don’t cook in it, never cook in it, apart from melting some chocolate to put on top of a cake, that sort of thing ... the biggest thing I do now with it is that I plate dinners at night and then we heat them in the microwave when Derek [her husband] comes in from work … So that’s my biggest use on it …

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The microwave also means Mary doesn’t need to be as organised, or if she isn’t organised there are fewer costs. If, for example, they have no bread she can defrost some bread quickly and make the sandwiches for her husband to go to work. Previously, she would have been stuck. So the microwave is not a cooking device – it is a time machine giving Mary control. All three women identify themselves as cooks but in progressive terms rather than traditional ones. They embrace new prepared food ingredients such as pre-made sauces alongside the ‘occasional’ ready meal. Labour saving foods such as pasta sauces are seen as proper food akin to home cooked. Described as ‘quick’ food they are distinguished from ‘fast’ foods, such as hamburgers. Quick food is acceptable, it saves time and can have additional ingredients added so as to singularise and craft it. For Mary, pizza is quick food, and not proper food. For Gwen, pizza is proper food – proper foreign food that she has incorporated into the family diet having discovered it on holidays aboard with her husband. Mary wants to cook proper food but more efficiently: Chop your meat up, your onions and your mushrooms or carrots or whatever they tell you to put in it, stick it in the oven for two hours and it’s cooked. Cos I think we all want quicker ways of doing meals. We’re not going to be like our grandmas were, who were tied to the kitchen the whole day, doing whatever and getting meals ready. No, we don’t do that anymore.

For Naomi the freezer means that a range of quick but proper meals can be served for herself and her husband fairly easily. Naomi also explains that the ready meal is now a regular (weekly) feature of her diet: it’s convenience. I do it on a Friday night after I’ve done the shopping, I pick up a ready meal each for myself and my husband and we have that so I don’t have to cook when I get back from shopping. Ella doesn’t have a ready meal, Ella has a pasta sauce that I’ve always got in the freezer that I’ve made myself which is frozen into small portions for her and she has pasta with that pasta sauce. I don’t give her ready meals, again it’s the health thing … And it is convenience that we have it and it’s all right, I don’t look forward to it, I don’t enjoy it. Well I don’t dislike it but my cooking, without sounding big headed, my cooking is far better than ready meals so I enjoy cooking and I enjoy eating, but sometimes it just saves time.

For Gwen and Mary going to get the shopping (mundane grocery provisioning) was relatively rare up until the mid/late 1950s because the bulk of provisions were delivered to the home by leaving lists with shop keepers. Mary remembers a brief period when she was a teenager when she would be sent to the local shops with a list. By the 1960s supermarkets were commonplace and home delivery had ceased. Women had to shop for provisions and children began to be implicated with shopping. Naomi was a child in the 1970s and has no recollection of home deliveries but remembers the distance and physical effort of bringing the shopping home on the bus, and the walk from the bus stop. As an adult Naomi has two supermarkets within walking distance but she dislikes both and prefers to wait for her husband to bring the car home from work and to drive 15 minutes to her favourite supermarket. She expresses isolation and frustration from not being able to more easily access her preferred supermarket. Naomi describes the supermarket as easy and convenient, as she is able to get everything that she needs in one place. It is productive and efficient in contrast to having to visit multiple shops as was the case for Mary. Mary, however, does not report shopping in the 1970s as inconvenient. And for Gwen and Mary the bulk of provisioning was home delivered and they only shopped for supplementary items. It is Naomi who expresses anxiety because she can’t shop at her supermarket of choice and who feels restricted in what she is able to do shopping-wise; she has to rely on her

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mother to drive her. Her husband disapproves of supermarkets describing them as the ‘scourge of the earth’. Naomi challenges the notion that supermarkets are morally reprehensible, asserting the benefits of their convenience in face of her husband’s criticism. A sacred mythology of convenience: Visions of hell and prosperity

Throughout the interviews the theme of convenience is used as a positioning category that the women use to locate and value their own place within family relations. But for convenience to operate in this way it must be understood as a discursive practice. Convenience is shown to be usefully ambiguous in this context because it can be deployed in multiple ways with varying and shifting meanings. The women evoke convenience in their accounts of family (Ward 1999; Carrigan and Szmigin 2006), and in our data family relating across generations, is laden with moral and social content, i.e. it is not a purely descriptive device but a mythical one. Any attempt to deconstruct myth, especially when it is embedded in the mundane and every day, can be difficult because the myth meanings are external to this local discourse. In an attempt to understand the underlying myth structures of convenience we looked for literary archetypes that might indicate and illuminate some basic origins and antecedents. Examining literary sources gives us a way to link mundane practices like the ones discussed by the women in the interviews with wider myth discourse. While modern marketing theory, in line with neoclassical economic orthodoxy, locates convenience as a motivating factor in the operation of effective market/economic systems, early modern and classical texts more often take an opposite position. Convenience, ease and comfort were more commonly represented through discourses of sin and sloth, and the pursuit or desire for convenience is seen as a source of decadence and moral failing. To illuminate this perspective we have chosen two of our favourite dialogues on convenience: the first is Franciso de Quevedo’s (1580–1645) Los Sueños (1627), translated into English as Dreams and Discourses (Quevedo 1989) to describe and explore the cultural basis for this use of convenience. The text offers a cutting comment that satirised seventeenth-century Spanish society. The Dreams and Discourses consist of five dream-visions, each recounting hellish imaginings. It is a testament to Quevedo’s brilliance that these remarkable satires endure and resonate so remarkably well even for the secular modern reader. Each of the discourses adopts a style offering the brutal untarnished truth by describing hell and the passage to final spiritual ruin. That much of the Discourse is topical satire makes it seem distant and fantastic in contemporary terms, but it is nevertheless generally accessible and highly amusing at times. The Discourse begins with Quevedo recounting his dream: It seemed to me that I found myself in a place upon which Nature smiled, endowing it with most pleasant tranquillity, where beauty entertained the eye, untouched with any evil feature. It was a place of quiet enjoyment, entirely without human echoes … Ah, but now, see how strange and inconsistent is man’s desire, for in none of this did I find peace. (Quevedo 1989: 93)

Leaving this place of bliss Quevedo is confronted with two pathways. The path to the right is ‘full of rough and impassable places’, and only a few struggle along it – people who ‘left upon the way their skin or an arm, or even, in some cases, a foot or a head’. This is the good path – the way of the righteous. Quevedo enquires of a beggar whether there is but an inn or hostelry on this route, where the traveller might rest to catch his breath. The beggar replies: ‘An inn or hostelry sir? How would you expect to find any such thing on this road, which is the way of virtue? For at birth you set foot on the road of life, living is travelling and the inn the world. When you leave it, your journey, whether in suffering or glory, is a short and lonely one’. (Quevedo 1989: 95)

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‘A plague on this’, tells Quevedo, and setting his foot back from the righteous path takes the left-hand route where he at once finds a ‘retinue that commanded instant respect; innumerable vehicles – carriages loaded with dazzling specimens of humanity, replete with regalia, liveries and handsome horses, that rivalled the sun itself’. Quevedo recounts his observations and feelings as he ‘glides as a skater’ down that lefthand road, a road that was paved and wide, and full of all the wonders and glories of life. All of human society is there on this road, with all classes, professions, guilds represented through allegorical association: ‘It would be impossible to overstate the joy with which I went along in such fine and honourable company’ (Quevedo 1989: 99). For some time he muses on whether this is indeed the way of virtue, comforting himself that the path is populated by people that would normally be judged as numbering among the virtuous. He reserves some special criticism for the hypocrites he observes along the way: For all of those, being ignorant of the life eternal and therefore destined to have no part in it, at least recognised and enjoyed the material world. But hypocrites know neither the one nor the other; they torment themselves in this life and are themselves tormented in the next. To sum up, you may truly say of such men that they achieve damnation the hard way. (Quevedo 1989: 98) But as Quevedo reaches the end of the path he notes the presence of the apothecaries and at that point realises with horror that this is the doorway ‘easy enough to enter but impossible to get out of – we’re in Hell, that’s where we are’. The remaining pages of the Discourse describe Quevedo’s journey around the caverns of hell where he observes with great satirical humour the damned being punished for their earthly deeds. The Discourse reads somewhat like the consumer researcher’s imaginary ethnography of the demonic realm. Quevedo’s allegorical satire utilises convenience in terms that are quite the opposite of those present in contemporary marketing discourse. There is nothing especially cryptic in this account and the message is plain: the road to salvation is a hard and unpleasant one, and convenience and ease is the road to damnation and perdition. The road to hell for Quevedo is not simply the way of luxury and plenty, although this is certainly present. The Discourse achieves its intended message by emphasising that it is the ease of the path which man must be on guard to avoid. Moral discourses that position convenience as essentially sinful contrast most obviously with economic discourse. From the late eighteenth century classical economic theory and utilitarian political theory provide alternative and arguably more complex accounts of convenience as the basis to account for behaviour. The moral discourse of convenience as sin is contradictory because the pursuit of ease, luxury and leisure are essential driving motivations for both individual and social prosperity. This contradiction is illustrated well by our second selection, Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, published in 1705, which is notable for suggesting a number of themes and principles that resonate closely with the classical economic theory formalised some 70–100 years later by Adam Smith. Mandeville’s fable is premised on the apparent contradiction between material prosperity (economic prosperity) and morality. In the Grumbling Hive the bees live in ease and comfort but only because the society is, in modern terms, ‘free’ in terms of moral codes and regulation. The economic prosperity of all the hive’s inhabitants is dependent on competitive rivalry and vice, where all things are possible and all opportunities can be taken advantage of irrespective of the moral consequences. Then leave complaints: fools only strive To make a great an honest hive. T’ enjoy the world’s conveniences, Be fam’d in war, yet live in ease, Without great vices, is a vain

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Eutopia seated in the brain. Fraud, luxury, and pride must live, While we the benefits receive.

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By all accounts Mandeville’s fable was considered scandalous at time, not least by the ecclesiastic authorities. This is hardly surprising given that it questioned the belief that a nation could be prosperous and commercially successful while also holding to the values of frugality and personal virtue. Mandeville’s poem actually goes much further than this to propose that vice is a necessary and beneficial requirement for prosperity, and that the pursuit of ease and convenience were vital to stoke what we might today call the ‘animal spirits’ that drive economies forward. We have borrowed Mandeville and Quevedo here to epitomise two competing ideologies of convenience. The ideological alternatives which they each nicely illustrate reflect the tension between the church and established Christian moral teaching on convenience and ease, and economic ideology which identifies the desire for conveniences as a necessary motor for economic prosperity. In religious ideology convenience and ease are a danger and a sin, a path to damnation. In classical economic ideologies convenience is a necessary, even desirable motivation, and for Mandeville, a legitimate goal whatever the moral consequences. Our oral histories of everyday domestic consumption illuminate how ideologies of convenience have become reproduced as contemporary consumer mythologies, and the way that consumers connect their own narratives to the larger cultural discourses (Hirschman 2000; Thompson 2004). It is as if the grand ideological struggles of modernity, between sacred and the secular, can be observed being played out as myth, being continually reimagined across the kitchen table and the store cupboard through everyday social relations of the family. Family signatures are localised configurations, or distillations of resonating myth discourses which manifest themselves through consumption norms and market expectations. Our data is interesting because it shows how these deep and persisting myth discourses of convenience that we have illuminated here, with the help of Quevedo and Mandeville, exist and operate via social and personal relations and family practice. Each of our families is in their own way, a grumbling hive, where moral trade-offs between ‘private vices and public benefits’ (as well as public vices and private benefits) serve to structure family relations and personal consumption. We can read in each and every routine trip to the supermarket, farmers market, department store and local grocer a continual choice of pathways, a faint echo of those myths upon which Quevedo’s vision drew inspiration. The preparation of meals, the organisation of store cupboards and the adoption of domestic technologies resonate these enduring cultural categories that are ideologies masquerading as marketing myth today. Oral history methodologies are especially useful for myth analysis because the accounts provided are essentially myth-memories. In this case they are local, private and domestic mythologies, selectively remembered and continually reconstituted in order to locate and make sense of consumption choices and decisions.

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VII

Cless

Cless – Introduction Pierre McDonagh

Dublin City University

The papers in this track raise a number of issues around what Castells would call ‘network society’, relating to issues of perceived control, technology and of course magic. This reminds me of how growing up in the 1960s and 1970s technology was depicted as the solution provider of our generation and this was exemplified by the optimism of James Burke and Judith Hann while presenting the BBC’s show Tomorrow’s World, which was retired in 2003. Armstrong’s paper draws satirically on myths in relation to policy making in health and safety and considers press reports of industrial accidents and the removal of actual regulations in order to free, as he suggests, ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. In this form of cost saving the Administrative Burden Reduction Programme has succeeded in normalising risk in the field of health and safety in the workplace, which is another legacy of an Iron Lady continued through the monstrosity of Cameron’s neo-liberal mind-set towards policies. This has culminated in a popularisation of the idiocy of health and safety where members of the public are invited to ridicule the current state of affairs. Campbell, O’Driscoll and Deane ask us to view bacteria as representing a form of Otherness that is completely under-theorised in philosophy, compared to the figurations of cyborg, terrorist, animal and alien. They coin the term ‘edgy life’ to describe the tendency in social studies to explore the contours of strange life as a type of post-human ethics. The authors list the reasons why scholars do this, and critique it, saying that, despite what postmoderns say, humans are not afraid of the Other, and actually embrace unclassified life forms as sources of bio-techno-cogno capital. The authors proceed to present the concept of immunity via Derrida and Eposito, and especially the salvific myth of the immune system that perpetuates in political and social discourse. Contrary to Derrida and Esposito though, their argument is that the market itself works on a logic of auto-immune efficiency, rather than deficiency. This is key to understanding how the market might be interrupted. Finally, they point to the halcyon days of the virus as the primary metaphor of social relations, asking how the ontology of the bacterium could act as a (supplementary) logic of communication. The third paper, by Milburn and Harvie, directly echoes the eruptions evident within network society and asks us to consider the magical use of fairy dust to enchant. Considering protests within society and how contagion takes hold of an idea or transmogrifies a melody into ‘a classic song’ the authors rampage through crowd theory, memes, sorcery and the Troggs (not Queen). The paper echoes the very foundations of Barlow’s manifesto for cyberspace as the lyrist of the Grateful Dead and asks us to think about crowds (not Mobs), sorcery (but not exorcisms) and the politics of austerity and/or social movements. In an era when Alex Krotoski presented us, via the BBC, with the Virtual Revolution, Milburn and Harvie have provocatively touched upon issues close to Erik Gandini’s own pièce de résistance in ‘Surplus: Terrorised into Being Consumers’ by noting that we must engage in, and create mechanisms for, collective analysis. I think their dust has worked.

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Health, safety and myth-based policy Peter Armstrong

University of Leicester

Pursuant to a deregulatory project inherited from the Thatcher and New Labour administrations, the UK’s Coalition government is now making a particular target of what Prime Minister Cameron has called, ‘the health and safety monster’. The rationale appears to be two-fold: that the present system of health and safety regulation, in conjunction with a ‘compensation culture’ created by ambulance-chasing lawyers, imposes an administrative workload which is both costly in itself and which additionally inhibits, or distracts from entrepreneurial activity. Successive enquiries into this ‘burden’ have failed to confirm either contention. The ‘entrepreneurial suppression’ thesis remains entirely conjectural whilst government calculations of the compliance costs saved by scrapping particular regulations show them to minor relative to the costs of the activities regulated. This is the case even though the calculations ignore any benefits which might accrue from improved record-keeping and any ‘displacement effect’ whereby costs are externalized onto employees and the public rather than saved. Faced with these inconvenient findings, the government’s fall-back position is that the claimed adverse economic consequences are the function of a perception of excessive regulation, irrespective of any basis which this might have in fact. On this view of the matter, the logical policy would be to work with the Health and Safety Executive’s ‘Myth-Buster’s Panel’ to challenge the mythos of rampant ‘elf ‘n safety’ perpetrated by certain elements of the UK media. Instead, government spokespersons have chosen to recycle the anecdotes on which this feeds in justification of the removal of actual regulations. This suggests that the supposed economic benefits of deregulation are not the real issue, that health and safety protections are being sacrificed in pursuit of the small state and an essentially Hayekian moral order.

Keywords: health and safety, industrial accidents, press reports, deregulation

Jennifer’s ears and the metaphysics of deregulation

My four-year-old grandson, Thomas, and his best friend, Jennifer are bouncing on a trampoline. For reasons beyond the reach of adult understanding, they are each boasting about the number of ears they have. The exchange escalates to the following point: Jennifer “I have eighty-seven ears” Thomas “I can’t see them” Jennifer “They’re invisible ears”.

