I Models and Series

The Pre-Industrial Object and the Industrial Model

The status of the modern object is dominated by the MODEL/SERIES distinction. To some extent things were ever thus. A privileged minority in society has always served as a testing-ground for successive styles whose solutions, methods and artifices were then disseminated by local craftsmen. All the same, one cannot exactly speak of `models' or `series' in connection with any time before the industrial era. For one thing, there was a far greater homogeneity among all objects in pre-industrial society, because the mode of their production was still everywhere handcraft, because they were far less specialized in function, and because the cultural range of forms was more restricted (there being little reference to earlier or to extraneous traditions); furthermore, there was a much tighter segregation between the class of objects that could lay claim to `style' and the class of locally produced objects that had use value only. Today a farmhouse table has cultural value, but just thirty years ago its sole value arose from the purpose it served. In the eighteenth century there was simply no relationship between a `Louis XV' table and a peasant's table: there was an unbridgeable gulf between the two types of object, just as there was between the two corresponding social classes. No single cultural
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system embraced them both. [122] Nor can it be said that a Louis XIII table is the model of which the countless tables and chairs that later imitated it are the serial form. [123] A limited dissemination of craft techniques did occur here, but there was no dissemination of values: the `model' remained absolute, for it was bound to a transcendent reality. No serial production in the modern sense could be based on it. The social order was what gave objects their standing. A person was noble or not: nobility was not the ultimate -- privileged -- term in a series but, rather, a grace that bestowed absolute distinction. In the realm of objects the equivalent of this transcendent idea of nobility is what we call the `style' of a period.

This distinction between pre-industrial `period' objects and the `models' of today is a very important one, because it allows us to get beyond the purely formal opposition and clarify the concrete relationship between model and series in our modern system.

Considering that broad strata of our society do in fact live among serially produced objects that refer formally and psychologically to models which only a small minority can enjoy, there is a strong temptation to simplify the problem by positing a polarity between the former and the latter, and then assigning the value of reality to just one of the poles: to separate series and model completely so as neatly to assign one to the real and the other to the imaginary realm. Unfortunately, the everydayness of serial objects is not unreal as compared with a putative world of models as true values, nor is the sphere of models imaginary just because it affects but a tiny minority, and thus might seem to fall outside social reality. Thanks to mass information and communications systems which promote models, there is now not only a well-established circulation of objects as such but also a `psychological' circulation which constitutes a radical watershed between our industrial age and the pre-industrial age of the transcendent distinctiveness of period `style'. Anyone who has bought a walnut bedroom set at Dubonbois Home Furnishings
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or a few mass-produced electrical household appliances, and may indeed have done so as a way of realizing a personal dream and as a mark of upward social mobility, knows full well at the same time, through the press, the cinema or the television, that completely `harmonized' and `fully functional' living spaces are on the market. Naturally he perceives such things as part of a world of luxury and status from which he is almost inevitably excluded by money; yet he also feels that today this exclusion is no longer underwritten by any class-based legal statute, by any transcending social rationale buttressed by laws. This conviction is of paramount psychological significance, because it means that despite the frustration, despite the material impossibility of acceding to the model object, the use of serial objects invariably embodies an implicit or explicit reference to models.

Reciprocally, models themselves have quit their former isolated, caste-like existence; [124] having become part of industrial production, they are themselves now open to serial distribution. They, too, are now said to be `functional' (an unthinkable claim for `period' furniture) and in principle accessible to all. Likewise anyone, in principle, via the very humblest of objects, may partake of the model. Indeed, both model and serial objects in the pure form are increasingly difficult to find. The transition from the one to the other is subject to an infinite differentiation. Just like the production process, the object traverses every shade in the social spectrum. Such transitions are experienced in everyday life in terms of possibility and in terms of frustration: the model is internalized by those who are involved with serial objects, while the series is intimated, negated, transcended and lived in a contradictory manner by those who have to do with models. The socially immanent tendency whereby the series hews ever more narrowly to the model, while the model is continually being diffused into the series, has set up a perpetual dynamic which is in fact the very ideology of our society.

