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Market Dreams
Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic
By Elaine Weiner THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2007 University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-09988-7
Chapter One
Introduction
In 2003, two Czech film students, Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, used a state grant totaling 1.5 million Czech crowns (as well as other funding) to promote the opening of a fictitious hypermarket in Prague. Klusák and Remunda documented the hoax in their film Ceský sen (The Czech Dream), which became a box office hit when it reached Czech theaters in 2004. While the media and politicians condemned the film for wasting public money, Czech filmgoers flocked to see it. Remarkably, Ceský sen played in Czech theaters for over a year. While the novelty of its genre, billed as a reality show on film, captured Czechs' attention, it was arguably the absurdity of its story that truly captivated them.
Klusák and Remunda employed the services of a top advertising agency, visited style consultants at Hugo Boss for their makeovers as "directors" of the hypermarket, and invested in psychometric tests aimed at gauging consumer preferences. For two weeks in May 2003, the opening of the supposed hypermarket was advertised via a teaser advertising campaign with brightly colored slogans on billboards such as "Don't Go There," "Don'tSpend Your Money," "Don't Stand in Line," "Opening May 31st at 10 A.M.!-Where? You'll find out soon," and a chorus-sung jingle with sarcastic lyrics like "If you don't have the cash, get a loan and scream, 'I want to fulfill my dream!'" In Klusák and Remunda's words, the strategy was built on "suspense" and "mystery." TV spots as well as two hundred thousand flyers advertising ridiculously low prices further tantalized Czech consumers. The lures worked. On May 31, 2003, more than a thousand people-young, old, fit, and disabled-showed up at the Letany fairgrounds in Prague for the hypermarket's grand opening. The advertisements had promised a "surprise" for everyone who came on opening day, and that is indeed what they got. What from a distance appeared to be the front of the hypermarket painted in the eye-catching colors of its advertisements was in actuality just a ten-meter-high, one-hundred-meter-wide billboard sitting in a green field. After realizing that they had been tricked, the "customers" had a variety of reactions. Some cursed the student filmmakers. A few even threw stones at the store's faux facade. Several chuckled at the well-executed ruse. Others noted the irony in having been duped. As one would-be "customer" commented, "I thought the era of lies was over, but it's not."
While most obviously, this film is a treatise on consumerism gone wild, its meanings-for Czechs as well as for other Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) citizenries more broadly-go much further. The timing of this scam coincided with the Czech government's campaign for a "yes" vote on accession to the European Union (EU). In Ceský sen's closing sequence, Klusák and Remunda signal this wider significance by inserting a short segment on Czech politicians' campaign to convince Czechs to vote favorably on EU accession, thereby intimating that marketers and politicians vying for Czechs' purchasing and political verve similarly exploit an array of verbal and visual ploys. For Czechs, the film's connotations speak not only to the continuities between marketers' and politicians' manipulation of consumers' and citizens' minds but also to the parallels between slogans of the socialist past and those of the postsocialist present. Albeit in different guise, the "propaganda" associated with the socialist past exists in the present.
In Ceský sen, the convergence of more than one thousand "customers" at a market's opening day and film shots of many running across the Letany grounds toward its supposed entryway is testimony enough to Czechs' enthusiasm for the market. But, while Ceský sen is about Czechs' mania for a particular market, it might also be read as a parable about Czechs' fervor for and encounter with capitalism. Seventy-seven percent of Czechs voted in favor of EU accession-to becoming in effect a part of Europe's common market. In 1989, a mere fourteen years earlier, Czechs had radically changed course, rejecting the Communist Party's command economy regime in favor of a free-market economy. These processes of marketization are not unique to the Czech Republic; many countries across the CEE region have followed a similar path. However, Czechs' attitudes toward their socialist economic past (negative) and their anticipated capitalist future (positive) have been more pronounced than the attitudes of their CEE counterparts (Rose 2001; Rose and Haerpfer 1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998). While Ceský sen shows Czechs rushing toward an imagined market located in a Prague field, the race toward the market more broadly understood is an underlying subtext. Ceský sen reminds Czechs about the power not only of ideas but also of those notions that fallaciously buttress the market. Even some of the hypermarket's prospective customers in the film acknowledge this irony, which thus cannot escape the audience's notice. Ceský sen compels Czechs to think about the market's meaning for them and more profoundly to reflect on how easily they can be convinced of its "dream."
