New, this old catchphrase

“” Galeries Lafayette, 130 years of new features “,” Total, pioneers for 100 years “,” Back market, it’s not new, it’s new »: The novelty has a good back, and it sells, including if it is necessary to use the most absurd tautologies and contradictions. By the way, “ How did the allegation to novelty become a commercial strategy ? “(P. 8) It was to this vast question that the philosopher Jeanne Guien, specialist in the history of consumerism, had the good idea to tackle.

Novelty in long term

“” This book focuses on novelty as it is built by merchant speeches “(P. 7), the author indicates from the outset. Thanks to economic sociology, we know that the value of the goods does not preexize the exchanges, but that it is built by market discourses. In this “ Quality economy », The novelty made it possible to sell a remarkable amount of goods. Jeanne Guien defines it by the conjunction of the primacy and fugititywhich makes it a formidably effective lever on the commercial level, aroused both curiosity and purchasing urgency. Merchant speeches then valued behaviors “ neophiles (Old Greek neosnew, and Philéôlove or desire) and symmetrically disqualify attitudes “ neophobic “, Reducing any resistance to” new »To a backward -looking posture. Neophilia becomes the cornerstone of the supply economy and the structural overproduction of capitalism ; The one, too, of consumerism that reaches society to the market.

Jeanne Guien’s work reveals that the merchant construction of novelty is the fruit of a long history of which it is high time to take the measure. The tracer makes it possible to put an end to a double amnesia: that which makes it possible to manufacture new from scratch, including where there is none, and that which leads to euphemizing obsolescence as a crucial and assumed strategy of capitalism since its origins, identifying too gladly the “ desire for novelties »To a universal and timeless inclination. The author therefore tears off the novelty from her convenient anhistoricity, by associating commercial and industrial history, by which we access the practices and speeches of the actors of economic life, and philosophy, which provides tools to analyze them. Unpretentious to completeness and the help of an appreciable variety of sources – packaging, catalogs and advertisements, gray literature produced by market players and their media comments -, its analysis offers us a rich panorama of six centuries of neophile discourse. Fortunately, because it is the risk with a fresco of this scale, the philosopher is attentive to the variation of the contexts that she never looks. Of XV^e Century to the present day, the history of neophilia therefore replayed that, better known, of capitalism.

From trade in the distance to theUltra Fast Fashion

According to Jeanne Guien, the roots of the commercial use of novelty date back to colonial trade, described as “ far away ». If the import of so -called “ exotic »In no case emerges with the expeditions of the last XV^e Century, these campaigns were supported by a powerful commercial imagination – made up of abundance and wonders to discover – intended to arouse the appetite of the European elites. Indeed, in modern times, it is in the shadow of this conquest of novelty that the “ exoticism “And the” curiosity Are mobilized by merchants-adventurers and other traders in order to open the worldly markets to colonial productions (for example food, from cocoa sugar, as well as artifacts and advent objects). These market qualifications also serve to justify the conquest and appropriation of resources, to make the brutal asymmetry of colonial exchanges, to finally reserve the monopoly of the taste of novelties.

At XVIII^e and especially at XIX^e centuries, this time it is “ innovation Who legitimizes the abuses of now industrial capitalism. The author recalls that the mechanization of the workshops is immediately conflictual because of its effects on employment – let us think here of Luddism in England in the 1810s. It is in this context of controversies aroused by the machinism that the obsolescence of the means of production was theorized and praised by the Charles Charles Babbage, which sees in 1832 in the “ new improved models »A lever for devaluing more quick machines than their wear. Promised to a very long prosperity, such neophile speeches are constantly reinvented, as under the more contemporary day of the law of Moore, named after the engineer who predicted, in 1965, the exponential curve of innovation in computer science and planned obsolescence within it. However, such models are unaware that the obsolescence of tools has as a corollary that of humans, pre -deprecated, dequalified, exploited, that Marxian criticism already points out. They are also based on a evolutionary vision of very questionable history, which erects the “ progress On a consensual horizon – what it is never – and obsolescence in fatal precept to reach it.