Like the saint for whom he is named, Thomas has already learnt to doubt assertions for which no evidence is presented. Jennifer, however, is ahead of him. She has learnt that the constitutive powers of discourse transcend the realm of empirics. Something of the sort is the case with enterprise discourse. Lord Young of Graffham, a noted ideologue of the Thatcher era, and one recently reintroduced to public debate by the Coalition government, maintains that the spirit of 365

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enterprise beats within the hearts of the British people notwithstanding its comparative lack of surface manifestation. The discrepancy between belief and evidence is explained by recourse to a suppressive agency: that of bureaucratic red-tape. Grounded in the undeniable fact that rules tend to constrain people’s behaviour, much of the persuasive power of Lord Young’s position lies in the concealed assumption that the web of bureaucracy ensnares the would-be entrepreneur along with sociopath and the criminal. Even when this assumption is surfaced, and it is conceded that protective regulation can exist for good reasons, the libertarian will still argue that it has ‘gone too far’. Drawing on Hayekian (1979) beliefs that the fully-realised individual is a species of entrepreneur in the general sense of taking responsibility for decisions made in the face of uncertainty, phrases such as ‘nanny state’ suggest that protection beyond a certain point is either infantilising in its consequences or is an insult to human autonomy. The implication that those who endanger their fellow human beings are performing a public service is less frequently spelt out. One of the remarkable things about this complex of ideas – though one which is not often actually remarked – is its success in remaining at the level of generality. It is always red tape as such which is the culprit, and rarely or never, that a specific legal or regulatory requirement has been shown to have frustrated a concrete entrepreneurial intention. Alternatively, if it is the emergence of intention itself which is at issue, deregulatory rhetoric is reticent on the kind of entrepreneurial initiative which might emerge in response to the removal of a specific regulation. A likely explanation is that the responses in question tend to be disreputable. A case in point was the extension of the audit exemptions for small companies introduced by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) in 2012. In response to the preceding consultation paper, the Fraud Advisory Panel1 (2011) pointed out that company fraud had risen ‘remorselessly’ since the introduction of the original exemptions in 1994 (para. 7). On the particular proposal to exempt companies with fewer than 50 employees the Panel commented, ‘Significantly damaging criminal or otherwise unethical behaviour may be particularly likely in a business with few employees, but relatively high turnover or assets, and where there is no regular contact with suitably ethical outside advisors’ (para 14). In the light of these observations, it is perhaps not surprising that the governments’ response to the consultation, rather than citing specific entrepreneurial opportunities presented by unaudited accounts, fell back on generalities about the ‘increased level of flexibility and the reduction in the regulatory burden’ offered by the proposals. (BIS 2012, 4) In this it was typical of a deregulatory rhetoric wherein the quite distinct concepts of stifled entrepreneurship and compliance costs are de-differentiated within portmanteau terms such as ‘regulatory burden’. Whilst this conflation, in conjunction with a number of heroic assumptions, succeeds in making it possible to quantify the burden in terms of hard cash, the results tend to be unconvincing as ammunition for the de-regulatory project. In the case of the small firm audit exemptions the saving in management time was estimated at 2 hours per company (5 hours in the case of qualifying subsidiaries) whilst the average cost of audit was taken to lie between £8,000 to £83,000 (BIS 2012). Concerning the savings in time, does anyone really think that two (or five) hours of management time is sufficient to make the difference between pro-active entrepreneurship and just stayin’ alive? As for the cost, taking the higher figure to apply at the upper limit of the small company exemption, the easement of the regulatory burden amounts to 0.12% of a £65m annual turnover, scarcely enough, one would have thought, to ‘mak[e] the UK one of the best 1 The Fraud Advisory Panel is a registered charity established in 1998 by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and this vested interest needs to be born in mind when assessing its views on the retention of audit. That said, the panel claims over 300 members drawn from all sectors.

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places in Europe to start, finance and grow a business, in part, through reducing the regulatory burden’ (BIS 2012, 12). Assuming that the policy-makers of neo liberalism are not stupid, such trivial savings suggests that the real intention behind de-regulation is the creation of an ambiance rather than a substantive adjustment of the potential returns to entrepreneurial activity. The absence of regulation, or, better still, the ostentatious act of removing regulation, may be imagined as a means of freeing the entrepreneurial spirit from the mundane tasks of business housekeeping, much as Kant’s metaphorical dove, ‘cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space’ (Kant 2003). The analogy suggests that the promoters of entrepreneurship should be careful what they wish for. The record shows that some of the 20th Century’s most spectacular coups of entrepreneurship have occurred, not in open markets, but where opportunities for arbitrage have resulted from government intervention and where there have been loopholes within regulatory structures (Armstrong, 2005). Bureaucratic concretizations of the ‘anti red-tape’ agenda2 began with Margaret Thatcher’s Deregulation Unit. Diplomatically renamed the ‘Better Regulation Unit’ under New Labour this survives under the present Coalition (Tombs and Whyte 2009: 5). Between 2005 and 2010 New Labour also ran an ‘Administrative Burden Reduction Programme’ which, according to its final report, delivered savings of 26.62%3 in the overall administrative burden on business and third sector organizations, as against a target of 25%. The actual figure for the claimed savings was an annual £3.5 bn. which looks enormous at first sight. To put it this amount in perspective, however, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has estimated that the Conservative Party’s pledge to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m will cost an annual £5.8 bn. by 2018-9 (Toynbee 2014, Adam and Emerson 2014). To put the savings in context (which is a different matter), bear in mind that the £3.5 bn. is supposed to be distributed throughout the economy. To a first approximation, therefore, it is appropriate to express it as a percentage of the UK’s GDP, currently £2440 bn., of which figure it is only 0.14% This unimpressive result is probably why the ‘savings’ of these programmes have nearly always been reported as aggregate amounts rather than as percentages of the relevant turnover. On the few occasions when compliance costs have been thus set in context they have turned out to be trifling. For example, an HSE-sponsored study of annual expenditure on health and safety in SME’s found that it varied between £166 and £20 per employee, the higher figure applying to companies with fewer than 250 employees (Lancaster et al. 2003, 17). Even so there are a number of questions which need to be asked of the figures. Firstly, the savings calculated by the Administrative Burden Reduction Programme were derived from estimates of the management time consumed in gathering information and filling in forms minus a business-as-usual cost. These estimates were obtained from those responsible for the tasks concerned, a procedure which would certainly be acceptable in a managerial time-study. And though they were ‘validated’ by an independent review panel on the recommendation of the National Audit Office, the methods by which this panel satisfied itself remain obscure. Secondly, the analysis, being driven by the presupposition that regulation is always and everywhere a burden (Tombs and Whyte 2010), made no allowance for any benefits foregone as a consequence of deregulation. Examples include the possibility (certainty?) that insurance premiums and the costs of litigation might increase as a consequence of reduced record-keeping and increased risk. On 2 This was initially written as a joke but I have since discovered that the Department for Business Administration and Skills has produced an 89-page manual for those charged with the development and implementation of its deregulatory policies (BIS 2013). I have not been able to determine how many civil servants are employed in the Better Regulation Unit and similar, but their annual costs have not been subtracted from their claimed savings as they ought to have been. 3 Given the heroic assumptions involved and the crudity of the procedures, the quotation of the percentage savings to two decimal places looks like an in-joke on the part of the civil servant responsible.

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this point an HSE-sponsored study of health and safety regulation in SMEs reported that the larger organizations in their sample were more likely to report that the benefits outweighed the costs, adding that ‘This may be due to the fact that [the smaller companies within the range] are less likely to have experienced an accident and therefore do not realise the costs associated with not taking action.’ (Lancaster et al. 2003, vii). Thirdly, the figures ignore the possibility that the ‘savings’ in question might be made at the expense of customers, employees or the public – in other words that they might not be savings at all but simply externalizations of cost. This tendency of compliance costs to evaporate when subject to scrutiny may explain their tendency to cohabit with a ‘suppressed entrepreneurship’ rationale within the ideology of deregulation. If the compliance costs turn out to be unspectacular, one can always argue that the true and major harm is to the capacity of a business to identify and exploit opportunity, a particularly convenient line of argument since this damage can be attributed to its perception of regulation rather than to the reality. Conversely, if that disabling effect is felt to be too nebulous a justification for the dismantling of whole swathes of protective regulation, the argument can be shifted back onto the hard-headed ground of calculable cost. In this manner, the argument is able to shift from one foot to the other. Neither is firm on the ground but the shift itself is sufficient to create an aura of defensibility. The context of deregulation: perilous construction

On 13th April 2014, The Observer carried a two-page spread on health and safety in the construction industry organized around the death of Richard Laco at the Francis Crick buildingsite (Boffey 2014a). Laco was a figure with whom the business school academic might find it possible to identify. He possessed a first-class honours degree in banking, finance and economics and was fluent in four languages, despite which he had found it necessary to work as a labourer for Laing O’Rourke. Since the demise of deep coal mining and deep-sea fishing, construction is now Britain’s most dangerous industry. Since 2001, the article pointed out, 760 workers have died on British construction sites as compared to the deaths of 448 British soldiers in Afghanistan. In addition to these accidental deaths, there were 2,500 from asbestos exposure, 500 from respirable crystalline silica and 200 from diesel exhaust emissions. Laco’s death occurred when he was asked to put aside his normal duties and help to raise a broken lift. He was standing on its roof when it fell five stories. Laco’s was a ‘normal accident’ in a rather different sense that that described by Perrow (1984). For Perrow, normal accidents are a consequence of complex interactive processes in which the low probability of failure in any one component multiplies up to a much higher probability for the system as a whole. The ‘normality’ of Laco’s death was a consequence of repetition rather than complexity. It resulted from the kind of risks which are taken by relatively junior managers or workers themselves in improvised attempts to make good some flaw or interruption in the normal work process. Risks of this kind are taken in response to a felt moral obligation or managerial pressures to get a job done or to keep a process in operation, motives which are often reinforced by incentive payment systems. Such practices can become institutionalised as normal, both in the sense of their repetition and in the sense that they cease to be perceived as dangerous and are regarded as part of the job. The resulting accidents can be described as normal in yet another sense - that they are the inevitable consequence of the repeated taking of risks to which managers and workers may have become desensitized (see Nichols and Armstrong, 1973 for an early empirical study along these lines). This normalization of risk means that progress in the field of health and safety depends in part on challenging the prevailing commonsense on how jobs are to be done, just as the wearing of seat belts was once an affront to the commonsense of motoring. It also means ‘no-nonsense’ approaches like that signalled by the title of Lord Young’s 2010 review - Common Sense, Common Safety - are an obstruction, albeit possibly an unconscious one - to the necessary destabilization the conventional wisdom.

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Recognising that the safety record in construction was a something of a scandal the Labour government of Gordon Brown commissioned an inquiry into the underlying causes, headed by Rita Donaghy, a past president of the Trades Union Congress. Key, amongst a total of 28 recommendations, Donaghy concluded that any improvement would depend on increased employee involvement in health and safety issues, preferably through the medium of trade unionism ‘so that workers are alert to risk and can speak out, without unfair consequences, about unsafe practices’ (Donaghy 2009, 18, see Nichols 1997, 149 ff. for evidence that involvement of this kind is effective). Donaghy also recommended that the resources available to the Health and Safety Executive needed to increase if an adequate level of inspection was to be achieved. A particular concern was the manner in which the reporting of health and safety issues could be inhibited and responsibility for them lost within the network of subcontracting relationships characteristic of the industry: Many stakeholders, particularly trade unions, some academics and bereaved families, feel strongly that self-employment, whether genuine or bogus, adds to the risk in the industry ... Some claim that the under-reporting of serious accidents is also because the self-employed tend not to report them as they do not receive benefits ... Some claimed that they were less likely to report unsafe practices because “they wanted a job next Monday”’ (Donaghy 2009: 34. See Boffey 2014b for a description of ‘a culture of spying and fear’ which inhibited the reporting of accidents on the site of London’s Crossrail Project).

Donaghy (2009) also addressed the problems posed for health and safety by the fragmented structure of the industry. Unscrupulous contractors have been able to avoid responsibility for fatalities by going into liquidation, only to re-emerge with the same personnel under different names (Boffey, 2014a). In order to prevent this malpractice, she recommended that companies should be required to name a director as personally responsible for health and safety. Brown’s government broadly accepted the Donaghy recommendations but lost office in the 2010 general election. Though the subsequent coalition government claimed to have implemented 23 of Donaghy’s 28 recommendations (McMahon and Dutta 2010), pretty well all of this ‘implementation’ consisted of anodyne reassurances that the expressed concerns were already provided for. In an industry notorious for the blacklisting of trade union activists and anyone else who raised health and safety issues (Cohen, 2012) nothing was done to facilitate worker involvement or to require employers to nominate a specific director as responsible for health and safety. Donaghy herself was particularly ‘appalled’ at the 35% cut in the HSE budget announced in 2011, describing the industry as a ‘ticking time-bomb’ which would detonate when construction picked up with the end of the recession(Boffey 2014a). To no-one’s great surprise, the present Chief Inspector for Construction at the HSE, Heather Bryant, disagreed, expressing the view that the organisation was adequately resourced, and that construction was one of its priority areas (McMahon and Dutta 2010). Perhaps she too ‘wanted a job next Monday’. David Cameron’s monster: the mythos of elf ‘n safety

In the course of her deliberations, Donaghy (2009, 31) had suggested that the courts were reluctant to use their powers to disqualify company directors who had been convicted of criminal offences when these related to health and safety. A contributory factor, she thought, might be ‘a subconscious antagonism to “’elf ‘n safety”’. Subconscious it may be, but any such antagonism in the minds of the judiciary has an obvious source in public discourse. Pursuant to its mission to delude and inflame, none of the national media have been more relentless than the Daily Mail in its mission to whip up apoplectic reaction against the protective regulations which it vilifies as ‘elf and safety’. On 8th December 2013 it car-

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ried the headline ‘’Elf and safety forces Nativity procession Mary to ride on a donkey wearing HARD HAT’. Notice that word ‘forces’ and the shouty capitals of ‘hard hat’. The innocent joys of childhood despoilt! Sacrilege, near as dammit! One had to read the body text to discover that those involved were far more relaxed about the affair than the Mail’s anticipated readership. The church youth worker who had organised the procession said ‘The owner of the donkey has asked us to do this to make sure we’re in keeping with council guidelines and his insurance policy’. For his part, the owner of the Donkey said ‘The donkey in question has been used on the beach before so he’s very docile, but a donkey is very high of[sic] the ground for a small child so it is better to be safe than sorry’. Almond (2009) discusses more examples of this kind of reportage. So persistent has been this stream of hostile and inaccurate commentary that from April 2007 to December 2010 the Health and Safety Executive ran a ‘Myth of the Month’ series in which inaccurate citations of health and safety as reasons for disallowing activities or refusing services. were exposed as such. From 2012 this was replaced by a standing ‘Myth-Busters Challenge Panel’ to which members of the public are invited to submit examples. The intention was to ‘provide a mechanism to independently challenge potentially disproportionate or inaccurate advice or decisions, made in the name of health and safety.’ (HSE, 2013). At the time of writing, the panel has dealt with 281 cases, a ‘top ten’ of which was published in 2012:

1. Driver refused to allow customer on bus with hot drink because of health and safety 2. Bar refused to let customer carry tray of drinks because they had not been ‘health and safety trained’ 3. Charity shop has said that they cannot sell knitting needles for health and safety reasons 4. Public hall removed knives from kitchen on the grounds of health and safety 5. Shop refused to put coffee in customer’s own reusable cup on the grounds of health and safety 6. Airline passenger told boiled sweets were no longer provided on the grounds of health and safety 7. Hotel chain does not provide floor towels due to ‘Health and Safety’ 8. Fish & chip shop told customer he could not have ‘batter scraps’ for health and safety reasons 9. School bans yo-yos on health and safety grounds 10.Office workers advised that kettles and microwaves were not allowed due to health and safety requirements

The myth-busters’ point was that there was nothing within health and safety legislation or the HSE codes of practice to justify any of these refusals and prohibitions. This, however is only part of the problem. Praiseworthy as they may be, the HSE’s exposures of cynicism and error do nothing to challenge the ‘Daily Mail’ view that health and safety regulation as it really exists is a fit target for its characteristic mix of bile and ridicule. There is no executive arm of government to point out that a hard hat, being mandatory for members of the Pony Club, is not unreasonable for the Virgin Mary. Even given the restrictions of their remit, there is one prominent failure which stands against the record of the HSE’s myth busters: that of the Prime Minister himself. It appears that David Cameron subscribes to many of the myths that his own executive arm is trying so hard to demolish. In 2009, when still leader of the opposition he made a speech which ran as follows: I think we’d all concede that something has gone seriously wrong with the spirit of health and safety in the past decade. When children are made to wear goggles by their head teacher to play conkers. When trainee hairdressers are not allowed scissors in the classroom. When office workers are banned from moving a chair without expert supervision. When staff at a railway station don’t help a young mum carry her baby son’s buggy because they are not insured. (BBC 2009).

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Writing for Lib-Dem Voice, Paul Walter (2009 – i.e. before the formation of the coalition government) pointed out that the ‘facts’ in this speech ‘are so mythical that several of them are actually listed as “Myths of the month” by the Health and Safety Executive website. Indeed, the HSE has actually produced cartoon posters of at least three of them.’ Walter also pointed his readers towards a ‘beautiful deconstruction’ of the speech by the Guardian Journalist Zoe Williams (2009) in which she suggested that Cameron was playing a double game, ‘tutting with the dim and winking at the savvy’. By this she meant that that the future Prime Minister was angling for the support of those who believe the tales of ‘elf ‘n safety’ at the same time as that of the ‘sophisticates’ who know them to be false but are nevertheless prepared to make use of them in the larger cause of deregulation. All this implies that Cameron does not quite believe in the ‘health and safety monster’ which he has repeatedly pledged to tackle (Watt, 2012). The record shows, however, that he has tried his best to do so. Whilst still leader of the opposition he commissioned a review of health and safety policy under the chairmanship of Lord Young of Graffham, a Tory grandee who had proved a dependable advocate of de-regulation as secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the first Thatcher administration (Fairclough, 1991, Selden, 1991). With this choice it could have reasonably been hoped that his Lordship would turn up evidence that health and safety regulations were indeed restricting industrial activity and swamping businesses with pointless demands for information. For all his ideological commitments, however, Lord Young was not a man to expose himself to accusations of inventing the facts or of naivety in believing the inventions of others. Annexe D of his 2010 report replicated – and, in so doing, endorsed - the ‘myth-busting’ approach of the HSE, exposing the reality behind a number of prejudicial press reports. Instead, he argued that the mythology itself was sufficient to inhibit the spirit of enterprise, especially when structurally amplified by the mechanisms of ‘compensation culture’. On the one hand, ambulance-chasing lawyers, free since 2005 to advertise their services on a no-win-no-fee basis, had encouraged the belief that claims for compensation for any injury which was not clearly the client’s own fault could be pursued risk-free. In order to defend such claims, on the other hand, insurance companies and ‘over -zealous’ health and safety consultants (Young 2010, 56) had pressured employers into restricting the activities of their employees, and the products and services which they offered, above and beyond any actual requirements of the Health and Safety at Work Act. For Lord Young, therefore, the inhibiting effect of health and safety regulation followed as much from the myth as the reality. At one point, his Lordship additionally suggested that the quantities of cash involved indicated that ‘compensation culture’ itself might be a myth (Young 2010, 46), but once one is persuaded that business activity is a function of perception rather than reality (as with ‘business sentiment’), the distinction loses much of its relevance. By this circuitous route, Lord Young reached a position on the truth-effects of discursive formations more usually associated with the name of Michel Foucault (2002). Cameron, however, seems to have read the report differently – or not read it at all. His ‘Forward’ (Cameron, 2010) ignored Lord Young’s qualifications and ontological niceties: ‘Newspapers report ever more absurd examples of senseless bureaucracy that gets in the way of people trying to do the right thing and organisations that contribute to building a bigger and stronger society. And businesses are drowned in red tape, confusion and the fear of being sued for even minor accidents.’ Notice Cameron’s effortless segue from ‘Newspapers report’ to ‘business are’ as if his Lordship had not been at pains to stress the untruth of those reports. Cameron also buys into the ‘stifled entrepreneurship’ agenda for which neither Lord Young nor anyone else has presented evidence, ‘ We’re going to end the unnecessary bureaucracy that drains creativity and innovation from our businesses’ (Cameron, 2010). The coalition’s next try was the Löfstedt review of 2011. Amongst other things, this was to ‘consider the opportunities for reducing the burden of health and safety legislation on UK businesses whilst maintaining the progress made in improving health and safety outcomes.’ (DWP