As I watched Ceský sen in the Svetozor Theater, located just off Prague's Wenceslas Square, during the summer of 2005, I was struck by the realization that Czechs were engaged in recognizing the market not merely as a set of practices involving the trading, buying, and selling of goods and services but also as a constructed image or set of ideas. For more than a decade, my scholarly attentions have focused largely on questions of marketization and in particular on its meaning in the Czech context and in the postsocialist world more generally. My engagement, informed by my feminist inclinations, has been somewhat more limited, centering principally on marketization's implications for women. Nonetheless, my understanding of the ideological workings of the market is certainly akin to the insights wonderfully embodied in Ceský sen.
In this book, I explore how free-market economics as a discourse penetrated postsocialist spaces-specifically, the Czech Republic-and how political elites discursively mobilized the free market to legitimate a new economic order in the decade following socialism's overthrow. This discourse manifests as a grand narrative-a metanarrative-in which capitalism vanquishes communism and frees the "captive" populace. In the most fundamental sense, it is a constructed story about good conquering evil. In this compelling metastory, the neoliberal market is the ever-moral hero and the state the almost-always-immoral villain. The free market fights the impoverishing (communist) state for economic growth and ultimately prosperity. In Czech neoliberals' telling of the tale, no compromises in the form of market socialism, reform communism, or a socialist market economy are viable. Only a neoliberal market can truly free the populace from its communist confinement, allowing citizens to leave an uncivilized place and return to the civilized world-that is, Europe. To reach this tale's triumphal end, however, those held captive must help with their own release. This entails forsaking their "bad," irrational behaviors (irresponsibility and dependence) and assuming "good," rational behaviors (self-reliance, personal responsibility, and independence). According to Czech political leaders, Czechs' national character as a talented, able and clever people renders this adaptation possible. In return, the people can end the punishing deprivations of their socialist past and reap the copious rewards of a capitalist present and future.
At the time of this tale's telling, free-market economics is globally hegemonic. At this historical moment, the "invisible hand" of the free market is deemed the most economically functional route, and state intervention is seen as dysfunction. This metastory is further set in a space with a distinct past, marked by nearly half a century of state socialism-the Czech Republic. In its postsocialist present, this place has encountered fewer tribulations and more triumphs than other postsocialist countries have in restructuring its economy. In this particular time and place, this meta-tale has taken root, with national and international political elites actively contributing to its cultivation. Their careful and crafty nurturance has resulted in a strong, steady, and ultimately quite convincing metastory.
At its core, however, this book focuses on how a postsocialist populace interprets this conveyed "dream" of the free market in which capitalism now promises a "radiant future." More concretely, the book concerns how seventy-four Czech female managers and factory workers stay true to its transposed logic despite the incongruities between their "reality" and the "dream." Regardless of the inclusivity of the market metanarrative's promise, many scholars expected that women and workers would walk away from the free market empty-handed-capitalism's losers-much like the would-be customers in Ceský sen. In fact, Czech female managers have found their way in, reaping the market's promised gains. Czech female factory workers, in contrast, have remained outside, with the free market's rewards out of their reach. Experientially, these two groups of women have traveled very different postsocialist paths. Yet interpretively, in their personal postsocialist parables, members of both groups conclude that their path ends with liberation. For the managers, this release from socialism's strictures is immediate and ubiquitous, affecting every facet of their lives as workers, citizens, wives/partners, and mothers. In trading their socialist misbehaviors for a "market" mode of comportment, they count themselves among transition's success stories. The factory workers' losses are just as profound as the managers' gains-if not more so. In the postsocialist era, the workers have been pushed to Czech society's economic and social margins. However, they interpret these deprivations as temporary; their descendants will partake in capitalism's promised bounty. In their understandings, the "radiant future" will belong to their children and grandchildren.
The conclusion of Ceský sen makes apparent the mismatch between reality and dream. The filmmakers admit the hoax, and there is no escaping the knowledge that a billboard and some scaffolding do not make a hypermarket. In contrast, the free market's propagators acknowledge no such ruse; they will not discredit the "dream" of capitalism. Moreover, no credible alternative seems available. For this postsocialist populace, socialism is now their nightmare, and capitalism has become their dream. Consequently, female managers and factory workers strive interpretively-either altering their own experiences or modifying elements of the market metanarrative-to preserve their faith in capitalism and to avoid a Kafkaesque state of being. In so doing, they both empower and disempower themselves, sometimes quite unwittingly.