The `Personalized' Object

It should be noted that the model/series scheme regarding the distribution of objects does not apply evenly to all categories. It works fine in the realm of clothing
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(for example, a dress from Fath versus a ready-to-wear dress) or in that of cars (for example, a Facel-Vega versus a Citroën 2CV). The more specific an object's function, however, the more ambiguous things become; thus the difference between a `Frigidaire' from General Motors and a `Frigeco' refrigerator, or between one television set and another, is not so easy to classify. In the case of small utensils such as coffee mills, the notion of `model' tends to become indistinguishable from that of `type', because the object's function tends very largely to absorb differences of status, which may eventually amount to no more than the contrast between luxury models and serial models. (This distinction marks the weakest expression of the notion of model.) At the opposite extreme, when we turn our attention to machines -- collective objects par excellence -- we find that there is no such thing, either, as a luxury version of a pure machine; a rolling-mill, even if it is the only example of its type in the world, is still, from the moment it appears, a serial object. One machine may be more `modern' than another, but this does not make it the `model' for which other, less advanced machines constitute the corresponding series. In order to ensure comparable performance, it will be necessary to build other machines of the same type -- that is, to construct a pure series on the basis of this first member. There is no place here for a range of calibrated differences that might serve as the basis of a psychological dynamic. At the level of pure function, since there are no combinative variants, there cannot be any models either. [125]

The psycho-sociological dynamic of model and series does not, therefore, operate at the level of the object's primary function, but merely at the level of a secondary function, at the level of the `personalized' object. That is to say: at the level of an object grounded simultaneously in individual requirements and in that system of differences which is, properly speaking, the cultural system itself.
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Choice

No object is proposed to the consumer as a single variety. We may not be granted the material means to buy it, but what our industrial society always offers us `a priori', as a kind of collective grace and as the mark of a formal freedom, is choice. This availability of the object is the foundation of `personalization': [126] only if the buyer is offered a whole range of choices can he transcend the strict necessity of his purchase and commit himself personally to something beyond it. Indeed, we no longer even have the option of not choosing, of buying an object on the sole grounds of its utility, for no object these days is offered for sale on such a `zero-level' basis. Our freedom to choose causes us to participate in a cultural system willy-nilly. It follows that the choice in question is a specious one: to experience it as freedom is simply to be less sensible of the fact that it is imposed upon us as such, and that through it society as a whole is likewise imposed upon us. Choosing one car over another may perhaps personalize your choice, but the most important thing about the fact of choosing is that it assigns you a place in the overall economic order. According to John Stuart Mill, choosing such and such an object in order to distinguish oneself from other people is in itself of service to society. Increasing the number of objects makes it easier for society to divert the faculty of choice onto them, so neutralizing the threat that the personal demand for choice always represents for it. Clearly `personalization', far from being a mere advertising ploy, is actually a basic ideological concept of a society which `personalizes' objects and beliefs solely in order to integrate persons more effectively. [127]

Marginal Difference

The corollary of the fact that every object reaches us by way of a choice is the fact that fundamentally no object is offered as a serial object, that every single object claims model status. The most insignificant object must be marked off by some
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distinguishing feature -- a colour, an accessory, a detail of one sort or another. Such a detail is always presented as specific: `This dustbin is absolutely original -- Gilac Décor has decked it with flowers for you!' `A revolution in refrigeration -- complete with brand-new freezer compartment and butter softener!' `An electric razor on the cutting edge of progress -- hexagonal, antimagnetic!'

These are what David Riesman calls marginal differences; perhaps it would be more exact to call them inessential differences. The fact is that at the level of the industrial object and its technological coherence the demand for personalization can be met only in inessentials. The sole way to personalize cars is for the manufacturer to take a serially produced chassis, a serially produced engine, then change a few external characteristics or add a couple of accessory features. A car cannot be personalized in its essence as a technical object, but only in its inessential aspects.

Of course, the more the object must respond to the demands of personalization, the more its essential characteristics are burdened by extrinsic requirements. Coachwork is weighed down by accessories, for example, even to the point where technical norms for a vehicle such as fluidity of line and mobility are contravened. `Marginal' difference is thus not solely marginal, for it can run counter to an object's technical essence. The personalization function is not just an added value -- it is also a parasitic value. Indeed, from the technological standpoint it is impossible to conceive of an object in an industrial system being personalized without thereby losing some measure of its optimal technical quality. The dictates of production bear the most responsibility here, for they play unrestrainedly on inessentials in order to promote consumption.

