george manas

With these questions, Mauss posited a dual, dichotomous way of thinking about the object (as gift). On the one hand, the object is passive; its circulation is determined by societal “rules,” such as tradition, for example. The object here, we might say, acts solely as a principal, for it carries the message that it must be reciprocated, but it is not wholly constitutive of that demand. The gift in itself, in other words, does not obligate the receiver to reciprocate –other, extrinsic forces function to that end. Autonomy, however, defines the nature of the object in the second perspective. Here the object is cast as an agent whose (intrinsic) “power” demands that its receiver give something in return to the giver. The object as (passive) on the one hand, and on the other hand, the object as (active, autonomous) subject –to borrow Foucault’s formulation, this is how the object has been, and doubtless continues to be, known.

The aforementioned Volkswagen advertisement campaign offers a propitious opportunity to discuss not only Mauss’s theory of objects, but also other thinkers’ efforts to challenge as well as to elaborate the Frenchman’s work. The ad is provocative for the following reasons: Firstly, like most ads, the Volkswagen ads raise the question of the signification of a (brand) name (Volkswagen) and not merely of a physical object (a car, for example). When viewing Volkswagen TV commercials or, for that matter, the company’s ads in print form, one is not seeing a car but, rather, a representation of a car, and sometimes one sees or hears only the word Volkswagen. We might ponder, then, what it is about the sign Volkswagen that evokes in us a response, and, moreover, just where this provocative power lays – in us, collectively as well as individually, or in the sign, the word itself.  Secondly, the kind of commodity advertised –an automobile –compels us to broaden our focus and examine the nature of the car as sign, what meanings we associate with automobiles. Furthermore, and as a result of the prior question, we must also ask where the various meanings people read in the automobile originate –in the car itself or in society, collectively, or in the individual, personally. Lastly, as an advertisement, we are induced to ponder the ad itself as a kind of object or sign, one not separate from but intertwined with Volkswagen and the automobile as signs. A brief elaboration upon these three aspects of the Volkswagen ad suggests that Mauss’s, as well as Maurice Godelier’s and Jean Baudrillard’s, theory of subject/object relations are in need of revision. In treating subjects and objects as mutually exclusive, these thinkers mistakenly simplify the roles of both subjects and objects in society.

(1) Volkswagen as a sign. Throughout its history, the Volkswagen brand has, perhaps more so than other automobile names, evidenced a kind of cultural plasticity, whereby it has demonstrated a propensity to “embody” or signify various moments in history. Take, for example, the familiar images of Volkswagen vans and Beetles at Woodstock in 1969. The company itself sought to bank in on such images, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it began to advertise the new Beetle in the cloak of hippy terminology, for example, “Flower Power” –indeed, these modern Beetles are equipped with a small vase in the dashboard, a feature that lends the car an illusion of naturalness, such as the kind evoked by “Woodstock,” and, moreover, that links it to the presumably carefree, anti-bourgeois, idyllic lifestyle of the hippy. Manifest in this cultural appropriation is the unfailing ability of the marketplace to subsume the counter-culture –by way of fetishization, naturalization, and commoditization – into the mainstream. Most recently, Volkswagen has launched a publicity campaign for its new Beetle, the theme of which is the Beetle as a “Force of Good”, a moniker that invokes the myth of the humane, caring hippy, as against the image of the heartless businessman. In a recent campaign commercial, for example, the Beetle, by the sheer force of its presence, causes a buzzing alarm-clock (which reads 6:00AM) to explode. The Beetle here, like the image of the hippy of years past, represents a lifestyle contrary to the banal 9 to 5 lifestyle of most Americans. The Beetle, in other words, pretends to transcend the exigencies of the marketplace, even as, ironically, it is of that realm. Repressed by the company, however, is its link to Hitler’s Germany. Volkswagen, literally “the peoples’ car,” was begun as part of a deliberate attempt to standardize the property and tastes of Germans. In fact, in 1932 Hitler sketched what would become the prototype of the first Beetle.  For many Americans, to be sure, the “volks” part of Volkswagen evokes not only flowers and bell-bottom jeans, but also, and perhaps more stringently, the evils of socialism, such as the erasure of individuality and personal freedom, to name a few.

(2) Volkswagen as car. Since Eisenhower’s grand highway project, automobiles have occupied a peculiar role in American mainstream culture. Automobiles do not merely constitute consumer culture. They also sustain and form it, most explicitly with regard to shopping malls, which, as we all know, are composed not only of stores, movie theaters, spas, etc., but also giant parking lots. Consumer culture has, in a sense, developed in relation to the automobile, even as the car is one of its kin. For individual owners, however, the car often has what we might call personal significance, which, though it   may be related to popular beliefs, is not bound to them. A car that once belonged to a now deceased relative, for example, may hold particular significance to its inheritor. Furthermore, there is yet another sort of personal attachment to discuss, and it involves narcissistic projection. Though physically separate from its owner, an automobile is often the object of a psychological attachment, what Jean Boudrillard calls, in The System of Objects, a relationship of a projective kind. In such cases, a car is regarded by its owner to be a part of himself, and himself a part of the vehicle. This is the phenomenon Roland Barthes has described in his “The New Citroёn”: one drives an automobile as if with one’s whole body; one is, or at least imagines one’s self as, part and parcel of the machine, and the machine as part and parcel of one’s self.  

(3) Volkswagen as an advertisement. “On the road of life,” reads the ad developed by Arnold Communications, “there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted.” Quite obviously, this is a kind of a help-wanted ad, such as those found in any newspaper or on countless storefronts. Unlike the conventional help-wanted ads, however, “Drivers Wanted” allots agency to the object (the car) and, to a degree, it objectifies the subject (the consumer).  Here the role of the employee, as it were, is cast as seeking an employer, and not, as is the tradition, vice versa. This reversal has startling implications, chief among them being that it affords the commodity subjectivity, and, in turn, objectifies the consumer. This process of subjectification is precisely what Maurice Godelier was describing when he wrote, “In societies dominated by the obligation to sell and to make money, to make a profit in competing in the sale of goods and services, people are, up to a point, treated like objects."²

These three aspects of Volkswagen –as a sign, a car, and a publicity campaign –require us to treat subjects and objects as interdependent rather than exclusive terms.  Mauss’s contention that objects have a soul or spirit reduces subjects to the passive status of objects, and also ignores the simple fact that the existence of the term object implies its correlate, the term subject. After all, the object as such requires, for its very existence, to be seen, a subject. This fact is precisely what, by virtue of its ad-hood, the “Drivers Wanted” ad explicates. The ad, like Volkswagen and cars, implies a viewer; it does not exist in itself. While both Godelier and Boudrillard have amended this impasse in Mauss’s theory by stressing the role of the subject in subject/object relations, they have nevertheless conceived a world in which objects have carte blanche, so to speak. Boudrillard, for example, contends that the significance of objects results from subjects – subjects project meanings onto objects. What he misses, however, is that objects play a formative role in subjects –objects project onto subjects. Similarly, Godelier posits a world in which objects, estranged from their origins in personal relationships, behave like subjects. What Godelier fails to consider is that such a viewpoint implies an interpretative subjectivity, an agency that sees objects behaving like subjects.  Mauss, like Godelier and Baudrillard, fails to deal with the paradox that subjects make objects, just as objects make subjects. Subject and object are interdependent; each relies on the other for its very existence. This mode of relation is often called chiasmus, the Greek word for “crossing.”   

(2) Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott (1996; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p.71.