TPCS 18: Culture as accent

By Jan Blommaert and Piia Varis

Introduction

Let us open with a mundane but telling example. Figure 1 shows an advertisement that was part of a campaign a couple of years ago. The well known beer brand Carlsberg here advertises a new bottle.

Carlsberg

Isn’t this interesting: a massive worldwide advertisement campaign is launched about the new shape of a beer bottle. The beer itself – what most people would perceive as the commodity to be purchased – remains unaltered; what changes is the packaging, the container in which the beer is sold. What is advertised and marketed here is a detail of the whole commodity, a non-essential aspect of it. Or is it?

We see in our present ways of life how often the things that are construed and presented as relevant or crucial are in actual fact details, hardly fundamental aspects of something bigger and more encompassing. Thus, this paper intends to draw attention to the very small proportion of cultural material that seems to matter in many aspects of everyday life: the fact that in a world which otherwise revolves around strong tendencies towards uniformity, small – very small – differences acquire the status of fundamental aspects of being. Identities and senses of ‘being oneself’ are based on and grounded in miniscule deviations from standard formats and scripts that organize most of what this ‘being oneself’ is actually about. This pattern, in which culture increasingly appears as an ‘accent’, an inflection of standard codes and norms, is part of consumer culture. In that sense, it is old – remember Marcuse’s one-dimensional man (1964) and Bourdieu’s remarkably stable class-structuring patterns of cultural distinction (1984). But the increased speed and intensity that characterizes the present 2 economy of cultural forms and that finds its expressions in the widespread intensive use of online social media makes these patterns more visible and less escapable as objects of reflection.

This paper has limited ambitions. We intend to provide a rough outline of the two forces we observe and we see as defining this pattern of culture-as-accent: a strong tendency towards uniformity and homogeneity on the one hand, and the inflation of details as metonymic marks of the total person on the other. Both forces co-occur in a dialectic in which the very forces of homogenization are always ‘footnoted’, so to speak, by strong and outspoken tendencies towards inflating and overvaluing details. In fact, much of contemporary cultural life can perhaps best be described as ‘uniformity-with-a-minor-difference’, and consumer capitalism plays into both apparently contradictory forces. The clearest examples of these patterns can thus be found in advertisements, and most of the illustrations we shall use in this paper are taken from that domain.

How to quote: Blommaert, J., & Varis, P. (2012). Culture as accent. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 18).

Read the full working paper here: Culture as accent.