Pleasures of Scoreboard (9 Dec 2010)

This Wired article about “retail hackers” — people who try to turn companies’ price discrimination techniques against them — offers this useful distinction:

According to Donald Lichtenstein, a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, super-couponers have learned to ignore “acquisition utility,” the pleasure and value one obtains from, say, a box of cereal. Instead, they peg their shopping decisions to “transaction utility,” the difference between what they’re getting the cereal for and what they think the cereal is supposed to cost. In other words, super-couponers don’t perceive a grocery item as food, at least not until they exit the store and serve it for breakfast. On the shelf and in the cart, the super-couponer evaluates products with the cold-eyed calculus of a trader.

This is another way of saying that these people are after exchange value rather than use value — they are beyond use value, as Baudrillard liked to say. Or in other words, the utility they are after is what radio host Jim Rome and his devotees used to call scoreboard — the sheer irrefutable fact of winning, of beating someone else. This old column of mine about “thrift-store gentry” discusses the idea in terms of obsessed thrift-store shopping — I defined scoreboard there as “an ethical Occam’s razor, a pitiless pragmatism that relentlessly transforms all situations into zero-sum clashes with clear winners and losers.” My conclusion was that “beating the system” by scoring retail triumphs was not really beating the system but reinforcing it. You’re still shopping and reckoning your identity in terms of acquiring stuff.

I think that we are encouraged to fall back onto such pleasures as scoreboard in shopping for a number of reasons. First, competitive consumption nicely mirrors the competitive aspects of production in capitalism, making that ideology holistic and naturalizing the idea of a zero-sum society — that there should be winners and losers in the great game of making and distributing useful things. Of course, cooperation with others would be an illusion and off course there should naturally be vast inequality.

Also scoreboard is compensation for discovering that use value is a mirage, an alibi. Or to put that differently, the pleasures of zero-sum scoreboard are infinite, whereas our organic human needs are quite limited. Satisfaction is anathema to both our growth-oriented economy and our sense of limitless self-potential, of endlessly expanding identity, so fixating on exchanges for their own sake as the source of new pleasures makes sense. That is an inexhaustible well.

The problem with this — the reason retail hackers seem more crazy than enviable — is that focus on the pleasures of exchange blocks our access to the pleasures of the things acquired. We don’t want to accept that use value isn’t more real than exchange value. So we believe that the hackers don’t really taste the cereal, in a way, if they ever even get around to eating it. It’s akin to collecting mania, where managing the collection replaces enjoying the things collected — you enjoy buying albums more than listening to them, if they ever get played. We become, if the article is to be believed, “cold-eyed” and dispassionate — which, presumably, is inherently bad.

Baudrillard seems to argue that no one can ever really taste the cereal, that this is always already an ideological illusion necessitated by consumer capitalism. His position seems to be that you can’t “really” experience anything within capitalist social relations (if ever) — sensory experience is always mediated, and the mediation becomes the focal experiential point. To beat those conditions, you need to upend all of society, not aggressively clip coupons.

I wouldn’t go that far, but I often find myself falling into the collector/scoreboard trap of fetishizing the triumph of winning the exchange, or completing the series, or whatever it is that makes me lose sight of the goods themselves in light of some other goal that seems like it should be subordinate. Then I generalize from my experience, wonder if there are structural aspects to consumer society that encourage us to fall into those traps. (Since obviously it can’t simply be my credulity or weakness. Obviously.) The looming question is whether these derivative pleasures that come directly from capitalism’s structure are actually less pleasing to us than the authentic pleasures of enjoying objects and non-exchange-oriented experiences.

Further complicating things, capitalism tends to makes us think that all experiences and goods can be understood as exchange-oriented, as trades in which a measurable status outcome is at stake. Scoreboard everywhere, all the time.

