A POLITICS OF AESTHETICS?
The politics of aesthetics is concerned with the examination of the conflict between the established global aesthetic about what ‘good-looking’ means and the multivariate social forces that have risen to oppose such a global aesthetic. With relevance to globalization, the established global aesthetic on looking good is very much propagated by mass media and advertising. This is made possible by the advances in telecommunications and advertising that enable corporations to capture the imagination of millions globally about what it means to look good and to become beautiful by using its advertised products and/or lifestyle.
This established aesthetic is challenged and hence made possible due to sites of resistance which can be found globally and also utilize the same advances in telecommunications to resist and challenge it. A clear examination of the variations in tradition, culture, social norms and religion would enable one to determine the leverages in such a dichotomous political relationship both between states and within states.
GLOBALIZATION AS THE BADGE OF MODERNITY
The process of globalization has been deemed as the badge of modernity. The modern consumer is provided with an exorbitant range of choices of goods and services, whether real or not. The consumer has the choice to purchase and consume such goods and services in order to emulate the established global aesthetic of being beautiful. However, if one does not purchase or consume such goods and services for whatever reasons, one may be deemed as either going against progressive modernist standards or falling out of favour with the established global aesthetic of being beautiful.
In a sense, the consumption of such goods and services become cultural goods which one must possess in order to remain in acceptance by the established aesthetic order. One may not possess or consume such cultural goods for many reasons, some by choice while others by circumstance, both of which provide rich breeding sites of resistance against such a global aesthetic order. Post-modernists may reject such an established aesthetic order, perhaps deeming it a crass attempt by fashion industries to induce everyone to dress either like a Hollywood superstar or the lithe models on the catwalks of London, Paris and New York. While the majority of middle-class peoples in the Third World and even developed nations may not be able to purchase such cultural goods due to relative or absolute poverty, which is perhaps the main reason for the thriving trade in imitation goods.
UPROAR OVER BONE-THIN MODELS
Indeed, the recent uproar in fashion circles itself against using seemingly bone-thin, skeletal and underweight models is an example of global resistance to the established global aesthetic, what with fashion shows in Italy also following suit. This open secret of the high-class fashion industry to use lithe models has been widely documented and has been known to attract a cult following of teenage girls becoming anorexic and bulimic in attempts to emulate the bone-thin models who are often oppressed into maintaining their lithe figures. The reason why the revived debate has drawn so much attention within the industry and the media was that the self-imposed restriction against using lithe models came within the industry itself, from a high-class fashion show in Spain, attracting similar actions within the industry. This could be seen as a form of globalization-from-above, since it was initiated from the industry itself, a major player in the politics of aesthetics, and attracting other industry players to follow suit in its moralistic direction.
The fashion industry is indeed a major player in the politics of aesthetics, along with its fellow weight-loss, cosmetics industries and their mass advertising appendages. These three major industries thrive on making millions of people feel insecure about their bodies, which has become a powerful reflection of their identities and their self-confidence.
THE WEIGHT-LOSS SCAM
Through the use of models with ultra muscular and toned bodies, the weight-loss industry establishes them as the global aesthetic and induces millions to achieve bodies as toned as the models through the use of their advertised weight-loss goods and services. The cruel reality, as we all know, is that very few of us would actually attain such toned bodies in our lifetimes, whether we use the products or not. In fact, it would not be surprising to find that the advertising models themselves never once used the advertised products, but were simply head-hunted for the jobs because they already had very toned bodies.
However, such irresponsible advertising results in the endeavors of millions who buy not so much the product or advertised lifestyles, but into their own escapist dreams and fantasies about having a toned body. Capitalizing on this fact, weight-loss corporations have been known to be lax in controlling what chemicals and substances constitute their health products, resulting in products that are highly unhealthy while perhaps inducing short-term weight-loss through severe laxative effects. The Slim10 debacle in Singapore is a good case in point where there were many reports of adverse reactions experienced by local users, with the most serious resulting in liver complications and even failure.
Such obnoxious industries survive and continue to thrive as they capitalize on the individual’s entrapment in the global aesthetic of looking good. Corporations will never stop advertising such utopian lifestyles unless consumers demand for them to be banned, consumer demand being the raison de’tre for such superficial industries in the first place. Has globalization and modernity really accorded the consumer many new real choices?
HAS GLOBALIZATION ACCORDED REAL CHOICE?
The cruel truth remains that modernity has only succeeded in institutionalizing a certain false consciousness, where the consumer is led to believe that he/she can utilize the most advanced products from world-class pharmaceuticals to modify their bodies towards the established global aesthetic. What the consumer fails to see is the utopian nature of such an enterprise and how many irresponsible giant pharmaceuticals are profiting enormously by encouraging everyone to strive to be a copy of one another and shed their identity and self-confidence in the process.