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2011, 2, italics added). Its Chapter 9 considered the role of compensation culture in amplifying and giving concrete effect to health and safety mythology, coming to conclusions which broadly reiterated Lord Young’s scepticism: ‘“Compensation culture” (or the perception of it) in the UK has been the subject of several reviews over the last few years, but no evidence has been presented for its existence.’ ‘Despite this,’ Löfstedt continued, ‘a wide range of stakeholders through written submissions and during various meetings presented a different view. For example the experience of members of one trade body was that “the appetite for and expectation of financial recompense for any type of perceived harm has increased considerably in recent years,”’ (Löfstedt 2011, 87). On this flimsy basis Löfstedt’s report, which was at pains elsewhere to stress its evidence-based approach, concluded thus: ‘The evidence does seem to suggest the belief in a compensation culture is still having a significant impact on the behaviour and outlook of business, with the Better Regulation Task Force concluding that, although it is a myth, the perception of its existence, driven by media coverage, has a significant impact on the behaviour of both public and private employers.’ (Löfstedt 2011, 87). In the light of these reports, commissioned respectively by David Cameron himself and by his Minister for Employment, it is sometimes difficult to fathom – and when fathomed, to believe – the British Prime Minister’s attitude towards health and safety in the workplace. At the 2011 Conservative party conference, he had this to say: ‘One of the biggest things holding people back is the shadow of health and safety. This isn’t how a great nation was built. Britannia didn’t rule the waves with arm-bands on.’ (Hazards, 2011, Gott, 2011). The implications of this metaphor for Cameron’s vision of the workplaces of the ‘Great Society’ are breathtaking. Is it really the case that the Prime Minister thinks that there is something childish about protective workware? If so why does he so often arrange for himself to be interviewed wearing a hard hat and reflective jacket? And does he really believe that people should go to work in the expectation that there will be casualties - the decks spread with sawdust so that the gunners do not slip in the blood of their comrades? Since both of the reports commissioned on Cameron’s watch stressed the deleterious effects of misconceptions about health and safety and compensation culture, Lord Young’s as well as Löfstedt’s, one might think that government policy, like that of the HSE, ought logically to address the myth-making propensities of the media. If it is true that business activity is inhibited by a proliferating mythology of health and safety restriction, driven and given concrete effect by a compensation culture which is itself a myth, then tinkering at the level of actuality would seem to be beside the point. Instead, the Löfstedt review, restricted as it was by its terms of reference, recommended only that there should be substantive reductions in the quantum of health and safety regulation, referring the related question of civil litigation costs to the Jackson report of 2010. The government response to date (Grayling 2011) has concentrated mainly on Löfstedt’s recommendations on ‘simplifying’ the risk assessment procedures for ‘low hazard workplaces’ (mainly those of white collar employment) and exempting from health and safety law altogether those of the self-employed whose work activities pose no potential risk to others. Concerning the former, James, Tombs and Whyte (2013) have pointed out that many white collar workplaces involve exposure to asbestos hazard and that the government’s ‘low risk’ category includes agriculture and docks, which are actually two of the most dangerous. Concerning the self-employed, the evidence points to a need for more protection, not less. Their fatality rate is 1.2 per 100,000 per annum, over twice that of employees (TUC, 2013), yet it is estimated that the ‘no risk to others’ exclusion will exempt one million people from any legal responsibility for their own safety (James, Tombs and Whyte 2013, 35). It is not difficult to imagine how this will affect negotiations between civil engineering firms and their sub-contractors. Conclusion

There is little doubt that ill-health, injury and loss of life will result from the British government’s partial dismantling of protective legislation in the field of health and safety. Its justifi-

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cation in terms of a wider deregulatory ideology, on the other hand, is muddled and tenuous. Compliance costs and the inhibition of entrepreneurial initiative are bundled together within concepts such as ‘regulatory burden’ in a manner which makes it difficult to pin down and evaluate the precise benefits which are being claimed. When published figures for compliance costs are examined, they turn out to be minor relative to those of the regulated activity. Concerning the suppression of entrepreneurship no government spokesperson has ever presented evidence that this occurs, nor has one spelt out what kind of entrepreneurial initiatives they expect to follow from the removal of specific protections. When the factual basis for deregulation proves wanting, the argument shifts onto the ground of managerial misapprehensions but instead of working with the Health and Safety Executive to correct these, government ministers endorse and amplify them. Meanwhile policy remains firmly on the ground of concrete acts of deregulation. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the sacrifices being imposed on the British workforce and public are for the sake of a neo-liberal vision of the moral order which is valued in and for itself, irrespective of any economic payoffs. References

Adam, Stuart and Carl Emerson. 2014 “Death to the Death Tax” http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7164 Last accessed 5/5/2014 Almond, Paul. 2009. “The Dangers of Hanging Baskets: Regulatory Myths and Media Representations of Health and Safety Regulations.” Journal of Law and Society, 36: 352-75. Armstrong, Peter. 2005. Critique of Entrepreneurship. London: PalgraveMacMillan. BBC. 2009. “Cameron says health and safety rules ‘over the top’” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8388025.stm Last accessed 1/5/14 BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills). 2010. Simplification Plans 2005-2010 Final Report. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31630/101083-simplification-plans-2005-2010-final-report.pdf Last accessed 29/4/14 BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills). 2012. Audit Exemptions and Change of Accounting Framework: Government Response to Consultation. http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/business-law/docs/a/12-874-audit-exemptions-and-accounting-framework-response.pdf Last accessed 29/4/14. BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills). 2013 Better Regulation Framework Manual: Practical Guidance for UK Government Officials. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/211981/bis-13-1038-better-regulation-framework-manualguidance-for-officials.pdf Last Accessed 3/5/14. Boffey, Daniel. 2014a “The Needless Death of Richard Laco and What it Tells Us About Britain’s Perilous Building Sites.” Observer, April 13. Boffey, Daniel. 2014b. “Crossrail’s Culture of ‘spying and fear’.” Observer, April 27. Cameron, David. 2010. Forward to Lord Young loc. cit. Cohen, Nick. 2012. “Blacklist of Safety Whistleblowers: The deadly scandal in the building trade.” The Observer, July 29. Donaghy, Rita. 2009. One Death is too Many: Inquiry into the Underlying Causes of Construction Fatal Accidents. London HMSO Cm 7657. DWP (Department of Work and Pensions). 2010. The Government Response to the Rita Donaghy Report . London HMSO, Cm 7828. Fairclough, Norman. 1991. “What Might we Mean by ‘Enterprise Discourse’?” In Enterprise Culture, edited by Russell Keat and Nicholas Abercrombie, 38-57. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. Abingdon: Routledge. Fraud Advisory Panel. 2011. Response to the BIS consultation paper “Consultation on Audit Exemptions and Change of Accounting Framework.” Fraud Advisory Panel. Chartered Accountants’ Hall, Moorgate Place, London, EC2R 6EA Gott, Richard. 2011. “Let’s end the myths of Britain’s imperial past.” The Guardian, October 19.

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Grayling, Chris Rt. Hon. 2011 The Government response to the Löfstedt Report. Department of Work and Pensions. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/66794/lofstedt-reportresponse.pdf Last accessed 3/5/2014. Hayek, Friedrich. A. 1979. The Political Order of a Free People. Vol. 3. Law, Legislation and Liberty: a New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hazards. 2011. Issue 116, October-December http://www.hazards.org/votetodie/overkill.htm Last accessed 29/3/14 HSE (Health and Safety Executive). 2012 “Ridiculous ‘elf and safety excuses exposed by watchdog.” http://www.hse.gov.uk/press/2012/hse-myth-busting.htm Last accessed 29/3/14. Jackson, Rupert M. 2010. Review of Civil Litigation Costs: Final Report. Norwich: The Stationery Office. James, Phil, Steve Tombs and David Whyte 2013 “An Independent Review of British Health and Safety Regulation? from Common Sense to Non-sense,” Policy Studies, 34,1: 36-52. Kant, Immanuel Kant. 2003. The Critique of Pure Reason. Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm Last Accessed 2/5/2014. Lancaster, Rebecca, Rachel Ward, Paul Talbot and Andrew Brazier (Entec UK Limited). 2003. Costs of Compliance with Health and Safety Regulations in SME’s. Research Report 174. London HMSO Löfstedt, Ragnar E. 2011. Reclaiming health and safety for all: An independent review of health and safety legislation. London: HMSO, Cmnd 8219. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/66793/lofstedt-tor.pdf Last Accessed 3/5/2014. McMahon, Nick and Mamata Dutta. 2010 “Government response to Rita Donaghy’s report published.” Association of Corporate Counsel. http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=9216174f-20184a4b-8667-c364721f7da8 Last accessed 30/4/14 Nichols, Theo and Peter Armstrong. 1973. Safety or Profit? Industrial Accidents and the Conventional Wisdom. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Nichols, Theo. 1997. The Sociology of Industrial Injury. London: Mansell. Perrow, Charles. 1984. Normal accidents: living with high-risk technologies. New York: Basic Books. Selden, Raman. 1991. “The Rhetoric of Enterprise.”. Ch. 3 In Enterprise Culture, edited by Russell Keat and Nicholas Abercrombie, 58-71. London. Routledge. Tombs, Steve and David Whyte. 2010. “A Deadly Consensus: Worker Safety and Regulatory Degradation under New Labour.” British Journal of Criminology. 50: 46–65. Toynbee, Polly. 2014. “Scrap Inheritance Tax: Leave the Dead to Rest in Peace.” The Guardian 2 May Trades Union Congress. 2013. “Self employed and the Health and Safety at Work Act” http://www.tuc.org.uk/workplace-issues/lawlegislation/01-health-and-safety/self-employed-andhealth-and-safety-work-act Last accessed 2/5/14. Walter, Paul. 2009. “Why David Cameron is wrong on health and safety.” Lib-Dem Voice. http://www.libdemvoice.org/why-david-cameron-is-wrong-on-health-and-safety-17059.html Last accessed 29/3/14. Watt, Nicholas. 2012. “David Cameron pledges to tackle ‘health and safety monster’.” The Guardian, January 5. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jan/05/david-cameron-health-safety-monster Last accessed 25/3/14. Williams, Amanda. 2013. “Elf and safety forces Nativity procession Mary to ride on a donkey wearing HARD HAT.” Daily Mail, December 8. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2520240/Crash-testMary-Bizarre-Elf-Safety-rule-mother-baby-Jesus-ride-Bethlehem-Donkey-wearing-HARD-HAT.html Last accessed 1/5/14 Williams, Zoe. 2009. “Conkers, goggles, elf’n’safety? You really could make it up.” The Guardian, December 2. Young, David. 2010. Common Sense, Common Safety: A Report by Lord Young of Graffham to the Prime Minister following a Whitehall - Wide Review of the Operation of Health and Safety Laws and the Growth of the Compensation Culture.. London: The Cabinet Office. http://www.number10.gov.uk/wpcontent/uploads/402906_CommonSense_acc.pdf Last accessed 1/2/2012.

Bacteria and the market

Norah Campbell, Aidan O’Driscoll and Cormac Deane

Trinity College Dublin; Dublin Institute of Technology; Trinity College Dublin

Bacteria are the most ancient, global and strange forms of Otherness to have ever existed. But compared to other figurations of the Other – the cyborg, the alien, the terrorist and the animal – they are woefully under-theorised in philosophy. As our context, we examine advertisements for anti-bacterial agents over a one hundred year period. Important recurring visual conventions emerge, which tell us a lot about the contemporary social and political myths of border-control, identification, the enemy, the family, justice, and community. We propose, contrary to Esposito and Derrida, that the market itself is an instance of auto-immune efficiency, rather than deficiency, and finally, we theorise a bacterial logic of communication, as supplementary to a viral mode.

Keywords: the philosophy of bacteria; posthuman ethics; advertising; immunity; bacterial v. viral logic of communication.

The bacterial imaginary

What would life be like if we took bacteria seriously, if we took microbial mundanity rather than godly transcendence as the important place to look for philosophy? It has recently been suggested that there have been only three important events in the universe, three essential becomings – the moment of matter, the moment of life and the moment of thought (Meillassoux 2010)1. The second of these is the bacterial moment, when the universe moved from sterility to fecundity. Born three and a half billion years ago, bacteria are the ground zero life forms, the arche-fossil, and what’s more, they are still here with us. They are in radioactive vents and polar icecaps; they will be here after the sun implodes and the Earth freezes. Bacteria are masters of omnipresence. This is small wonder, as there are about 5 million trillion trillion of them on this planet (Whitman, Coleman and Wiebe 1998). If every one of them were a penny, the stack would reach a trillion light years (Earth Times 1998)2. There are 100 trillion of them in my body; their cells outnumber mine by a factor of ten and their genes outnumber mine by a factor of a hundred (Yong 2011). Biomes are truly global biotic communities – regions that have a prevailing environmental similarity, like grasslands, tundra and such. The human can be accurately described as a recent feature of the bacterial biome, a guest of the bacterial

1 As Graham Harman (2010, 97) points out, “we may be greatly impressed by the emergence of vertebrate species, the appearance of agriculture after the long hunter-gatherer era, of the first appearance of stars in the universe.” But for Quentin Meillassoux, there are only four fundamental events in the universe – the creation of matter (the so-called Big Bang and the accretion of the Earth), the emergence of life (the moment the pre-biotic became life), the beginning of thought, and the advent of justice. Only the latter has not yet emerged, and indeed, may never emerge (Meillassoux 2010). 2 More disconcertingly, the number of bacteria is so large, that events that would take 10 billion years in the laboratory might happen every second in nature. Bacteria might have already witnessed the advent of justice.

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Figure 1: Ernst Hackel (1879) The Tree of Life

host. Bacteria radically cross species barriers; more than this, they cross between life and non-life, between biotic and a-biotic (that is, they can exist without a living “host”). Bacteria and humans are what Donna Haraway would call “mess mates”, that is, companions in consuming and being consumed (Tsing 2014).

Bacteria are ancient, prokaryotic life. Eukaryotic life – dinosaurs, spiders, humans, marigolds, life as we know it – didn’t come until two billion years later, when anaerobic bacteria literally poisoned themselves with their own wasteful by-product – oxygen (Margulis and Sagan 1998). From the perspective of bacteria, eukaryotes are a recent externality cost of bacteria’s production system, an externality that they adapted to and, eventually, thrived within3. Bacteria chal3 This symbiosis occurred during the so-called oxygen revolution, when oxygen, from being a waste product of hydrogen-frantic bacteria, became the very source of life for these anaerobic bacteria entering the bodies of their aerobic hosts (Parisi 2007, 37). This process, known as endosymbiosis contends that, far from eliminating the ill-fitted cell, selective pressures catalyzed the emergence of eukaryotes in a newly constituted atmosphere, which forced anaerobic bacteria to become hosts in breathing cells: “In other words, eukaryotic cells – the constituent cells of all

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Figure 2: The Phylogenetic Tree of Life (2006) Ciccarelli et al. Figure 3: Detail from the Phylogenetic Tree of Life – homo sapiens are in the pink segment, second across.

lenge classification by flattening hierarchy. The Tree of Life, which names Man as the crowing glory of the evolutionary universe (figure 1), is replaced with a DNA-based model of life, which reveals Man to be an ingredient of an astonishing biotic soup of prokaryotes, archaebacteria4 and eukaryotes, each one, as Margaret Wertheim (2007) points out, as different as a giraffe is to a mushroom (figures 2 and 3). So, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould (1996), “on any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant forms of life on Earth”. It is strange then, that we do not have a philosophy of bacteria, and that histories of it are relatively scarce. Popanimals and plants – are not the result of random and gradual mutations: their newly constituted nucleic organization stems from the symbiotic parasitism of distinct bacterial cells – anaerobic and aerobic” (Margulis and Sagan 1998, 37). 4 Archaebacteria have been renamed archaea in recent times. This whole new kingdom has only been discovered in the late 1970s.

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ular culture representations of the Other – aliens, terrorists, animals, cyborgs and such, have always been a way to understand how humans see the “not-human” in contemporary times (see Badmington 2004; Deane 2008; Campbell 2010). However, no research examines representations of bacteria as the orginary non-human, nor what their supreme otherness in popular culture can tell us about the parameters of the human, the family and the state, or about border-control, justice, and the concept of the enemy. This paper examines how bacteria are imagined in advertising from 1914 to 2014, recognizing that advertising is a repository of fears, fantasies, projections and norms about social order. It argues that it is time for the bacterium to rival the virus (its Cain brother and more infamous frenemy) as the supreme metaphor for contemporary social relations and as the basis of a theory of communication.

Edgy life As the science of life and the study of living organisms, biology provides our dominant methodology for deciding the borders of existence, for deciding where life begins and ends. We live in a time of posthuman biology (Campbell and Saren 2010), where life, philosophy and technoscience plummet into and propel out of new types of “life”. The approach that Eugene Thacker (2005) calls biophilosophy attempts to grapple with systems that exceed the capacities of standard biology because they are so massive (Gaia as a regulatory system of planetary, or even interplanetary, scope), so dispersed (climate change)5, so ancient (like the tiny strange protist mixotricha paradoxa, on which more in a moment), so minute (the new capacities of physical material engineered through nanotechology)6, so boundless (for example, Dorion Sagan’s notion of a “metametazoa” – which reconceives the human as a multiple afloat in the “omnisexuality” of bacterial exchange), or so relational (Thacker’s term for this is extrinsic life; life whose unit of measurement comes from the relation it has with its environment, as in the cases of swarm, pack, flock, epidemic)7. Bacteria are mythic entities. Mythic has a second meaning; when something is extremely large it does not seem real anymore. Bacteria constitute a truly global biome, a para-collective, under-theorised force that requires re-classification and redefinition. Why? Because, as is well established in iconic studies such as by Bowker and Star (1999), classification is driven by a will to power on the part of humans. The “fin” in definition is an end, a terminus, and this sense is amplified further by the intensifying Latin prefix “de”. The implication is that meaning has reached a final resting place, and that it will not trouble thought anymore. In response to this rationalizing drive, there has been a turn to a type of species pluralism in sociology (Franklin 2007; Lattimer and Miele 2010), where thinkers interrogate the edges of life and propose new models of what it constitutes, as we have explored in the paragraph above. There seems to be at least four reasons for doing so. First, the consideration of other strange lives, as well as other prepositions of connection (“with”, “alongside”, “between” life) acts as a guide to think differently about what constitutes life. Second, there is intent to promote radical inclusivity and to challenge mindsets that fixate on identity and difference (Braidotti 2005). Third, the mission is to decentre the human as the premier valence of the universe, which in turn may cultivate an ecological (in the sense of global and inter-species) ethics. And fourth, to encourage a more enlightened experience of friendship, by thinking of the Other as planetmate, messmate, natureculture and so on. 5 Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyper-object is instructive here, where “objects” like climate change, challenge notions like world, nature, or even environment (see Morton 2013). 6 Nano-objects such as carbon nanotubes, cut through Heidegger’s famous idea of non-alive objects being “poorin-the-world”, because they are inorganic objects that pose new forms of sensing and sense-making. See, for example, Brown 2007). 7 See Eugene Thacker. 2010. After Life. University of Chicago Press.