Prose Style of the Cognitariet (12 Nov 2010)

As a fan of abstruse jargon, I appreciated this essay by old-school autonomista Franco Berardi (aka Bifo) in e-flux journal, “Cognitarian Subjectivation.” The title pretty much gives you a flavor of how the whole piece is. I’m not sure if it’s actually insightful or whether I am just pleased that I have now read enough of this stuff to be able (I think) to decode most of it. As I read, I was actually shocked when a mundane straightforward proper noun like “Facebook” was used instead of some Latinate abstraction along the lines of “mediatized integumentary hypersocio-subjectivation apparatus.” But I think the gobbledy-gook approach to style here may have a political purpose — to slow readers down and impede textual consumption. The difficulty of reading this essay models what it implicitly argues for in its content — slowing down, intervening in the smoothly overwhelming flow of information that, he claims, we assimilate with less and less pleasure and comprehension.

Berardi’s chief point here is about the mismatch of limitless online cultural production and the very limited amount of time we have to take it in. “Marx spoke of overproduction, meaning the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. But today it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. The social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of networked production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the cognitive class.” In other words, party by choice and party by compulsion, we — meaning people who deal with information or media for a living or to stay “connected”; i.e. “neuro-workers” whose “nervous systems act as active receiving terminals”‘ and who “are sensitive to semiotic activation throughout the entire day” — are always online, processing information, manipulating signs and tinkering with social facts, and it is wearing us out. We have harnessed our sociality to the rhythms of real-time, and we can’t keep up — instead our “emotional energy” is being “exploited,” mainly by the media companies that make use of our work harvested online — that’s the assembly line, by which our experiences are reassembled into memes.

Marx also “spoke” of communication technology serving mainly to speed up consumption so that the M-C-M’ cycle would spin faster — e.g., more commodities would be sold for profit in quicker revolutions of the fashion wheel. Berardi picks up this theme and applies it to our current situation:

digital technologies have enabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannot be dealt with according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge, acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure.

What he’s arguing, I think, is something that makes intuitive sense to me: because of the pressures imposed by social media, etc., we now frantically process the sorts of things we once could enjoy — things we once had time to think about and luxuriate with (via the “intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge”). Stuff that we expect to give us pleasure, that once gave us pleasure, instead seems just as often to exhaust us. (“I’m going to download more and more music until I complete my collection of Krautrock releases from the 1970s… I know there are more out there… Must find them… Must tag them properly… Must blog them…”)

After that, Berardi sort of spins his wheels in the article, throwing out some unanswerable, tangentially related questions (“Is it still possible to forge social autonomy from capitalist dominance in the psycho-economic framework of semiocapitalism?” Still? Was that ever possible?), touring through the rise of the creative class (“cognitive labor and venture capital met and merged in the dot-com”) and offering some incredibly general recommendations (“If we want to find the way towards autonomous collective subjectivation we have to generate cognitarian awareness with regard to an erotic, social body of the general intellect” — what does that mean? Apparently something to do with poetry and paradigm shifts).

Still, I think the valuable thing about this essay is simply the effort it takes to read it. Not that everything should be in social-theory code, but I found myself strangely refreshed after having printed this thing out from the pdf and sitting at my kitchen table and puzzling through it, away from screens and “semio-capital”. I felt restored to myself in away: you might even call it autonomous subjectification.

Consumer Refusal (18 Oct 2010)

Mark Thoma linked to this analysis by Mary Daly of the San Francisco Fed, which included the following chart:

The warning the chart is intended to convey is that the U.S. could be in danger of emulating Japan’s “lost decade” of minimal growth and near deflation, which makes bubble debts linger on and on and discourages consumer spending, since you can theoretically get more for your money if you wait. This in turn, if you believe economists, dampens animal spirits (which aren’t so “animal” after all).

Jodi Dean, responding to this NYT article about Japan’s “Great Deflation,” offers another way of interpreting this slide into stasis.

Young Japanese people no longer fly to Manhattan to shop. They save their money. “They refuse to buy big ticket items like cars or television.” and they lack “their elders’ willingness to toil for endless hours at the office…”
The revolution? The dismantling or undermining? It reminds me of descriptions of the last decades of the USSR (not the exciting Gorbachev years but the dreary years of Brezhnev). Of course, the rhetoric is embedded in US capitalism where anything but BUY BUY BUY is a threat. To take this seriously means to note the real threat in not buying, not working endless hours at the office. To take another path.
They aren’t buying it.
And perhaps increasingly we aren’t either. Maybe “can’t buy” is becoming “won’t buy.” Or maybe can’t buy now means can’t buy the lie that capitalism lifts all boats.
What goes along with not buying it? Making what we need.

