Thinking through New
Authors: Marshall P. David 
Published: October 2020

A friend of mine once tried to capture the feeling that one gets from a new
thing. He decided that there was no word to describe the sensation of having
an unblemished eraser when you were in primary school, but nevertheless it
produced a kind of fascinating awe in the apparent perfection of the new. A
similar feeling captures the new car owner in smelling the interior's
recently minted plastic. Used car dealers would doubtless love to bottle
that smell because it produces the momentary pleasure of new ownership. And
I am sure there are certain people who are addicted to that smell, and go
test drive new cars with no intention of buying just for the experience of
the "new" smell. New clothes produce that same sensation: most of us ignore
the label which says "wash before wearing" because we want to experience the
incredible stiff tactile sensation of a new shirt. My friend called this
gle-gle, and it is a pervasive relationship to New in a variety of guises.
New implies two kinds of objects or practices: it implies either the
replacement of the old or it points to the emergence of something that has
not existed before. In both cases, new always heralds change and has the
potential for social or cultural transformation. As a result, popular
writers and ad copy editors often link new with revolution. For example, the
advent of the computer was seen to be revolutionary. Similarly a new
detergent which worked in cold water promised cataclysmic change in the
1960s. But these promises of revolution through some innovation have not
necessarily led to massive social upheaval; rather they have identified a
discursive trope of contemporary culture which links new with rejuvenation.
The claim that something is new is the mantra of modernity and the kitsch of
the postmodern.
This double-play of the concept of the new is best untangled through thinking
how a once new object becomes the contemporary way of expressing the former
hope of progress and change -- with raised and knowing eyebrow. I recently
stumbled into one of these double-plays. While searching for bedding for yet
another birthday slumber party, I picked up an old mattress which still had
its 1950s label, where it proudly announced that the cushioning was the
wonderful new revolutionary foam system called the Dunlopillo. The
Dunlopillo system was certainly trademarked and no doubt patented for its
then unique system of troughs and cones of army green foam; but in its
current incarnation the foam was weak and the bed easily crumpled in half.
All that was left of the sentiment of newness was the label, which in its
graphics expressed the necessary connection to science as the future, and
authoritative zeal in its seriousness of its revolutionary potential.
But seen from 1998, the claims seemed bombastic and beautifully optimistic.
Modernity's relationship to the new is to celebrate the potential for
change. It is a cultural project that has enveloped the sentiments of
capitalism and socialism from their origins in the 18th and 19th centuries,
and manifested itself in what Schudson labelled "capitalist realism" in
advertising, and what is known as socialist realism as a state-sanctioned
artistic movement in the Soviet Union. Both representations provided their
systems with the capacity to repaint the cultural canvas with each new
product such as Dunlopillo, or in the Soviet system with each new five-year
productivity plan for the collective. Maintaining the unity of the cultural
project was a challenge to each system's representational regime; sustaining
the power of the new as a revolutionary force is the fundamental link between
capitalist and socialist systems throughout the twentieth century.
These representational regimes were in fact connected to the production of
new phenomena, new materials, new social formations. However, the message of
the new has gradually weakened over the last thirty years. Think of the way
in which the Space Race produced all sorts of new technologies of computing,
calculation and the integration of electronics into the running of the
automobile. It also produced the breakfast orange-juice substitute, 'Tang'.
Indeed, the first advertisements for Tang intoned that it was the drink that
astronauts enjoyed in space. Tang and its flavour crystals provided the
ultimate form of efficiency and convenience, and provided a clear link
between the highly ideologically driven space program and the everyday lives
of citizens of the "free" world. In the 60s and 70s the link between the
general project of modernity and improving everyday life was made evidently
clear every time you added water to your Tang flavour crystals. One has to
ask: where is Tang today? Not only is it difficult to find in my
supermarket, but even if it were available it would not operate as the same
representation of progress and the project of modernity. Instead, it would
have little more than a nostalgic -- or, kitsch -- hold on a generation that
has seen too many representations of the new and too many attempts at
indicating improvement.
The decay of the cultural power of the new is clearly linked to consumer
culture's dependence on and overuse of the concept. The entire century has
been enveloped by an accelerating pattern of symbolic change. Symbolic
change is not necessarily the same as the futurologist Toffler claiming that
we are in a constant state of "future shock"; rather it is much more the
introduction of new designs as if there were not only transformed designs,
but fundamentally transformed products. This perpetually 'new' is a feature
of the fashion industry as it works toward seasonal transformation.
Toothbrushes have also been the object of this design therapy, which
produces both continual change over the last twenty years, and claims of new
revolutionary designs. Central to this notion of symbolic change is
advertising. Advertising plays with the hopes and desires of its audience by
providing the contradictory symbolic materiality of progressive change. The
cultural and political power of the new is the symbolic terrain that
advertising has mined to present its "images of well-being".
What one can now detect in the circulation of advertising is at least two
responses to the decay of the power of the new. First, instead of
advertising invoking the wonders of science and its technological offspring
providing you with something revolutionary, advertising has moved
increasingly towards personal transformation, echoing the 30-year-old