Market, Meaning, and (Meta)Narrative
An important precondition for the analysis presented in this book is that the market is not solely construed as the trading, buying, and selling of goods and services. In contrast to this market realist conceptualization, scholars have argued that the market also functions as a mental model informed by particular cultural and political referents (Carrier 1997; Dilley 1992). I locate my theoretical take on the market largely in the latter theoretical camp, as do other scholars who conceptualize the market as a discursive form. I extend the theoretical and empirical agenda of market modelers and discourse analysts in considering the workings of the free market as a discourse in the postsocialist milieu (Dilley 1992). I suggest, however, that the market does not merely represent an ideological manifestation expressed via discourse but also takes shape as a narrative-more specifically, as a metanarrative. Metanarratives are not only grand or all-encompassing stories but are distinct from other narratives in their naturalization; this naturalization occurs when social phenomena are naturalized (Somers 2001). Put more simply, when stories are grounded in "that which is designated as 'given'-unchanging, spontaneous, voluntary, natural, God-given, law-like"-they achieve metanarrative stature (Somers 1999:144). Thus, when narratives go meta, they derive an authority that is profoundly difficult to dislodge. However, as Elliot Mishler asserts, metanarratives "conceal patterns of domination and submission" (1995:115).
During moments of social turmoil, narratives become "at least partly externalized," making them all the more ready for both their propagators and protagonists to enact (Hart 1992:635). Instrumentally, these narratives can become a mobilizational resource for political leaders who manipulate them to persuade their addressees to adhere to a desired course of action (Hart 1992). In the aftermath of the CEE citizenries' revolutionary retaliation against the socialist state in the late 1980s, the market metanarrative came to the fore in much of the region as a formidable resource for political leaders. Free-market economics underpins a potent, publicly espoused metastory aimed at convincing CEE citizenries of the merits of the free market. The metanarrative embodies a very particular rather than universal set of values that, treated as natural and thus taken for granted, go unexamined. While counternarratives can undermine such stories, this event is unlikely in the postsocialist milieu (Mishler 1995). Socialism's collapse has created an ideological void. For CEE populaces, the communist counternarrative has been discredited, leaving the metanarrative of the free market not only hegemonic but unrivaled. In an otherwise uncertain and ambiguous postsocialist world, the free market has been "elevated to the touchstone of certainty" (Dilley 1992:22).
Furthermore, the market is not something "out there" but rather is integrated into the very self, often unconsciously. The principal way in which humans are understood to make sense of their lived experiences is through narratives (Jameson 1981; Kane 2000; Mishler 1986; Personal Narratives Group 1989; Somers 1994). As Laurel Richardson explains, "People make sense of their lives through the stories that are available to them, and they attempt to fit their lives into the available stories. People live by stories" (1990:129). Individuals effectively seek to integrate their experiences, past and present, by invoking prevailing stories-public, social, and/or cultural (Somers and Gibson 1994). In addition, individuals not only appropriate narratives in the act of sense making but also articulate their resulting reasoning in narrative fashion. In other words, people cognitively and orally engage their world through stories (Richardson 1990). Out of this synthesis of lived experience with available stories emerges who individuals are and what they do. As Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson elaborate, to do otherwise "would fundamentally violate their sense of being at that time and place" (1994:67).
Two types of stories lie at the empirical core of this book: a metanarrative about the free market of public currency, and seventy-four personal narratives. I look at how a portion of the CEE populace-twenty-six Czech female managers and forty-eight Czech female factory workers-engage with a constricted narrative universe dominated by the story of a free-market economic order. I demonstrate how these two groups of women have anchored their experiences-what has happened and is happening to them-to this metanarrative. Most apparently, this book describes the role of a metanarrative about the market in a postsocialist space. More importantly, it speaks to how a publicly articulated narrative's structure and context can empower the story so that it defines "what is possible and intelligible" (Chase 2005:667). The delimiting capacity of such a story, however, can transpire in radically different ways.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Market Dreams by Elaine Weiner Copyright © 2007 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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