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Figures 4-7: Cute bacteria

It seems to us that the intention in species pluralism is to foster a humbling experience in the reader when she faces the sheer complexity of life beyond humanist coordinates. Consider Donna Haraway on the mixotricha paradoxa – a protist8 that exists in the hindgut of a South Australian termite: … a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair” (trichos)... a nucleated microbe with five distinct kinds of internal and external prokaryotic symbionts, including two species of motile spirochetes, which live in various degrees of structural and functional integration with their host... Opportunists all, they are nested in each other’s tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology. (Haraway, 1995, xvii-xviii)

8 Protists are eukaryotes, but they are interesting precisely because there has been a lot of contestation about including them in the plant-animal-human community of eukaryotes. Algae, slime moulds, amoebae and ciliates are all protists, which Haraway says “constitute a kingdom of their own dubious morphology.” (Haraway, 1995, xviii).

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Figure 8: The playground of bacteria Figure 9: The playground of bacteria (detail) In this paper, however, we caution against underestimating the ideological forces that continue to dominate our conceptions of life, and continue to entrap us in a humanist mode of imagining life, even when we confront posthuman biological categories. We examine how each type of life delineated above (extrinsic, minute, dispersed and so on) is also made into a market (a source of biocapital, technocapital or infocapital), and in the process is inserted into an ideological matrix. Humans actually embrace the unclassifiable as a source of fresh bio-technocogno capital, and in so doing expose both the power and weakness of such an embrace. In what follows, we use advertising that is concerned with bacteria as a lens through which to subject the particularities of that embrace to philosophical analysis. We are the 99%

What do bacteria look like in advertising? This section speaks about six related visual conventions. The first is the rendering of bacteria as cute; the second is the presentation of bacteria as a motif of overpopulation; the third is the depiction of bacteria as “lower-class”, the fourth is the presentation of bacteria as a force which produces uncanny social order, the fifth is the sacredness of good bacteria, and the final convention is the conflation of bacterial promiscuity with sexual promiscuity. Cuteness

Bright-coloured images abound of bacteria as little monsters, often infant-like, and with freakishly funny features (see figures 4-7). In high concentrations, they make playgrounds of bacterial frolic (see figures 8 and 9). This is indeed strange, when we consider that the antibacterial agents that are being sold in these advertisements exhort us to kill bacteria violently, millions at a time.

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Figures 10 & 11: Superhero bacteria-killer

As Sianne Ngai shows, cuteness is a “minor” aesthetic category, often overlooked by its more spectacular counterparts, the sublime and the beautiful (Ngai 2012). The cute is a minor aesthetic category, not only because it is overlooked, but because it is ambiguous. For example, in our sample the creatures are often open-mouthed, emphasizing the paradox of a boundary that is open. On the surface, the cute is associated most closely with the small, and therefore with a desire to protect as well as touch. But the cute entails a range of minor negative effects: helplessness, pitifulness and excessive availability. This summons a set of complex secondary feelings: of resentment at being emotionally manipulated, contempt for the weakness of cute objects, and disgust at their cheapness (Ngai 2012). In other words, to judge something as cute, ironically, can accompany a desire to dominate it. Advertising derealises the category of bacteria by making bacteria symbolically harmless while at the same time emphasizing their physical harmfulness. The effect of this two-fold strategy is that we are relieved of any guilt because bacteria are moved out of any ethical zone (they are not even real, for God’s sake!), and we kill with impunity, by turning the relationship into a game that children might play, where the killer is staged as an armored superhero (see figures 10-15)9. The apotheosis of this a computer game created by the bleach brand Domestos, which allows the bacteria-killer to hone her fledgling skills with bleach target practice10. This

9 Technically speaking, then, bacteria are homo sacer, in the sense they are bare life that can be killed but not symbolically sacrificed. 10 http://www.domestos.co.uk/games/

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Figure 12: Superhero bacteria-killer Figure 13: The killing game type of cute anthropomorphism frames the death of bacteria as a game, and firmly positions them as absolute enemy. In such an ethical context, we can start to understand posthuman biology’s demand to re-conceive non-human life, in this case bacteria, as kin. Over-population

New technologies to visualize the world produce new imaginaries of life itself. With the widespread use of the microscope in the 19th century, the microbial was brought into visuality, and new modes of interacting with and ingesting the world were developed. Below we see a woman dropping her teacup upon discovering through the microscope that water is not a dead substance, but a living world of cutely creepy organisms (figure 16). This sketch dates from a period of exponential population growth in London, the dawn of Malthusian economics, when the Thames was an open sewer. The cramming full of many life forms into tiny spaces was literally an uncanny microcosm of the social order. Overpopulation and proliferation are recurrent themes in visualizing bacteria. They live in obscene proximity with each other, their intimacy an affront to the individualizing force of modernity, and their disorderly jumble anathema to the schematizing grid of science, civic control, and biopolitical organisation, even in their death. (figure 17).

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Figure 14: The killing game Figure 15: The killing game

Lower-class

Within the aesthetic of cute and overpopulous bacteria, there is also another more nefarious rendering of bacteria as the “lower classes”: they are, quite literally, the 99%. They wear tracksuits, they are overweight, they have bad skin (figure 18) and teeth. In another depiction (figure 19), a bacterium is presented as a suicide bomber in an underground train, about to kill himself and his species with bottles of disinfectant strapped to his chest. In yet another, (figure 20) we see a well-suited business man walking into his clean and private property, holding the hand of a homeless man, who is the incarnation of bacteria.

The Uncanny – alien matter out of place

The final visual convention we draw attention to is the In her now classic book on the concepts of purity and pollution, and their deep-seated links with social order and transgression, the anthropologist Mary Douglas observes that our concept of bacteria is a manifestly modern one, emanating from the discovery of pathogenic organisms in the 19th century. (Previous to the 19th

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Figure 16: Monster Soup, commonly called Thames Water, etching by William Heath, 1828 (Wellcome Trust)

century and the advent of germ theory, disease was believed to have spread through poisonous vapors – miasma – whose existence was unrelated to cleanliness). Cleansing rituals before the bacteriological age acted to ward off spirits and restore social order and control. The discovery of germs caused a radical re-conceptualization of dirt…“so much has it transformed our lives that it is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of pathogenicity” (Douglas 2006, 200). Douglas goes on to argue that the modern quest for purity is the paradoxical attempt to “force Figure 17: Over-crowding experience into logical categories of non-contradiction” (Douglas 2006, 200). In his analysis of E.T.A. Hoffman’s short story The Sandman, Sigmund Freud (Freud 2003 [1925]) posits that the feeling of the uncanny in the story arises when we are in doubt as to whether a deliberately ambiguous being – an automaton – is really alive or not. He argues that the uncanny is a class of horror which leads us back to the familiar. Tracing the etymology of the German word homely (heimlich), he notices that while it is “intimate, friendly, comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house”, it is also a word which means “[c]oncealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others…“Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud 2003, 132)11. Like the monster, the uncanny functions as an effect of différance, “the sys11 “What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word “heimlich” exhibits one which is identical to its opposite “unheimlich”…From the idea of “homelike”, “belonging to the house”, the further idea is developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways…” (Freud 2003, 132).

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Figure 18: The lower-classes Figure 19: The suicide bomber Figure 20: the homeless man

tematic play of differences” (Derrida 1988, 24); the uncanny is not antithetical to the familiar; it is the familiar differed and deferred. Anti-bacterial messages often derive their potency from their ability either displace body parts (figures 21– 23), or to put the animal in the place of the human (figure 24), or to present the intimately familiar as completely strange and dangerous terrain (figures 25–28). Public health posters during the swine flu outbreak presented to the citizen the terrain of the hand as a vast and unfamiliar bacterial colony. One did not have a palm with ten digits; one had a territory that contained neglected enclaves that were in danger of attack; the red high-alert zones that existed between certain fingers and around certain digits which now demanded due attention in the washing regime. Good Bacteria: Selling Germs

As Mary Douglas so famously declares in Purity and Danger, dirtiness is not inherent in dirt; “If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from out notion of dirt”, Douglas argues, “we are left with the very old definition of dirt as matter out of place… This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is a system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.” (Douglas 2006, 44). Food on my plate is food; food on my face is dirt. Soil in the garden is soil; soil on my carpet is dirt. And so on. We argue that marketing mythologizes bacteria by positioning them as grimy layer that insinuates itself between us and the world. However, bacteria are the quintessential pharmakon: anti-substance itself

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Figures 21-23: The displaced body that allows it both to act in the marketplace as a powerful poison (dirt) and powerful counter-poison (cure)12, a point to which we will return. The counter-poison is of course the “healthy bacteria” or biotic category. Bacteria that are in the gut are not dirt; this is dirt in its (market-sanctioned) place, and the visual representation of bacteria is manifestly different, no longer moribund, good bacteria are alert and active; they are clean and shiningly slim rather than sluggish and dank (figures 29 and 30). Indeed, we contend, after Douglas, that when something in the system is forced out and made taboo (Douglas deals with corpses, certain categories of food etc.), it returns as an especially sacred and potent totem. Good bacteria are endowed with a sacredness that literally forms an angelic halo around those who ingest them (figure 31). 12 In his essay on Plato’s Phaedrus, Derrida argues that the hemlock is presented to Socrates as a poison (pharmakon). Yet it is transformed, through the effects of the Socratic logos, into a cathartic power (pharmakon), helpful to the soul in that it awakens to the truth of eidos. Derrida shows that the pharmakon in Phaedrus is instilled in the story by many different associations; sometimes to denote something beneficent, sometimes something maleficent. Ambiguity and undecidability turn the pharmakon into anti-substance itself – oscillating, fluid matter. For example, in Plato’s Protagoras pharmaka are classified among the things that can be both good (agatha) and painful (aniara) (Derrida 2004:102). While the pharmakon is viewed as a curative force, it is a force that cures in a way that is against nature. Disease in ancient Greece was seen as a living organism that must be allowed to develop naturally: “[i]n disturbing the normal and natural progress of the illness, the pharmakon is thus the enemy of the living in general, whether healthy or sick” (Derrida 2004, 102).

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Figure 24: Animal bacteria

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Figures 25-28: Danger zones

Bacterial Sex

Bacteria propagate in the most ancient way – they have sex by contagion, also known as endosymbiosis, or symbiogenesis13 (Lynn and Margulis 1986; Franklin 2007). Parisi (2007, 31) explains that endosymbiosis is a narrative of sex that undermines the Darwinian story of natural selection, fitness and incremental change, because bacterial sex is an example of how “the appearance of new organisms in evolution stems from prolonged symbiotic associations”,

13 Franklin 2007: “bacterial sex” can occur virtually at any time by a simple contact to send genes to the most immediate neighbour. Bacterial sex entails two modes of transmission: transduction, in which a fragment of the bacterium DNA can be taken up into the protein case and travel to other bacteria; and conjugation, in which DNA is transferred through a tiny tube forming between two cells as the donor passes a copy of its DNA to the recipient.”

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Figures 29 and 30: Active, good bacteria

Figure 31: Sacred bacteria

which are non-copulatory, contagious and vast. The big difference between a virus and a bacterium is that the virus cannot continue to exist without a living host. Bacterial propagation involves a type of contagion that moves across phyla and lineages, across biotic and a-biotic space. Bacteria are the most community-minded creatures to have ever existed In her history of the field of bacteriology in the early 20th century, Olga Amsterdamska observes that bacteriologists were very late in taking up the idea of the sexual reproduction of bacteria – as late as the 1940, preferring instead the theory of monomorphism. What was the problem in according bacterial a genetic role? Amsterdamska answers this on a sociology of knowledge frame: specific medical concerns constrained the biological ideas of bacteriologists; their knowledge was shaped by the practical, immediate and funneling effects of funding, specific bacterial problems in society, and specific personalities within microbiology departments. For our part, we prefer to focus more on the psychoanalytic and representative devices of the social imaginary. We have not yet fully formed an answer to this question, but we believe there is something uncanny about bacterial genetics (things having sex within me), which is disconcerting back it conflates the roles of host and guest, or at least it imagines a guest that is behaving inappropriately! In figures 32 and 33 we see anti-bacterial as agents which will deprive bacteria of reproductive rights. Figures 32 & 33: Bacteria deprived of reproductive rights

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Figure 34: Bacterial promiscuity

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At this juncture, we wish to examine a motion advertisement to understand more deeply the dynamics of sex, reproduction and social order inherent in anti-bacterial advertisements. Dettol’s “No Touch Handwash System” is a hand-washing product that was launched in 2011. It is a counter-top soap machine that dispenses soap on sensing the hands. It draws from a familiar narrative; woman taking care of children in the home, touches raw chicken, touches children: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgpdI_2cko Dettol, and many other brands of home cleaning products, intervene in the liminal space between the hands and the world. Hands are our primary mode of handling the world; they bring a direct haptic and proprioceptive awareness of the world into consciousness. The introduction of a veil of bacteria that disturbs this unmediated relationship between hands and world is uncanny. In many of advertisements of this kind, bacteria are depicted to be promiscuous, using the hands to move from object to object with disturbing rapidity. Bacteria are linked to moral as well as microbial protection, reinforced on Dettol’s website: When you use the DETTOL No-Touch Hand

Figure 35: Purity and proper womanhood Figure 36: Anti-bacterial morality

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Wash System, you’ll know you’re helping your family by fostering proper and effective handwashing to help prevent the spread of harmful germs. (www.dettol.co.uk). In advertising bacteria, a familiar mythic narrative arc is found; the closed unit of the body/ the family is threatened by a foreign assault from without. The Visitor is unwanted, contact is contagion and sharing is frowned upon. Bacteria is a moral failing – the promiscuity of bacteria is literalised, and people, especially women, who tolerate germs are sexually promiscuous (see figure 34). Contrast this with Dettol’s images of the unbacterial woman in Dettol’s images (for example, figure 35), an emblem of proper motherhood, as well as Dettol’s various social media campaigns, targeted at mothers and directly aligning anti-bacterial with proper motherhood (figure 36). Immunity and community: from germ warfare to germ terror

The immune system has recently been posited, by Roberto Esposito in particular, as a model for the mechanisms that create and sustain social systems and institutions14. The immune system, whose job it is to detect pathogens, distinguishes them from the organism’s own healthy tissue and protects the organism. It is also, according to Esposito, “the symbolic and material lynchpin around which our social systems rotate” (Esposito 2011, 2). This is because most of our preoccupations, from cyber-security to terrorism, from immigration to global pandemics, centre on the work of identification, location, incorporation and expulsion. A derived concept, auto-immunity refers to the process by which one’s immune system, in trying to protect the living being, mistakenly attacks it. In the years before his death, the philosopher Jacques Derrida argued that contemporary democracy was an auto-immune system (Derrida 2004a, 2004b). For Derrida, we live in a world where, in our prodigious, assiduous boundary management in all areas of life, we create protective systems that attack us. In Derrida’s words, we are surrounded by “autoimmunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome” (2004a, 99). For him, the war on terror, for example, is a system whose preservation activates its destruction, because it “works to regenerate, in the short or long term, the causes of the evil [it] claim[s] to eradicate” (2004a, 100). Democracy, for Derrida (2004b), follows an auto-immune logic in that it goes into hyperactive mode, and ends up trying to close itself off from the multiplicity that it protected in the first place. This was of course not the only microbial metaphor used by Derrida to describe systems that, on the one hand, get stronger as parts get weaker, and, on the other, get weaker as its parts get stronger. In his earlier work,15 Derrida deconstructs the myth of the pharmakon – a cure that is a poison and a poison that is a cure – to do two things. The first is to argue that the whole of western philosophy practices a type of conceptual non-contamination16. The second is to em14 “…if the semiotic axis around which every social institution is constituted lies in the boundary between self and other – between us and them – what constitutes both its interpretive key and effective outcome better than the principle of immunity?” (Esposito 2011, 150). 15 Plato’s Pharmacy (Derrida 1981) is an extended essay reflecting on Plato’s account of the last day in the life of Socrates, as told in the Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus walk in the countryside. Socrates recounts to Phaedrus a myth about the origin of writing: the king Thamus is presented with a present from his son Theus; the gift of writing. Theus tells his father that the gift will make his people wise as it will improve their memory Thamus rejects the gift, saying that writing is actually a pharmakon, a poison that will cause people to become even more forgetful than they already are, giving the appearance of speech, though it is not; writing is absent, because no one stands behind it; it is not a living, but a dead speech. The vital life of the memory would come to hypnotised by the pharmakon of writing; “fascinating it, taking it out of itself by putting it to sleep in a monument. Confident of the permanence and independent of its types (tupoi), memory will fall asleep, will no longer keep to keeping itself alert, present, as close as possible to the truth of what it is” (Derrida 1981, 107–8). 16 “According to a pattern that will dominate all of Western philosophy, good writing (natural, living, knowledgeable, intelligible, internal, speaking) is opposed to bad writing (a moribund, ignorant, external, mute artifice for the senses). And the good one can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad one.” (Derrida 1981, 149, emphasis added).

