***** Slavoj Zizek, "Seize the Day: Lenin's Legacy," _The Guardian_ 23 July 2002, <http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,761903,00.html>
...John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: "And if the stock market profited everybody?" The strategy is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils the egalitarian communist agenda - everybody can participate in it. Berger proposes a comparison: "Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would, of course, not work. Why? The swastika addressed potential victors, not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice." In contrast, the hammer and sickle invokes the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice". At the very moment this hope is proclaimed dead according to the hegemonic ideology of the "end of ideologies", a paradigmatic post-industrial enterprise (is there anything more post-industrial than dealing in stocks on the internet?) mobilises it once more. The hope continues to haunt us. *****
***** New York Times 1 December 2002 How the Disposable Sofa Conquered America By JOHN LELAND
Sitting in a modern, uncluttered office in Almhult, Sweden, earlier this year, a woman named Josephine Rydberg-Dumont advanced a global theory of home. ''We're ready for modernism now,'' she said. ''When it first came, it was for the few. Now it is for the many....'' Rydberg-Dumont, 47, is the managing director of Ikea of Sweden, the creative nexus for what has grown to a $10.8 billion worldwide operation....She was heading toward a vision of material utopia in which products are the problem and more products are the solution....Last year, 29.3 million people worked their way through the directed Habitrail of an American Ikea store. In the slog of recession, Ikea sales for the year that ended in August were up 5 percent over the previous year....
The train ride to Almhult from Copenhagen, the nearest major city, passes through an unattractive grind of rocky forests, broken incongruously by a tiny Wild West theme park called Amerika. The theme park, gone in the span of a train whistle, is a small gesture in the way of cultural translation and tribute, like the American programs that cycle through Swedish TV.
America is here and not here. In the 19th century, much of the region's population immigrated to places like Minnesota and Nebraska, leaving those who stayed behind to squeeze a slender living from crafts and small farming. In 1953, Ingvar Kamprad opened a furniture showroom here. He combined his initials with those of Elmtaryd, the farm where he grew up, and the village of Agunnaryd, his hometown, to form the name Ikea. Today, the United States -- with its shifting economies, its eager trendiness and its unique demographics -- may control a good deal of the future fortunes of Kamprad's company. It's certain that his company has anticipated a good deal of the future of the United States.
To peer into the world of Ikea for any time is to dive into the thorny bramble of class, in particular the twisted course of class during the 1990's. In the peculiar rites of the company culture, from Almhult outward, class is always in the foreground. The company's 70,000 employees are called ''co-workers''; the target customers are referred to as ''the many,'' or sometimes ''people with thin wallets.'' Private offices are rare; everyone is on a first-name basis. Bill Agee, an American who transferred to Almhult five years ago, said he had to adjust upon entry. ''It's a little religious or missionary in a sense,'' he said, ''but it's who we are.'' The overt goodyism of it meshed with his experiences of Sweden as a whole. When he first arrived, he made a wrong turn down a one-way street. Instead of screaming at him, people on the street wagged fingers -- ''as if to say, 'You're not doing your part to support a better Sweden,''' he said. ''That bothered me more than someone giving me the finger.''
The office chatter has a benevolent ''Star Trek'' vibe: the answer is always design, and the reward for such answers is world domination. The most basic products come packaged as a mission, rendered under the slogan ''democratic design.'' Even the company's newsletter includes articles on the effectiveness of the newsletter: a recent issue cited a study showing that ''three out of four Ikea co-workers read the magazine regularly.'' Peter Fiell, who researched the company for his book ''Industrial Design A-Z,'' described the ethos as a kind of moral humanism played out in chairs and shelving units. ''It goes back to Charles Eames -- how to get the most quality to the greatest number of people for the least money,'' Fiell said. ''That's the nucleus of modernism. It's inherently optimistic.''...