In other words, Japan may be a model of a society in the process of rejecting consumerism. But is the “shrinking population and rising rates of poverty and suicide” that the Times article notes the price for this ideological reorientation? I daydream sometimes about the possibility of mass refusal of consumerism, but this is a purely egocentric fantasy of everyone choosing to live as I would have them for my own comfort. In reality, rejecting consumerism when you’ve been brought up to be a consumer is painful, and I wouldn’t want to have to do it myself without much more mental preparation and institutional support of some sort.

This question ties in with what I was trying to get at in my post at Generation Bubble about consumerism in China. In the context of the Western insistence that Chinese consumers pick up the consumption slack for economies like Japan and the U.S., I wonder how quickly cultural attitudes toward consumerism can safely shift without creating ideological chaos that makes individuals’ lives confusing and intolerably insecure. Will the U.S. start manufacturing more consumer goods if China rebalances? In a zero-sum global economy with respect to labor competitiveness, are Americans ready to become the immiserated reserve army poor, relatively speaking, and absorb declines in their standard of living as measured in terms of consumption?

In Cyber Marx, Nick Dyer-Witheford darkly suggests that globalization’s “deindustrialising process comes full circle, by creating in the old metropolitan areas zones of immiseration so deep that they then become low wage areas which lure capital back from its flight to the one-time periphery: Scotland and Ireland are now attracting Japanese and Korean investment with industrial wage levels comparable to those in parts of Asia.”

Incidentally, he also notes that globalization requires that consumption be reorganized in new consumerist lands through the media, another point I was trying to make in the Gen Bub essay:

a global projection of consumerism into zones previously entirely relegated to economic marginality demands a reconstruction of needs and desires — of cultural traditions, religious prohibitions, dietary habits, sexual mores, traditions of self-sufficiency — similar to that experienced by the Euro-American proletariat in the first part of the twentieth century, but exceeding it in scale. In this process the vanguard organisations are the great media corporations — characterised by concentrated ownership, vertical and horizontal integration, and mastery of world-spanning arrays of convergent technologies….Globalisation means that everywhere, all the time, it is “video night in Kathmandu,” as the habits of media spectatorship are stimulated and implanted worldwide.

“Video night” is outdated — it’s internet time everywhere, and Chinese consumers, as the McKinsey report stresses, are eager adopters of the medium. BAsically, the internet is first and foremost a consumerist training tool from capital’s perspective, which is why it will continue to be difficult to make it into something subversive. Lots of minds are working hard to make it strictly consumerist, and they already have come up with the iPad to further their machinations. Hopefully people aren’t buying that either.

RSS feed blues (30 July 2010)

I have a yo-yo relationship with my RSS feed. Sometimes I am on top of the flow and it all seems very generative, the ideas the reading stir in me seem proportional to my capacity to think them through. But more often, I fall behind the pace of news I have set for myself, and the entries pile up in my Google Reader, and I start to become increasingly anxious. I feel as though I am not only falling behind in my reading, but with the times themselves, that the rising number of unread posts is an index to how irrelevant I’ve become.

But that number is also an index of my ability to focus — the higher it is, the more successful I have been at focusing on something more appropriately limited. I’ve been working on something “real.” I’ve been reading and researching, not consuming.

Sometimes when the number gets high I respond by barreling through as many as I can in one sitting, usually late at night, and usually far beyond the point at which I can think about anything I’m reading with any kind of clarity, but instead experience it all en masse as proof that I don’t know anything, everyone else knows more than I do, and wouldn’t I be better off if I stopped trying to integrate and assimilate all this knowledge and all these conversations going on over my head once and for all? What’s the point of drilling down to zero new items other than an arbitrary sense of accomplishment with no substance to it? The RSS reader makes my reading into a metered sprint to nowhere.