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phasize both “the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic” that actually happens in the space between these two poles (Derrida 1981, 149). While the pharmakon is viewed as a curative force, it is a force that cures in a way that is against nature. Derrida explains that in Plato’s Timaeus, disease in ancient Greece was seen as a living organism that must be allowed to develop naturally: “[i]n disturbing the normal and natural progress of the illness, the pharmakon is thus the enemy of the living in general, whether healthy or sick” (Derrida 1981, 102). In Derrida’s words: [Pharmakon’s] translation by “remedy” nonetheless erases, in going outside the Greek language, the other pole reserved in the word pharmakon. It cancels out the resources of ambiguity and makes more difficult, if not impossible, an understanding of the context. As opposed to “drug” or even “medicine”, remedy says the transparent rationality of science, technique, and therapeutic causality, thus excluding from the text any leaning toward the magic virtue of a force whose effects are hard to master, a dynamics that constantly surprises the one who tries to manipulate it as master and as subject … Remedy is the rendition that, more than “medicine” or “drug” would have done, obliterates the virtual, dynamic reference to the other uses of the same word in Greek … Translators have consistently decided what in Plato remains undecidable, and thus influenced the course of the entire history of Platonism. (Derrida 1981, 99–100, emphases in original)

That is the effect of the pharmakon. If it were purely external, writing would leave the intimacy or integrity of psychic memory untouched. The pharmakon is that dangerous supplement17 “that breaks into the very thing that would have liked to do without it, and yet lets itself at once be breached, roughed up, fulfilled and replaced, completed by the very trace through which the present increases itself in the act of disappearing…” (Derrida 1981, 113–114). Derrida’s concepts of auto-immunity and the pharmakon are of interest here because they describe a dynamic that will interest us in this section – a movement that reflexively constitutes its own antithesis. For Esposito (2011), the immune system offers a framework for speaking about the protection and negation of life. Law, he argues, is an immunization mechanism, its most fundamental task being to ensure the survival and continuation of (a) community. But, echoing Derrida, Esposito recognizes that the community can only be protected if a little of what is lethal to it is allowed to penetrate the fortress: “The human animal can live longer than all others because – not despite the fact – she is constitutionally sick. In order to ‘recharge’ itself, life constantly needs what threatens it – a block, an obstacle, a bottleneck – because the constitution and the functioning of its immune sysyem requires an ‘ill’ to activate the alarm system.” (Esposito 2011, 90). Auto-immunity is an affront to “the salvific myth of the immune system” (Esposito 2011, 162, emphasis added), when the body, broadly defined,18 goes into an “overactive defense … seeking to strike at the enemy [and] causes harm to itself.” (Esposito 2011, 163). Let us now import these concepts by Esposito and Derrida into our analysis. The market, which presents bacteria as a wholly foreign adversary and its products as powerful fortressbuilding devices to keep them out, is auto-immune in a number of literal and figurative ways. Let us first think about the literal level: the hygiene and the pharmacological markets, and their auto-immunity. 17 See Derrida 1997, 27–73,141–64. 18 The body politic, the body proper, the body electronic etc.

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Figures 37 & 38: Bacteria as the community Midway through the last century, a golden era free of infectious disease was predicted; the 2014 WHO report on antimicrobial resistance speaks about a “post-antibiotic era – in which common infections and minor injuries can kill – far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st Century.” (WHO 2014). The study reveals, for example, the treatment failure to the last resort of treatment for gonorrhea – third generation cephalosporins– has been confirmed in nine countries so far. More than one million people are infected with gonorrhea around the world every day. There has been an almost total collapse of investment in antibiotic research, where private pharmaceutical companies realise that there is little return on the huge expense of developing new antibiotics, which are administered in short-term doses, and therefore have lower rates of profit than life-long drugs such as high blood pressure medication. In fact, no new classes of antibiotics have been developed since 1987, and there are none in the pipeline, constituting a market failure that, according to some experts is as big as climate change risk (Spellberg 2009; New Zealand Tribune 2013). The mar-

Figure 39: Bacteria as (degenerate) community

Bacteria and the market

Figures 40 & 41: The individual as bacterial

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ket conceives bacteria (and, of course, viruses) almost solely as an enemy which has to be fought using antibiotics,19 employing a hyperactive protective logic which has given birth to super-resistant bacteria, more commonly known as superbugs. They are a remnant that switches to a mode of extreme virulence (as if it were angry), in precise accordance with the paradigm of auto-immune disorder. Superbugs powerfully expose the role of the market as a force which kills the system by protecting it. A second aspect of the market’s tendency to operate according to auto-immune logic is in the way that it stages the contact between humans and bacteria as a war, positioning bacteria as an outside enemy, rather than part of us. The logic of community and immunity is found throughout our portfolio of images that are drawn from the category of anti-bacterial advertisements for domestic hygiene products. Anti-bacterial advertising is usually structured as follows: the threat of bacterial contamination looms large; then there arrives on the scene anti-bacteria in some form of gel, soap, powder or foam, and the dilemma is resolved. Anti-bacterial advertising reinforces the sense of the body as closed, private property and fear of the antigen. It emphasizes an ideology of containment that must be re-enforced periodically. In images 37 and 38 below, the single biggest source of that threat is community itself. In each of the images, we are encouraged to think of bacteria as other people who threaten our sovereign cleanliness. The act of anthropomorphism here embodies bacteria as a particularly degenerate human – the homeless man (as above), the transvestite, the street sweeper (figure 39); dirt is not just physical, but symbolic impurity, threatening to engulf the private property of the individual. Compare this to public health warnings from the early and mid twentieth century about the bacterium tuberculosis, where it is the individual that is the threat to the communal body, rather

19 Anti-biotic, literally “against life”.

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than the other way around. In the first poster, we see Boris being ostracized from Soviet society for spitting, and in the following two, it is the person who is being addressed who is the contaminating force, and who is red-faced with shame. On a more conceptual level, while auto-immunity has deadly consequences on a microbial lifescale, and Esposito and Derrida have successfully argued that many social systems suffer from the same autoimmunitary flaws, we contend that the market exhibits an auto-immune efficiency rather than auto-immune deficiency. In other words, while an auto-immune system realizes its weakness in its strength, the market realizes its strength in its weakness. As many have shown, the market has the uncanny ability to identify its enemy, its Other, its non-market, and co-opt it into its system; indeed, the question of whether anything or anyone can escape the market has long been debated in consumer research (Kozinets and Handelsman 2004; Thompson, Arnould and Giesler 2013; Cova, Mclaran and Bradshaw 2013). It is out of the remit of the paper to think about how to interrupt a market system that has auto-immune efficiency, though the question is an important one. Esposito describes his own desire to interrupt the democratic system that protects life through negation, and warns against the temptation of doing this in a straightforward, affirmative way: “I have stressed repeatedly, the category of immunity is inseparable form that of community; as its inverse mode, it cannot be eliminated. This is borne out by the fact that there is no community without some kind of immunitary apparatus. And second, because to negate the negation through which immunity in its turn negates what threatens life would mean to repeat the same procedure.” (Esposito 2011, 16, emphasis added)

In other words, the route for Esposito is to take on the system not by negating it, which, he argues, merely re-incants the spell, but by deepening the internal contradiction. To negate the negation of negation is not an option for Esposito. Noting this, we acknowledge that the route to interrupting the market is rarely simple negation. Bruno Latour’s seminal book on Louis Pasteur (The Pasteurisation of France) was originally titled Germ Warfare (see Knorr-Cetina 1985). Anti-bacterial images are more reminiscent of germ terrorism; there is no respite from an innumerable, incalculable enemy that has to be vigilantly watched for. The threat of the irruption to boundaries, particularly property boundaries, is never fully eradicated. Anti-bacterial products must be used to periodically clean away germs; most advertisements use the term keeping germs “at bay” – they will always return. Because, unlike Derrida’s notion of democracy attempting to guarantee 100% immunity, the market makes no such promise. It promises temporary relief, but not permanent freedom from germs. Bacterial v. viral communication

SARS, H1N1, and AIDS are much more current motifs in the cultural imaginary than the olderfashioned TB, plague, cholera or syphilis20. Viruses of different types have provided cultural theorists, artists, philosophers and scientists with new metaphors to understand communication, ethics, relations and sexuality (Bersani 2009; Parikka 2007; Serres 2007; Bear 1983). On the other hand, bacteria seldom do (though for an exception, see literary works like Doktor Faustus (Thomas Mann, 1947) and Liebelei (Arthur Schnitzler, 1895), which could probably constitute a syphilis genre). Viral metaphors (viral marketing, going viral, computer virus, and on

20 Though the bacteria anthrax and MRSA for differing reasons have presented themselves forcefully in the cultural imaginary.

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on) abound. No one talks about bacteria, its fatter lazier, older relation. In what ways does the bacterium communicate and propagate that act as a supplement to the viral mode of communication? Does it tell us something about a communicative logic that is different from the viral one? What might going bacterial mean, rather than going viral? Recent research has revealed that bacteria are far from simple one-on-one communicators; they exhibit a meta-communication system that allow them to talk and listen in huge numbers, a type of communication known as quorum sensing (Silberman 2003; Miller and Brassler 2001). Like a highly powerful social media ecology, quorum sensing allows microbes to collectively know changes and challenges in their environment; it allows them to build mutually beneficial alliances with other types of bacteria. It allows them to enter a host and build up in silent innocuous numbers; the entire community then senses through the quorum that they are strong enough to switch on, and not be devoured by the immune system. As Silberman (2003) points out, this is “the sort of collective strategizing typically ascribed to bees, ants, and people, not to bacteria”, and a discovery which suggests that social networks were the first inventions of life, not its latest pinnacle of achievement. So bacteria are not mere passengers21. We might usefully draw on a Jungian approach to character, by proposing the idea of bacterial archetypes: We have found that bacteria are described in myriad scientific literature as pioneers, armies, colonizers, voters, crowders, harvesters, educators, sharers, helpers, attackers, resource integrators, gift-givers, educators. What are the differences between the two, and how can we understand the bacterium as the dangerous supplement of the virus? For the time being, we propose an initial table that interrogates the differences between the bacterial and the viral as a way to explore the concept of a bacterial logic of communication. New metaphors constitute powerful ways to unconceal realities in the world; in the words of Robert Shaw, “you don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.” (Gleick 1987, 262). Bacteria

Prokaryotes (non-nucleated cell)

Propagation through transduction and conjugation Endosymbiosis (horizontal gene transfer) Cross species barriers Cross life and non-life Colonialist (reproduce and live in colonies) Sometimes good Going bacterial Etymology: small staff Greek bakterion, i.e. rod-shaped Uncanny Local (infection) colonial Dead host-living cell Analogue logic? Large Antibiotic death

Virus

Unclassified (genetic material, no cellular structure, no metabolism) Invasion – propagation through copies Cross species barriers Can only exist in living host

Always bad Going viral Etymology: poison, slimy liquid PIE root weis = to melt away; to float Alien Systemic (infection) Living host-dead cell Digital logic (network, information, agent) Small Vaccine weakens

21 Contrary to popular opinion, bacteria are not parasites.

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Conclusion: An other Other

Representations of the Other tend to revolve around aliens, terrorists, animals, and cyborgs, and have always been a way to understand how humans see the “not-human” in philosophy. We point to a marked absence of bacteria in these accounts, and show that they are the most ancient, global and strange Other to have ever existed. They present important sites to think through contemporary political and social dynamics; of border-control, identification, the enemy, the family, justice, and community. At the beginning, we track the contemporary turn to species pluralism in social studies, as a source of and for posthuman ethics. However, we argue that, contrary to a lot of species pluralist theory, humans actually embrace the unclassifiable as a source of fresh bio-techno-cogno capital. There are many ways to look the market. Some people examine prices, some use statistical data. We use images produced by the market as a repository of unarticulated fears and fantasies about these issues listed. We examine anti-bacterial advertising, and examine the dynamic of certain conventions to draw bacteria into visual regimes – cute, overpopulated, lower-class, uncanny, sacred and promiscuous. The theoretical framework we have drafted in to understand these complex movements is (auto)-immunity. From there, we argue that, while immunity theorists like Esposito and Derrida have successfully argued that many social systems suffer from autoimmunitary flaws, we contend that the market exhibits an auto-immune efficiency rather than auto-immune deficiency. In other words, while an auto-immune system realizes its weakness in its strength, the market realizes its strength in its weakness. This has implications for understanding how such a system can be interrupted. Finally, we have proposed that the bacterial offers a supplementary logic of communication to the viral, and encourage the drawing out of bacterial movement as a way of understanding social relations today. References

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On the uses of fairy dust: Contagion, sorcery and the crafting of other worlds1 David Harvie and Keir Milburn2 University of Leicester

How do struggles and uprisings circulate? We look to mythic resources to help us narrativise and conceptualise instances of ‘affective contagion’ within social movements. We first review ‘crowd theory’, from Gustave Le Bon to Freud and beyond, and then the memetics of Richard Dawkins and his followers. We find both theories lacking when it comes to accounting for collective agency. Next we turn to the work of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, who contend – and we agree – that capitalism is ‘a system of sorcery [albeit one] without sorcerers’. In such a system, one needs to craft techniques to protect oneself against capitalism’s spells, to ‘get a hold of’ and ‘denaturalise’ capitalism and thus to repotentialise the world. While Pignarre and Stengers draw inspiration from neo-pagan witches, we instead look to the annals of pop history, where we discover 1960s band The Troggs struggling to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. We take their ‘sprinkling of fairy dust’ notion and apply it to anti-capitalist struggles, exploring what elements might be required for us to become accomplished sorcerers ourselves, conjuring up something beyond ourselves, something we can’t wholly know, something beyond the existing ‘natural’ limits of society: something ‘supernatural’.

It began with the suicide, a self-immolation by fire, of a man who has been downgraded to unemployment, and to whom was forbidden the miserable commerce that allowed him to survive; and because a female police officer slapped him in the face for not understanding what in this world is real. In a few days this gesture becomes wider and in a few weeks millions of people scream their joy on a distant square and this entails the beginning of the catastrophe for the powerful potentates. Alain Badiou, 2011

Before, I watched television; now television is watching me. Egyptian rebel, 20113

In the 1980s security experts in the West used the idea of the domino effect to talk about social movements in Central America. El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras … the US government feared that victory by ‘communist’ (sic) forces would threaten its own strategic interests. If one government was allowed to fall to popular power, neighbouring regimes would topple, one after the other, until the spectre of revolution was at the gates of the US itself. Underlying the domino theory was the laughable notion that outside agitators (in this case, Moscow- or Cuban-trained revolutionaries) were somehow responsible for the rise of popular national liberation movements. But the domino theory was also part of a wider outlook that tries 1 This article has its origins in a short chapter, ‘On Fairy Dust and Rupture’, published in Occupy Everything (Free Association 2012); the argument here has been substantially expanded. 2 Corresponding author. 3 Cited by Badiou (2011)

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to squeeze social movements into a mechanistic and linear framework: this event sparks that movement, that movement leads to this rebellion. Around the same time UK politics was transformed by a series of riots that raged across every major town and city. In the space of 10 days in July 1981, eruptions in London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Leeds were mirrored by street battles in less glamorous locations like Cirencester, Market Harborough and Dunstable. The ferocity of the riots was stunning. But even more shocking, for the state, was the speed with which they spread. Newspapers talked of outside agitators travelling the country on motorbikes, but more tellingly they warned of the ‘copycat effect’. Fast forward 30 years, and the Arab Spring saw oppositional movements emerging and spreading with an awesome speed. Their effects were not confined to North Africa. Protests and movements sprang up around the world, from the 15M in Spain to the Occupy movement emerging from New York. . A timeline on YouTube gives some sense of the global spread of protest and uprising over the three months between December 2010 and March 2011.4 Social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook clearly played a role in expanding those movements, and the speed of that exchange was significant. But in itself that’s not enough to explain the power of these events. Struggles have always circulated one way or another – in the 1790s the Black Jacobins in Haiti and revolutionaries in Paris couldn’t rely on tweets, but news went back and forth on the ships that crossed the Atlantic. So the question is this: why are some events taken up, re-interpreted and re-played elsewhere? What connects a suicide and millions of people screaming their joy? In this paper we look to mythic resources to help us to narrativise and conceptualise instances of ‘affective contagion’ within social movements. Our era has been dominated by two episodes of affective contagion. The first instance was the economic crisis, which despite its deep structural causes, became manifest through a spreading wave of panicked affect. Second, and in response to the first, we have witnessed several connected waves of popular uprising and explosive social movements – alluded to above –most notably during a turbulent 2011. These have also spread ‘virally’, both between countries and through their populations; slogans such as ‘We are the 99%’ and ‘Real Democracy Now!’ have expressed previously unrealised, or at least unexpressed, sentiments, while forms of action, such as the occupation of city squares, have aligned these sentiments with affects of collectivity. With writers such as Paul Mason (2012) seeking explanations for ‘why it is kicking off everywhere’ through the hyper-connectivity of networked individuals embedded within social media, it is not surprising that many have sought recourse in concepts and metaphors such as viruses and memes. To trace the deployment of concepts of contagion and virality in forms of social organisation we begin with the crowd theory of Gustave Le Bon and his reactionary casting of collectivity as eruptions of atavistic and irrational behaviour caused by the suggestibility inherent in what he called ‘the mental unity of crowds’ (Le Bon 2001: 2). Le Bon, of course, was a great influence on Freud’s conception of group psychology. Taking Le Bon’s account of the crowd as his starting point, Freud provides a more sophisticated rendering of this model, which in many ways reverses its polarity. However, Freud still fails to escape an atavistic model of collective contagion and one in which the collective operates only as a meta-individual. In the next section we examine Richard Dawkins’s concept of the virality of the meme in which he translates the blind and emergent design of genetic evolution onto the spread of human ideas and beliefs (Dawkins 1976). Human agency is removed by placing the meme centrestage, and casting its accompanying algorithm of imitation and mutation as the actor, the ‘blind watchmaker’ (Dawkins 1988). Of course, Dawkins’s metaphor, although intended as a counterpoint to William Paley’s ‘intelligent watchmaker’, also evokes Adam Smith’s oft-repeated metaphor of the invisible hand, employed to describe Smith’s conception of the benign capitalist order, which emerges naturally from individuals each pursuing their own self-interest

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with no regard for societal outcomes.4 Dawkins’s meme metaphor functions in a similar way: it tends to naturalise what exists. Moreover, Dawkins’s memetic theory is unable to account for collective agency; we also suggest that Dawkins himself is unable to grasp how memes, at least Internet memes, work. In opposition to the thrust of Dawkins’s self-declared war on religion, we wish to move beyond the limiting concepts of both crowd theory and memetics by delving into the mythical and indeed ‘supernatural’ realms. In these sections we first review the argument of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) that capitalism is a system of sorcery, albeit one without any sorcerers. As part of its never-ending processes of producing ‘infernal alternatives’ and ‘minions’, and of ‘reduc[ing] the intelligence of its agents’, contains a logic of ‘killing politics’ and a logic that seeks to ‘naturalise’ its very existence. In such a world, we need techniques that grant us some protection against this sorcery, that ‘disenchant’. While Pignarre and Stengers look to the neo-pagan witches of the alter-globalisation movement, we turn to the use of the phrase ‘fairy dust’ by a desperate member of the pop band The Troggs. We use this resort to the mythic to help us interpret some recent social movements, which appear to have spread horizontally without recourse to pre-established links or established leaders. In this way we hope to unearth the contemporary incantations of a politics of lateral affective contagion.