So, when you choose YOUR Ariane, you have forty-two colour combinations to select from (including solid colours and two-colour versions). De luxe hub-caps are available from your dealer when you buy your car. The point is, of course, that all these `specific' differences are themselves picked up and mass-produced in serial form. And this secondary seriality is what constitutes fashion. Ultimately, therefore, every object is a model, yet at the same time there are no more models. What we are left with in the end are successive limited series, a disjointed transition to ever more restricted series based on ever more minute and ever more specific
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differences. There are simply no more absolute models -- and no more serial objects devoid of value categorically opposed to them. If it were otherwise, there would be no psychological basis for choice -- and hence no cultural system. Or at least, no cultural system capable of embracing modern industrial society in its entirety.

The Ideal Nature of Models

How does this system of personalization and integration work? Its operation depends in the first place on the fact that each `specific' difference continually negates and disavows the object's serial reality to the benefit of the model. Objectively, as we have seen, such differences are inessential. Furthermore, they often mask technical shortcomings. [128] They are in fact differences by default. They are always experienced, however, as features conferring distinction, indicative of value -- as differences of overmeasure. It is thus not necessary for a concrete model to exist for every category of objects, and in many cases none does: minuscule differences, invariably apprehended as positive, quite suffice to extend the series, to create the aspiration towards a model that may be merely virtual. Such marginal differences are the motor of the series, and fuel the mechanism of integration.

Series and model should not be conceived of as two poles of a formal opposition, with the model being viewed as a sort of essence which -- once divided and multiplied, so to speak, by virtue of the concept of `mass' -- gives birth to the series. From this standpoint, the model appears as a more concrete or denser state of the object which enables it to be retailed or disseminated as a series formed in its own image. The model /series distinction is often used in this way to evoke a kind of entropy homologous to the degeneration of higher forms of energy into heat. This conception, which deduces the series from the model, is completely at loggerheads with lived experience, which implies a continual inductive movement from the series into the model -- less a degenerative (and literally unlivable) process than a siphoning process.
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The fact is that the model is everywhere discernible in the series. It inhabits the slightest `specific' difference between one object and the next. Above we noted the same tendency in collecting, where each item in a collection is marked by a relative difference which momentarily lends it a privileged status -- the status, in effect, of a model; all such relative differences refer to all the others, and in aggregate they constitute absolute difference -- or rather, fundamentally, just the idea of absolute difference, which is precisely what the Model is. We may say of a model that it exists or that it does not exist. The Facel-Vega certainly exists, yet all the variations in colour or capacity refer ultimately only to the idea of the Facel-Vega. Indeed, it is essential that the model be no more than the idea of the model. Only on this condition can it be present in every single relative difference, and thus integrate the whole series. If the Facel-Vega actually existed, the `personalized' satisfaction to be derived from any other car would be radically compromised. On the other hand, the idealizing assumption that it exists serves as a justification and solid underpinning for personalization vis-à-vis something that is precisely not the Facel-Vega. The model is neither impoverished nor high-wrought: it is a generic image manufactured through the imaginary assumption of all relative differences. Its fascination stems directly from the tendency that causes the series to negate itself from one difference to the next; it is the fascination of intense movement, proliferating reference, never-ending substitution -- in short, a formal idealization of transcendence. What is integrated and invested in the model is the whole evolution of the series.

The fact that the model is just an idea is, moreover, the only thing that makes the actual process of personalization possible. The notion that consciousness could be personalized in an object is absurd: it is personalized, rather, in a difference, because only a difference, by referring to the absolute singularity of the Model, can thereby refer at the same time to what is really being signified here, namely the absolute singularity of the user, the buyer or (as we saw above) the collector. Paradoxically, then, it is through an idea that is both vague and shared by all that everyone may come to experience himself as unique. Reciprocally, it is only continual self-individualization on the basis of the range of serial distinctions that allows the imaginary consensus of the idea of the model to be revived. Personalization and integration go strictly hand in hand. That is the miracle of the system.
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From the Model to the Series

The Technical Deficit of the Serial Object

Now that we have analysed the formal play of differences by means of which the serial object manifests itself, and is experienced, as model, it is time to examine the real differences that distinguish the model from the series. For naturally the upward tendency of differential valorization relative to the ideal model masks the inverse reality of the destructuring and drastic downgrading of the serial object relative to the real model.

