by Loren Ryter loren@u.washington.edu
September 6, 1994
Reprinted with
permission of the author on Academics
Studying Nike (Reebok, Adidas, & New Balance) Web Site
Photo 1: Original NikeTown Architectural Drawing - Loren Ryter (Larger Version)
Contrast Photo 1, the architect's more haunted image, with the more surreal spectacle of Nike's on line virtual tour of NikeTown.
Photo 2: NikeTown Melbourne (Carnivalesque Protest is outside inhabiting in a different sense)
See More of NikeTown Melbourne Photos
[View
NikeTown
Protest Video by Jonathan in NikeTown
Chicago]
NIKETOWN
is simultaneously a fantasy and a reality.
NikeTown is a 24,000 square-foot "sports retail
theater" in Seattle, a 20,000 square-foot "pioneer retail
mega-store" in Portland, a 68,000 square-foot "landmark
experience" in Chicago, a 29,000 square-foot "convenient
meeting place" in Orange County, a 24,000 square-foot
"Retail Environmental System" in Atlanta, and a five-story
"inspirational event" in San Francisco, but its dominion
extends into the farthest corners of the globe and penetrates into the
deepest reaches of our minds.
NikeTown
is the Middle Ages Town Square brought to the future-in-the-present.
The landscape of NikeTown is dotted by "a dazzling
array" of "individual pavilions," each "designed
to look like individual store fronts," and which are "nearly
all in sight of each other" thanks to the towering "atrium
that rises from Town Square."
The ability to observe and to be observed from virtually any
point within the territory is a primary feature of the architecture of
NikeTown. The
"pavilions," which each "house a different product
line" such as "Golf, Tennis, Running, Basketball, Kids', and
Air Jordan¨," are in fact miniature homes, the sites to which
identities are fixed and around which blood loyalties are formed.
Town
Square plays the "dominant role" in NikeTown, acting as a
"central hub" which relentlessly projects, from gargantuan
video screens, a "hip, high energy" barrage of "sports
and cultural images."
Heroic figures of Athletes, towering "life-size"
within Town Square, each
embody the trinity of hero-product-self.
Cultural artifacts enshrined throughout the terrain of
NikeTown, such as the broken Tennis Racquet of John McEnroe, the Bat
of George Brett, or the Shoes of Charles Barkley, define the
parameters of the possible and the outlines of the imaginable.
NikeTown provides its citizens with a complete, modular,
sensory environment. The
denizens of NikeTown are orchestrated by manufactured background
sounds "ranging from chirping birds and crickets" to
"shoes 'squeaking'" to "tennis balls being whacked back
and forth" and they are warmed or cooled by "individually
tailored" temperature levels designed to "enhance and
complement" the featured product line.
In short, NikeTown is a total visual, aural, and tactile
assault, whose finest details are meticulously articulated by
technologies of broadcasting, lighting, audio, and temperature, which
produce a nearly inescapable verisimilitude.
There
are no acknowledged cracks in NikeTown. Yet in the deeper reaches of
the alleyways, one can hear young men shout "give it up, mutha
fucka!" as they rip the Product, which is tantamount to the
soul_, from the still-warm feet of their victim.
No official of NikeTown would authorize such methods of Product
acquisition, yet the Product is so entangled with the self, so
encrusted with what it means to be a human in NikeTown, that it is of
little wonder that the necessity of possession should obviate the need
for kindness. In the
thriving, festive heart of NikeTown, the Product is divorced from
production, and the Shoe-itself exists always-already created.
Yet in the most distant outlying reaches of NikeTown, the
Product is in fact produced by the nimble and docile bodies of female
workers trained either and only to stitch or to glue, who don't have
the liberty to leave their work-compounds without specific management
authorization, who earn lower than subsistence wages, who are
chronically malnourished, who would have to work nearly one thousand
lifetimes to earn Michael Jordan's annual product endorsement fee, and
who are not infrequently raped and murdered by paramilitary death
squads if they attempt to organize to improve their wages and working
conditions._
The
entire edifice of NikeTown is held up by an infrastructure of
regulations, rules, and institutions which guarantee its smooth
operation and without the intervention of which NikeTown could not be
sustained. These
"impersonal" rules dictate that anyone not in compliance
with the function of NikeTown (that is to consume the Product/subject
the self) will be cited, incarcerated, or expelled.
In some areas, non-consumptive sitting constitutes a sufficient
legal breach to warrant penalization.
At all levels: municipally, nationally, and internationally,
institutions like the police, the state, the military, the banks, and
the International Monetary Fund operate to guarantee NikeTown
"the freedom to expand" and to carry with it its
characteristic host of significations, cultural proclivities, and modi
operandi.
