Commodification on the streets of Paris

 

“As I went out one morning”to quote a song, I strolled around the Marais until I came upon the Camper shoe store and “laboratory” on Rue Debelleyme, and I started to laugh.

The laugh has to be backfielded. Go back to Paris this Spring. There were constant demonstrations against our squirt of a president, and this was accompanied by much black block versus the cops action. One of the black bloc signatures was to throw bricks through the windows of luxury goods shops and banks. I once saw a Gucci store that not only put the usual plywood over the window, but actually took down the Gucci sign, trying to hide. The result of this anti-capitalist fronde was that for a while, many streets in Paris sported shops with broken store windows.

Now, Paris is the home of the art of the show window. Beginning with the consumer society of the 19^th century, this has been one of the constants, something the walker in the city looks out for. Show window design is an almost pure interface between art and commerce – it is the epitome of what Marx called Kommodifitzierung, commodification – the turning of an object or event into a marketing ploy. Interestingly, if you look back on the translation of this word into English, it really didn’t gain ground until the early 80s, when “commodification” began to show up in works of art and literary theory, and hence to newspapers. The NYT has always been my paper of record for the popularization of words and phrases – they crop up there, when they are new and dripping with yolk, captured by quote marks. So it was with “commondification”. The quotes are a way of capturing but not claiming the word. Commodification with quote marks is somehow stronger than commodification without quote marks – it is a sort of meta-commodification.

Anyway, back to my laugh. Some show window artist must have thought about the stoned windows, with the result that the Camper “laboratory”, with its function of selling shoes, is now fronted by a window in which the spiderweb imprint of the fractured window has been painted on the windows. They are fake stoned windows! This is bold, this is ironic, this is commodification and ultra irony! The irony being, in part, that Camper shoes – which I wear, normally – are definitely not luxury goods. They are wanna be luxury goods. If you want luxury sneaks, go to Balanciaga.

Commodification as an aspirational claim is one that passed over my head. But after laughing about the window, I had to admire it. It has long been the proud aim of neoliberal culture to absorb all lefty-ness in the quest to sell more goods, but usually there is some time lag and some pretence. I do not know how long it took, after Che’s death, for Che’s t shirt to arise as an accountrement for the college student, but I imagine it wasn’t an immediate process. But Campers has shown how to do it in real time.

Chapeau!