Ocholophobia

The idea that explosive, contentious politics spreads contagiously has a long pedigree. The reactionary Prince Metternich reached for a viral metaphor when he declared in response to the 1848 cycle of European revolutions, ‘when Paris sneezes Europe catches a cold’. The more sustained reactionary genre of crowd theory developed in the shadow of the 1871 Paris Commune, which, coming after a century of collective action, had forced the crowd – or the mob(ility) or the multitude or the ‘many-headed Hydra’ – to the centre of the political stage. These experiences produced real analytical difficulties for the emergent liberal ontological narrative of the rational, autonomous liberal individual.5 In response, a series of French and Italian writers brought the newly emerging ‘sciences’ of sociology and psychology to bear on the problem, discovering that far from being a force for progress, the crowd events of recent history were atavistic eruptions of primitive, irrational behaviour. The paradigmatic problem with which crowd theory framed crowds was the juridical one of assigning individual responsibility within collective acts. The perceived phenomenon that the theory seeks to address sets up an individual of good character who is swept up by a crowd into acts they would otherwise not consider. Crowd theory is then an attempt to account for affective contagion within an ontology that denies collective agency Crowd theory found the means of resolving crowd phenomenon with an individualist ontology through the figure of the crowd leader. Though their opinions on the mechanisms involved differed, there was general agreement that crowds formed in relation to leaders and that at least part of the collective subjectivity of the crowd was in fact a reflection of the individual subjectivity of the leader (King 1990). We can see such a schema at work in Gustave Le Bon’s bestselling book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895). Le Bon (2001: 2) begins by setting out the distinction between the individual mind and the crowd mind: 4 Though not by Smith! Smith himself uses the metaphor only once in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and once in The Wealth of Nations (1776). In both instances he writes of ‘an invisible hand’, not ‘the invisible hand’; in both instances he uses the metaphor to describe a particular not a general phenomenon; and in neither of these instances is he describing the ‘efficient’ and most socially beneficial allocation of resources that occurs through the free market. 5 In actual fact most crowd theorists, and Le Bon in particular, limited the necessary scope of rationality by making distinctions based on race and class.

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Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed; doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organised crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds.

The mechanics of this mental unity are threefold. First, ‘the individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power’, which in turn leads to a loss of inhibitions. Second, the crowd causes an affect of contagion where ‘every sentiment is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest’ (Le Bon 2001: 6–7). Last, and most important, membership of a crowd mentality lowers the participant’s intelligence and leads to a heightened suggestibility. This leaves the crowd open to hypnotism by crowd leaders with any suggestion immediately reinforced by the mechanism of contagion. Although the crowd can come together without leaders, that is, its hypnosis can be self-induced, Le Bon makes clear that crowds ‘are so bent on obedience that they instinctively submit to whoever declares himself their master’ (Le Bon 2001: 75). In other words, the crowd’s suggestibility needs a leader and so crowds automatically seek one out. Le Bon’s schema was designed to play on the predominant bourgeois fears of his time. As the leading crowd agitators of the late nineteenth century were of a socialist, communist or anarchist bent, then the danger, seemingly embodied by the Paris Commune, was that the suggestible masses of the newly teeming cities would be led to embrace a primitive, atavistic communism. In response Le Bon offered his book as a guide to the counter-manipulation of crowds by established elites.6 When Freud (2001) comes to consider group psychology he takes Le Bon as his starting point, fully accepting his description of crowd phenomena. His sole point of criticism is that hypnotism is an inadequate explanation of the mental unity of the crowd. For Freud, formation of the ego takes place, in part, through identification with external objects that act as ego ideals.7 This identification, as one of the earliest libidinal ties, is usually with the father. However, in certain situations another object takes the place of the father as the ego ideal. So for Freud (2001: 116) a crowd consists of a ‘number of individuals who have substituted one and the same object for their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’. This common object is the leader. Each individual in the crowd has a libidinal investment in the leader. However, the leader, as a single person, cannot reciprocate all the libidinal energy that has been invested in him. There is a surplus that becomes invested in the other participants of the crowd, who can identify with one another as common egos since they share the same ego ideal. Despite its long-lasting popularity Le Bon’s description of the crowd is unable to account for a significant amount of crowd behaviour. Not all crowds act stupidly or irrationally, for example. Freud’s conception has the advantage of identifying the crowd with the circulation of sublimated libidinal bonds. This allows him to account for crowds without diagnosing a nec6 Although as Le Bon’s book was a contemporary bestseller and has remained in print continuously to this day, we might suppose that it chiefly served as a titillating group phantasy for bourgeois readers. 7 It would be technically more correct to describe this identification as an investment of libidinal energy, an object cathexis.

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essary reduction in intelligence. There is though much crowd behaviour that still seems to escape Freud’s description. His account seems limited to crowds in their most paranoiac form; indeed the image brought to mind is of a Nuremburg rally gripped by the oratory of Hitler.8 We can suppose that Freud would advocate the adoption of a better father figure but the anti-democratic political message of his theory is clear. Just as there can be no family without a father, so there can be no society without leaders. Indeed Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 102) describe Freud’s schema as: [T]he disgrace of psychoanalysis in history and politics. The procedure is well known: two figures are made to appear, the Great man and the Crowd. One then claims to make history with these two entities, these two puppets, the Great Crustacean and the Great Invertebrate.

There are many other potential group formations but these are obscured by the presuppositions of Freud’s theory of the unconscious. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 29–30) put it: Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the unconscious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person. Schizos, on the other hand, have sharp eyes and ears. They don’t mistake the buzz and shove of the crowd for daddy’s voice.

Crowd theory understands the crowd as inherently irrational whereas for Freud this is not necessarily so. Brennan (2004: 62), however, rejects the ‘view that the meaningful division is between the mad crowd and the rational crowd … on the contrary it is between the collective and the individual explanations of group and crowd phenomena’. Within Brennan’s division both crowd theory and Freud’s group psychology provide an individual explanation of the group. They both fit into a mode of thought that can only conceptualise collectivity ‘as a sort of metaindividual, united by and bound to a single purpose and characterised by an ontological homogeneity’ (Gilbert 2014: 51). Gilbert defines this mode of thinking as Leviathanic logic named after ‘Hobbe’s claim that what binds together the members of society is nothing but the fact of their individual submission to the sovereign authority: there are no lateral bonds of fellowship or common purpose, only a collection of parallel, but never intersecting “vertical” bonds linking each individual to a central or superior locus’ (2014: 50). The next model of viral contagion that we turn to appears to help us overcome crowd theory’s inability to think the collective except through the prism of the individual. It does so by placing a self-replicating unit of culture, the meme, as the primary cultural agent. This unit operates below the level of conscious intention and so decentres the rational, conscious individual. Our ultimate question, however, is whether the theory of memes opens up a model of collectivity in which the bonds of affective contagion can operate laterally, with no necessary recourse to vertical leadership. It is this, we believe, that is key to understanding the question of ‘what is to be done?’ within contemporary social movements.

The selfish meme

There is little doubt that the contemporary ubiquity of the viral metaphor has been provoked by the techno-social properties of computer-mediated social networking. If it seems odd that a 8 Indeed this may not be a coincidence. Gonen (2003) provides a detailed tracing of the influence of Le Bon’s theory on both Hitler and Mussolini.

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biological rather than a technical metaphor is used to conceptualise this then it might seem odder that the key concept is derived from the field of genetics rather than epidemiology. The dominant metaphorical resources in discussing the viral nature of contemporary communication, and indeed fields such as ‘viral marketing’, arise from a genetic analogy for the evolution of culture first suggested by Richard Dawkins (1976: 201–215) in a short, speculative section of his book The Selfish Gene. It was here that Dawkins first coined the neologism ‘meme’ as the proposed cultural analogue of the gene.9 As the base unit of culture a meme might be ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashion, ways of making pots or of building arches’ (Dawkins 1976: 206). To this list, of course, we could add myth and folklore (Lynch 1996: 33–34). The evolutionary analogy for culture begins with its mechanism of transmission. If culture is spread through imitation then perhaps, Dawkins (1976: 192) suggests, it is the individual unit of culture, the meme, which is the replicator and the human mind or brain is a mere host or vehicle within which meme self-replication takes place.10 It is apparent that much of the attraction of the meme concept lies precisely in this decentring of human agency. It is this decentring that allows the viral metaphor to take hold. Dawkins (1976: 192) makes this clear when he introduces the idea ‘[w]hen you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of the host cell’. In addition to self-replication and transmission the gene analogy also requires the introduction of variation. This has proven problematic for meme theory, not due to the lack of variation but the potential for too much. As memes pass from one host to another, the chance of alteration becomes large; just think of the popular children’s game Chinese Whispers. This problem of ‘copy-fidelity’ is conceded by Dawkins (1976: 209), who admits that cultural imitation ‘looks quite unlike the particulate, all-or-nothing quality of gene transmission. It looks as though meme transmission is subject to continuous mutation, and also blending’. This huge potential for variation through imperfect imitation should produce a much more chaotic and unstable culture than we find in the actual world. So the core problem for meme theory is to account for the stability and regularity of culture and provide mechanisms that limit the variation caused by fallible transmission and environmental interaction. This is accomplished by suggesting that meme self-reproduction must take place in a context of competition for survival with other memes. For Dawkins (1976: 211) the scarce resource that necessitates this competition is ‘the attention of a human brain’.11 The successful meme is the one that ‘goes viral’, by surviving and propagating widely. This element of competition is what allows Dawkins to invoke the operation of the ‘blind watchmaker’ – an analogy which, as we note above, in turn invokes that of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand – that allows structure and regularity to emerge in culture from below. ‘Selection favours memes which exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage. This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected. The meme pool therefore comes to have the attributes of an evolutionarily stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade’ (Dawkins 1976: 215). 9 Although there had been many previous iterations of similar ideas, not least in the suggestion by William Burroughs (1967: 49) that ‘the word is now a virus’. 10 This, of course, is an exact analogy of Dawkins’s ‘gene-centred’ view of evolution, in which the fundamental unit of analysis – the level at which evolution by natural selection occurs – is the gene, and individuals in any particular species are merely vehicles for the propagation of their constituent genes. This approach has been dubbed Darwinian ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘ultra-Darwinism’ by critics such as Steven Rose (see e.g. Lewontin, Rose and Kamin 1984; Rose and Rose 2000); we will return to Rose later on. 11 This raises a serious problem for meme theory and one that we will come back to later. Surely the competitive pressure that comes from this attention economy must be altered by the different properties of the different sociotechnical devices that mediate cultural transmission?

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It is evident in The Selfish Gene that part of meme theory’s attraction for Dawkins is its ability to incorporate the concept of God within it. Indeed there is evident glee in Dawkins’s (1976: 207) reduction of God to one meme among others. What is it about the idea of a god which gives it stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions of existence … God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture. We can of course rebound this question and ask the following: What is the survival value that ensures the propagation of meme theory? What is it doing for people? How and where has it circulated?12 We think there are three mains areas through which meme theory might resonate. The first area of resonance, as indicated in the passage above, is among those seeking antireligious and atheist arguments. When seen in the register of social and political organisation this could be cast as a project of freedom. If religious doctrine has falsely limited human possibility then meme theory may be mobilised to overcome it. It might, for instance, be used to discredit religiously based injunctions against gay rights. If God is just a meme, the argument might go, then we should pay no heed to those who seek sanction for their actions in God’s authority. Meme theory, however, goes much further than that. It also undermines ideas, such as the self and free will, which are central to many humanist conceptions of the world. If the aim is to undermine religious authority, then the meme seems an over complex and unwieldy argument with which to do it. Second, meme theory resonates with the popular fields of evolutionary psychology and socio-biology. These fields have been criticised for genetic reductionism and the pursuit of ‘just so’ arguments that begin from the existing state of things, taken at face value, and work back to propose evolutionary mechanisms that might explain this outcome. When done in a reductionist fashion such an approach works to naturalise what already exists and so hinder social change (Rose and Rose 2000: 1–13). We suspect that the attraction of the meme analogy in the field of culture follows a similar pattern. In this way meme theory’s decentring of conscious human intention actually asserts a new, reductive and determinist model of the human. It is from here that we see the re-emergence of the enlightenment problematic of a failed, or foreshortened critique of transcendence. An attempt to overcome the predominant transcendent fiction of its time, God, does so only by setting up a reductive model of the human which comes to act as a transcendent fiction itself and with it an apparent limit on social and political possibility. The third area of resonance for memetics is its previously mentioned utility in grasping the techno-social properties of computer mediated social networking. It is this that has sparked the contemporary popularity of the word meme. Indeed in popular usage a meme refers almost solely to snippets of texts and pictures that are shared online.13 The ease with which snippets of information can be shared widely on social media, along with the ease with which these snippets can now be altered, has been interpreted as a speeding up of culture’s evolutionary mechanism (Blackmore 1999). Yet it is meme theory’s rendering of both human brains and technological media as simple vehicles or hosts for the self-replication of memes that most mirrors the circulation of information in a social mediated world. Its applicability to biologi12 There is no performative contradiction here. Dawkins has simply provided a particular rendering of a performative analysis. Posing such questions does not require us to embrace the detail of meme theory. 13 When we refer to social movement forms ‘going viral’ the analogy is less to the field of epidemiology and more to the similarity of experience with online sharing. Indeed it seems likely that the increased speed with which social movement forms circulate partly depends on the breadth of weak ties facilitated by social media.

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cal, social and technical system chimes with our increasingly cyborg existence. Indeed Blackmore (1999) not only notes the isomorphism between meme theory and the properties of digital media but also argues that the development of this technology is simply the action of memes seeking more efficient mechanisms of their own transmission. There are, however, serious limits to meme theory’s applicability to the virality of social media. Its focus on the meme pays little regard to the effects that different media have on the form of the memes that circulate. To make this point obvious we can compare books and tweets. While books facilitate the development and transmission of complex sets of ideas, tweets are significantly more ephemeral. And it’s not just the technical properties of media that alter such tweets, but also the culture the media is embedded in. A dominant form of Internet meme is a picture or snippet of video upon which different text can be inserted. The large amount of Internet memes originate from the Internet forum 4chan,14 which has its own culture and ethic that spreads memes simply for the ‘lulz’. As the the Deterritorial Support Group (2012: 33) explain, ‘lulz are essentially the raison d’être of the internet meme – an attempt to derive humour, usually through a joke of prank. But more than this – humour for its own sake, humour devoid of a moral framework’.15 Meme theory’s failure to account for the way that memes are changed by the media they circulate in is evidenced by Dawkins’s inability to grasp the operation of Internet memes. On 9 February 2013 Richard Dawkins tweeted the following: ‘I get daily messages, apparently from different people but all using identically illiterate spelling: “Your a dick”. Coordinated campaign?’16 The ‘Your a Dick’ tweet is actually a perfectly crafted meme that circulates virally with no need for central coordination. It perpetuates not only because of the puerile double entendre contained in the shortened version of Richard, but also because each time it is tweeted a host of Dawkins’s followers are provoked into correcting its spelling. The meme is a troll that contains a self-fulfilling critique of a perceived tendency among both Dawkins and his fans to mistake pedantry for intelligence.17 We don’t know who started the ‘Your a Dick’ meme. Internet meme culture has a disregard for the attribution of innovation that presents something of a problem when discussing the virality of social movement forms and how one might act to provoke horizontal affective contagion. To examine this problem let’s look at the case of viral marketing. The attraction of virality for marketers is its ability to ‘shift the burden of marketing labour onto the consumer’ (Fuller and Goffey 2007: 2). To make this possible the marketer’s role and strategy needs to be obscured.18 Yet as Fuller and Goffey (2007: 2) observe, such ‘a requirement that runs strictly counter to the very principle of branding as such’. The marketers are not in it for the ‘lulz’. They need to maximise the return on investment, which requires both the linking of the meme to the brand in question and the attribution of the campaign to the marketing company. In doing so the previously obscured media strategy must ultimately be revealed. As Fuller and Goffey (2007: 2) put it, ‘viral marketing simply isn’t viral enough’. This problem is mirrored in political campaigning that seeks to trigger affective contagions. Political change needs those affects to be brought back to conscious meaning. And of course the initiators of a viral action will often want attribution so that their future capacity can be in14 http://www.4chan.org (accessed 30 May 2014). 15 Although the Deterritorial Support Group (2012: 32–38) go on to examine the development of enough sincerity within this culture to enable political action to emerge out of it, most notably through the group Anonymous. 16 https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/300264541743374337 (accessed 30 May 2014). 17 The Deterritorial Support Group (2012: 37) defining trolling as ‘Internet slang for the act of posting inflammatory extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion’. 18 This obscuring helps overcome the resistance to the marketer’s messaging that seems to arise through resentment of their intrusive domination of the attention economy.

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creased.19 Of course this can also be a problem. Just because a group had a good idea that went viral it doesn’t mean that they will propose the best way forward next time. New conceptions of both leadership and action are needed for a politics of lateral affective contagion and meme theory seems unable to conceptualise it. There is a determinism in the analogy of the ‘blind watchmaker’ that displaces the role of conscious creativity. As Blackmore (1999: 204) puts it, ‘the consciousness of a designer is not the causal factor’ of cultural development for meme theory. This applies as much to the design of the conscious human intellect as it does to the intelligent design of a Christian God. In which case what is to be done and who exactly is to do it? This seems a limit point for the utility of the meme. It is able to conceptualise neither individual nor collective agency. So we have found crowd theory trapped by its castigation of collective affective as atavistic irrationality. We have found Freud’s rendering of crowd theory unable to account for collectivity except ‘as a sort of meta-individual, united by and bound to a single purpose and characterised by an ontological homogeneity’ (Gilbert 2014: 51). When we looked at the contagious nature of memes we found a tendency to naturalise what exists and an inability to account for collective agency. To find a way beyond these limitations we turn to the work of Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, in their book Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (2011). In this book Pignarre and Stengers are specifically interested in how we might not only summons affective forces that exceed us but also act to ward off other forces within which we have become trapped. We first examine their characterisation of capitalism as a ‘system of sorcery’ before turning to the creation, or better, crafting of collective affect out of rituals rooted in myth and the supernatural – that is, to the uses of fairy dust. Do you believe in magic?