SINGAPOREAN SLIM10 DEBACLE
The Singaporean authorities were surprisingly hush on the Slim10 issue, only issuing health warnings initially and banning the product’s sale eventually, with no legal action taken against the company. One wonders if this issue of liver failures upon consuming Slim10 had occurred in the US, it might have already resulted in multi-million dollar class-action lawsuits, yet in Singapore it provoked a surprisingly tame reaction from the authorities. Upon closer scrutiny, many giant pharmaceuticals have operations in Singapore, and it does not stretch the imagination much to understand that the authorities might have reservations towards prosecuting Slim10’s parent firm, for follow-up actions might threaten the pharmaceutical industry as a whole.
This lack in punitive action by the usually authoritarian and iron-fisted Singaporean authorities should not be misunderstood as fulfilling globalization’s critics which speak of a retreat in the sovereignty of the nation-state. As the Slim10 debacle did not threaten Singapore’s strategic interests, it was not in the authority’s interests to prosecute it as harshly as it might with say, drug trafficking. In fact, it would be more reasonable to argue that this was exemplary of a tacit cooperation between the industry and the nation-state. The Singaporean authorities and the pharmaceuticals industry both stood to gain much more if they kept the Slim10 debacle from the public’s view and negotiated back-door deals that would benefit both parties much more in the long term than a class-action suit would. As students of globalization, we must be critical in our outlook and not easily mistake state inaction as the retreat of the nation-state.
HYPERPOLARIZED ASSERTIONS OF A GLOBAL AESTHETIC
Sites of resistance have indeed been formed by the families and close ones of victims of irresponsible health products which proclaim to assist in helping one achieve the global aesthetic of looking good. However, on the other extreme, pro-anorexia groups have actually sprouted, especially in the US from 2001 to 2003. Such tightly-knit support groups encourage each other to ‘purify’ themselves through anorexia and even claim that it should not be stigmatized as an illness.
We have seen how the nature of good-looking is never static, and is always dependent on variants like socialization, culture and religion. In such tightly-knit groups, pro-anorexic individuals receive a high degree of social support and social acceptance for continuing their otherwise deviant acts of anorexia. The nature of good-looking is always in flux and being challenged by different groups. Despite the attempts and global exercises in asserting a global aesthetic, there will always be discordance over it, thus a politics of aesthetics. The discrepancies in the distribution of power often determines which asserted aesthetic takes prominence, at least for the duration of that power status quo and within the cultural and religious constraints of that social milieu.
The politics of aesthetics is concerned with the examination of the conflict between the established global aesthetic about what ‘good-looking’ means and the multivariate social forces that have risen to oppose such a global aesthetic. With relevance to globalization, the established global aesthetic on looking good is very much propagated by mass media and advertising. This is made possible by the advances in telecommunications and advertising that enable corporations to capture the imagination of millions globally about what it means to look good and to become beautiful by using its advertised products and/or lifestyle.
This established aesthetic is challenged and hence made possible due to sites of resistance which can be found globally and also utilize the same advances in telecommunications to resist and challenge it. A clear examination of the variations in tradition, culture, social norms and religion would enable one to determine the leverages in such a dichotomous political relationship both between states and within states.
GLOBALIZATION AS THE BADGE OF MODERNITY
The process of globalization has been deemed as the badge of modernity. The modern consumer is provided with an exorbitant range of choices of goods and services, whether real or not. The consumer has the choice to purchase and consume such goods and services in order to emulate the established global aesthetic of being beautiful. However, if one does not purchase or consume such goods and services for whatever reasons, one may be deemed as either going against progressive modernist standards or falling out of favour with the established global aesthetic of being beautiful.
In a sense, the consumption of such goods and services become cultural goods which one must possess in order to remain in acceptance by the established aesthetic order. One may not possess or consume such cultural goods for many reasons, some by choice while others by circumstance, both of which provide rich breeding sites of resistance against such a global aesthetic order. Post-modernists may reject such an established aesthetic order, perhaps deeming it a crass attempt by fashion industries to induce everyone to dress either like a Hollywood superstar or the lithe models on the catwalks of London, Paris and New York. While the majority of middle-class peoples in the Third World and even developed nations may not be able to purchase such cultural goods due to relative or absolute poverty, which is perhaps the main reason for the thriving trade in imitation goods.
UPROAR OVER BONE-THIN MODELS
Indeed, the recent uproar in fashion circles itself against using seemingly bone-thin, skeletal and underweight models is an example of global resistance to the established global aesthetic, what with fashion shows in Italy also following suit. This open secret of the high-class fashion industry to use lithe models has been widely documented and has been known to attract a cult following of teenage girls becoming anorexic and bulimic in attempts to emulate the bone-thin models who are often oppressed into maintaining their lithe figures. The reason why the revived debate has drawn so much attention within the industry and the media was that the self-imposed restriction against using lithe models came within the industry itself, from a high-class fashion show in Spain, attracting similar actions within the industry. This could be seen as a form of globalization-from-above, since it was initiated from the industry itself, a major player in the politics of aesthetics, and attracting other industry players to follow suit in its moralistic direction.
