Rioting Nonconsumers (10 Aug 2010)

Is rioting an expression of envy, or something more political, or something that is ultimately inexplicable? From Zygmunt Bauman’s response to the London riots:

We are all consumers now, consumers first and foremost, consumers by right and by duty… It is the level of our shopping activity and the ease with which we dispose of one object of consumption in order to replace it with a “new and improved” one which serves us as the prime measure of our social standing and the score in the life-success competition. To all problems we encounter on the road away from trouble and towards satisfaction we seek solutions in shops. From cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension. Buying on impulse and getting rid of possessions no longer sufficiently attractive in order to put more attractive ones in their place are our most enthusing emotions. The fullness of consumer enjoyment means fullness of life….

For defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life unfulfilled – and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning. Ultimately, of humanity and any other ground for self-respect and respect of the others around.

Supermarkets may be temples of worship for the members of the congregation. For the anathemised, found wanting and banished by the Church of Consumers, they are the outposts of the enemy erected on the land of their exile. Those heavily guarded ramparts bar access to the goods which protect others from a similar fate: as George W. Bush would have to agree, they bar return (and for the youngsters who never yet sat on a pew, the access) to “normality”. Steel gratings and blinds, CCTV cameras, security guards at the entry and hidden inside only add to the atmosphere of a battlefield and on-going hostilities. Those armed and closely watched citadels of enemy-in-our-midst serve as a day in, day out reminder of the natives’ misery, low worth, humiliation. Defiant in their haughty and arrogant inaccessibility, they seem to shout: I dare you! But dare you what?

Here Bauman is drawing on ideas he’s developed over his series of books from the past decade: Liquid Modernity, Consuming Life, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (which I wrote about here). Modern identity is fluid, unmoored, and the consumer society has hijacked it to serve its ends, making our sense of self and the meaning of our life contingent on consumer desire; cravings for novelty; the ability to want, get and discard the “right” things, and so on.

In Consuming Life he argues that “if one agrees with Carl Schmitt’s proposition that the ultimate, defining prerogative of sovereign is the right to exempt, then one must accept that the true carrier of sovereign power in the society of consumers is the commodity market; it is there, at the meeting place of sellers and buyers, that selecting and setting apart the damned from the saved, insiders from outsiders, the included from the excluded (or, more to the point, right-and-proper consumers from flawed ones) is daily performed.” Thus it should not be surprising that feelings of social exclusion play themselves out as attacks on shops.

But why now? Why riots in London all of a sudden, if this sort of exclusion has been persistently present? Is it just random when one of the land mines Bauman sees littering consumer society gets stepped on? Chris Dillow asks this question and attributes it to information cascades, which allow would-be looters to confirm for themselves that their behavior is sufficiently correlated with others that they will collectively get away with it. But he adds, as “illuminating as the theory of information cascades can be, there is a problem with it. We cannot forecast when such cascades will emerge. We can only identify them in hindsight. They allow us to explain behaviour, but not predict it.” This is kind of reminiscent of Badiou’s theory of the event, or at least what I understand of it. It can’t be predicted because it is a total disruption of how we understand the procession of ordinary occurrences. Would appreciate a link to anyone interpreting the London rioting in Badiou’s terms.

Dillow’s questions also reminded me of Andrew Potter’s response to the Vancouver hockey rioting:

The point is that if you can get enough people to riot, then you all get away with it. The trick, then, is getting enough people willing to do it, in the same place and at the same time, to create a tipping point effect. And so when it comes to starting a riot, what the participants are faced with is essentially a coordination problem.

Potter thought that social media might simplify the coordination problem the way a big hockey game (or an egregious example of police brutality) can, but might also provide enough surveillance to discourage it. Facial recognition technology is being used on looters in London, as it was after the Vancouver incident. Social media potentially adds to the number of cameras pointed at everyone to protect the consumer citadels.

Anyway, I think one of the most interesting things Bauman writes about is his interpretation of Levinas’s theory of the infinite responsibility to the other. As infinite responsibility is a pretty serious burden for anyone, one of society’s purposes, Bauman argues, is to limit our sense of obligation, to give us rationalizations for watching out mainly for ourselves or some limited subset of society, or to give us a way of ranking our responsibilities to others. In a consumer society, the celebration of individualism and our “right” to convenience and novelties work to convince us that we have a duty to free ourselves from having to consider other people’s needs—and the market works to supply us the tools to avoid impinging human contact. It sells us ways to avoid having to deal with other people and the “hassle” they represent. If we can’t afford those or if we become sick of strictly being that hassle to others, then looting works just as well as an expression of our own right to not give a shit about others. If purchasing power represents freedom, so then can looting.

