weakness of this book. Instead we get an in-depth
outline of how animals were incorporated into the
latter’s philosophies to do differing things, such as, for
Deleuze, to smash out of the notion of a bubble, so as
to make animals even more radically relational. In this
Uexküll disappears for long sections of the book, while
Buchanan never really looks at the possible relevance
to recent philosophy of any of Uexküll’s concepts
beyond that of his Umwelten notion. Moreover, the lack
of any real engagement with work from biosemiotics,
and semiotics more generally, means that the area
where Uexküll has most clearly risen to prominence,
and where a massive amount of scholarship (some
good, some not so good, as ever), has been done on his
relations with philosophy, is somewhat passed over.
Still, this is a compelling book, even if the greater
concentration on Heidegger means that Onto-Ethologies
constitutes something of a lost opportunity to have
engaged in more detail with other traditions of thought.
This is particularly true of the recent emergence of
Deleuze and Guattari as philosophers who, for many,
are thought to aid an ecological politics that would be
more ecological than ‘ecology as a science’, with all the
repercussions this would have for the ‘animal question’.
Recent work by Patrick Hayden, Bernd Herzogenrath
and others is seeking to push at a radical naturalism
that Uexküll can also be seen to be generating. This
book may aid these linkages and connections, helping
to produce a more philosophically engaged politics of
human–animal practices.
Chris Wilbert
New asceticism
Jim McGuigan, Cool Capitalism, Pluto Press, London, 2009. 282 pp., £50.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 978 0 74532 640
5 hb., 978 0 74532 678 8 pb.
The problem that Jim McGuigan’s impressively wideranging book addresses – capital’s capacity to incorporate dissent – is an old one. Under neoliberal hegemony,
however, capital’s omniphagic capacity to consume all
exeriority became supercharged. Capital did not merely
absorb disaffection, it fed on it. McGuigan identifies
the metabolization of the desires and discourses of
the 1960s’ counterculture as the crucial moment in
this process. He draws upon Thomas Frank’s doctoral
thesis, The Conquest of Cool, which argues that,
far from undermining capitalism, the countercultural
rebellions of the 1960s ‘effectively – and ironically
– refreshed the cultural and political economy of
corporate America’.
‘Coolness’ is a necessarily nebulous concept, in part
because it is always shifting (hence the phenomenon
of corporate ‘cool hunters’, charged with pursuing
and capturing it). McGuigan shows that the concept
of ‘coolness’ originated in Africa, and, in America,
‘coolness’ – from jazz to hip-hop – has always been
associated with black culture. Business schools and
management gurus seized upon the rhetoric and
imagery of the counterculture in the 1960s, but they
were only able fully to incorporate ‘coolness’ in the
1990s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the East
and the emergence of post-Fordism in the West. In the
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last thirty years, the older spirit of capitalism analysed
by Max Weber, based on asceticism and rational calculation, has been superseded by the new spirit theorized
by Boltanski and Chiapello. Hijacking the rhetoric of
May ’68, this new capitalism privileged spontaneity,
multitasking and hedonism. By the twenty-first century,
‘cool’ and ‘capitalism’ are firmly yoked together, and
not only in the West. A 2004 market research report
showed that ‘Chinese students value “cool” … and they
associate it with leading Western or Westernized brand
companies, most notably Nike, Sony, Adidas, BMW,
Microsoft, Coca-Cola, IBM, Nokia, Samsung, Ferrari
and Christian Dior.’ Whilst originating in the USA,
‘cool capitalism’ now has global appeal:
The legitimacy of market forces in any sphere of life,
consumer sovereignty, widespread participation in
capitalism through share ownership, anti-government
rhetoric, ‘cool’ culture and the argot associated with
it, all these elements emanate from the US but are
now global in their reach, representing the popular
appeal of neoliberalism around the world
One of the stories of the last thirty years has been
the annexing and subduing of bohemia by business,
and McGuigan’s discussion of bohemia proves to be
one of the most fascinating sections of the book. He
returns to Marcuse’s concept of art as ‘the Great
Refusal – the protest against that which is’. Whilst
conceding that Marcuse’s thought was in the end
too ‘totalizing’, McGuigan defends Marcuse from the
common criticism that he was a ‘cultural elitist’. This
kind of dismissal of Marcuse is of course typical of
the flattened out ‘democratization’ which is very much
a part of the new spirit of capitalism, and which has
successfully smeared Marxism at the same time as
it has denigrated intellectualism. As Jameson argues
in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’ (recently
collected in Valences of the Dialectic), ‘the repudiation of Marcuse at once takes a political and an
anti-intellectual form (who is the philosopher-king
appointed to adjudicate between the true and the false
in these matters, etc.?).’
