On target: Aura, affect, and the rhetoric of "Design Democracy"

Public Culture

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 599-618

  Harold, Christine ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77449128503     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2009-010     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. See Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 2005).
2. Bill Brown, "Thing Theory," in Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5
3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).
4. See excerpts from Shaviro's work-in-progress "The Age of Aesthetics" at his blog The Pinocchio Theory, www.shaviro.com/Blog.
5. A writer for Adweek, for example, gushed that the issue was "the smartest and most exciting example of branded entertainment I've ever seen" and that "the iconography of the city is captured cleverly without a cliché in site" (Barbara Lippert, "Hitting the Bull's-Eye," Adweek, August 22, 2005)
6. The Chicago Sun-Times, for example, called the issue "the most jaw-dropping collapse of the so-called sacred wall between editorial and advertising in modern magazine history" (Lewis Lazare, "Target, New Yorker Cross Line," Chicago Sun-Times, August 19, 2005)
7. One blogger rightly noted that Target was often painted as a brute "with its dirty paws all over the lily-white, virginal New Yorker (with the related school of thought that The New Yorker is a bit of a whore to let it happen)" ("A Few Notes on the Target Issue of the New Yorker," Tingle Alley, August 20, 2005
8. www.tinglealley.com/?p=898 [accessed May 12, 2009]).
9. Indeed, another writer, in a post on a popular New York media blog, wrote, only half-jokingly: "Oh, my darling New Yorker, sexy as can be.. .. I can't look at you. You have sold yourself utterly to Target and now as I turn your pages all I can see are its smeary fingerprints, branding you, carelessly claiming you for its own" (Rachel Sklar, "My Blood Runs Cold: My Sexy New Yorker Despoiled by Target," MediaBistro .com's FishbowlNY, August 16, 2005
10. www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/magazines/my_blood_runs _cold_my_sexy_new_yorker_despoiled_by_target_24704.asp [accessed May 12, 2009]).
11. For a firsthand account of the New Yorker's controversial embrace (under Tina Brown's editorship) of mainstream American popular culture, see John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (London: Methuen, 2000)
12. Quoted in Laura Rowley, On Target: How the World's Hottest Retailer Hit a Bull's-Eye (New York: Wiley, 2003), 58
13. I refer to the slogan for Mizrahi's women's clothing line for Target: "Where Fifth Avenue meets Main Street, USA" (www.isaacmizrahiny.com/about/timeline/98/september_2003_-_target [accessed May 12, 2009]).
14. Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 5
15. Target, "Our Focus on Design," sites.target.com/site/en/corporate/page.jsp?contentId=PRD03-001088 (accessed September 6, 2006).
16. Steven Shaviro, "Try Another World," The Pinocchio Theory, June 4, 2006, www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=498 (accessed May 12, 2009).
17. Target, "Our Focus on Design," sites.target.com/site/en/company/page.jsp?contentId=WCMP04-031806 (accessed May 25, 2009).
18. Quoted in Edward Relph, The Modern Urban Landscape (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 107.
19. Sarah Vowell, "From Bauhaus to Tract House: Architect Michael Graves Turns His Folly to the Mass Market," February 10, 1999, www.salon.com/ent/music/vowe/1999/02/10vowe.html (accessed May 12, 2009).
20. Quoted in Vowell, "From Bauhaus to Tract House."
21. Daniel Naegele, "We Dig Graves - All Sizes," Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2000, 1
22. Quoted in Pallavi Gogoi, "How Target Found Its Grooviness," BusinessWeek, October 3, 2005, www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2005/id20051003_749507.htm (accessed May 12, 2009).
23. Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 2.
24. Verbeek, What Things Do, 1.
25. Verbeek, What Things Do, 2
26. Brown makes the point thus: "The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation" ("Thing Theory," 4)
27. Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2002)
28. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1993)
29. Norman, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2004)
30. Norman, Emotional Design, 26
31. Norman, Emotional Design, 10
32. I want to acknowledge that this "depth" may itself be the effect of a layering or folding of available surfaces, but I leave this discussion to the more adept Deleuzeans among us
33. Steven Shaviro, "The New," The Pinocchio Theory, June 10, 2006, www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=499 (accessed May 12, 2009).
34. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 3:105.
35. Benjamin, "Work of Art," 3:105
36. Mark Dery, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs (New York: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1993)
37. Nigel Thrift, "Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification," Economy and Society 35 (2006): 281
38. Brian Massumi, "Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments," in A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvii.
39. Norman, Emotional Design, 11
40. Natacha Lorena Poggio, "Making Sense with Design: A Taxonomy of Designed Experiences" (MFA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2006), 42
41. Poggio, "Making Sense with Design," 42-43
42. Quoted in Phil Patton, "For the Mall Rats, a New Piper," New York Times, January 14, 1999
43. Marcel Duchamp, "The Richard Mutt Case," letter to Blind Man, no. 2 (1917)
44. rpt. in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (New York: Wiley, 2002), 252.
45. ReadyMade online "media kit," readymademag.com/mediakit.php (accessed May 12, 2009).
46. Janelle Brown, "Do It Yourself," Salon.com, May 21, 2001, archive.salon.com/mwt/style/2001/05/21/handmade/index.html (accessed May 12, 2009).
47. For a recent overview of the feminist craft movement, see Rob Walker, "Handmade 2.0," New York Times Magazine, December 16, 2007.
48. Brown, "Do It Yourself."
49. Quoted in Brown, "Do It Yourself."
50. Quoted in Robert Gavin, "Everyday Hackers," Boston Globe, April 19, 2004
51. Quoted in Gavin, "Everyday Hackers."
52. Quoted in Elizabeth Evitts, "Speaking Graphically with Ellen Lupton," March 20, 2006, www.metropolismag.com/story/20060320/speaking-graphically-with-ellen-lupton (accessed May 12, 2009).