Economics and market behavior is a huge area of study — the best business minds are all interested in it — so rather than try and make an exhaustive account, I would like to point to one particular event.
A northern European group that started off making fictional zines and theorizing on ‘happenings’ called monochrom created a few years ago a last bastillion of Soviet culture called Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. What started out as a village in the Austrian countryside ‘remade’ into the last Soviet Country (with tours available) became so widely popular that monochrom could not in good conscience continue to give tours. Having three times the population of a 500 people village swamp the village for a weekend would be potentially devastating. Eventually, in order to further the experience, monochrom created an ‘adventure style’ video game. I won’t go into detail about the game here, what I am more interested in is how this experience interfaced with the economy.
It seems that with capitalism, we desire experiences, the novel experiences things can give us. There are plenty of Marxist thought about this — but what is interesting, although perhaps difficult to assess is how these novel experiences become translatable into other Cultures, of other peoples, and even of one’s past cultural experiences — which become commodified into a new kind of hybrid experience entirely, neither of the past nor of our ‘normal’ experience, but wholly of the present.
Monochrom went on to have various installations such as the Unterzoegersdorf computer (which ran on a coal furnace one had to shovel continuously in order for another person to be able to play Tetris) as well as various Unterzoegersdorf installations. There was one especially interesting moment when they were kicked out of a computer convention as the Unterzoegersdorf representative with the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was borderline-trolling party-goers, perhaps offensive to Disney officials running the convention. The Unterzoegersdorf representative also, for purposes of art, had the wild experience of eating a glob of wasabe ‘not knowing what wasabe is… and deciding that it was capitalist posion’. Of course, one assumes the Unterzoegersdorf camera man was using a modern camera, something the Unterzoegersdorf representative did not even seem to notice as being astounding.
One particular event they did was particular applicable to this discussion. The website boing boing hired Monochrom to do a viral video for Cheetos, paying them a sum of a few thousand dollars. Monochrom saw a prime opportunity to further explore capitalist relationships with their very anti-capitalist characters. The results are below. I invite you to take the time to watch all 6 segments. It is delightful.
Unterzoegersdorf/Cheetos Campaign
While amusing, one cannot help but think that the compete rage of the Soviet Unterzoegersdorf characters, in part jest, at being ‘tricked’ and ‘used’ to promote a very Capitalist-foodstuff but in part seriousness — for Unterzoegersdorf-ians to find their livelihood but a ‘colony’ of the Global Economy. While Cheetos is featured heavily in the dialogue as the center of conflict, the nature of the Monochrom’s tension is more on the side of Unterzoegersdorf-ians trying to figure out what to make of the raw junk of Capitalism. It may benefit Cheetos only to be repeatedly mentioned and pondered — we laugh because the weird orange coloring DOES smear all over our hands. In fact, we are reminded of Cheetos and that may be enough to make our mouth water (or wince) in association. Larger questions remain largely unexamined What should we make of our own economic proliferation? How should we come to terms with ourselves? In an exploration of Unterzoegersdorf we come to face ourselves as Other — perhaps in what only great works of Art do — reflected back to ourselves our own values in negativity, as dissymmetry and excess, the best non-linguistic analysis of all, something even Emmanuel Levinas refuses to see — when he preaches of the acceptance of the Other but cannot accept those ‘asiatic hordes’ which surround Israel… and refuses to deal with them as citizens of humanity…
I’d hate to think that if I were to continue on and on, I would end up swallowing myself into a Hegelian synthesis of some sort, negative and particular made universal, more or less.
I also strikes me that this entry is applicable with the previous On Testing IRL although creating such a viral meme does not in fact have a control group of any sort. One is immediately hypnotized in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf our own image, as fascist as they are in our unthinking allegiance to our own ideology, something which accepts Cheetos as blindly as they reject it.