It becomes paralyzing, the overload. What makes me think I have something important to say, relative to all this that is already being said? What am I trying to learn anyway? What productive purpose is all of this serving? The ideas in the posts, which crop up somewhat randomly, pull me in dozens of different directions, each of which would require hours if not days to properly follow up on to the point where I could credibly respond. All the posts hit me less with their content but instead as tiny proofs of the focus of these other writers I respect, who somehow manage to evade the traps I am stuck in — the frenzied dilettantism, the arrogance to believe I can keep up with all these different disciplines. Who do I think I am, James Franco?

I would likely benefit from a better set of filters that do the focusing for me, but what then? What sort of intellectual autonomy do I have left (presuming I have any to begin with) once I’ve outsourced my ability to stay focused?

Information Processing and Pleasure (30 July 2010)

I’ve been reading Tyler Cowen’s provocative book The Age of the Infovore (a.k.a. Create Your Own Economy), which argues for the beneficial potential in seizing upon information organization as a form of pleasure itself rather than preparatory work that leads to pleasure. I’m somewhat skeptical of that; I tend to lament the time I spend sorting my library on iTunes instead of hearing the music. The need to organize and accumulate feels like a screen between me and the music; I can’t even hear it anymore until it’s organized, and I find myself listening as a way of processing to know how to sort a song, put it in its proper playlist, rather than to enjoy it in a more sensation-oriented way. I add so much metadata that it begins to obscure the data; the metapleasure cannibalizes from the pleasure I once derived from music. I end up just collecting music and information about it; much of it never gets played at all. And that gnaws at me at times. I fantasize about getting the “never played” playlist down to zero — sometimes I consider leaving my iTunes playing while I sleep.

Cowen asserts that the organization makes the music “actually sound better” — presumably that satisfaction from organizing can be enjoyed as sensuous. To me these are distinct satisfactions — the organization “pleasure” feels more like OCD compulsion, an anxious restlessness at everything not being in its proper place. Whereas getting lost in the music is something entirely different, a suspension of anxiety and the need to “get things done.” Perhaps the way I experience pleasure is no longer in sync with society — i.e., my generation was socialized in a disappeared age, and the structure of everyday life now demands a different kind of subjectivity, responsive to different modes of pleasure. I may be insufficiently autistic, as Cowen suggests the pleasure in ordering and processing is a quintessential autistic trait that is becoming advantageous in an infocentric economy.

Cowen argues that ordering can be a mode of relaxation, rather than a mere manifestation of the psychic pressure to be productive: “Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming, and it helps us plumb philosophical depths…. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating your economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.” In other words, the infiltration of digitally mediated information processing into our daily practices gives a chance to experience more autonomy in our lives, provided we are content to live life at the level of “little bits,” as he calls them — memes, cultural fragments, decontextualized informational nuggets, isolated data points and so forth. Cowen makes this crucial point: When access is easier (which it has become, thanks to the internet), we tend to favor smaller pieces of information as a way of diversifying our options. This could be a matter of our inherent preference for novelty, though it may be a consequence of the values we inherit from our society, which privileges novelty over security, omnivorous dabbling over deep geekery. Either way, our internal filters are winnowing, such that we start to choke on anything more substantial than a tweet, become restless at the thought of assimilating larger, holistic hunks of culture. This seems to be a conceptual shift in how we approach experience, not as something overwhelming to lose ourselves in but as something to collect and integrate within ourselves as a series of discrete, manipulatable objects.

Social norms, biological imperatives and technological developments, then, have fragmented culture into ever smaller bits, as our identities have been cut free from traditional anchors. And experiences have been reified, in part because of the ease with which they can be digitized and distributed. As a result, we now carry the burden (or enjoy the freedom) of having to continually reassemble such fragments into something coherent and useful for ourselves — into our self-identity, into an amalgam that represents our interests and self-perceptions, as well as the image we want to present socially. The Internet “encourages us to pursue our identities and alliances based around very specific and articulable interests,” Cowen notes — they need to be simplified to match the bittiness of how we all have begun to see the world.

As Cowen points out, culture was once largely ordered for us collectively by the nature of the slow media through which it reached us. Songs came in a prescribed order on an album. K-tel picked the hits for Music Explosion. Now we do the selection and the arranging for ourselves. “A lot of the value production has been moved inside the individual human mind,” Cowen writes.