Of all the servitudes visited upon the serial object, the most obvious concerns its durability and its technical quality. The imperatives of personalization and production combined cause a proliferation of accessory features to the detriment of strict use value. The first effect of all the innovations and all the vagaries of fashion is to render objects more shoddy and ephemeral. Vance Packard points up this tendency, listing `three different ways that products can be made obsolescent':

Obsolescence of function. In this situation an existing product becomes outmoded when a product is introduced that performs the function better.

Obsolescence of quality. Here, when it is planned, a product breaks down or wears out at a given time, usually not too distant.

Obsolescence of desirability. In this situation a product that is still sound in terms of quality or performance becomes `worn out' in our minds because a styling or other change makes it seem less desirable.

The first type of obsolescence -- the functional type -- is certainly laudable.... [129] The last two aspects of this scheme work together. The accelerated replacement of models itself affects the object's quality. Thus stockings may now come in all colours, but their quality will have declined (or perhaps research and development will have been cut back to finance an advertising campaign). Should the manipulated fluctuations of fashion fail to restimulate demand, recourse can be had to an
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artificial sub-functionality -- to `deliberately shoddy construction'. Packard quotes an industrial designer, Brooks Stevens, to the effect that `Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it.' [130] And he finds that Oliver Wendell Holmes was prophetically close to the mark `when he wrote of that wonderful one-hoss shay which was built in such a logical way that on a given day "it went to pieces all at once". [131] Thus certain American car parts are designed not to survive more than sixty thousand kilometres of driving. As manufacturers themselves will discreetly admit, the quality of most serial objects could be substantially improved with no significant increase in production costs. Deliberately debased parts are just as expensive to manufacture as normal ones . . . BUT THE OBJECT CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO ESCAPE FROM EPHEMERALITY OR FROM FASHION. This is the fundamental characteristic of the series: the objects that compose it are weakened on a systematic basis. In a world of (relative) affluence, the shoddiness of objects replaces the scarcity of objects as the expression of poverty. The series is forcefully imposed for a brief cross-section of time; its universe is distinctly perishable. THE OBJECT CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO ESCAPE DEATH. Unfettered technological progress would doubtless override this mortality of the object, but the strategy of production strives constantly to maintain it. [132] Ernest Dichter speaks, in connection with selling, of a `strategy of desire'; we might well speak here of a strategy of frustration. These two strategies together serve to ensure the exclusive rule of the goals of production- indeed, production has now emerged as an all-surpassing agency with the power not merely of life but also of death over objects. [133]

The model, by contrast, is privileged in that it lasts (though only in a relative sense, for it too is caught in the speeded-up cycle of objects). It is granted solidity,
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entitled to `loyalty'. Paradoxically, it has come to dominate an area traditionally reserved, it would seem, for the series, namely use value. This superiority of the model, reinforced by the influence of fashion -- that is, the combination of technical and formal qualities -- are what constitute its superior `functionality'.

The `Style' Deficit of the Serial Object

In parallel fashion, when we compare the serial object to the model we find that the serial object's physical attributes, just like its technical ones, are distinctly inferior. Consider the material used, for example: the steel and leather armchair on show at Airborne will crop up in aluminium and leatherette at Dubonbois Home Furnishings. The glass partition of a model interior will have a plastic echo in the serial version. Solid wood furniture will reappear in a whitewood veneer. A fine woollen or wild-silk dress will proliferate in ready-to-wear form in a wool mixture or in rayon. It is the heft, hardiness, grain or `warmth' of a material whose presence or absence serves as a marker of difference. Such tactile characteristics are close to the most profound defining qualities of the model -- far more so than the visual values of colour and form, which are more easily transposed to series because they are better suited to the needs of marginal differentiation.