NikeTown
as Domination
Globally,
no other "freedoms" are guaranteed by such a secure
network of institutional backing.
A
kind of double-domination undergrids NikeTown.
Both
types of domination occur under the rubric of "impersonal rules
and norms" and both are in fact experienced intensely personally
inasmuch as they scar living bodies and/or the souls which contain
them. The more obvious first type is seen from the standpoint of
oppressed groups, whose own "objective reality" does not
conform to dominant images/truths projected from the Town Square video
screens. This form of
domination is typified by the slain labor organizer, the malnourished
sweat-shop worker, or the homeless person driven off the regulated
NikeTown streets (realistic even to the "actual manhole
covers") by the policeŅagents of enforcement of the impersonal
rules who are seen nevertheless in entirely personal terms.
The
second type of domination is more subtle, as it involves the
contortion of self and identity by various micro-technologies of
power, what Foucault broadly characterizes as the modern disciplines:
The
disciplines became the general formulas of domination.
They were different from slavery because they were not based on
a relation of appropriation of bodies; indeed, the elegance of the
discipline lay in the fact that it could dispense with this costly and
violent relation by obtaining effects of utility at least as great.
(Foucault 1984, 181)
That
is, modern technologies of power, which produce self-regulating
subjects, are more efficient, but yet no less dominating, than the
cruder technologies of direct bodily intervention which preceded them.
He argues that these modern techniques leave incisions at least
as deep, and their effects are more total, going to the core of being
rather than the surface of skin.
While Foucault focuses on specific institutions like the modern
prison, hospitals, and mental institutions, his approach could be
applied just as fruitfully to the normalizing potential and
subject-productive power of mythologized commodities such as Nike
shoes. With the Heroic
Shoe occupying such a prominent position within the life world, with
its centrality on display at every turn, subjects construct their own
subjectivity with primary reference to it._
With body and soul so shaped into conformity with
commodity-image, one can appreciate the intensity of the physical pain
generated by the feeling of inadequacy and incompleteness arising from
the lack possession of the Product.
It is a pain so intense that one might even excuse a person led
to kill in order to regain his very identity.
Now
that some of the geography and dynamics of NikeTown are somewhat more
clear, it is at last possible to make (non)sense of the question of
whether domination is getting better or worse as history progresses.
For it is only from within the borders of NikeTown that one is
led to wonder about how to distinguish and then how to judge personal
and impersonal domination, because here the impression that they are
distinguishable stubbornly retains its solidity.
The very idea that it is not only possible to ask, but to
positively and generally determine, whether domination has been
getting better as history unfolds, epitomizes the dangerous
Enlightenment confidence in independent, objective reason which Michel
Foucault sought to undermine in his genealogical studies of the
present. I intend to argue in the remainder of this paper,
more or less with Foucault, that the desire to pronounce a positive
verdict on the normative status of particular forms of domination will
lead us (and has repeatedly led us) to very spurious conclusions and
to ethically untenable, if not to say brutal, practical positions.
What we will need instead are methods to identify and resist
various forms of domination, the most immediate of which will always
be the regimes of the present.
Global
System of Power and NikeTown
As
we have seen, within the same global system of power relations,
complex varieties of domination exit along multiple axes
simultaneously._ However,
let's assume for the sake of argument that instead of looking at how
different forms of domination affect people who are subject to the
given order, we were to start from the perspective of ideal types of
social arrangements as envisioned by charismatic figures and as
institutionalized by elites. We
could then draw the two ideal types of "personal
domination," which would be characterized by personal, affect
relations between a ruler and his subjects, and "impersonal
domination" which would be characterized by an order governed
impartially according to codified rules, regulations, and norms.
We would then proceed to the next step of observing that
personal domination seems to correspond to "traditional
domination," and impersonal domination to "rational-legal
domination," as elaborated by Max Weber.
Weber regarded traditional domination to be legitimate as long
as it rested "on an established belief in the sanctity of
immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority
under them." Similarly, rational-legal authority is legitimate as
long as it rested "on a belief in the legality of enacted rules
and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue
commands." (Weber 1978, 215)
From the Weberian "value-neutral" perspective, when
these conditions are met, both are regarded as equally legitimate, but
there remains the temptation to declare which one is less
legitimate.
These
two pieces seem to snap rather neatly into History.
Traditional (personal) domination is what they had in the
middle ages, with barons lording it over the teaming masses of feudal
serfs. Peasants toiled
the land from dawn to dusk, and were forced to pay large portions of
their harvest to their lords. If
they disobeyed direct commands of the lords or the sovereign, they
were subject to all kinds of cruel punishment, or even execution by
the vilest of means. Rational-legal
domination, on the other hand, is what we have today in the modern
West, where every individual is subject to the same universal laws,
yet where there are still large gaps in wealth.