For Pignarre and Stengers, capitalism is ‘spellbinding’, it ‘mesmerises’ (2011: 4 and 30). Capitalism transforms the economy – and, we might add, society more generally – ‘into a politics that kills politics, that gives itself the authority of a rationality that demands unanimity’ (2011: 15; emphasis in the original), it is a system that produces – produces ceaselessly – ‘infernal alternatives’, that is, a ‘set of situations that seem to leave no other choice than resignation or a slightly hollow sounding denunciation. (Such a denunciation is powerless because this situation offers no hold and the conclusion always comes back to the same thing: it is the whole “system” that has to be destroyed)’ (2011: 24). Further: [C]apitalism works to continuously to reduce the intelligence of its agents, to replace it by automatic behaviour that can in turn become the matter of infernal alternatives. These latter, then, are not imposed by a decision at a global level, they are the fruit of patient processes of fabrication at a very small scale, of careful experiments, because it is always a question of capturing without creating too much alarm, or by creating false alarms. This is all the more effective given that most frequently innovations are not controlled by a plan. They progress and impose themselves, giving the impression and make good sense. (Pignarre and Stengers 2011: 28; our emphasis) And who performs these ‘patient processes of fabrication’, ‘not limit[ing] themselves to applying or following rules, but tak[ing] pains to apply the rules with loyalty, that is to say, with a certain inventiveness’ (2011: 32)? Minions. ‘We all say “we have to”, but the minion says it a little differently, affirming the legitimacy of this “we have to” by saying “yes” to it, by eventually finding ways to better enforce it. Minions are enforcers’ (2011: 32). Moreover:20 19 The initiators of UK Uncut, for instance, maintained control over the key media bottleneck points, their blog and Twitter account. 20 We make no apology for drawing so heavily on Capitalist Sorcery nor for quoting from it at such length. We believe it a really important book and would go so far as insisting that ‘everyone’ should read it – except that such an insistence would go directly against Pignarre and Stengers’s explicit warnings against majoritarian modes of thought.

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The fabrication of minions is a permanent production. It may be ‘organised’ – as in the case of the ‘deflowering’ of the consultant – but most often it is diffuse. And it always has something of the initiation about it, with recruitment into the group of those who ‘know’. But it is a ‘dark’ initiation, involving adherence to a knowledge that separates people from what they often continue to feel, and what they now dismiss as a dream or a manifestation of sensitivity one should protect oneself from. The incorporation of the ‘we have to’ is something of a tipping point, when one turns against oneself and adheres to despair, and it is doubled with a scorn for all those who haven’t yet understood, who are still ‘dreaming’. And who it is a matter of recruiting in turn. […] The ‘we have to’ to which minions adhere designates something of the order of the vindication of a paralysis. It translates a type of capture that has nothing to do with an idea, mendacious or not. To have an idea is to be able to back it up, to make the case for it, whereas minions are dumbstruck by a prohibition on thinking what they are working for. But that is also what confers on their work its infernal ‘creativity’. Humbly but tirelessly they make the regulations, the definitions, the words, the manners, the procedures that will exclude the thinking they find so intolerable. And it is here that we sense that we are becoming capable of a pragmatic operation – ‘naming’ what we are dealing with, what it is that succeeds in fabricating minions, in making those who it captures active in a way that permits each one to present him or her self as a ‘subject’, responsible for what he or she does. Naming is not neutral, it is not giving something a simple label – it is a deliberate act that engages a mode of relation or, in our case, of struggle. […]

There has, for a long time, been a name for something that manages to produce a coincidence between enslavement, the putting into service, and subjection, the production of those who do freely what they are meant to do. It is something whose frightening power and the need to cultivate appropriate means of protection against is known by the most diverse of peoples, except us moderns. Its name is sorcery. (Pignarre and Stengers 2011: 33–35) But if capitalism is a system of sorcery, it is a ‘system of sorcery without sorcerers’ (2011: 135). Marx and Engels (1968: 40) captured this point when they channelled Faust in the Communist Manifesto: ‘Modern bourgeois society is … like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’. Politicians and capitalist strategists – minions all, of course – are not the freely choosing agents presupposed by liberal ideology. They are caught up in this logic of killing politics and even if they wanted to escape it they simply wouldn’t know how. And how do we ourselves – who hate capitalism, who are not minions – avoid capture? What also concerns us here is Pignarre and Stengers’s (2011: xi) argument that the politics of capital, and in particular of neoliberalism, contains a logic of ‘killing politics … It is a logic that aims to “naturalise” – and hence automate and de-politicise – political decisions’. It is this natural logic that has been used to justify austerity. The political possibilities opened up by the crisis have disappeared behind a veil of apparent necessity. Destroying this mask of naturalness is far from easy – for how do we avoid the ‘infernal alternative’ of ‘resignation or a slightly hollow sounding denunciation’? It is this very ‘naturalisation’ that is capitalist sorcery. As postpunk band the Gang of Four put it: ‘Each day seems like a natural fact’.21 21 On their 1981 song ‘Why Theory’.

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In such an apparently hopeless situation, Pignarre and Stengers explore ways by which we might ‘protect’ ourselves against capital’s spells, ways by which we might ‘get a hold’ of capitalism, create or craft spaces for politics, for thinking, for empowerment. Certainly they remind us that ‘Marx’s categories “disenchant”’ (2011: 54). More provocatively – and seemingly as uncomfortably for them the writers as us the readers – they take seriously the rituals and myths – the ‘technique’ – of neo-pagan witches in the alter-globalisation movement. Neo-pagan witches have learned that in the first place the technique or the art, the craft that they call magic is not what has to be discovered, in the sense of the authentic secret. It is a matter of reclaiming, of reactivating. And it is also a matter of relaying the old knowledge that such an art forces one to pay attention, to protect oneself, that is to say in the first place and above all, not to think of oneself as sufficient unto oneself. They have learned (again) the necessity of casting the circle, of creating the closed space where the forces they have a vital need for can be convoked. (Pignarre and Stengers 2011: 138) What we think Pignarre and Stengers are arguing here is that mythical and supernatural resources can help us both denaturalise the prevailing economistic ontology that sees only rational, autonomous utility maximising individuals, and craft collectivity and affective contagion. We agree. Anti-capitalist politics must be about breaking with the apparently naturalness of capitalism, of overcoming its limitations; it must be about repotentialising the world. The problem, of course, is that we are also caught up, to a greater or lesser extent, within the current sense of things, within our ‘everyday’ lives of ‘we have to’s’ and ‘infernal alternatives’. While Pignarre and Stengers have learned from the neo-pagan witches, we instead turn to the history of pop music. A sprinkling of fairy dust

One of our favourite anecdotes from the annals of pop history involves a famous bootleg tape of 1960s band The Troggs having a hilariously sweary argument at a recording session. The sound engineer, who failed stop the tape player, captured a group of musicians trying desperately to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. The conclusion they reached is now legendary: ‘You got to put a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard’. What did Reg Presley, the Trogg’s singer and main song-writer, mean when he talked about sprinkling a ‘bit of fucking fairy dust on the bastard’? For us, the notion is attractive for at least two reasons. First, creating a hit record in pop music involves triggering an episode of affective contagion, the very phenomenon (albeit in different circumstances and for different ends) we are interested in theorising. Indeed Blackmore (1999: 56) cites the pop song as a prime example of the viral phenomena that the concept of the meme is trying to capture, ‘any catchy tunes that gets you to rehearse it in your head will get passed on, and so we will all come across such tunes and be in danger of “catching” them’. Presley’s ‘fairy dust’ notion suggests a situated crafting of affective resonance. It suggests that there might be a certain incantation or invocation that might help conjure particular forms of subjectivity and associated activity that help us break with the ‘naturalness’ of neoliberal capitalism and thus repotentialise the world. When the ‘naturalness’ of the current state of things begins to lose its grip – as it does when events and crises put the continuation of our everyday lives into doubt – then space opens up for ‘supernatural’ solutions. Second, the notion of fairy dust acknowledges that we, as anti-capitalist militants, are also sorcerers. For we are trying to conjure up something beyond ourselves, something we can’t wholly know, something beyond the existing ‘natural’ limits of society; something ‘supernatural’. In such conditions concepts like fairy dust begin to make sense. Fairy dust invokes the need for a gamble, a roll of the dice, an experiment. For this we need to leave our safety zones. ‘“We don’t know” thus makes us leave the safety of the regime of judgment for one of risk, the

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risk of failure that accompanies all creation’ (Pignarre and Stengers 2011: 44). But involving the element of chance doesn’t mean just trusting to luck. We can think of the process of putting ‘a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard’ as a kind of incantation that draws on past experience in order to exceed it. Even the Troggs knew that the path to fairy dust lies between knowledge and cliché: ‘I know that it needs strings, that I do know’. Given this, we can see the occupation of Millbank Towers during the demonstration against tuition fees on November 2010 as an invocation.22 That jubilant show of defiance as boots went through windows crystallised a new mood of militancy. By doing so it conjured up a movement no one was expecting. Yet that movement quickly stuttered as it failed to generalise. Another example of actions sprinkled with fairy dust can be found with UK Uncut, established around the same time as the student movement. Who could have predicted that occupations of Vodafone shops would resonate so widely and spread so virally? Was it the result of fortuitous circumstances? Or did the specifics of its incantations facilitate its spread? UK Uncut certainly shows us some of the elements needed for a contemporary invocation of politics. First, it manages to capture a spreading desire to take part in direct action. There is a deeply felt need for a new collective, participatory politics to counter the parliamentary-democratic system’s killing of politics. Yet UK Uncut’s actions also spread because they are easily replicable. They have a low entry level. Taking part isn’t too difficult. It doesn’t require too much preparation or specialist knowledge. The risks involved are not too high. Second, although the actions contain a ‘supernatural’ element, they also make immediate sense. The argument is instantly grasped: austerity is a political decision and not the result of a ‘law of nature’. It is a political decision not to tax corporations and the rich as rigorously as the rest of us. It is a political decision to impose the costs of the crisis onto the poorest of society and those who did least to cause it. The UK Uncut actions, and the police response they provoke, reveal some of the dynamics of capital that neoliberalism seeks to deny. They reveal, for example, that capital contains different and antagonistic interests and that politicians, the police and contemporary structures of power align themselves with certain interests and against others. It is a political decision to do so. Yet there is a danger here. Because actions must be instantly understandable, they can only push so far into the boundaries of what it is currently possible to say. They must by necessity still contain many of our society’s hidden presuppositions to thought. If the actions don’t contain a dynamic that pushes further and generalises wider, then the movement risks collapsing back into the sense of the old world. We are all too familiar with this. ‘Of course we’d love to tax the bankers’, says the government, ‘but if we did they’d simply move to Geneva’. The parliamentary-democratic system seeks to kill every revelation of a political decision with a new ‘naturalisation’. Now we can make out the third necessary element of our incantations. Our forms of action must include mechanisms or moments that set the conditions for collective analysis. Perhaps they must build in spaces, physical and temporal, which can maintain collectivity while slowing down the level of intensity. We need that familiar rhythm between the high intensity of action and the cooler pace of discussion and analysis. It is only by maintaining this rhythm that we can push further through the dynamics of capital that limit our lives. In such conditions movements can change and adapt in order to generalise. During the student movement the university occupations played something of this role but on their own they weren’t enough. For a movement to move, it must exceed the conditions of its own emergence. While a small group might stumble across a workable incantation, they must conjure up forces that make themselves redundant. The aim must be to make the mass its own analyst, to spread the potential for 22 Millbank Towers houses the HQ of the ruling Conservative party.

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leadership across the whole of the collective body. After all if a genie gives you three wishes, then your last request should always be for another three wishes. References

Badiou, Alain (2011) ‘Tunisa, Eygpt: The Universal Reach of Popular Uprisings’, www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1031 (accessed 21 May 2014). Blackmore, Susan (1999) The Meme Machine, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brennan, Teresa (2004) The Transmission of Affect, New York: Cornell University Press. Burroughs, William (1967) The Ticket that Exploded, New York: Grove Press. Dawkins, Richard (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, Richard (1988) The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin. Dawkins, Richard (1998) Unweaving the Rainbow, London: Penguin. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press. Deterritorial Support Group (2012) ‘All the Memes of Production’, in Alessio Lunghi and Seth Wheeler (eds), Occupy Everything: Reflections on Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, New York: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia: 32–38. Free Association, The (2012) ‘On Fairy Dust and Rupture’, in Alessio Lunghi and Seth Wheeler (eds), Occupy Everything: Reflections on Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, New York: Minor Compositions/Autonomedia: 24–31. Freud, S. (2001) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, London: Vintage. Fuller, Matthew and Goffey, Andrew (2007) Towards an Evil Media Studies, www.spc.org/fuller/texts/towardsevil ( accessed 30 May 2014). Gilbert, J. (2014) Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in the Age of Individualism, London: Pluto. Gonen, J. (2003) The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler’s Utopian Barbarism, Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. King, E. G. (1990) Crowd Theory as a Psychology of Leader and Led, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. Le Bon, Gustave (2001) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Mineola, NY: Dover. Lewontin, R. C., Rose, Steven and Kamin, Leon (1984) Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, London: Pantheon. Lynch, Aaron (1996) Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society, New York: Basic Books. Marx, Karl and Engles, Fredrick (1968) The Communist Manifesto. In: Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels Selected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 31-63. Mason, Paul (2012) Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, London: Verso. Pignarre, Philippe and Stengers, Isabelle (2011) Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rose, Hilary and Rose, Steven (eds) (2000) Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology, New York: Harmony Books.

Megamythomanicial Pierre McDonagh

Dublin City University

‘Who are you?’ à la Daltry turned Sherlock Mxxs a day helps you work rest and play! Red, white and blue Green, white and orange, Chocolate eggs, Ads that beg Person am I, Construed to consume or citizen be? Sameness guarantees our ashy end, Return Junk to Sender, I dent it see, Psycho babble, Scrabble.

Honest brokers don’t play poker, good guys ain’t like Bram Stoker, Bulls of brown and feisty Queens, lead us to the in betweeners, Breaking Bad news to the Grim reaper, Mauriac’s the next store keeper

You been CCT’d or TCR’d mate, never to late!? Freudian fever slumped o’er in treatment’s McShane We are all the same, Bony harps won’t save your skin, Adieu to the next of kin.

I paint, converse and legitimate, markets for fools of time, consumers ain’t Devine People unite Africa’s alright Redemption, Songs for the Tempted, Desert Island Discs.

Possessed of the self Smitten through wealth Megamythomanical. Like a bird on that wire with the golden voice Don’t Heaney that Joyce my friend, Little feat, down in the tube station Seventy bags left over Seymour!?

Tombstone, The Rockford Files, mashed Friends, Cowboys and Indians, 413

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Sky burials very green Steve McQueen, the big screen.

Clap along, Annalong CS Lewis Are you my butty, butty? Marathons are very nutty. Does your room not have a roof Are you playing at being aloof? Happy and you know it, Itsy bitsy, Odds and sods, smiling beguiling Mod, rocker or Sid? Bric-o-latté

Mastermind, give us a clue, cactuses! Cooley Time, Dan’s Stonewall Café Are you going my way? I haven’t got a clue.

Scaramouche wasn’t a douche. I am, I am. Will.i.am Austerus borealis Dallas, Buckingham Palace under Milkwood, not Silkwood.

Peter Sellar’s got a room And taking down Higgs Boson’s particules Tomo! & Spike Milligans walking backwards for Christmas Gengis Khan, Ironman! Sauchiehall street, Keep your wits aboutye and yer nose clean here and yer safe enough. Is yer head cut? Pat the Baker, ‘Eventually’ Mr Fawlty! Show time!

Scent of a woman, Jack’s back Massive attack Green, green, grass of home alone, Bugsy Malone. Hoo-ha!

No habla inglés ametralladora Kelly, Say hello to my little friend, Megamythomanicial.

6th Feb 2014

In Dreams

Robert Grafton Small

University of Leicester

‘A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the bum on the corner is drinking. All Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.’ (Warhol 1975: 101)

‘There are no alternatives to this model, only variants… the transvestites’ names and surnames are not enough, their details of borth (sic) are irrelevant; they are absorbed in the uniqueness of the Person the prefigures them,’ (Pasolini 1975/2009: 6)

Silkscreen, colour TVs. Craft but not Kraftwerk. Outsider art from the inside. Andy blurs genders, genres: sex toys with sex. We see our selves multiply. Yet singular, raw, unfinished. The real in films of paint, on skin, Lascaux made surface. Candy Darling wrapped in desire, very like himself. A product. An other. Fantasy framed, wanting. Her own double, alone. Chinaski may come with rum and coke but a bum, the President? Really? Yet lack is liquid, a body fluid in our longing, every seduction a sediment of despair, bubbles all the same. Liz Taylor knows… Do we, Ladies and Gentlemen? Portrait. Mugshot. More than Most Wanted. Deviant hangup, criminal pin-up; a little object overlooked. And understood: the self denied a sign of the real. So make-up runs, prints bleed. Andy too; cut up, shot up. His flesh, her frustration. Fetish as Performance Art. ‘I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself.’ (Houellebecq 2011: 155) References

Houellebecq, Michel. Whatever (translated from the French by Paul Hammond). 2011, Serpent’s Tail, London. Pasolini, Pier Paulo. Andy Warhol: Ladies and Gentlemen, Skarstedt Gallery (translated from the Italian by Rodney Stringer). 2009, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, New York. Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). 1975, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London.