Of course, even colours and forms are never integrated unscathed into a series. Finish is wanting, as is inventiveness. Faithfully transposed as they may be, forms suffer a subtle loss of their originality. What the serial object lacks is thus less the material itself than a certain consistency between material and form which ensures the model's finished quality. In series this consistency, this set of necessary relations, is destroyed for the sake of the differentiating action of forms, colours and accessories. Style gives way to combination. The process of downgrading referred to above in connection with the technical aspect is here more of a destructuring tendency. In the case of the model object, details and the workings of details are not the point. Rolls-Royces are black, and that's that. [134] The model is literally hors série, without peer -- hence out of the game: only the `personalization' of objects allows the play of differences to expand in proportion with the length of the series (as when
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fifteen or twenty different shades are available for a single make of car); at the other extreme -- the return to pure utility -- the play of differences once more ceases to exist (for a very long time the Citroën 2CV came only in a grey that was hardly a colour at all). The model has a harmony, a unity a homogeneity a consistency of space, form, substance, and function; it is, in short, a syntax. The serial object is merely juxtaposition, haphazard combination, inarticulate discourse. As a detotalized form, it is nothing more than a collection of details relating in mechanical fashion to parallel series. Suppose that the uniqueness of the aforementioned armchair lies in its particular combination of tawny leather, black steel, general silhouette and mobilization of space. The corresponding serial object will emerge with plasticized leather, no tawniness, the metal lighter or galvanized, the overall configuration altered and the relationship to space diminished. The object as a whole is thus destructured: its substance is assigned to the series of objects in imitation leather, its tawniness is now a brown common to thousands of other objects, its legs are indistinguishable from those of any tubular chair, and so on. The object is no longer anything more than a conglomeration of details and the crossroads of a variety of series. Here is another example: a luxury car is in a red described as `unique'. What `unique' implies here is not simply that this red can be found nowhere else, but also that it is one with the car's other attributes: the red is not an `extra'. But no sooner does this colour appear ever so slightly changed on a more `commercial' car than it becomes the red of thousands of others - a mere detail or accessory feature of cars that are red as an `extra', because they might just as well be green or black.

Class Differences

By now the reader should be getting a better feel for the distinction between model and series. More even than its consistency, it is the nuancing of the model that makes it distinctive. At present we are witnessing an attempt to stylize serial interiors -- to `bring good taste to the masses'. The result, generally speaking, is `all in the same colour' and `all in the same style': one may have a `baroque living-room', a `kitchen in blue', etc. What is presented as a `style', however, is fundamentally a mere stereotype, the unnuanced generalization of a particular detail or aspect. The fact is that the nuance (within a unity) has come to characterize the model, while difference
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(within uniformity) has come to characterize the series. Nuances in this sense are infinite in number, being emphases ever susceptible of reinvention in accordance with an open-ended syntax. Differences are finite in number, being the result of systematic variations on a single paradigm. Let us not be misled by the apparent scarcity of nuances and the apparent profusion of differences (due to their massive dissemination), for structurally speaking the fact remains that nuances are inexhaustible (the model in this connection may be said to come close to the work of art), whereas the serial difference is part of a finite combinatorial system or tablature which, though it no doubt changes continually in response to fashion, is nevertheless, for each synchronic moment considered, limited by and strictly subject to the dictates of production. In sum, the series offers the immense majority of people a restricted range of choices, while a tiny minority enjoy access to the model and its infinite nuances. For the majority a range which, however extensive it may be, is composed of invariable elements -- generally the most obvious ones; for the minority a multitude of random possibilities. For the majority a set code of values; for the minority endless invention. We are thus indeed clearly dealing with class status and class distinctions.