Violators of the laws are punished, but the techniques of
punishment are humane. It
seems, if History is any evidence, that the world is progressing along
its natural course, unfolding into ever-higher levels of rationality
and humanity. One might
easily ask, how could we not help it along?
Both
Foucault and Franz Fanon ridicule this view of history.
Foucault insists that the genealogies he is writing are
histories of the present, since the only possible perspective from
which to squint over one's shoulders is from where one sits.
Foucault's is a history filled with contingency, one which
fluctuates rather than unfolds. Joan
Cocks articulates a similar notion of history, doubting that history
is "a matter of an inevitable or even a possible progression from
domination to freedom" and venturing that at best it seems to
"move in a jolting way between ordinary and abnormal times."
(Cocks, 221) The
anti-imperialist writer Frantz Fanon, though subscribing to a
decidedly Marxist conception historical resolution, satirizes the
colonialist conceit that History ends where he stands:
The settler
makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute
beginning...he is the unceasing cause: "If we leave, all is lost,
and the country will go back to the Middle Ages...."
The history which he writes is not the history of the country
which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all
that she skims off, all that she violates and starves (Fanon 1963, 51).
The
end of history, then, appears to be merely a compliment one pays to
one's own conquest.
If we can't presume that history is moving in a particular direction, can't we at least still ask which ideal type of domination, personal or impersonal, is worse? Most decidedly not. To ask which form of domination is worse entails also making a judgment about the opposite question: "which form of domination is better?" From better, it is a small slip to best, and from best, it is only a slight nudge to Truth. Once such a normative proclamation has been made, a theorist will naturally tend to become a propagandist for his or her favored system of domination. In fact, more often than not, the theorist will forget that the issue of domination had ever been a question in the first place, so satisfied he will be with his moral certainties, and will then turn to the more practical problem of how to best institutionalize his pet system of authority. Western academics have been particularly prone to take this turn, especially in the field of comparative politics, which since its inception has been primarily concerned with the problem Fanon deplores: how to make them look more like us. And so it is that "development" remains the most pressing issue among comparativists to this day, despite a number of important critical challenges._
Nobel
prize-winning economist Douglass North demonstrates the tenacity with
which one can wrestle with the "problem" of the lack of
development in third world countries.
To be fair, it is not clear that the question of domination
ever nagged mildly at his lauded intellect, as his chief concern is
merely one of process: how
can institutions be created that will enforce a system of property
rights which will best approximate the neo-classical economists' ideal
of zero-transaction costs and assure minimal transaction costs and
maximal efficiency? After
all, according to North, "third world countries are poor because
the institutional constraints define a set of payoffs to
political/economic activity that do not encourage productive
activities." (North, 110)
Since
the goal is efficiency, the
task is to identify and then facilitate the formation of institutions
which will exhibit the necessary characteristics to eradicate formal
and informal constraints which block increased economic performance.
Some of these informal constraints, which he defines as
habitual cultural traits, may include such things as a high value on
human life and dignity, or equitable distribution of wealth.
As Gregg Miller pointed out, such informal constraint would
lead to intolerably high transaction costs due to affect.
In passing, North does note that "the price paid for
adaptive efficiency" is the wiping out of the losers, who include
farmers, laborers, Indians, slaves, and immigrants.
He adds that it would simply be "amazing" if
"maximizing activity" did not come "frequently at the
expense of others." (North, 134 & 136)
The losers, in other words, should make way for efficiency, the
presumed ultimate good.
North's
observation that there will always be losers in any new, emerging
social formation is hardly a new one, but only economists seem to be
able to take it with such indifference.
Karl Polanyi took a similar conclusion to different ends as he
developed his hypothesis that the market for land, labor, and money
arose out of a charismatic idea and eventually had to be
institutionalized with harsh measures and "highly artificial
stimulants administered to the body social" (Polanyi, 57):
Economic liberalism was the organizing principle of a society engaged in creating a market system...it evolved into a veritable faith in man's secular salvation through a self-regulating market. Such fanaticism was the result of the sudden aggravation of the task it found itself committed to: the magnitude of sufferings that were to be inflicted on innocent persons as well as the vast scope of the interlocking changes involved in the establishment of the new order. (Polanyi, 135)
Polanyi
argued that after decades of trying to protect the poor displaced by
the enclosure system in England under the Speedhamland Laws, some
economists came to the conclusion that if a competitive labor market
was to succeed, the poor and inefficient would simply have to starve.
After the revocation of the poor laws, Polanyi writes, Malthus
and Ricardo passed over the scenes of "secular perdition"
they had mandated in "icy silence."