The key word is “individual,” though. These amalgamations are increasingly private and intensely personal, but nonetheless need social validation, which was intrinsic to the cultural order when it was mandated for everyone. When there were only three TV channels, everyone wanted to know who shot J.R. and no one needed to explain what they were talking about with that or why they cared. Now I would need to do a lot of explaining if I was intensely curious about who shot J.R. (which I am, and please don’t spoil it for me!).

The point is, we want our identities — our cultural investments — recognized; we want to be understood. So we end up having to explicate ourselves, “share” our private organizational schemes with ever more urgency on the host of new media forms designed primarily to facilitate this sort of communication — the communication of privately curated little bits organized into a hierarchy, commented upon, glossed in an effort to make their contingent coherence more broadly comprehensible so that we feel less alone, less like we treading water alone in a vast sea of information.

Our ongoing efforts to communicate the significance of our assemblages is itself a harvestable kind of information processing — it has personal value to us, making us feel understood and recognized. But it has monetary value to media companies and marketers as demographic data and semantic enrichment for their brands and products. Our quest for coherence and recognition and ontological security turns out to be very useful intellectual labor when resituated outside the crucible of our own identity.

Sometimes this seems very sinister to me, a monetization of our social being in a way that cuts us out of the rewards, even as it makes some “knowledge work” jobs expendable. It also leaves us with an identity that feels more fragile and reified at the same time; we are alienated from our immediate experience of ourselves and instead relate to ourselves as though our identity is a brand. It also means that the public sphere becomes “the social factory,” as the autonomistas say, a realm that blends production and consumption so seamlessly that leisure and for-itself social activity and pure sensual immersion become impossible. They become irrelevant, outmoded forms of pleasure — contemplation (decidedly and necessarily inefficient) is a casualty of the joys of efficient processing as pleasure. (Cowen calls this the Buddhist critique — ordering precludes a sense of oneness and harmony with the universe that Buddhists pursue. Nicholas Carr makes similar points about focus in The Shallows; our brains are being changed by internet use to disregard contemplation as joy.)

We are driven to be producing informational value and accepting that as pleasure, rather then engaging in the kinds of pleasure Bataille grouped under the notion of expenditure — waste, symbolic destruction, eliminating meanings, destructuration, entropic anarchy. That may be a good thing, unless you believe the need for “expenditure” builds up within a rationalized society and may explode into fascist movements if not ventilated. It seems that digitization means that our visions of excess are directed into a rage for ever larger collections of things (think hoarders) or ever more order.

Nothing’s gonna stop the flow (27 July 2010)

Alan Jacobs, responding to Peggy Nelson’s celebration of the flow, asks:

In the Flow, are “listening” and “consuming” distinguishable activities?

That’s an interesting distinction: Listening, if I’m reading Jacobs right, is way of appropriating knowledge that is not simultaneously productive or at once situated in an exchange process, as the word “consuming” implies. The digitally mediated flow seeks to make any noneconomic responsiveness to art or culture or anything else in life more or less impossible — or at least ideologically undesirable. Why just attend a lecture when you can liveblog it and “add value” with your coverage?

The implied imperative in Web 2.0 is to make all consumption productive and allows us to avoid the ignominious fate of becoming a passive consumer — the straw-man figure of our era who represents the inauthentic conformist couch potato who has surrendered all agency. Perhaps no subject position has been more demonized than that one in late-capitalist consumerism, as various investigations of the rebel consumer illustrate.

The flow basically eliminates the lag time that listening presupposes, the space in which a more considered response can germinate (if warranted). You might call it the space that makes a deliberate aesthetic possible. (Ross Douthat suggests this space for contemplative reading is becoming a luxury, a class-based privilege contingent on being to afford a distraction-free retreat. I would add that it’s also a matter of class whether one feels impelled to be relevant through accelerated productive consumption or whether one will be confident of one’s relevance as a matter of habitus.) If the immediate aesthetic response is simply a coded form of obedience to existing relations of power, the social order inscribing itself on our hearts as Eagleton argues, then obviating the space of rumination reinforces the aesthetic’s ideological function. We can’t dispense with the aesthetic, which allows for real experiential pleasure, a pleasure that seems to resound deep within us and call forth a certain holistic sense of ourselves that is wedded to enduring ideals of the good. But when we make our aesthetic response more deliberate, there is a chance to align our pleasure with our identity with consciously affirmed social ideals.