Among the many repercussions of the technology boom of the 1990's was that it flipped the compass points of American class. Suddenly new money was more dynamic, more mesmerizing than old money....Appropriate to the new economy, the furnishings were expensive, but their value lay not in the materials but in an overlay of information, a narrative of design. They told a story that flattered both the owner and his audience. It was retro and futurist, a comforting view of dizzying change. For Ikea, this was a recipe for opportunity. Marble was expensive; color could be done cheap.
Josephine Rydberg-Dumont noticed a corollary change that had similar advantages for Ikea's American experiment: an upmarketing of downmarket goods. Calvin Klein's cK T-shirts, Starbucks coffee, basketball shoes designed as if for the space program, sushi in the Grand Union -- these were tokens of conspicuous quality for a broad part of the population. ''Ten or 15 years ago, traveling in the United States, you couldn't eat well,'' she said. ''You couldn't get good coffee. Now you can get good bread in the supermarket, and people think that's normal. I like that very much. That's more important to the good life than the availability of expensive wines. That's what Ikea is about.''
It was a particularly good thing to be about in the 1990's, a decade in which the economic folk tales were of astronomical success (or, by the end, vertiginous falls), but the broad reality was quite different: for Americans in the middle of the wage scale, real earnings, adjusted for inflation, declined or held flat for much of the decade. Even when they were putting away a few dollars, members of the middle class were losing ground to the people to whose status they aspired, the heroes of those folk tales. The majority of Americans were participants in a zeitgeist of obscene riches without having a piece of the action.
What they could have, in just the same degree as the new economy's new rich, was the immaterial titillations of design. Design was a perfect class commodity for a class that was going nowhere. It added value to a toilet brush or a garbage pail, to say nothing of personal computers. The ubiquity of these fluid computer-generated designs suggested an attractive world of class mobility. It promised that you could be moving forward, even if your paycheck was slipping back: why, just look at your toothbrush, designed by Philippe Starck for Alessi. Glossy design magazines sat side by side with the tabloids in supermarket checkout lines. Decor gurus built cable TV franchises among the same daytime audiences that used to watch soap operas. Target invited the six-pack public into the (blob-shaped) pool, introducing conspicuously cool lines by the name-brand designers Starck and Michael Graves. Here was a distinctly American perspective on democratic design: if you couldn't afford to make your home look like Buckingham Palace, you could get some of the snob appeal of an Ian Schrager boutique hotel. Not only that, the newer take was better.
And what that new perspective looked like, more than anything, was Ikea. Showcased in magazines, bruited among early adopters, Ikea suited the benign technocracy and ironic wink of the new economy. Where stores like Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware offer the comfort of prefab antiques, with a promise of permanence and connection with the past, Ikea fabricates a connection with motion itself. With little change in the product line, the company shifted its profile from its blandly functional side to its design side -- if not among the literal ''many,'' then among the taste makers the many followed. ''They raised the popular consciousness of design,'' Fiell said. ''It's based on a highly optimistic view of the future, with equality of opportunity and an integrated look that is part of the identity.'' Sold only in Ikea stores, surrounded by a universe of other Ikea goods, the designs aim for an instant sugar rush. Like the Swedish clothing chain H.&M., whose store opening clogged Manhattan sidewalks in April 2000, it promises 360 degrees of immediate visual candy, at impulsive, no-guilt prices -- what the critic George W.S. Trow has called the context of no context. It's like being on TV, all shimmery surface. As a set designer for MTV's ''Real World'' told me, ''We love Ikea.''
The aroma of impermanence that hung over a lot of Ikea products, the nicked veneers and wobbly joints of Ikea regret, no longer seemed such a problem. Impermanence had become a mark of progress, not of decay. After years in the red, Ikea's revenues in the United States doubled over a four-year period, to $1.27 billion in 2001 from $600 million in 1997. The company expanded from 5 stores in the United States at the start of the 90's to 15 stores now and plans to add 50 more in North America by 2013. The United States is the company's third-biggest market, after Germany and Britain. The company declines to give information about profits, but as an indication of the number of people visiting these stores, the in-house restaurants, serving Swedish meatballs and cured salmon, are now the 15th-largest food chain in America.