McGuigan traces the Great Refusal back to the Paris
of the 1830s and the 1840s. From the start, bohemianism was caught in a relationship with the bourgeoisie
that was both symbiotic and antagonistic. Even as they
excoriated bourgeois mores, the bohemians depended
on the bourgeoisie for money, and the way that a series
of art movements – realism, naturalism, impressionism,
cubism – first of all challenged and then were absorbed
into the dominant culture is the paradigm case of
the process of rebellion and recuperation which has
characterized capitalist innovation. ‘Each movement
challenged academic art, was at first rejected by the
academy and eventually usurped the old academy
and became the new one, in a dialectic of refusal and
incorporation.’ Yet this process seems to have been
short-circuited by the emergence of something like the
Young British Artists of the 1990s. Here, the moment
of ‘rebellion’ and incorporation became simultaneous.
With someone like Damien Hirst, an attenuated and
anodyne sense of ‘shock’ was coterminous with – even
preceded by – his championing by business. The
partnership between Charles Saatchi and Hirst brought
advertising and art – which had shadowed each other
throughout the twentieth century – into a tight synergy.
If, before, advertising had plundered art, now art – like
every other form of culture – had become a form of
advertising. In these conditions, ‘the Great Refusal’
becomes a passé romanticism, and the required attitude
is a chic realism which fully embraces consumerism. The tastemakers in this era of hyper-conspicuous
consumption are not artists, but celebrities: McGuigan
gives the examples of David Beckham and Michael
Jordan. Nike’s marketing of the Air Jordan sneakers is
for McGuigan ‘an exemplary case of the articulation of
the articulation of a life-enhancing sport (basketball),
blackness and global – that is, American – consumer
culture under the dominant sign of “cool”.’ Yet, as
Naomi Klein long ago made us aware, Nike is also
notorious for its exploitative outsourcing of labour to
sweatshops. Capitalism’s ‘cool’ veneer – McGuigan
also points to mobile phones, manufactured in factories
in Shenzen, where there is insufficient ventilation and
a high concentration of toxic substances – is typically
a front for the most exploitative processes.
Even as it cites the resurgence of socialism in
South America, McGuigan’s concluding chapter on
anti-capitalism maintains that ‘capitalism is here to
stay, having survived any conceivable challenge to its
reason to be’. This might have seemed to be the case
at neoliberalism’s moment of high pomp, but things
appear rather different in the wake of the financial
crash. Capitalism may not have instantly perished,
as some hoped, but neither has it survived the crash
intact. Only a few years ago, capitalism confidently
proclaimed itself the only system that worked, but
we are now in a situation in which nothing seems
to work. As Martin Wolf declared in the Financial
Times last year, ‘the assumptions that ruled policy and
politics over three decades suddenly look as outdated
as revolutionary socialism’. Cool Capitalism does a
thorough job in identifying what anti-capitalism is
still up against, but the book begs the question: is it
necessary to create a ‘cool’ anti-capitalism, or should
we be seeking to overcome the ‘coolness’ that has
supported capitalism for the last thirty years? ‘Coolness’ has in many ways served as a synonym for
‘contemporary’, and it is, without a doubt, imperative
that anti-capitalism resist cool capitalism’s identification of modernization with neoliberalization. Yet is it
also necessary to defeat ‘coolness’ itself? In place of
consumerism’s slick insouciance, can we posit a new
ascesis, a new Great Refusal?
Mark Fisher
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