The fashion industry is indeed a major player in the politics of aesthetics, along with its fellow weight-loss, cosmetics industries and their mass advertising appendages. These three major industries thrive on making millions of people feel insecure about their bodies, which has become a powerful reflection of their identities and their self-confidence.
THE WEIGHT-LOSS SCAM
Through the use of models with ultra muscular and toned bodies, the weight-loss industry establishes them as the global aesthetic and induces millions to achieve bodies as toned as the models through the use of their advertised weight-loss goods and services. The cruel reality, as we all know, is that very few of us would actually attain such toned bodies in our lifetimes, whether we use the products or not. In fact, it would not be surprising to find that the advertising models themselves never once used the advertised products, but were simply head-hunted for the jobs because they already had very toned bodies.
However, such irresponsible advertising results in the endeavors of millions who buy not so much the product or advertised lifestyles, but into their own escapist dreams and fantasies about having a toned body. Capitalizing on this fact, weight-loss corporations have been known to be lax in controlling what chemicals and substances constitute their health products, resulting in products that are highly unhealthy while perhaps inducing short-term weight-loss through severe laxative effects. The Slim10 debacle in Singapore is a good case in point where there were many reports of adverse reactions experienced by local users, with the most serious resulting in liver complications and even failure.
Such obnoxious industries survive and continue to thrive as they capitalize on the individual’s entrapment in the global aesthetic of looking good. Corporations will never stop advertising such utopian lifestyles unless consumers demand for them to be banned, consumer demand being the raison de’tre for such superficial industries in the first place. Has globalization and modernity really accorded the consumer many new real choices?
HAS GLOBALIZATION ACCORDED REAL CHOICE?
The cruel truth remains that modernity has only succeeded in institutionalizing a certain false consciousness, where the consumer is led to believe that he/she can utilize the most advanced products from world-class pharmaceuticals to modify their bodies towards the established global aesthetic. What the consumer fails to see is the utopian nature of such an enterprise and how many irresponsible giant pharmaceuticals are profiting enormously by encouraging everyone to strive to be a copy of one another and shed their identity and self-confidence in the process.
SINGAPOREAN SLIM10 DEBACLE
The Singaporean authorities were surprisingly hush on the Slim10 issue, only issuing health warnings initially and banning the product’s sale eventually, with no legal action taken against the company. One wonders if this issue of liver failures upon consuming Slim10 had occurred in the US, it might have already resulted in multi-million dollar class-action lawsuits, yet in Singapore it provoked a surprisingly tame reaction from the authorities. Upon closer scrutiny, many giant pharmaceuticals have operations in Singapore, and it does not stretch the imagination much to understand that the authorities might have reservations towards prosecuting Slim10’s parent firm, for follow-up actions might threaten the pharmaceutical industry as a whole.
This lack in punitive action by the usually authoritarian and iron-fisted Singaporean authorities should not be misunderstood as fulfilling globalization’s critics which speak of a retreat in the sovereignty of the nation-state. As the Slim10 debacle did not threaten Singapore’s strategic interests, it was not in the authority’s interests to prosecute it as harshly as it might with say, drug trafficking. In fact, it would be more reasonable to argue that this was exemplary of a tacit cooperation between the industry and the nation-state. The Singaporean authorities and the pharmaceuticals industry both stood to gain much more if they kept the Slim10 debacle from the public’s view and negotiated back-door deals that would benefit both parties much more in the long term than a class-action suit would. As students of globalization, we must be critical in our outlook and not easily mistake state inaction as the retreat of the nation-state.
HYPERPOLARIZED ASSERTIONS OF A GLOBAL AESTHETIC
Sites of resistance have indeed been formed by the families and close ones of victims of irresponsible health products which proclaim to assist in helping one achieve the global aesthetic of looking good. However, on the other extreme, pro-anorexia groups have actually sprouted, especially in the US from 2001 to 2003. Such tightly-knit support groups encourage each other to ‘purify’ themselves through anorexia and even claim that it should not be stigmatized as an illness.
We have seen how the nature of good-looking is never static, and is always dependent on variants like socialization, culture and religion. In such tightly-knit groups, pro-anorexic individuals receive a high degree of social support and social acceptance for continuing their otherwise deviant acts of anorexia. The nature of good-looking is always in flux and being challenged by different groups. Despite the attempts and global exercises in asserting a global aesthetic, there will always be discordance over it, thus a politics of aesthetics. The discrepancies in the distribution of power often determines which asserted aesthetic takes prominence, at least for the duration of that power status quo and within the cultural and religious constraints of that social milieu.
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