The redundancy of its secondary features is an attempt to compensate for the serial object's loss of essential qualities. Colours, contrasts and the `modern' look are thus overloaded with significance; indeed, the serial object's modernity is stressed at the precise moment when the model is sloughing modernity off. Whereas the model retains an airiness, a discretion, and a `naturalness' that is the epitome of culture, the serial object remains stuck fast in its quest for uniqueness, and betrays a constrained culture, an optimism in the worst of taste, and an empty-headed humanism. For the serial object has its own class-specific script, its own rhetoric -- just as the model has its own rhetoric of reticence, veiled functionality, perfection and eclecticism. [135]
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Another expression of this redundancy is accumulation. There are always too many objects in serial interiors. And too many objects means too little space. Promiscuity or saturation occur as reactions to scarcity. Loss of quality must be made up for by the sheer number of objects. [136] The model has its own space, in which objects are neither too close to one another nor too far apart. The model interior is given structure by these relative distances, and if anything it tends towards the opposite kind of redundancy: connotation by emptiness. [137]

The Present as Privilege

Another axis of comparison in distinguishing model from series is time. We have noted that the serial object is designed not to last. Just like generations of people in underdeveloped societies, generations of objects in consumer society are short-lived, and one very soon gives way to the next. Where the abundance of objects increases, it always does so under the constraints of a calculated scarcity. That, however, is the problem of the object's technical durability. The immediate experience of the object, as determined by fashion, is another matter.

A rapid sociological examination of the market in antiques reveals that it is governed by the same laws and organized fundamentally in accordance with the same model/series scheme as the market in `industrial' products. It emerges that within the potpourri which, in the case of furniture, includes everything from baroque to Chippendale, from Medici writing-tables to Art Nouveau and fake rustic, it is always possible (given the necessary financial resources and culture) to go higher and higher up the ladder of `established' values in search of the focus of one's `personal' mooring back in history. There is a status attached to regression in time, and one's means are liable to determine whether one acquires a genuine ancient Greek vase or a mere reproduction, a Roman amphora or a Spanish pitcher.
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In the world of objects the past and the exotic have a social dimension, a relationship to culture and income. The leisured classes go to their antique dealers for medieval, haute époque or French Regency furniture; the cultivated middle classes scour flea-market junk stalls for the wherewithal to re-create a solidly bourgeois cultural décor with `authentic' peasant touches; and rustic themes are just perfect for service-sector employees enamoured of the largely bourgeoisified country interiors of the previous generation, or of provincial `period styles' that are really hybrid forms impossible to date and having nothing but the vaguest echo of a `period'. Each social class thus has its very own cut-price museum. Only workers and peasants still largely shun antiques. True, they have neither the leisure nor the money required, but the chief reason is that they are not as yet touched by the acculturation phenomenon affecting other classes. (Not that they consciously refuse it -- rather, they simply fall outside its sphere of influence.) Nor, however, do they care for the modern and the `experimental', for new `creations' or for anything `avant-garde'. Their own museum is often limited to cheap hardware and a folkloric world of china or earthenware animals, gewgaws, decorated mugs, framed mementoes, and the like -- a whole stereotyped iconography quite liable to be found cheek by jowl with the very last word in electrical household appliances. This is in no way to downplay the need to `personalize' -- which is the same for all; it is just that the only people who can regress in time are those who can afford it. Difference -- in this case culturalized difference -- is what creates value, and it has to be paid for. Models and series are just as easy to find in the realm of cultural nostalgia as in the immediacy of fashion.

If we look to see what in this range of possibilities has the maximum value, we find that it is either the most avant-garde of objects or objects from the past with an aristocratic dimension: either a glass-and-aluminium villa with elliptical contours or an eighteenth-century château -- either the ideal future or the ancien régime. Conversely the pure series, the unmarked term, is located, not exactly in the present, which is, along with the future, the time of the avant-garde and of the model, nor in that transcendent past which is the preserve of the well-to-do and their acquired culture, but instead in an `immediate' past, an indefinite past which is fundamentally a sort of belated present, a limbo into which yesterday's models
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have just recently fallen. In clothing styles the pace of change is very rapid, and the office workers of today wear dresses derived from last season's haute couture models. In furnishing, however, what has wide currency in the present is whatever was in high fashion a few years or even a generation ago. Serial time here is always the time of the wave before, so to speak. As far as their furniture is concerned, most people live in a time which is not theirs, a time of generality, of insignificance, the time of that which is not modern but not yet antique (and, no doubt, never will be antique): the equivalent in time of suburban impersonality in space. By comparison with the model the series does not stand merely for a loss of uniqueness of style, of nuances, and of authenticity: it stands also for the loss of the real dimension of time -- for it belongs to a kind of empty sector of everyday life, a negative realm automatically filled up with senescent models. For only models change; series merely follow upon one another in the wake of a model with which they can never catch up. That is where their true unreality lies.

