Markus Giesler, vous l’avez peut être déja lu ici, est Professeur de marketing à l’université de York (Toronto), reconnu par le NY Times comme l’un des meilleurs sociologues des nouvelles-technologies.
Après avoir disséqué la notion d’adolescent cyborg et la pratique de l’Hype-Ode, Markus s’intéresse aujourd’hui à l’extention méta-humaine. Ces petites parcelles du futur qu’on s’implante impunément, comme on customise les voitures. Lorsque le Botox rencontre le réel, cela donne ça: un entretien (en anglais s’il vous plait) abordant sans censure la modernité sous toutes ces facettes. Ici une explication rhéth(é)orique sur l’utilisation des adjuvants de Jouvence.
Markus, you are a well-known expert on entertainment marketing and you have conducted groundbreaking studies on market evolution in the war on music downloading. Why this leap from rock bands to Botox?
botoxAs always, the impetus for this research is rooted in a personal observation. When I came to Toronto in 2004 I moved into the Forrest Hill neighborhood and I couldn’t help but notice the sheer ubiquity of cosmetic Botox clinics. I had a hard time finding a shoemaker but Botox was everywhere. Actually, the number of Botox clinics in the Greater Toronto Area tripled between 2005 and 2008. Now we have some 70 clinics and most of them are here in my neighborhood. And, of course, that begs the question of how this market, the
market for cosmetic Botox injections, could emerge quasi overnight? This became my research question, you know, how do markets emerge? So for me, Botox is the vehicle for answering this more fundamental question.
Don’t economists already know how markets emerge?
Yes, for economists that’s a relative no-brainer. Their answer is that markets emerge when a latent consumer demand is met by an innovative producer solution and deals are made. But that doesn’t explain how we got there as a culture. What had to happen in our culture so that Botox suddenly had a price that people are willing to pay? Why do they care about Botox in the first place? Economic value is driven, shaped, and constrained by cultural meaning that are for the most part at least bracketed in classic economic theory. So the goal of my research project was to unpack some of these more hidden market-culture
relationships.
So how do markets really emerge?
First of all, what the economists propose is one possible answer. Expropriating a pricevalue rhetoric for explanatory purposes is a standard move. But there is more to this relationship. For instance, the fact that Botox is a product with an explicit body focus plays an important role. Ask yourself how our understanding of the human body has evolved. For a long time, the idea that the body is this natural object that we have to
control using medical knowledge and technology was invisibly binding. People would use Botox to treat things like involuntary eye blinking, migraine, or incontinence. But medical research, advances in biotechnology in particular, DNA research but also research in advanced computing, have ushered in a new body understanding, a kind of cyborg body: this idea that our body is an open-ended hybrid of organic and technological components that we can constantly reconfigure and enhance. We’re all surrounded by cyborgian stories, media stories about bionic children, DNA, genomes, therapeutic cloning, Terminator genes, and so on. In short, the life sciences no longer interpret the human body in distinction from but through technology. And the further scientists penetrate into the human body using increasingly technological means, the more difficult it is to isolate an essential state of nature, and the more flexibly they can define what counts as human.
What counts as human anyway?
Markus Giesler Vs BesterRight. Just what counts as human? Where in all of this does the person end and the technology begin? Hunter S. Thompson once penned this great line: are we human or are we dancer? At this point in history, similar to the Renaissance, we ask ourselves once again, what it means to be human? We look at socially sanctified institutions for answers. Craig Venter, the CEO of Celera Genomics, the company behind the human genome project, would say, we’re a combination, we’re cyborgs. And we ask ourselves, wow, now what does this mean for our own social roles as, say, professors, teenagers, mothers, fathers, and our relationships with other people? And then, this cultural puzzle becomes an identity quest that gives rise to multiple forms of self-experimentation. We’re looking for creative outlets. People write books, poems, they produce films, and so on. They imagine the cyborg professor, the cyborg teenager, the cyborg mother, and so on. Many of these cultural creative acts are market-mediated and the best canvas for these creative
acts, if we’re not directors or writers, is our own body. We’re still asking ourselves how do markets emerge? Now, we can formulate a cultural answer: markets emerge as cultural creative domains to facilitate the shift between these cultural norms. Consumers help to consolidate new cultural norms like the scientific cyborg ideal of technological improvement through personal self-enhancement.
I guess you had Botox as well…
Yes, I’m injected. I did it once. I went to several Botox parties during data collection. That’s where I got it, in a Torontonian upper middle-class living room, somewhere between the Bang & Olufsen stereo and the Laura Ashley sofa. And people’s reactions were really diverse. Some thought I was crazy, vein, full of issues. Others thought this was an interesting research experiment. See, it’s exciting where we’re going with this. Now we’re on the experience level. The power of consumption is sheer amazing when you imagine how 100cl of muscle blocker can shift one’s entire pattern of social relationships.
Can you tell us more about some of the reactions you’ve received?