The real-time revolution, the rise of the flow, basically requires all responses be even more spontaneous than aesthetic approval or else be forgotten and ignored as everyone moves on with the tide of events. From the perspective of real-time hegemony, listening is an arrogant effort to arrest the flow of events rather than swim with them and contribute to the flow’s momentum. Trying to stand still amid the flow, to stop and listen, to focus longer than the flow’s pace permits, is to ask to be drowned as the flood washes over you.

Fashion As "Consumer Entrepreneurship" (23 April 2010)

A few weeks ago, Tyler Cowen linked to this essay by Jason Potts about fashion, in which he likens fashion cycles to business cycles and argues that fashion is what allows consumers to assume risk the way that entrepreneurs do. It’s an interesting read, though for me it mainly sharpened my sense of which assumptions about fashion I accept and which I reject. I agree with this:

fashion seems to be an expression of risk culture on the consumer side, just as entrepreneurship is on the producer side of the economy. Could it be, then, that a rational, open society not only accommodates fashion, but actually requires it as a mechanism of competitive advantage and productivity growth?

But rather than claim that “a rational, open society” needs fashion, I would change that to “consumer-capitalist society.” Consumerism requires fashion to sustain growth. If consumers lack the will to “explore new consumer lifestyles” they may fail to spend and begin to save, thus crippling the demand necessary to fuel economic growth. Thus fashion — consumer risk — is necessary to make us discontented with what we already have and regard it as obsolescent.

Fashion is the “creative destruction” of our tastes in things. It undermines the cultural capital that exists in the tastes that currently reign, Potts suggests, and puts new cultural capital up for grabs.

When a fashion cycle comes to an end, those who placed unfortunate bets during it are put back on a more nearly equal footing with those who were successfully fashionable. To be fashionable in the next cycle, fashion victor and fashion victim alike must pay the price of tooling up again in line with the latest trends.

That sounds sort of egalitarian, which is not how I would describe the fashion world. Each turn of the fashion wheel does not wipe the slate clean. People who “bet wrong” on fashion don’t get to start fresh with the same amount of credibility. It’s not a roulette wheel. Fashion mistakes have a cumulative weight; misjudge trends and people will ignore you next time. If you keep changing fashions in an attempt to hit a winning one, you run the increased risk of digging a deeper and deeper hole, like a liar who is trying to maintain earlier lies by piling on new ones.

And people enter the fashion field with different levels of social and cultural capital to begin with; fashion is a means to leverage those differences and make them effective. Fashion allows a status difference to translate into being treated differently, preferentially. The process of making fashion change allows those with the cultural capital to have greater say in what form those changes will take — they can guarantee that they will suit their strengths in other areas or assure that fashion serves other ends they have, like making a profit. And fashion is programmed; the industry dictates when changes will occur and has professional consultants to determine what those changes will be. They may bubble up from the street or from amateurs, but amateurs cannot validate their innovations culturally. They need to be sanctified by the fashion industry; they need to become sellable.

It is easy to see how makers of fashion-oriented product are taking risks — people might reject the goods. But consumers shoulder an aspect of the risk involved in fashion as well — and what is at risk for them is status and, to some degree, self-esteem. Fashion, Potts claims, “a mechanism to periodically liquidate certain elements of a consumer lifestyle, triggering the incentive to learn about new things and to demand new goods.” Potts views this “social pressure” as an inherently good thing. As things go out of fashion we are prompted to engage with the world to discover what has become fashionable, thus expanding our “flexibility in consumer lifestyles” and allowing us to experience the “sublime pleasures of risk-taking” — kind of like what the subprime crisis did for the financial sector.

