JeanSnow.net — Diamond Agency’s Clast

Diamond Agency's Clast

What is the Clast blog? “Breaking down consumer and media insights in Japan,” is what it claims, and if you’re thinking Marxy, then you’re right to do so, since he’s the man behind the posts of this new blog from the Diamond Agency. Expect the same sort of cultural coverage and dissection readers of his Neomarxisme blog will already be familiar with. Oh, and it’s also available in Japanese.

Category: Web

Expect this sort of insight:

“For fashion magazines, however, itâ€™s a different story. Internet media has yet to prove an authoritarian status.”

Authoritarian, not authoritative, Marxy? Why? Ah, because you’ve read the Frankfurt School. Because you are an “icono-clast”.

But what sacred images does this iconoclast smash, writing pen sketches of the Japanese market for a market-led Japan? Why, the sacred images of the very people who developed the tools being used, of course! What’s being smashed here is the image of a human nature in any way bigger than the market.

I can promise you that Theodor Adorno — author of “The Authoritarian Personality” — clutches his head in his hands and rains a great cloud of tears down from the neo-Marxist heaven from which he glimpses this travesty of his terms, his methods.

All those great books, those risks, those critical concepts — so that Au can sell a pink cellphone more effectively to an office lady? So that the LDP can win another privatization-themed snap election using targeted celebrity assassins? Is this where it all ends up? Do we have to start this thing all over?

07.03.08 19:26

Posted by Momus

So you object to the stance he takes, or to the entire project in question (I’m assuming you already knew David worked for an ad agency)?

07.03.08 22:00

Posted by Jean Snow

Momus doesn’t like it - now I’ve seen everything!

07.03.08 22:42

Posted by marxy

“So you object to the stance he takes, or to the entire project in question (Iâ€™m assuming you already knew David worked for an ad agency)?”

I think I have more respect for marketing when it respects the consumer. A danger I see here is that the Marxist-style class politics we’ve seen Marxy employ on Neomarxisme turn, in the twinkling of an eye, into a kind of marketing which considers the consumer a dupe. I see nothing to contradict this in the analysis on clast of Can Cam Woman.

I also think that whereas on Neomarxisme Marxy would (quite rightly) lament Japan’s development into a more high-Gini, vertical and class-divided society, on clast this will turn into a completely unproblematical “market segmentation” which Marxy will be “just the man” to describe, allowing the kind of people who use this market research to exploit and re-inforce these emerging class gaps.

07.03.09 0:53

There’s of course a secondary meaning to “clast” which is “classed”, as in “Roll up! Roll up! Japanese consumers ranked, sorted and classed!”

So, there’s the individual Western iconoclast, that’s Marxy, and there’s the sheeplike, but increasingly micro-flocked, Japanese collectivity, “classed”.

Classed by the ‘clast! It’s neat, isn’t it! But is that really how he views himself, and is that really how he views them?

07.03.09 1:25

Marxy has been providing invaluable information via his blog for quite some time, opinions and analysis that is not available anywhere else. He absolutely deserves to benefit from the work that he’s done to date.

07.03.14 16:49

Posted by Gen Kanai