'Midcult' - Environmental Sustainability's Enemy

Sniggering aside to his fictional alter ego from Saul Bellow's Humbolt's Gift and description therein of how one part of the boychik's anatomy reacted adamantly to his own words during a moonlit Montauk beach encounter with an equally immodest lass, the eminent critic Dwight MacDonald [See left (of course)] is remembered in large part for a 1960 article in which he launched the term 'Midcult'. Despite its possible pyschological connotation to Khmer Rouge-like brainwashing, Midcult, instead, was a development, per MacDonald, which provided a thin gloss of culture - a "fig leaf" was his exact term - to the formulaic nature of most pop or mass culture. This latter strain was deemed 'Masscult' by D.W. and served as the polar opposite to true (and redeeming) high art, the secular God for many. Midcult, therefore, was an intermediate high ground. Per Mr. MacDonald, it was also a longterm metastisis because it drained the marrow from high art to make it more digestible for the upwardly mobile without the effort required to chew over the concepts, conundrums and dichotomies inherent within any significant cultural work.

Heavy stuff, eh? Regardless of MacDonald's thesis' correctness (and that debate, thankfully, is omitted here), there is a corollary to the promulgation of environmental sustainability in much of packaging design. Specifically modern Marketing folks stumble with Midcult-hued products when trying to build what they call 'Brand Equity'. By contract, Masscult items instead rely upon secondary advertising, i.e. radio/TV ads, and have no such need to use their packaging for a point of brand/product differentiation.

You eat, right? If so, then you ingest a fair amount of sugar. Possibly, too, you know the daily delight of a good cup o' joe like the one being enjoyed by the fraulein to the right? Some of your consumption - even if not as a result of your own toiling - happens in your own domicile, I bet. Chances are, then, you have some kind of container with sugar or coffee therein; might be a leaking five pound bag, maybe a zip-lock printed bag from the manufacturer, etc. Sugar and java beans are two examples, but it could be applied to any number of household commodity-derived items, i.e. cereal, rice, all manners of nuts, dried beans + lentils, pasta ... and the hits keep comin'.

Yes and your point? If you truly wanted to lower your individual carbon footprint - sustainability's real aim - with regards to consuming these types of items, then what would that personal supply chain look like? Would you pick-up discrete packages of each item, truck them home and throw-out packaging to make landfills grow? One superior scenario would have you bring to the store plastic containers made from recycled material (or purchase the receptacles there), fill-up what you need (and only that much) from large-scale dispensers and repeat the cycle when you needed more.

The packaging - and all the carbon emissions involved in producing it - would be eliminated save the original recycled material used for the container. Additionally, the containers could be configured on a nice pull cart which would be much easier to transport and unload than the current metal shopping pushers. One could presume that such a system in full operation would net a cost-savings to the consumer for elimination of several steps in the manufacturers' production. As our greatest non-war (during his Administration, that is) U.S. President no doubt would say of this, "Bully!".

Utterly fabulous (albeit highly unrealistic) idea, but what the hell does this have to do with Midcult and/or Dwight MacDonald? Ask why we have that packaging in the first place. When it comes to some food items, there is a legitimate safety concern. However for the types of items referenced above, tampering by a malicious entity would be easy enough in the current configurations as I know, unfortunately, from personal experience dealing with the fallout from such. The answer, I believe, is that the packaging allows corporations to perpetuate the appeal of slightly upscale items, i.e. Midcult, to build their brand equity.

Not just words nor images, but actual packaging design can denote the class of consumer who should use an item. Admittedly it's an excercise half Sigmund Freud and equal part Cindy Crawford (or name your alternate favorite advertising eye candy for melding sex appeal with an appeal to sophistication). Such is fine and certainly I am not one to protest having to gaze upon new graphics reminiscent of Malevich nor dew-eyed damsels draped suggestively across boxes of Post Toasties. This endgoal, however, is anathema to good functional design and precisely the kind of excess which serves as budgetary feedstock for the foes of consumer packaging's sustainability.

So? If that product differentiation were not needed for many/most common items, then a lot more of consumer purchases would be commodity-based. The latter is imminently amenable to enhanced environmental sustainability because it does not require the literal material of packaging to solidify its demographic appeal. All that stuff - paper, plastic, resin derivatives, etc. - is omitted from the supply chain to get the essential thing you buy into your pantry or larder. The crux here is Marketing's use of Midcult-like packaging design concepts (albeit, perhaps, unintentionally). This begets an inherently inefficient structure only to provide a brand marketing platform via the packaging (but is usually an utterly non-essential thing to the product itself).

Isn't that all Marketing does? No and, certainly, design doesn't have to cater to furthering such even outside the ole USSR. Thinking of a Rolex, is the best example. You'd take one even if it came under a wrapping of speckled jute paper because the thing itself is so impressive that the packaging pales by any comparison.

When the item is inherently worthwhile the point of product differentiation is achieved without any need for resort to ancillary marketing reassurances. It's only when a cultural fig leaf, of sorts, is needed that packaging takes on any importance beyond functionality to deliver the goods safely and/or cheaply. In that sense it's Midcult, not Masscult, which is the true enemy of enviromental sustainability.