And though it was linked to the boom, the benign futurism has so far proved resistant to recession. ''Our philosophy should work in good times and bad times,'' said Lena Simonsson-Berge, marketing manager for Ikea North America. There would be no need to retune the Ikea pitch, she added. ''We are prepared for downturns.''
There is a price for all of Ikea's cost-cutting, and during my immersion in Almhult I felt the increasing chafe of design irritation. Little flaws, multiplied, mocked the cheery optimism of the veneers. Even in the company headquarters, cabinet doors never seemed to line up at right angles; in a conference room organized around four abutting beech Effektiv desks, each corner was a slightly different height. Joints wobbled. ''See, this is what I don't like,'' said Eric Linander, a communications officer, jiggling an unsteady table top. ''The design is good, but the quality is not so good.'' The minor glitches undercut the promise of material utopia: things weren't getting perfect; they were creaking from below. Like many logistic systems that are internally consistent, Ikea's populism does not accommodate the inherently individualistic revenge of imperfection: that delivering 80 percent of the quality for 60 percent of the price is not always a bargain. What looks good on ''Real World'' does not always wear well at home. Linander casually dropped a word to the wise: self-assembled furniture requires retightening over time.
The test of the limits of Ikea living lies in a pilot program called BoKlok, Swedish for ''Smart Living,'' that the company has instituted at scattered sites in Scandinavia. (See ''A Prefab Utopia,'' this page [@ <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/magazine/01UTOPIA.html>].) For nearly six years, in partnership with the international developer Skanska, the company has built small, prefab apartment buildings, expanding its design agenda beyond chairs and light fixtures to cover whole mini-communities and, by extension, the lives inside. So far, they have built more than 1,000 units and have branched into four countries. The inexpensive, pleasant apartments carry the overlay of ''democratic design'' to a logical conclusion. Madeleine Nobs, one of the three architects, all women, described the project in evangelical terms: ''As an architect, I think you can make people's lives better by design.''
For all of Ikea's rhetoric about social mission, however, there is an unspoken paradox to the company's efforts to build homey communities. With its huge parking lot and accompanying traffic glut, an Ikea store is often a smiley-faced enemy of community cohesion. The low prices draw customers away from smaller neighborhood shops, the nodes of community exchange; the volume of business attracts other mass retailers, creating big-box strip malls. Wary residents in Westchester County, N.Y., recently organized to fight Ikea in court, ultimately preventing the company from opening a store in New Rochelle. In the same way, Ikea's self-image as an ecofriendly company stands in direct contradiction to its campaigns telling you to toss out a perfectly good lamp.
But the company has an impressive track record for avoiding controversy and keeping its positive, even benevolent, image intact. Ikea was mentioned in a 1992 documentary that looked at child labor in Pakistan but managed to escape the damaging publicity lobbed at Nike and other multinationals, in part by forming strategic partnerships with groups like Greenpeace, Unicef and Save the Children. In 1998, when it was struggling with its environmental policy, Ikea reached out to Greenpeace and bankrolled a major research project by the World Resources Institute that impressed all involved parties. Most striking, in 1994, Ingvar Kamprad, the company's founder, was revealed to have supported various Nazi groups in the 1940's and 50's. He issued an apology, and in April 2001 the company expanded into Israel without incident. On opening day, 15,000 customers flooded the aisles.
On a recent afternoon, I muscled my way through the Ikea store in Elizabeth, N.J., which frequently tops $1 million in sales on a Saturday. Like all Ikea stores, it is set up to force shoppers through the whole store, instead of letting them head for their department of choice: a bit of gentle social coercion, the strong arm of democratic design. Three times each year, department heads follow customers through the maze, mapping their paces to see how to get the most from the traffic flow. When they noticed that men weren't following their female partners into the textile departments, they set up displays of tools just outside. ''We sold screwdrivers like you can't believe,'' Nordin said....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/magazine/01IKEA.html> *****
Cf. _Fight Club_, <http://www.fightclub.co.uk/>
Cf. Louis Proyect, "Frank Lloyd Wright," <http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/wright.htm>. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>