A Misadventure of the Person

`The product now in demand is neither a staple nor a machine, it is a personality,' according to David Riesman. [138] Personal achievement is indeed an obligation haunting the modern consumer in the context of the forced mobility imposed by the model/series system (which is, incidentally, but one aspect of a much larger structure of social mobility and aspiration). In the area which concerns us here, this constraint is paradoxical: it is clear that in the act of personalized consumption the subject, in his very insistence on being a subject, succeeds in manifesting himself only as an object of economic demand. His project, filtered and fragmented in advance, is dashed by the very process that is supposed to realize it. Since `specific differences' are produced on an industrial scale, any choice he can make is ossified from the outset; only the illusion of personal distinctiveness remains. In seeking
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to add that `something' which will make for uniqueness, consciousness is reified in an even more intimate way, precisely because it is reified right down to that particular detail. Such is the paradox of alienation: a living choice is embodied in dead differences, indulgence in which dooms the subjective project to self-negation and despair.

This is the ideological function of the system: increasing status is nothing but a game, for all differences are integrated in advance. The very deceit with which the whole arrangement is shot through is an integral part of that arrangement, on account of the system's perpetual forward flight.

Yet are we quite justified in speaking of alienation here? Overall, the system of manipulated personalization is experienced by the vast majority of consumers as freedom. Only to a critical eye does this freedom appear merely formal, and the process of personalization as a misadventure of the person. Even in cases where advertising motivates on the basis of nothing at all (as where the same product goes by different brand names, where differences are illusory or where quality is erratic) -- even where the choice is undoubtedly a trap -- it still cannot be denied that even superficial differences are real as soon as someone invests them with value. How can we contest the satisfaction of a person who buys a dustbin decorated with flowers or an `antimagnetic' razor? No theory of needs can authorize us to assign priority to one actually experienced satisfaction over any other. If the demand for self-worth is so deep-seated that in the absence of any alternative it embodies itself in a `personalized' object what basis do we have for rejecting this tendency, and in the name of what `authentic' essential value could we do so?

The Ideology of Models

The system we have been describing reposes upon an ideology of democracy; it claims to be an aspect of social progress -- to be what makes it possible for all gradually to gain access to models by virtue of a continual sociological upward movement which is carrying each stratum of society in turn to greater material luxury, and, from one `personalized' difference to the next, ever closer to the absolute model.
[p. 154]

Two objections may be raised to this account of things. In the first place, we find that we are in fact, in our `consumer society', farther and farther away from equality before the object. The idea of the model has been obliged to seek refuge, concretely, in ever more subtle and definitive differences: such and such a skirt length, such and such a shade of red, such and such an advance in stereophony, or the few weeks that separate haute couture from mass distribution courtesy of Prisunic. All extremely ephemeral things -- yet all very expensive indeed. A seeming equality attaches to the fact that all objects obey the same `functional' imperative. But, as we have seen, this formal democratization of cultural status conceals other inequalities which are far more serious in that they affect the very reality of the object, its technical quality, its substance and its life-span. The privileges of the model are no longer institutional, it is true; they have, as it were, been internalized -- but this has merely made them more tenacious. Just as, in the wake of the bourgeois revolution, no other classes ever gradually acquired positions of political responsibility, so likewise, in the wake of the industrial revolution, consumers have never won equality before the object.

