Trading Solidarity

images that we might mistake for socialist posters are instead recuperated to sell cars.

Indeed. This is said about the appropriation of revolutionary figures and symbols into banal consumerism. I am thinking specifically of Che merchandise. Tattoos are similarly characterized as a mainstream subversion. (Here, one also sees the need for more nuanced categories or schema for understanding our world. Tattoos, for instance, may have nothing to do with subversion per se, but may be a vote of confidence in the permanence of an affective relationship to someone or something, including a particular brand of politics.)

On a funnier note, check this out.

“to whom are these representations of labor selling? Why this now? What does this move say about our historical moment?”

These are the fundamental questions, among others, that we are trying to deal with. I mean “we” in both the narrow and broad sense: this blog and its reader-participants, and also the larger intellectual community.

Thinking along the lines I drew before, let me offer that these representations of labor are being sold to labor itself. Specifically, the Toyota ad I referred to was showcasing a four-door sedan, which is more or less understood as a family car. Family, then, expands from one’s direct kin to the lager ‘family’ of fellow workers and even more broadly the nation. The car is an explicitly middle-class car spread across a ten thousand dollar range between its base model and the top end. The ‘labor’ buying this car ranges from line workers to middle management, the latter being spread across many economic sectors not merely the automotive. Labor, in its role as consumer, is being sold its own production as a mode of solidarity with other labor. Strange and brilliant (in that evil genius kind of way).

Fair trade coffee, to use an example with which I have some familiarity, seems to carry similar affective loads. ‘Family,’ or solidarity perhaps, is expanded transnationally to include workers in the developing world through consumption habits that demonstrate some desire for their well-being. Cynically, of course, one is always skeptical what ‘fair trade’ actually means to the field workers in terms of living conditions or if, like ISO9000, it is merely a purchased label that makes our coffee more palatable. Holding both conditions as valid but not entirely true, I submit that the pressure for and availability of ‘fair trade’ goods is a positive step toward what Robbins would call “feeling beyond the nation” More specifically, consuming ‘fair trade’ products is a move toward ‘cosmopolitan’ affect because it is an attempt to bring our daily lives into greater harmony with our desire for a more equitable world. At its best, and I realize I may be overly generous here, ‘fair trade’ coffee, hybrid cars and such trends hint toward the incorporation of larger solidarities into our everyday culture.

Insofar as buying ‘foreign’ cars was animated by a desire to support (fellow) labor, understood in that ad as unionized American workers, then consuming ‘fair trade’ products represents an extension of that same “imagined community” and its potential affective ties. Both are, from a generous and optimistic view, steps toward a cultural ethos that incorporates ‘global feeling’ into everyday experience.

Perhaps "production" is worth emphasizing here: the "product" of knowledge here may be linked not only to "quality" indicators as ISO 9000, but also college rankings and ambiguous terms such as "excellence" that are used by alumni organizations, state legislators, and disciplinary (and cross-disciplinary) award systems.

Damn! The hammer falls on we who are paid to dissent. (I’m thinking of Bruce during Stoler’s colloquium). I know this is part of your research and I would love to hear more of your thoughts on rewarding “knowledge production,” especially when the product is—ostensibly—dissent.