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Author Biographies

Peter Armstrong holds the title of Emeritus Professor, having retired from Leicester University Management School in 2010. He is best known for his work in critical accounting though his most-cited paper is on the inelastic behaviour of engineering materials. This was coauthored with Charles Frederick over half a century ago during a previous life as a research engineer in the nuclear power industry. [Email: [email protected]]

Dominique Bouchet is Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern Denmark. Dr Bouchet was born in Paris where he was educated as an economist and a sociologist (http://bouchet.dk/the-man/curriculum-vitae/). He is the author or co-author of more than 40 books and 180 articles published in ten languages (http://bouchet.dk/publications/mainpublications/). Dr Bouchet has also presented hundreds of popular lectures for audiences that range from young children to seniors coming from all social backgrounds. In 2007 Dominique Bouchet was awarded the ‘researcher’s prize’ for ‘Transcending Research’ by the Danish Union of Professors and Researchers in the fields of Humanities, Sciences and Social Sciences. [Web: http://bouchet.dk, Email: [email protected]]

Neil Buttimer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Irish in University College, Cork (UCC), Ireland where he has taught from 1982 to the present. He obtained his doctorate from Harvard University, where he was founder of the annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium (1981–). His research, lecturing and postgraduate supervision are in medieval Irish tradition, pre-Famine Gaelic Ireland and contemporary cultural policy, with an emphasis on textual analysis and source criticism. He established the Higher Diploma/MA in Irish Heritage Management (1990–2000), and the BCL (Law and Irish) (1999–) at UCC, both programmes having national as well as international work-experience placement linkages. A former editor of the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, his publications also include ‘Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’ (1989), ‘Cork: History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County’ (1993, with Patrick O’Flanagan), ‘The Heritage of Ireland’ (2000, with Colin Rynne and Helen Guerin), ‘Tréimhse Phromhaidh’ (2012), and numerous papers in journals and edited collections. His award-winning graduate students have themselves published monographs and articles relating to modern Irish language, literature and culture. Among other projects, he is currently completing an in-depth study of the works of Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin (ob. 1838), merchant, philanthropist, teacher and political activist, who would become Gaelic Ireland’s most celebrated diarist. [Email: [email protected]]

Gareth Brown is a PhD student at the University of Leicester School of Management. His research centres on the organisation of collective imaginaries, with a particular focus on poetic methodologies and on the political and utopian imaginaries of social movements and radical leftist groups [Email: [email protected]]

Angus Cameron is an undisciplined social scientist who has worked his way through Art History, International Relations, International Political Economy and Human Geography on his way to Management. This journey also includes spells as a cocktail bartender and financial journalist. Cameron’s research interests include performativity, narrativity, spatiality, indeterminacy, boundaries, zeroes, islands, money and, most recently, the intertwined characters Trickster, Devil, Fool and Witch. Since 2008 he has extended his academic work with

Author biographies

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collaborative performance art projects, chiefly with Swedish duo Goldin+Senneby on their ongoing project ‘Headless’. [Email: [email protected]]

Norah Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Marketing in Trinity College, Dublin. Her research interests centre on the philosophy of technology, especially under the trope of the posthuman, critiques of service-dominant logic, and imaginations of the future in consumer culture. [Email: [email protected]]

Rob Caruana is an Associate Professor of Business Ethics at the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR) at the University of Nottingham Business School, UK. Rob’s research interests include consumer social responsibility, responsible tourism, critical discourse analysis and corporate communications. [Email: [email protected]]

Katherine Casey is a doctoral candidate with the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Limerick. Her research interests include: ethical consumption, political consumerism, ecovillages, new social movements and consumer movements [Email: [email protected]]

Andrea Davies is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Consumption at the University of Leicester School of Management. She is co-editor of Consumer Research Methods (Volumes I–IV), Sage Major Works Series (2013) and was joint editor of the Journal of Consumer Behaviour (2006–2009). Her research interests focus on contemporary and historical aspects of consumption and consumer research methodologies with particular interest in family and motherhood, empowerment and consumer ambivalence, retail technologies and retail settings, posthumanism and oral history. Address: University of Leicester School of Management, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK [Email: [email protected]]

Cormac Deane is the IRC Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Film Studies, Trinity College Dublin. He is the translator of the final work of Christian Metz, L’Énonciation impersonnelle, which will be published by Columbia University Press later this year. His research in screen aesthetics, biopolitics and depictions of ‘terrorism’ has appeared most recently in Television Aesthetics and Style and the Journal of Sonic Studies. [Email: [email protected]]

Marion Deane is an independent scholar. She graduated with a BA in English and Irish from Queen’s University Belfast in 1961. She lived abroad in various university towns including Cambridge, England and Berkeley, California where her husband was teaching. After settling in Dublin and with four children in tow, she resumed her studies. In 1985 and 1997, she graduated from University College Dublin with a First Class MA in English and a First Class MA in Early and Medieval Irish respectively. In 2000, on receiving an award from Atlantic Philanthrophies, she moved from Trinity College Dublin where she had begun a doctoral thesis on ‘The Birth-tales of Cú Chulainn’ to complete her work at Magee College, University of Ulster, Derry. She graduated from there in 2004 with a PhD in Celtic Studies. [Write to her at 33 Oakley Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, or email [email protected]] John Desmond is interested to explore questions of morality in relation to marketing, aspects of consumer culture that are marginal to mainstream interests and in marginalia more generally. He looks forward to completing his study of obituaries from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so as to better understand changes over the years in the symbolic capital of business leaders, managers and marketers. [Email: [email protected]]

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Author biographies

Hilary Downey, Lecturer in Marketing/Consumer Behaviour, Queen’s University Belfast, studies consumer vulnerability and experiential consumption. Hilary employs the poetic turn as a dissemination tool for her research findings and is a member of Consumer Culture Theory and Transformative Consumer Research communities. [Email: [email protected]]

Dee Duffy lectures in Retail and Fashion Studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). She also manages Ireland’s only fashion buying postgraduate programme, and coordinates the newly launched Arthur Ryan Retail Centre at DIT. Research interests include consumer culture, Gaelic sport in Irish society, masculinity studies and fashion consumption. [Email: [email protected]]

Stephen Dunne is Lecturer in Social Theory and Consumption at the University of Leicester School of Management. He keeps his departmental webpage reasonably up to date. [Email: [email protected]]

A. Fuat Firat is Professor of Marketing at the University of Texas – Pan American and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. His publications include Consuming People: From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption, co-authored with N. Dholakia. He is the founding editor of Consumption, Markets & Culture. [Email: [email protected]]

James Fitchett is Professor of Marketing and Consumption at the University of Leicester School of Management. He is co-author of Marketing: A Critical Textbook (Sage 2011) and coedited Consumer Research Methods (Sage 2013). James’s research focuses on critical readings of marketing informed by cultural and critical theory. He has recently co-organised workshops for the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies on ‘The Costs of Culture’ and for ESRC on ‘Marketplace Exclusion’. He is associate editor for Marketing Theory and chair for the 2014 Macromarketing Conference on track on Neoliberalism and Macromarketing. Address: University of Leicester School of Management, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK [Email: [email protected]]

Sarah Glozer is a PhD Candidate at the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR) at the University of Nottingham Business School, UK. Sarah’s PhD research focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR), communication in social media and her research interests include ethical/sustainable marketing, consumer social responsibility and corporate communications. [Email: [email protected]]

Christina Golding is Professor of Marketing at Keele University, UK. Her research interests are cultural consumption, marketplace produced identities and nonconformist consumption. Her current work is centred on transgressive consumption, embodiment and consumption, and extraordinary experiences at festival. [Email: [email protected]]

Jo Grady is Lecturer in HRM and Industrial Relations at the University of Leicester School of Management. Her research mainly focuses on neoliberalism, financialisation and the development of capitalism, with particular focus on employee relations, welfare regimes and the role of the state. [Email: [email protected]]

Robert Grafton-Small is Visiting Fellow in the University of Leicester School of Management. A CNAA doctorate in consumption and the social led to lectureships in Marketing at Strathclyde and Organisational Symbolism – a national first – at St Andrews, then premature

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retirement on health grounds. His honorary fellowship is one with interests in original research and publishing across disciplines. From crosswords to Pop Art he remains a fan of hard-edge ambiguity. Address: University of Leicester School of Management, Ken Edwards Building, University Road, Leicester LEI 7RH, UK. [E-mail: [email protected]]

Chris Grocott is Lecturer in Management and Economic History at the University of Leicester School of Management. His research investigates the development of capitalism and capitalist political economy with particular reference to issues of class, ideology and imperialism. [Email: [email protected]]

Amy Rungpaka Hackley is Lecturer in Marketing at Queen Mary University of London. Prior to that she was Lecturer in Marketing at Durham University, and before that, at the University of Surrey. Dr Hackley’s PhD focused on young consumers’ experience of TV product placement, and her work has been published in various journals including Journal of Business Research, International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Marketing Management, Business Ethics – A European Review, and Marketing Theory. [Email: [email protected]]

Chris Hackley is Professor of Marketing at Royal Holloway University of London, teaching advertising and critical marketing. His recent and forthcoming books include Marketing in Context (2013) and Advertising and Promotion (in press, with Amy Rungpaka Hackley), both with Sage. Some of the work on this paper was carried out while on sabbatical as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Irvine, and thanks go to Professor Alladi Venkatesh and the Merage Business School for hosting. [Email: [email protected]]

Anu Harju is pursuing her Doctoral thesis at the Organizational Communication Unit at Aalto University School of Business. Her research interests include discursive and critical approaches to social media and identity, consumer resistance and online community dynamics from a cultural perspective. She has also examined the discursive construction and evaluation of the employee ideal in the labour market context. [Email: [email protected]; Tel. +358407418759]

David Harvie teaches Finance and Political Economy at the University of Leicester School of Management, where he is also a member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy. He is a member of The Free Association writing collective whose book Moments of Excess was published by PM Press (2011). Other recent publications include: ‘Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society’ (with Emma Dowling; forthcoming in Sociology); ‘Publisher, Be Damned! From Price Gouging to the Open Road’ (with Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Ken Weir; forthcoming in Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation); and ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Twenty-First Century’ (with Keir Milburn; in South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013). [Email: [email protected]; Web: https://leicester.academia.edu/DavidHarvie; www2.le.ac.uk/departments/management/people/dharvie]

Donncha Kavanagh is Professor of Information and Organisation in the Business School at University College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests include the sociology of knowledge and technology, temporality, phronesis, the history and philosophy of management thought, pre-modern and postmodern modes of organising, play and creativity. He has published widely in the fields of information and organisation, management, marketing and organisation studies. [Email: [email protected]; Web: http://donnchakavanagh.com]

Kieran Keohane is based in the Department of Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland. He has a number of research interests including sociological analysis in the interpretive tradi-

420

Author biographies

tion, confluences between critical theory and poststructuralism; cities and forms of urban life; identity, difference and social antagonism and others. He has published widely on his own account and also in joint publications with Carmen Kuhling. [Email: [email protected]]

Amee Kim holds a BSc in Statistics from Seoul, Republic of Korea, and an MSc in International Finance and Financial Institutions from the University of Glasgow, UK. She is currently working towards completion of her doctoral degree in the University of Leicester School of Management, UK. Her research looks at how the financial crisis was represented on front covers of print media in Korea, specifically using Yin-Yang mythology that permeates Korean life, and how this representation affects the view of people towards the crisis. [Email: [email protected]]

Carmen Kuhling is a sociologist based at the University of Limerick. Her current research interests include the relationship between cultural and economic transformations in Irish Society; modernity and social change; globalisation and quality of life; multiculturalism, citizenship and social exclusion; identity and social inequality; gender and representation; gender, occupational sex segregation and gendered interpretations of ‘skill’; changing family forms; and popular culture and cultural sociology. She has written on a diverse array of topics, from the New Age to dance and the Corrib Gas giveaway. [Email: [email protected]]

Maria Lichrou is a lecturer in the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Limerick. Her research interests lie at the intersections of consumer culture, tourism and place marketing. Her research has appeared in Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development, the Journal of Strategic Marketing, and Place Branding and Public Diplomacy. She is on the editorial board of Tourism and Hospitality Research. [Email: Maria.Lichrou@ ul.ie] Diane Martin (PhD, Utah, 2001) is an Associate Professor of Marketing in the School of Business at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. She is the co-author of the book Sustainable Marketing. Her research employs ethnographic methods in relationships between consumers, communities and culture. She is also researching marketing as a source of solution to the problem of sustainability. [Email: [email protected]]

Pierre McDonagh (PhD Cardiff University) has lectured in Ireland, the US and the UK and is a Fellow of caQtus collaborative as well a member of the Advisory Committee for Transformative Consumer Research within the American Association for Consumer Research. He is best known for his work on green management, sustainable communication and dark marketing. He enjoys music, good food, soccer and tennis, normally with friends and family. From 1 September 2014, he takes up a Professorship in Marketing at the School of Management, University of Bath, UK. [Email: [email protected]]

Keir Milburn is a lecturer in Organisation and Political Economy at the University of Leicester, where he is also director of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy. He is the author (with The Free Association) of the book, Moments of Excess: Movements, Protest and Everyday Life (PM Press, 2011). [Email: [email protected]; Web: www2.le.ac.uk/ departments/management/people/kmilburn]

Gianluca Miscione joined the School of Business of University College Dublin in June 2012. Previously he worked on information and organisation at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, University of Twente, Netherlands. Gianluca received his PhD. in In-

Author biographies

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formation Systems and Organisation from the Sociology Department of the University of Trento with a research on telemedicine in the Amazon. After that, he joined the Department of Informatics of the University of Oslo, where he developed his research on information infrastructures on the global scale. [Email: [email protected]]

Johanna Moisander is Professor of Organisational Communication at Aalto University School of Business. Her research interests centre on discursive and practice-based approaches to management and organisation studies and cultural consumer research. She has published her work in Organization Studies, Organization, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Consumption, Markets and Culture, and elsewhere. [Email: [email protected]]

Fiona Murphy is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in DCU School of Business, Ireland. She received her PhD in Anthropology from NUI Maynooth in 2009 for her research on trauma and memory among Australia’s Stolen Generations. Fiona’s current position sees her researching and teaching in the area of sustainability and critical marketing. [Email: [email protected]]

Aidan O’Driscoll is a Professsor in the School of Marketing at the Dublin Institute of Technology. His research interests are in resource theory, sustainability and business, and smart green design. He is a co-founder of the Business, Society and Sustainability research centre in DIT’s college of business. He serves on the sustainable enterprise group of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC), and is a director of Mercury Digital Publications, War Child Ireland and Irish Literary Trust. [Email: [email protected]]

Lisa O’Malley is Head of Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Limerick. Lisa has published widely on marketing and consumption and her work has appeared in the journals Marketing Theory, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Service Industries Journal, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management and Consumption, Markets and Culture. Lisa is on the editorial board of Marketing Theory and Journal of Marketing Management. [Email: [email protected]]

Per Østergaard is an Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing and Management, University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include interpretive consumer research, consumer culture, branding, fashion and philosophy of science. He has published articles on women’s lingerie consumption and identity construction, and books on social science research methods. He is currently research director for an innovation network on market, communication and consumption. Address: University of Southern Denmark, Department of Marketing and Management, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark. [Email: [email protected]]

Andy Prothero is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs of the Business School at University College Dublin, Ireland. Prior to moving to Ireland in 1999, Andy lectured at universities in Wales and Scotland and also spent a sabbatical period at Arizona State University in 2002. Her research broadly explores the area of Marketing in Society. Specific research projects have focused on, for example, advertising to children, motherhood and consumption, sustainability marketing, and sustainable consumption; and she has published widely in these areas. In 2005 Andy was the recipient of a UCD President’s Research Fellowship award and is currently working on a project from the award exploring ‘Ethics in Business Education’. Andy currently serves as Associate Editor of the Global Policy and the Environment Track for the Journal of Macromarketing, and as Associate Editor for the Journal of Marketing Management. [Email: [email protected]]

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Author biographies

Philip Roscoe is Reader in Management at the School of Management, University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the formation and organisation of markets and on processes of economisation. He previously taught at Sup de Co Montpellier, and was a post-doctoral researcher at Lancaster University Management School. He has a PhD in management from Lancaster University, an MPhil in medieval Arabic thought from Oxford University, and a BA in theology from the University of Leeds. In 2011 he was one of the winners of the inaugural AHRC BBC Radio 3 ‘New Generation Thinkers’ scheme; his book I Spend Therefore I Am was published by Viking (Penguin) in February 2014. [Email: [email protected]]

Michael Saren is Professor of Marketing at the University of Leicester. His interests include marketing theory, critical marketing and marketing technology. His recent research projects have investigated identity performances and gender expressions at the Whitby Goth festival, the privatised space of Starbucks and interpreting visitors’ behaviour and motivations at the ‘Bodyworlds’ exhibition. [Email: [email protected], Tel. +44 (0) 116 223 1011]

John F. Sherry, Jr., Herrick Professor of Marketing, University of Notre Dame, studies brand strategy and experiential consumption. Sherry is past President both of the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium and the Association for Consumer Research. He is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. [Email: [email protected]]

Jack Tillotson is a doctoral candidate at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. His research explores the intersection of consumption and mythology using ethnographic methods. [Email: [email protected]]

Terrence Witkowski is Professor of Marketing and Director of the International Business Program at California State University, Long Beach. Educated at Northwestern, UCLA, and UC Berkeley, he has published over 115 journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and abstracts, book reviews and other works. He focuses on marketing and consumer history with additional research in international marketing. He is editor of the Journal of Macromarketing and sits on the editorial review boards of several other journals. [Email: [email protected]]

Anna Zueva-Owens, International Business was Anna’s original field, but her doctoral work on cultural change in acquisitions introduced her to sociology, social psychology and poststructural methodologies. She is now researching business ethics topics using theoretical notions such as relational governance, governmentality, sovereignty and discourse. Myth-based analysis is her most recent direction. [Email: [email protected]]

Acknowledgements

Organising a conference, even an intimate one such as this, involves considerable efforts from different parties. We are most grateful to those listed below who have helped bring our gathering to fruition. We are thankful to our distinguished guests Neil Buttimer and Edel Breathnach, who graciously took up our invitation to act as keynote speakers for this event, thus broadening our horizons by relating our discussion of myth and markets to the academic study of Celtic culture and Folklore. We are very grateful for the diligence of Gemma Marren who copy-edited this text, Sheila Stephenson who attended to the type-setting and George Campbell, who designed the cover, each of whom patiently responded to our various requests. The support of our UCD colleagues Maura Mulvey, Susi Geiger, Ciaran Ó hÓgartaigh and Peter Keenan is very much appreciated. The Business School Research Fund, University College Dublin and the Arts and Humanities Benefactions Fund, Trinity College Dublin, generously contributed towards the costs of producing these proceedings. Thank you to each of our authors for answering our call and producing some truly memorable papers. Imelda O’Loan and Paul Gosling enthusiastically advised us on local connections to the Táin. We are grateful to Fáilte Ireland for providing us with the bags. Last but not least, we extend a big thank you to Paul and the staff at Ghan House, Carlingford, for making our stay so memorable. The organisers June, 2014