The second point is that it is a to delusion to take the model for an ideal point which the series will eventually be able to rejoin. The possession of objects frees us only as possessors, and always refers us back to the infinite freedom to possess more objects: the only progression possible here is up the ladder of objects, but this is a ladder that leads nowhere, being itself responsible for nourishing the inaccessible abstraction of the model. For the model is basically merely an idea, that is, a transcendence internal to the system -- and the system in its entirety can continue in its forward flight indefinitely. There is no prospect of a model entering a series without being simultaneously replaced by another model. The whole system proceeds en bloc, but models replace one another without ever being transcended as such and without successive series, for their part, ever achieving self-transcendence as series. Models move along faster than series: they inhabit the present, whereas series float somewhere between past and present, wearing themselves out in the vain attempt to catch up with models. This perpetual cycle of aspiration and disillusion, dynamically orchestrated at the level of production, constitutes the arena in which objects are pursued.
[p. 155]

There is a kind of inevitability at work here. Once a whole society articulates itself around models and focuses on them; once production strives in every way possible towards the systematic breaking down of models into series, and series in their turn into marginal differences or combinative variants, until at last objects come to have a status just as ephemeral as that of words or images; once the systematic stretching of series turns the whole edifice into a paradigm, but a paradigm whose ordering is irreversible, in that the ladder of status is fixed and the rules of the game of status are the same for everyone; once we fall under the sway of this managed convergence, this planned flimsiness, this continually eroded synchrony -- then all negation becomes impossible. There are no more overt contradictions, no more structural changes, no more social dialectics. For the tendency which seems, in accordance with technical progress, to mobilize the whole system in no way challenges that system's ability to remain unmoving and stable in itself. Everything is in movement, everything shifts before our eyes, everything is continually being transformed -- yet nothing really changes. This is a society whose embrace of technological progress enables it to make every conceivable revolution, just so long as those revolutions are confined within its bounds. For all its increased productivity, our society does not open the door to one single structural change.

I: Models and Series

Note from page 138: 1. Differences between classes of objects are doubtless never quite so sharp as those between social classes, however. The absolute hierarchical distinction between orders of society is mitigated at the level of objects by use: a table, after all, serves the same basic function at every rung of the social ladder.

Note from page 138: 2. It is true that much more recently the Henri II sideboard has become a true serial object, but this was achieved via the very different route of the industrial production of cultural objects.

Note from page 139: 3. This is not to say that they have lost their class-specific character (see below).

Note from page 140: 4. The work of art does not answer to the model/series scheme either. The same categorical alternative is posed here as for the machine: the machine fulfils or does not fulfil a function, the work of art is genuine or fake. There are no marginal differences. Only at the level of the private and personalized object (not at the level of the work itself) does the model/series dynamic come into play.

Note from page 141: 5. Where an object does exist in one version only (as in the case of cars in East Germany), this is an indication of penury which strictly speaking antedates the consumer society. No society can afford to consider such a stage anything but provisional.

Note from page 141: 6. I shall come back to this system later.

Note from page 143: 7. The technical downgrading of serial objects will be discussed in a moment; see also the section on `Gadgets and Robots' above.

Note from page 145: 8. Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay, 1960), p. 55.

Note from page 146: 9. Ibid., p. 54.

Note from page 146: 10. Ibid., p. 57.

Note from page 146: 11. Of course this tendency is liable to be slowed by the operation of competition. But in countries (such as the United States) where monopolistic production is the norm, true competition has long been nonexistent.

Note from page 146: 12. It must nonetheless be acknowledged that this cynical strategic perspective is not the only villain here, for there is unquestionably a degree of willing compliance on the part of consumers. Many people would be disconcerted indeed at the prospect of having to keep the same car for twenty or thirty years, even if it continued to meet all their needs. On this point, see `Gadgets and Robots' above.

Note from page 147: 13. Or sometimes grey, it is true. But the `moral' paradigm remains in place (see above, p. 31).

Note from page 149: 14. In a system of this kind the two opposíng terms cannot help but carry a surplus of meaning, for each is defined by reference to the other, and is to that extent redundant. Moreover, this redundancy of surplus meaning is the thing which, from the psycho-sociological point of view, defines the mode in which the system is directly experienced; although the present account may occasionally suggest the contrary, this can never be a system of pure structural oppositions.

Note from page 150: 15. The bourgeois tradition inclined naturally towards redundancy and accumulation (bourgeois houses were often stuffed to the rafters). The more `functional' approach of modern interior design runs counter to that tendency, however, so that the over-occupation of space in a modern house is more seriously inconsistent than in a traditional one.

Note from page 150: 16. See the discussion of `formal connotation' above, pp. 59 ff.

Note from page 152: 17. David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denny and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press/London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 46.