Avant-garde marketing (5 June 2008)

In the 1960s, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a proponent of the New Novel, whose purpose seems to have been to dispense with plot and characters, forcing readers to sift through a pile of description in search of what might be the writer's guiding purpose. A collection of Robbe-Grillet's essays, For a New Novel sheds less light than you would think on what he was up to, but I found it very interesting to read in conjunction with Rob Walker's book about contemporary marketing techniques, which are avant-garde in their own way, ignoring traditional limits and taking on unexpected forms and dispensing with its expected purpose of delivering an unambiguous sales pitch. It's no accident that Robbe-Grillet's most famous film, Last Year at Marienbad, has been a continual source inspiration to luxury marketers since it was released in 1961. It is hyperstylized but sufficiently empty, so that one can invest whatever significance one wants into the unresolvable situations depicted. It's a perfect approach for marketing goods like perfume -- conjure an aura akin to that which perfume is supposed to have, but make it indeterminate and "mysterious." The film is an encyclopedia of techniques for destroying the sense of time, place, contingency, and logic -- all things that marketing seeks to undermine in order to exert its illogical, free-associational form of persuasion that relies on consumers to connect the dots. The nature of the marketing is adaptable enough to inspire and then absorb a wide variety of wishes projected by consumers. Effective marketing coaxes us into doing the work of persuading ourselves. The goods have a chance of becoming placebos, that work because we believe.

This passage from Robbe-Grillet's "Time and Description" is about avant-garde fiction and film, but it seems like it applies strikingly well to any number of the "murketing" campaigns underway, or even to the nature of contemporary advertising itself:

Now, if temporality gratifies expectation, instantaneity disappoints it; just as spacial discontinuity dissolves the trap of the anecdote. These descriptions whose movement destroys all confidence in the things described, these heroes without naturalness as without identity, this present which constantly invents itself, as though in the course of the very writing, which repeats, doubles, modifies, denies itself, without ever accumulating in order to constitute a past -- hence a "story", a "history" in the traditional sense of the word -- all this can only invite the reader (or the spectator) to another mode of participation than the one to which he was accustomed. If he is sometimes led to condemn the works of his time, that is, those which most directly address him, if he even complains of being deliberately abandoned, held off, disdained by the authors, this is solely because he persists in seeking a kind of communication which has long ceases to be the one which is proposed to him.
For far from neglecting him, the author today proclaims his absolute need of the reader's cooperation, an active, conscious, creative assistance. What he asks of him is no longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full, closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to invent in his turn the work -- and the world -- and thus to learn to invent his own life.

That strikes me as marketing's broader sales mission: draw consumers in, entice them to fantasize and narrate themselves into a slightly refreshed existence through a vicarious participation in the indeterminate fragments of experience the marketers supply -- and of course through purchasing the goods associated with the whole process, which come to seem like the catalyst for all that creativity.