Another avatar of neophilia is the “ fashion “, Denomination that the clothing industry has gradually monopolized. If the reasons for change of set are historically plural (climate, activity, growth, wear, distinction, etc.), additional causality emerges in XIX^e century: the requirement for the renewal of the toilet. Why then ? In France, the abolition of corporatism and industrialization transform the textile sector, with the development of the making, the mass production of clothing “ all facts ». This offer was able to meet a demand thanks to the unique methods of distribution and communication of department stores. Based on the economy of scale and the rapid rotation of stocks, they imagine a commercial calendar and hammer the injunction to renewal. Since the XX^e century, this prescription was considerably accelerated, following the Statesunian and Spanish models (the chains of ready-to-wear stores), then Chinese (theUltra Fast Fashion debited on the internet). Obsolescence strategies at work are based on an ultimately simple thought: the faster a product can be dated, the more you can devalue it in favor of a second, glorified as “ new And desirable as such. But then again, the frantic cadences, matching the low -disproportionate prices of the fast fashion,, lead to deleterious effects – the fashion industry is notoriously one of the most violent in the world ; It is also one of the most polluting.

Faced with the spectrum of an overproduction crisis, market professionals have undertaken to make production and consumption coincide. Without ever reducing the offer, they strive to have more consuming, by presenting this driving as enviable – it is consumerism. In the light of the American case, the researcher reveals the cogs of this commercial effort which becomes professional XX^e century. To stimulate demand and legitimize waste, marketers invented methods in the 1950s and 1960s intended to plan obsolescence, adopting pseudo-Darwinist rhetoric assigning to each product a “ life cycle ». He returns to the designers, self-proclaimed avant-garde of the style, to shape “ ephemeral techniques », Acting on the form of an object which they are inmodming and which then ceases to please. The advertisers finally invoke modernity all the time: the allegations of novelty put on disparate forms, resulting from a technical or aesthetic change, a symbolic construction, or sometimes none of this. It happens that novelty is a fully hollow qualification, some advertisers pride itself on designing it from scratch.

Parangon of neophilia, the “ disposable ” – Vorace category which admits all kinds of goods – is right, rightly, the subject of substantial developments. From handkerchiefs (from the IX^e century in Japan !) And cans (at the end of XVIII^e century), the common point of products prescribed as “ disposable », That we buy and then buy new, is the technical, social or legal impossibility of their maintenance. At XX^e century, at the time of “ Taylorism at home “, The disposable products were readily tried” practices “, Because ready for use, but also under collective blindness to the future of these objects” rejected in the distance “(Thrown Away). This is the socioeconomic function of disposability, delegating and invisiting production and maintenance tasks, and each making more available for employment. These products are also very early approved as “ cheap », A quality to be contextualized: on the market, no price can be low without reference to wages, and these amounts are in any case high if they are confronted with re -use habits. “” Practical “,” cheap “, The disposable finally passes for” hygienic », Multiplying prophylactic promises, even though these goods are regularly castigated for their dangerousness, with great reinforcement of toxic substances and microplastics. Ordinary face of an apparently inextinguishable novelty, the disposable seals even the nine in the form of a seamless or packaging. In contemporary markets, where everything is sold (on) packaged, the unpacking test, an irreversible gesture which acts for the decline, inevitably leads to the desire for buyout.

Critique of neophile capitalism

Taking position in a debate that has lasted too much, Jeanne Guien shows that obsolescence (often described as “ programmed ») Do not fall under opaque industrial practices or fantasized plots. This is the opposite: the accelerated renewal of goods, including completely functional, has been constantly promoted to the light by market players since the origins of capitalism, to the point of becoming the criterion of a healthy economy. What healthy economy are we talking about ? The philosopher portrays a different reality to us. First, by reporting that the “ desire for novelties »Proceeds of commonly absurd and abusive discourse, between contradictions, emptiness and disappointed promises. Then, by demonstrating that neophilia, taken in always conflicting relationships, actually perpetuates an excluding economic model. The novelty, erected as a norm and variously put into speech through the ages, always discredits those who do without it, while legitimizing the beneficial dominations to the neophile economy. If this model is excluding, it is also unbearable: undoubtedly the volume would have gained more closely social criticism and environmental criticism, sometimes discreet in the work.

It was clearly urgent to write The desire for noveltiesin order to deconstruct a familiar summons and an implacable triptych: buy, throw, buy. Skillfully weaving the theoretical and the concrete, to which Jeanne Guien had accustomed us in her biographies of objects, this book offers a convincing reading grid of the economic model which we inherit, capable of informing contemporary debates on obsolescence, which we now understand that it is an engine of capitalism. This ample philosophical and historical fresco also throws the properly historian research bases, anchored in more closely circumscribed space-time contexts. They will make it possible to specify the purpose of the author and to extend his concern, moreover very laudable, to remove his evidence from neophilia by restoring her historical thickness.