self-help, self-discovery book industry. In Australia, GM-Holden's Barina
television ads provide a typical example. No technical detail about the car
is given in the ads, but a great deal of information --- via the singing,
the superimposed dancers, and the graphics employed -- signifies that the
car is designed for the young female driver. Symbolically, the car is
transformed into a new space of feminine subjectivity.
Second, advertising plays with the cynicism of the cognoscenti. If the new
itself can no longer work to signify genuine change and improvement in
contemporary culture, it is instead represented as a changed attitude to the
contemporary world that only a particular demographic will actually
comprehend. The level of sophistication in reading the new as a cultural
phenomenon by advertisers (or by proxy, their agencies) is sometimes
astounding. A recent Coca-Cola radio ad played with a singing style of ennui
and anger that embodied punk, but only as punk has been reinvented in the
mid-90s through such groups as Green Day. The lyrics were identical to the
rest of the "Always Coca-Cola" campaign that has been circulating
internationally for the last five years; however, the cynicism of the
singers, the bare tunefulness, and even the use of a popular culture icon
such as Coke as the object of a song (and ridicule), tries to capture a
particular new cultural moment with a different audience.
Advertising as a cultural discourse on its own expresses a malaise within the
transforming promise of the new that has been so much a part of modernity.
However, the myths of modernity -- its clear association with social
progress -- have never completely dissipated. In contemporary culture, it
has fallen on new computer technologies to keep the ember of modernity and
progress glowing. Over the last two decades the personal computer has
maintained the naiveté of the new that was central to mid-twentieth century
advertising, if not post-war culture in general. Very much like the Space
Race stitched together an ideological weave that connected the populace to
the interests of what Eisenhower first described as a military-industrial
complex, the computer has ignited a new generation of optimism. It has been
appropriated by governments from Singapore and Malaysia (think of the
Multimedia Super Corridor) to the United States (think of Vice President Al
Gore's NII) as the rescue package for the organisation of capitalism.
Through Microsoft's hegemony there is a sense of coherence in "operating
systems" which makes their slogan "where do you want to go today?", in its
evocation of choice, also an invocation of unity of purpose. The wonderful
synergy of the personal computer is that it weaves the conception of
personal desire back into a generalisable social system of value.
Despite all these efforts at harnessing the new computer technologies into
established political and economic forces, the new nature of computer
technology draws us back to the reason why new is intrinsically exciting:
the defining nature of the new is that it offers the potential for some form
of social change. The Internet has been the source for this new discourse of
utopia. If we follow Howard Rheingold's logic, New "virtual communities" are
formed online. A disequilibrium in who controls the flow of information is
part of the appeal of the Internet, and the very appearance of this journal
stems from that sense of new access. The Internet is said to challenge the
boundaries of nations and states (although English language hegemony and
pure economic access continue to operate to control the flow of those
boundaries), with regulation devolving out of state policy towards the
individual. Transforming identities are also very much an element of online
communities: if nothing else, the play of gender in online game and chat
programs identifies the constructed nature of our identities.
All of this energy, and what I would call affect, refers to how computer
technology and the Internet have managed to produce a sensation of agency.
What I mean by agency is not necessarily attached to the project of
modernity; rather it is the sense of being able to produce the new itself,
as opposed to just living in the architecture of the new provided by someone
else. On one level, the Internet and personal computers do provide a way to
make your information look as if it is more significant and of a higher
quality. The continuing proliferation of personal websites attests to this
narcissistic drive of contemporary culture. On another level, the narcissism
also identifies activity and agency in engaging in a form of communication
with others. The Internet then can be thought of as paralleling movements in
contemporary music, where the ability to construct soundscapes through
computer interfaces has given the musician greater agency in the production
of new electronic music.
The new is intrinsically an odd phenomenon. It continually threatens
established patterns. What is different about the new and its meaning in the
twentieth century is that it has become part of the central ideology of
western culture in its characterised representation of modernity. In a
strange mix, the new reinforces the old and established. Nonetheless, the
new, like culture itself, is never completely contained by any overarching
architecture. The new expresses the potential, and occasionally the
enactment, of significant cultural change. The fatigue that I have
identified in our thinking about the new identifies a decline in the power
of modernity to capture change, difference and transformation. That very
fatigue may indicate in and of itself something profoundly new.

References

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic
Frontier. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on
American Society. New York: Basic Books, 1984.
Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. London: Pan Books, 1971.

Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

P. David Marshall. "Thinking through New." M/C: A Journal of Media and
Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access]
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/think.php>.
Chicago style:

P. David Marshall, "Thinking through New," M/C: A Journal of Media and
Culture 1, no. 1 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/think.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:

P. David Marshall. (1998) Thinking through new. M/C: A Journal of Media and
Culture 1(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/think.php> ([your date of access]).