Virginia Postrel, "Surface and Substance"

The critic Camille Paglia has described Virginia Postrel, the author of The Future and Its Enemies (1998), and The Substance of Style (2003), as "one of the smartest women in America [who] for years . . . has demonstrated her daunting gift for cutting-edge social and economic analysis as well as her admirable command of lean, lucid prose." Now one of the nation's most sought-after public speakers on contemporary developments involving business, technology, and culture, Postrel began her career as a journalist with reporting stints at Inc. and The Wall Street Journal, and then served as editor of the Libertarian magazine Reason from 1989 to 2000. Postrel has a column that appears regularly in the New York Times and maintains a highly trafficked weblog where she provides on-the-spot responses both to weighty and to seemingly trivial developments on the national and international news scene. 

In The Future and Its Enemies, Postrel challenges those who see the spread of technology, the advent of the global economy, and the increasing influence of popular culture as threatening to undermine our nation's fundamental values and to imperil the country's future. Arguing against those on both the right and the left side of the political spectrum who see change in these areas as inevitably leading to decline, Postrel proposes an alternate, "dynamist" model in which the direction of progress is understood always to be unpredictable, open-ended, and contingent. She believes that embracing this model makes it possible to rethink everything from standard business practices to the search for truth and beauty. Postrel picks up this discussion in The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. Here, she focuses on the liberating power that is afforded by individual choice in the marketplace. Bringing together her research into fields as diverse as fashion, real estate, politics, design, and economics, Postrel seeks to establish that the biologically driven search for beauty expresses itself in all these areas, profoundly influencing the future of human culture. To this way of thinking, a seemingly trivial matter, like a political candidate's hairstyle, is understood to have a deeper significance, and the nation's preoccupation with style is seen not as a cause for concern but as a sign that the future belongs to those who appreciate the driving power of the desire for beauty.

Postrel, Virginia. "Surface and Substance." The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Camille Paglia's quote is drawn from "How the Demos Lost the White House in Seattle," Salon.com, December 8, 1999. Additional biographical information and digital image drawn from Virginia Postrel's home page.

Link to Explore:

http://www.wnyc.org/images/nologo_introduction.pdf: From the public radio station WNYC's website, the introduction to Naomi Klein's 2000 bestseller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.

Question for Connecting:

• How is Postrel’s argument changed by a consideration of the economic relations that underwrite the mass production of the items she admires? Is it possible to maintain a commitment to the aesthetic once attention is turned from the object itself to the labor that was required to make the object? Taking Pietra Rivoli’s discussion of the market forces governing the creation and distribution of t-shirts, consider what is gained by attending to labor rather than to aesthetics. Is labor “substance” and aesthetics “surface”? If consumers valued aesthetics more highly, would labor relations change?

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