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{"id":18251,"date":"2016-08-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=24"},"modified":"2016-08-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-05T00:00:00","slug":"marketing-crafts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/08\/marketing-crafts\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing Crafts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

C<\/span>ontemporary technologies threaten to suck us into virtual reality, and in response many have turned to real reality, to hand-crafts that link us to this worldly stuff. As Darian Leader (Hands<\/a>, 13-13) puts it, \u201cWe are encouraged to counter our apparent alienation in the excesses of the virtual world by returning to traditional activities such as weaving, knitting, model making, gardening, sculpting and general tinkering. Using our hands to make things is supposed to work against the dematerialized universe that we otherwise inhabit, a remainder or a new efflorescence of the grounding, satisfying bodily techniques of the past.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Leader doesn\u2019t have anything against crafts, but he doesn\u2019t think they involve any real break from the larger culture that they\u2019re supposed to resist: Crafts \u201care situated squarely in the very same ideology that they are intended to parry. When we look more closely at the marketing and promotion of globalized brands, they rely on exactly the same strategies: an emphasis on each person\u2019s uniqueness, their ability to create, the importance of time for oneself, the continuation of family and folk traditions. However different the coffee may be, the individual laboriously and lovingly hand brewing at home and a vast corporation like Starbucks increasingly share the same set of values.\u201d When people explain their devotion to crafts, they tend to invoke the motifs of the market: \u201cthe importance of personal choice, the sense of autonomy, the search for pleasure and a work of self-improvement.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

On a sinister note: \u201cIt is difficult to ignore here how some form of careful and delicate manual activity is so often associated with the cruellest of dictators. We could think here of Hitler\u2019s watercolour painting, the precision calligraphy of Chairman Mao, or President Snow\u2019s gentle rose pruning in The Hunger Games<\/em>. Individualized manual craft and automated destruction see strangely allied.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"