Botox life?Well, a big word in all of this is expression. Not just in terms of how you look before and after a Botox treatment and your wrinkles are gone. But what’s at stake here in terms of the expressions your colleges, friends, and family invest in you. Some people told me that I have a weird expression now. Others remarked that I have lost my expression entirely. I also had some really negative reactions from family and friends. I did Botox only once and for research purposes but the experience was worth it. See, wrinkles are an important part of a socialized body. They are a socio-biological symbols in that they help to structure the relationship between old and young, male and female, fertile and infertile, happy and the sad, and so on. Asking someone to be natural and authentic, which is a very popular thing to do right now, is asking that person not to mess with these dualistic relationships. The husband who tells his wife “Honey, don’t get the breast augmentation, I love your natural beauty” always also says “Honey, I love that I’m the powerful, rational man and you’re the innocent, emotional woman.” I’ve had a case like this. The husband was using Botox but you can see how he constructed it as a career investment, something that belongs on the professional stage and not in the family. Botox as a breadwinner resource but not for the wife. When you have a technology at hand that allows you to edit and reformat your body like a text, wrinkle function on, wrinkle function off, you can reconfigure some of the most entrenched patterns of power relationships. No wonder, then, that cosmetic Botox is the most common enhancement procedure in North America.
Have we all turned into cyborg by now?
Well, let’s say we’re currently in a transitional period between these models. We’re waxing and waning between the old and the new. Our behaviors are a bit schizophrenic in that we constantly tackle back and forth. There are areas, performative areas, where we can afford to refer to ourselves as a cyborg and others where we feel more comfortable mobilizing a romantic, naturally unencumbered body. We’re experimenting like the Renaissance artists.
The geniuses like Boticelli, Raphael, or Michelangelo?
Yes, the geniuses. Today they are viewed as geniuses. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was still wedded to the idea of God’s dominance over man, which he gradually perceived as limiting to his artistic projects. Outsmarting competitors with his unprecedented knowledge of the human body, he reasoned, would require the transgression divine protocol. In the proto-gothic ambience of his nocturnal studio, he secretly dissected, measured, and portrayed dozens of corpses. In his official dealings with the Vatican, on the other hand, diligent submission to pre-anatomical Catholicism still had tremendous cultural and economic currency, and required him to fall back into a doctrinal practice mode. In a way we’re witnessing another Renaissance. Today, self-enhancement culture is this peculiar community of Botoxified Leonardos, cultural creative consumers riding the Botox bender to experiment with the body.
Your theory is quite different from popular views. According to bioethics, we’re gradually turning into a nation of self-absorbed frauds. What’s your take on this?
Yes, my theory is different in that I’m a researcher, not a moralist. This is an interesting argument. But whenever someone laments a potential loss of some collectively valued resource due to some kind of social change, we should ask ourselves, how the author of the message is related to the resource. The cautionary tale of Frankenstein is a powerful one. Please don’t mess with nature. Otherwise, we will lose humanism’s last hard currencies. It’s based on the idea that there is a core self, some kind of essential state of sanity and rational decision making that we all rely on and that we compromise when planting the Botox needle. Again, what do popular stories like this one tell us about what is at stake? The core self is a shared treasure and reinforcing its validity by lamenting its loss is a great way to secure existing patterns of power relationships. Western societies have a tradition of historically evolving through stages of perpetual structural instability
based on a fundamentally enduring tension between romantic and technophilic ideals. In this view, the critics who are railing about inauthenticity may be expressing less of a relevant, alarming social comment than an emerging historical discontinuity between their cultural lens and the emerging cyborg worldview.
http://www.markus-giesler.com/
7 commentaires
Mais chapeau l’interview en anglais
Commentaire par Matt Oï, le Lundi 24 novembre 2008 à 22:24
J’ai du mal à comprendre ce commentaire…M’est-il adressé?
Commentaire par BSTR, le Lundi 24 novembre 2008 à 22:24
Ah non, c’est une illustration particulière de la pensée pseudo cyber-scientifique 
Commentaire par Matt Oï, le Lundi 24 novembre 2008 à 22:42
Ce que je veux dire c’est que toute cette pensée et cette épistémologie autour de la cybernétique ne produit d’évolutions qu’au niveau du langage finalement, sans grande intelligibilité.
Commentaire par Matt Oï, le Lundi 24 novembre 2008 à 22:47
Je répète (ce que j’ai laissé sur ton répondeur) : je scotche d’apprendre que la phrase “are we human or are we dancer?” est de Hunter S. Thompson parce que c’est précisément le refrain du nouveau single des Killers ! Diantre ! Belle interview sinon, instructive et tout.
Commentaire par sylvain, le Lundi 24 novembre 2008 à 14:17
Je m’apprête à lire l’article et, comble de tous les combles, il est anglais. Modernité de notre culture cosmopolite? Volonté marketing délibérée? Epouvantail linguistique destiné à éloigner le profane? Je n’ai que très peu de temps devant moi, j’y reviendrai plus tard, le sujet me botte. However, nice shirt Bester.
Commentaire par Lord Abe, le Lundi 24 novembre 2008 à 14:58
PLAY BLESSURES
Tout ça, c’est du baratin et c’est comme cela que ça se traduit en terme d’évolution sociale: j’aime bien ton cerveau droit, j’emmerde ton égo démesuré (mais je t’emmerde pas toi), tu m’étonneras toujours par ton côté mélodramatique (si tu étais une série, tu serais Profit ou Hélène et les Garçons)…