(Polanyi, 98).
By
now the necessity to subject populations to "shock therapy"
in varying degrees or to impose IMF "austerity measures" is
accepted as conventional wisdom by development propagandists, and such
strategies are no doubt necessary to establish the goal of maximal
efficiency and economic growth. But
somewhere along the line it has been forgotten that development itself
is a political and moral project which like other "great
transformations" of social orders necessarily entails the
domination of people, not only the process of change, but in the
outcome as well.
Not everybody wants to live in NikeTown.
It seems to me that we are in no position to promote such
grand, totalizing projects which wreak this kind of havoc.
But neither does this mean we should do nothing.
One
is often led to suspect that the criticism Foucault offers of all
forms of domination must lead to an inability to act in the world.
On the contrary, an unwillingness to be trapped into answering
questions which lead one to formulate positive moral generalities can
lead to new strategies for activism:
What I want to do is not the history of solutions... I would like to do the genealogy of problems... My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. (Foucault 1984, 344)
In
other words, a political theorist must turn her critical sights on the
danger du jour, which more often than not is located in the present.
There is nothing to prevent one from casting the net of
criticism widely. Foucault
gives attention to the micro-physics of power as manifest in the
disciplines of modernity simply because they are our particular modes
of domination, and because we dwell so closely within these networks
that we might otherwise simply fail to notice their effects.
At the same time, practices do exist in the further corners of
NikeTown which we might also choose to oppose, but taking such a
course of action need not consequentially preference one form of
domination over another.
Bibliography
Cocks,
Joan. The Oppositonal Imagination:
Feminism, critique, and political theory. London, Routledge.
Fanon,
F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth.
New York, Grove Press.
Foucault,
M. (1979). Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Alan Sheridan, trans. New
York, Vintage Books.
Foucault,
M. (1984). Paul Rabinow,
Ed. The Foucault Reader.
New York, Pantheon Books.
North,
D. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance.
Cambridge University Press.
Polanyi,
K. (1957). The
Great Transformation. Boston,
Beacon Press.
Scott,
J. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance:
Hidden Transcripts. New
Haven, Yale University Press.
Tucker,
R. (1978)The Marx -Engles
Reader. Second
Edition. New York, W. W. Norton.
Weber,
M. (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology.
Berkeley, University of California Press.
NOTES
------------------------
_All
quotes taken from "NIKETOWN Retrospective," promotional
literature produced by NIKE, Inc.
_
I borrow Foucault's usage of "soul" as a modern 'soul' which
is to be seen as a "correlative of a certain technology of power
over the body" and which is produced by the functioning of power
"around, on, within the body."
It is to be understood as a part of the body, which is molded,
adjusted, and regulated by the effects of power.
(Foucault 1979, 29).
_According
to CBS's news program Street Stories, Michael Jordan receives
approximately $20 million annually to promote Nike products.
An Indonesian worker gets $1.30 per day, on average.
At the same time in Indonesia, the poverty line was $1.85 per
day. I calculated that if
a worker worked 6 days a week for fifty years at that wage, it would
take her 986 lifetimes to earn Michael Jordan's annual endorsement
fee. Two female labor
organizers have been killed under such circumstances within the past
year in Indonesia.
_i.e.
Seattle's recently enacted no-sitting ordinances which prohibit
sitting on public sidewalks during business hours.
_Many
contemporary Afro-American activists encourage the personification of
oppression in these agents of enforcement.
For example, Shaka Shakur writes:
"What does it community policing mean in
reality to de millions of kkkolonized New Afrikans? What does it mean
to have kkkolonial occupation personnel (kkkops) occupying Our
communities, interacting with Our families and children, parading up
and down de block putting down psychological warfare of iam your
friend, iam here to serve and protect?...Our relationship as a
kolonized people to de Akkka govt is one of oppression and domination,
one of kkkolonialism and not one of equality....It's bad when we get
reduced to a point where WE call for Our own enslavement, where WE
mistake slavery/KKKolonialism for Freedom."
Shaka Shakur, "Community Po-Licking" in Copwatch
Report, (Berkeley: Spring 1993) Pamphlet.
_This
is why the neo-classical response to this entire analogy misses the
point. They would claim
that the existence of NikeTown is merely a response to individual
consumer demand for athletic shoes.
Yet this view assumes that demands are external to the medium
and technology of exchange. However,
the "postmodern" view insists that the visibility of the
commodity itself generates a desiring subject.
_See
Cocks pp 4-6 for a useful elaboration.
_Of
course one would include dependency theory in this category, but the
work of interpretivists like Vandana Shiva and Wolfgang Sachs is far
more interesting. See
Sachs, ed. The Development Dictionary.