Potts’s bias is clear — he regards entrepreneurial risk-taking as good and necessary for everyone: “Fashion is part of how economies evolve, not of how they decay. It is another name for consumer entrepreneurship: and the more we have of that, the better.” But that assumes people are like businesses (the brand of self) that need to constantly grow, and that analogy is, in my opinion, false. The notion of an ever-expanding, limitless identity is a construct that suits consumerism, but is it not an inherent human capacity. We don’t naturally long for an ever-changing, ever-growing self that is perpetually unsatisfied with itself. Identity can and does have limits; recognizing those limits brings peace of mind. Potts argues that “consumers who opt out of social competition for the ‘quiet life’ fail to develop their ranges of experience and capabilities.” Perhaps, but nothing about a “range” of experiences makes it preferable to the experiences themselves, even if they be limited in number. Everything that Potts regards as positive about fashion pressure for the economy is probably not so good for individuals.

Fashion effectively functions as a mechanism to induce and accelerate learning in complex lifestyles, enabling these lifestyles to become more complex still, thus improving their productivity in generating valuable consumption services…. Fashion is good for the economy because it is a mechanism to promote experimentation, learning, and re-coordination.

The valuable consumption services come at we the consumers’ expense — our lives become more “complex”. In other words, fashion is the means by which we are exploited for surplus-value extraction as consumers, to complement the way it is extracted when we are wage workers. For consumers, fashion does not “promote experimentation” — it makes us the subject of experiments. It doesn’t promote “learning and re-coordination” so much as anxiety and confusion and disorientation that makes “learning” a desperate necessity.

Fashion tells you that you are a fool to prefer the experiences to the range, and it applies “social pressure” to make you change your view. By following fashion and disseminating its dictates and by innovating on its terms, we create additional value for the retailers of fashion-oriented products — a description that is coming to embrace virtually everything that can be bought and sold. All we gain for what we have risked is an enlarged but more tenuous sense of self — it’s an identity bubble, with an inflated value that’s rooted in a superficial expansion in knowledge of trends. But it could burst at any minute by a blast of existential angst. What does it all mean? Nothing. It means you have to keep changing for the sake of change itself or else confront the emptiness.

Searching for inspiration (12 April 2010)

Sometimes I feel so uninspired. Or should I say, (Sometimes I Feel so) Uninspired.. Usually what happens when I feel this way is I begin driving myself with ever more relentlessness through posts in my RSS reader, looking for something to spark my interest. But what I always seem to forget in these moods is how many ideas and articles I have already set aside because I was too busy to deal with them at the time. I probably have dozens of things that I have either starred or shared in Google Reader, thinking I would write about them later here. And I have a stack of articles printed out as well that I have been meaning to read and write about. Yet when I am in this mood, I never feel like going back to that stuff. (Once I shelve something for later, I am essentially logged it for permanent limbo.) In fact, the essence of the mood seems to be a weariness with the backlog, a sense of futility, and a craving for some deus ex machina that will crank the wheel of my “creativity” without my having to do much of anything.

So I press forward it pursuit of novelty, because novelty seems to work that way — as canned creativity. The freshness of some particular meme can generate a seemingly automatic response: “So and so recently wrote X about Y. I agree/disagree with X, but believe that one must also think about Y this way. Also consider what Z said about Y when responding to so and so as well.” (In a post about the sudden outburst of journalistic cheerleading for the economy, Ryan Avent notes how this mentality among journalists can stampede them into manufacturing new received wisdom.) Novelty can stand in as a replacement for deliberation, can simulate the feeling of having thought something through, simply because it leaves a residue that’s similar to what I gain after I’ve thought my way through to what seems to me a fresh synthesis or analysis. When I go to the stream of fresh new content, it is because I want to avoid having to think anything through but still yield the same reward. I think that is the danger inherent in novelty generally.

A corollary to this is that I generally need to immediately think of something interesting to write about something I read or else I won’t bother. This also seems like a problem.

Fashion Coercion (6 April 2010)

I was revisiting the Marginal Utility archive earlier and this entry from a few years ago captured my attention: “Rooting against fashion.” It remains true; I still somewhat irrationally want fashion to fail, and most design too. There are, it seems to me, obvious reasons to root against fashion. Beyond being a means for mystifying class distinction (taste naturalizes inequality that is manufactured by social conditions), which is bad enough, fashion sets a social tempo for consumption that seems out of pace with most people’s lives, so they experience it as coercive. It compels us to be uncomfortable with ourselves and accept novelty as an inevitable condition of reality, as a positive value. This creates a culture-wide superficiality bias so pervasive, it seems petulant to complain about it. One can belong to society only through an investment in novelty, through caring about arbitrary change and helping establish the illusion that it is not arbitrary and means something more than entropic variation.

