Theft at the Public Till
restaurants on the Riviera: they are desirable nor because they serve good food, but because they attract an upper-class clientele. An increasingly reflexive mode of consumption demands a more self-conscious mode of production. Because investors need to get a competi- tive edge by means of product differentiation, they enhance the social status of design. Similarly, designers, artists, and architects emphasize individual- ism and ingenuity to get an edge on the competition for both patronage and museum-conferred posterity. This double ring of competition often leads designers to seek artistic solutions-like postmodernism- rather than devise new solutions to technical problems. Self-conscious production hides the social control made possible by a concentration of economic power. The appeal of imaginary landscapes, from the hotels in Palm Beach to Michael Graves's hotels at Disney World, is that they offer a retreat from the real world of power. They appeal to the child who delights in visual consumption and to the adult who revels in high speed. Speed creates pure objects. It is itself a pure object, since it cancels out the ground and territorial reference-points, since it runs ahead of time to an- nul time itself, since it moves more quickly than its own cause and obliterates that cause by outstripping it. Speed is the triumph of effect over cause, the triumph of instantaneousness over time as depth, the triumph of the surface and pure objectality over the profundity of desire. Speed creates a space of initiation, which may be lethal; its only rule is to leave no trace behind. It is a triumph of forgetting over memory, much like a second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience. The irony of community is missing here, as is the playfulness of social life. The charm to be found in social graces and in the theater of social rela- tions is all transferred outward into the advertising of life and lifestyles. This is a society that is endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking to justify its own existence. Everything has to be made public: what you are worth, what you earn, how you live there is no place here for interplay of a subtler nature. The society's 'look' is a self-publicizing one. Privacy is becoming the new status symbol in a society that is increas- ingly crowded. As homeowners perceive a breakdown in the social order and
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