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Q: Cayce Pollard has both a strange allergy to logos and a special talent for hunting out cool. Do you think that this kind of attraction-repulsion is a necessary response to our commercially-saturated lives?
A: I think most of us have a love-hate relationship with branding, though certainly not as visceral as Cayce's. If branding is about selling the consumer a narrative, a story about what a given brand means, and what that brand might mean in the context of the consumer's life-narrative, then branding is awfully close to "being our culture." And I take it for granted that, anthropologically speaking, none of us ever really step outside of our own culture. The extremity of Cayce's sensitivity gave me a way to explore that, a way to look for the "edges."
Q: It seems rather ironic that Win Pollard, an ex-security expert, goes missing in the chaos of September 11th — an event that has brought the work of men like Win to public view and has changed our very conception of what it is to be safe. What do you think about the new attitudes around safety and privacy in a post-9/11 world?
A: I see Win very much as being a part of the old order, a figure from the Cold War. I can't really imagine what he'd make of the post-9/11 world. It's almost as though he "had" to go, then, to vanish, because he'd no longer "make sense." 9/11 was a psychogeographical singularity, and the shifts we've seen since, in concepts of safety and privacy, are probably the thin end of a much wider wedge. And I don't think that that actually has much to do with ideology, party politics, or national politics. I suspect it's all somehow more basic than that.
Q: The characters in your book are faced with both the ease and excitement offered by a globalized world and the homogenization of culture that comes with it. Canadians have long struggled with a similar dilemma — to protect the varied cultures of its citizens in a cultural mosaic or to follow an American melting-pot approach. Does the Canadian experience inform your view of how a global village might maintain diversity and flavour?
A: I'm not sure I really believe in either of those metaphors. They've both been around for so long that the original serial numbers have worn off with constant handling, and they're both a bit too comfortably familiar to be of much critical use. My own experience, for instance, has been that I've not seen that the children of recent immigrants to the United States become any more generically "American" than the children of recent immigrants to Canada become generically "Canadian." And I've looked for that, have tried to see it, and haven't been able to.
I think it's far too early to tell. The "cultural mosaic", which is very much an official (as opposed to popular) metaphor, dates from the late Sixties. It's important to remember that the United States was, popularly as well as officially, a "melting-pot," when the official immigration policy of Canada was still one of frankly racist/colonialist exclusionism.
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