Back when I wrote the other post, I wondered why I was cheering against prosperity, the enabling condition for the elaboration of complexity in fashion. And I was cheering against something that seemed to bring other people pleasure — that let other people feel interesting. What do I have against other people being interesting? Am I threatened by it? Probably. Fashion is a field in which I will never be interested (I am very much a follower and not an early adopter or a trend setter), so from a human capital standpoint, I prefer it when it sinks in cultural esteem. Consciously or not, I’m sure I want people to compete on the fields that I recognize as strengths of mine. I think that I win when fashion and design fail.

Of course not all fashion can fail; something has to occupy the space structurally afforded to fashion trends by our culture. When I root against fashion, I root against this aspect of culture as a whole; it’s not as though I wish something else would become trendy. I have the hopeless wish that there weren’t any trends at all. But identifying something as a trend is fairly subjective — the trends that I adopt myself don’t seem like trends to me. Only the stuff that other people are collectively doing is recognizable and contemptible as trends. Trends are simply the way people participate in culture without actively making anything — unless you buy the idea that participation is a kind of production, since consumption of that sort “produces” new and useful information (usually marketing related) about the goods. Our consumption makes meanings, but it isn’t necessarily meaningful work, I think. But I waver back and forth about the idea of immaterial labor and consumptive production, wondering about the subjective element in that as well. (Do we have to be aware of the meanings we are producing to consider ourselves productive? Does anyone ever reach the zero degree of passivity? Is one never aware of one’s own objective passivity since our consciousness of ourselves is inherently active? Questions in a world of blue.) I tend to think of counter-trend behavior as a more “authentic” way of cultural participation, inherently more active as it functions as an implicit critique and requires conscious resistance. Design and fashion present themselves to consumers as means to avoid critique and resistance in favor of the pleasures of acceptance, the liberty to ignore social critique and simply enjoy the idea of oneself, fitting in and being approved by society at large.

My default interpretation of designy-ness is that it is an attempt at coercion disguised as an effort to please me. I persist in thinking this despite the manifest good intention of most designers, who I don’t think are in bad faith about wanting to “help” people or improve their lives with design. Nevertheless, they want to dominate me, and I am supposed to enjoy surrender. (At the New Inquiry, J. Bernstein makes a related point about the politics of reading.) But instead I take pleasure in stubborn resistance. The user-friendliness of, say, Apple’s computers strikes me, like many others (not so well represented in the media, it seems) as a prison. I read the convenience as their attempt to predict what I want without my consent or input. If I go along, I won’t know if what they wanted me to want was what I really wanted. This attitude gets incredibly counterproductive at times. When autonomy always trumps gratitude, you have to go through life making a point of being difficult to please, and pleasure, if and when it comes, must be private almost by definition.

Boredom production (6 April 2010)

This PSFK item about social networks ends with a platitude about keeping fickle consumers interested.

The rapid pace of change and relative unpredictability of when consumers’ rapt attention will become boredom is an ongoing challenge for social media players to continually understand their users, lifestyles and consumption habits – and to adapt to keep them engaged.

This reminded me of my most recent essay for Generation Bubble, where I argue that we are continually driven to produce our own boredom. The gist of my piece is that social media lets us function as our own mini ad agencies, working to exhaust the meaning of things more quickly so as to expand the flexibility of our identities, and to make each identity-signifying gesture seem more significant in the moment. Does that make sense? My point is that we want to expend the meaning in a good in a fireworks-like explosion of broadcasted signification; we don’t want our goods to continue to signify who we are after the contrived moment of their presentation to our public. As a result, we purposely make ourselves bored with things, and boredom is a state of open, uncommitted possibility for us, whereas ongoing engagement with some specific set of thing is confining.

So there is no way to keep consumers engaged without continually presenting them with novelty — to repackage the same crap as something new, if necessary. It’s not “relatively unpredictable” that consumers will be bored; it’s completely predictable, and the pace at which that exhaustion occurs is continually accelerating.