Part of the answer is that everyday life is now felt to be irredeemably alienated, so that only what violates or estranges it can be valid. For Post-Modern thought, the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug. Norms are just those aberrations we happen to endorse - in which case, since all aberrations are potential norms, they, too, ought to be suspect. And if consensus is the tyranny of the majority, as it seems to be for, say, Jean-Francois Lyotard, then there can be no radical consensus either. Since most purveyors of this wisdom pride themselves on their historicising cast of mind, it is ironic that they fail to see in it a reflection of the particular social conditions of modernity. For Samuel Johnson, it was the socially typical which was imaginatively enthralling, and aberration which was boring. Johnson had a proudly populist trust in the robustness of routine meanings, and saw language as embodying the common experience distilled from everyday practices. These days, it is not hard to find radicals who affirm the cause of the common people but dismiss their language as false consciousness. Post-Modern celebrations of the off-beat, marginal and minoritarian belong, among other more positive things, to an age in which the notion of a radical mass movement has become, not least for those too young to remember one, a contradiction in terms. [clip] ------------ Clip from March 25 New York Times: Living Arts Section New Blenders in Time for June Weddings By KARRIE JACOBS
[clip] Krups is not marketing LeVerrier's new machine, available since January, as a boy toy. But the company has done the next best thing: The imposing appliance, its oddly angled chrome base lending it the look of a sophisticated laboratory tool, is called the Power Xtreme Premium.
Sarah Reingewirtz, a Krups product manager in Closter, N.J., pointed out that earlier models were named Power X Plus and Power Xpert, but she said, "I can't tell you how it started."
Not that she has to. Clearly, the Krups blender is Xtreme for the same reason that the Cuisinart is Smart. Product differentiation isn't just about pure forms or blender gender but about language. The words don't describe the product; they describe the buyer. "It has to be the next new extreme," said J. Walker Smith, a managing partner in Yankelovich Partners, the market-research consultants. Although Smith cautioned that "people don't like being pandered to by marketers," he contended that Krups' use of the magic letter was apt, given that members of Generation X are now forming households. An extreme washer and dryer will, presumably, be next. The Smartpower blender, on the other hand, "has a special appeal to baby boomers, who think they're smarter than everyone else," he said.
Of course, compared to what appliance executives did in the '60s, when they assigned names to an unprecedented number of blender buttons, applying buzzwords like "smart" or "extreme" is child's play.
"When we came out with our 16-speed blender, eight of us sat up two nights straight, trying to get words with five letters, each one sounding a bit higher than the other," one unnamed marketer told Susan Strasser, the author of "Never Done: A History of American Housework" (Pantheon, 1982).
The Power Xtreme still uses some of those '60s words -- stir, whip, chop, mix, puree and liquefy -- on its stylish, low-rise '90s buttons. If the Power Xtreme were true to its name, it would employ a whole new vernacular: agitate, convulse, slash, thrash, mangle and destroy.