On Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of “Design Democracy”
If once we lived in a “system of objects,”1 today we live in a world of things. The era of mass consumption, awash in cheaply made gadgets and gizmos, has given way to a world in which every object is more than merely an object: each has become or has the potential to become a “thing.” These things are not oppositional to objects, but are instead supplemental to the object; they are defined, as Bill Brown suggests in Things, “as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects — their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.”2 The thing contains within it magic and mystery, the stuff dreams are made of.
Marketers and their corporate employers seem to understand, or at least intuit, this shift. Tasked with selling warehouses full of objects, they are increasingly transforming objects into things, or creating things outright in the hopes of sparking and fanning the flames of consumers’ passion. It seems that today’s capitalism is defined less by pastiche and a certain ahistoricity, as it was for Fredric Jameson, than by an intensification of formal novelty — what cultural critic Steven Shaviro has aptly termed the age of aesthetics.3 Things help create a world, an aesthetic dimension that we can assemble, inhabit, and presumably make our “own,” using the everyday items made available by the marketplace.
It is here that mass retailers like Wal-Mart and Target work in concert as one of the many vanguards of modern consumer culture. Offering low-cost items with mass appeal, both retail giants promise customers happier, fuller lives through the acquisition of ever more stuff, increasingly novel things, ever-expanding surfaces on which to express their personal style. These promises are, of course, myths invented by admen and -women, the spinmeisters of commerce, but the point here is not to offer facile condemnation or to reveal the hidden truths behind the shill. For what we see on the horizon of contemporary consumer culture has less to do with the branding and marketing of products than with the “thinging” of products, by way of an invitation issued by their physical composition: their design. The so-called big box stores have been enthusiastically embraced in some places and rejected in others, and they continue to amass high profits and to saturate markets. My goal here, through an exploration of Target’s celebration of design, is to begin to make sense of the role this big box retailer plays in the new age of aesthetics and what it means for the cultural dimension of the consumption of things. Enmeshed as we are in a growing world of things, in an increasingly aesthetic economy, we should take the opportunity to explore the mechanics by which big retailers are adapting to changes in consumption and pushing the boundaries and sensibilities of consumer sentiment.
We can begin with that cosmopolitan city that never sleeps, New York, teeming with millions of would-be consumers. And yet this hub of commercial activity, where mom-and-pop retailers and high-end boutiques peacefully coexist, has at best an ambivalent relationship with the big boxes. Wal-Mart, for example, has had a hard time making inroads in the Big Apple. In recent years New Yorkers have nixed the company’s plans for stores both in Queens and on Staten Island. To date, other than two locations on Long Island, the world’s largest retailer, known for low prices and unfair labor practices, continues to be an unwelcome intruder. Given New Yorkers’ apparent antipathy to Wal-Mart, it would seem that that other big box retailer so popular in Middle America would be struck down by the same blow. After all, aesthetics aside, the so-called House of Tar-zhay, like Wal-Mart, imports much of its mass-produced merchandise from China, a country not known for its fair treatment of factory workers, and has fought the unionization efforts of its own employees. Despite the many institutional similarities of Target and Wal- Mart, New Yorkers have a much more ambivalent relationship to Target.
The Target Buzz
One way Target has made inroads with Manhattanites is through transitory “pop-up” stores that open their doors for only a few weeks before morphing into something else. At the height of the 2001 holiday shopping season, for example, Target docked a 220-foot barge at the Chelsea Piers in New York Harbor to serve as a floating store. In 2003 it opened a temporary store in Rockefeller Center to promote its new line by the beloved New York designer Isaac Mizrahi, known for his car coats and schoolboy charisma. In the winter of 2006, a traveling Target in the form of a red double-decker bus emblazoned with Target’s trademark bull’s-eye made its way around Manhattan to promote a new line from British designer Luella Bartley — a line that would be available for only three months, after which another non-American designer would be spotlighted as part of Target’s GO International campaign. The GO International line itself, driven by the limited-edition collections of renowned designers from around the world, essentially turns the women’s apparel department of every Target into a buzz-worthy pop-up store, of sorts — cleverly lending an air of exclusivity to mass-produced fare.
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Notes
For his insightful contributions, I thank Ken Rufo. This article is part of a larger project for which I have gratefully received funding from the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the University of Washington’s Royalty Research Fund.
- See Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 2005).
- Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.
- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). See excerpts from Shaviro’s work-in-progress “The Age of Aesthetics” at his blog The Pinocchio Theory, www.shaviro.com/Blog.