Convenience of Streaming Services (5 Aug 2011)

An article at the AV Club by Sam Adams looks at the implications of Netflix’s streaming service and the growing popularity of Spotify, a music-streaming company. He begins with an observation that seems unassailable to me — “Convenience and choice are the watchwords of the digital era, in which content must be instantly accessible and as quickly digested, lest consumers flit off to some more welcoming destination” — but I was confused by the analysis that follows, which didn’t really explain why consumers are so susceptible to novelty and what he calls the “convenience trap,” the willingness to consume what’s available as opposed to what is presumably good for you. Adams fears we may be “unconsciously downgrading anything that isn’t so ready at hand.”

But what does that mean? Why does everything have to be graded? And does an unconscious grade have any meaning? If you can’t bother to make the effort to make your tastes conscious, then what difference does it make to you what you watch? And why should anyone else care? Adams is concerned that the great works may be lost to history if streaming services don’t assimilate them to their streaming libraries: “Spotify’s great, unless you want to listen to anything Hüsker Dü recorded before its major-label debut. Would you trade New Day Rising for the Black Eyed Peas catalogue?” This doesn’t strike me as a serious question. If you badly want to hear New Day Rising, try this. If you care about music, you probably won’t let Spotify dictate what you can or can’t hear, and digital reproduction has made it fairly likely that digital copies of everything will survive and proliferate. (Our real archival concern should be with the survival of analog artifacts that have yet to be digitized — even though digitization may lead to a not entirely representative version of a work surviving.) The people who have a lot invested in their entertainment choices will supplement streaming services with ready alternatives. The people who don’t diversify their supply basically don’t really care, and why should they? Because certain art is good for them, and they should be made to consume it through clever institutionalized market nudges?

Adams’s implicit concern seems to be that the tasteless masses will be left to languish in their cultural ignorance because the streaming services they thoughtlessly adopt don’t force more redeeming content on them. And he also seems to think that if you are not cleaver enough to make redemptive consumer quests for the great works, you will be too dim or disinterested to understand them: “If you’re not inclined to put forth the effort to get yourself in close proximity to a given artwork, will you be willing to expend the mental energy necessary to understand it?” Apparently if one lives next door to the Prado, Goya’s works there become more or less indistinguishable for you from Hagar the Horrible comics.

Working hard to gain access to a work has nothing intrinsic to do with being willing or able to interpret it. Adams offers an S&M take on art appreciation, that art should dominate and master us while we subserviently mold ourselves to its masterful lessons: “the viewer—not, please, the consumer—is fundamentally subservient to a work of art, in which it is our responsibility, and often our pleasure, to come to the work rather than expecting it to come to us. After all, shouldn’t art be inconvenient, if not in the sense of being difficult to access, then because it forces us out of our comfort zones, requiring us to reckon with its way of understanding the world?” I am pretty sympathetic to this, but I don’t think my attitude needs to be generalized. It’s not the only way to engage with art. And though I may try harder to get something out of a show I have to travel far to see, that doesn’t mean I necessarily cruise through a nearby show on autopilot.

The idea that difficulty is necessary to have a “real” art experience is similar to the idea that something more real happens when the art encounter is “spontaneous” — being surprised by the beauty of a sunset, etc. It is always tempting to extrapolate a dogma out of such experiences when they are profoundly affecting, but that would be a mistake. I don’t think there is a prescription for assuring edifying aesthetic moments. Instead, when people try to push some recipe for the aesthetic onto someone else, they are imposing an encapsulated version of a status hierarchy that favors them. Ultimately, whatever they are pushing now (no matter how universal the principles are presented to be) will be repudiated later in pursuit of some fresh form of distinction. Isn’t this an extremely elitist question: “How much more likely are you to bail on, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, when with a few clicks of your remote you can be watching a favorite episode of Friday Night Lights?” This seems to mean: You dummies should be watching the hard stuff (like me) but instead you are weak and let the technology trick you into watching what is mere middlebrow entertainment. You’re trapped in your own lazy tastes.

Adams points out that “we carry around unspoken assumptions about what’s long and what’s short, what’s easy and what’s hard, and when those assumptions calcify, we may no longer be aware they’re there.” Yes, this is how ideology typically works, and it extends far beyond how we choose to entertain ourselves. Making ourselves aware of our unthinking assumptions about what is common sense is probably always a good and worthy practice. But we don’t encourage people to join in that project when we imply that the reason it is necessary is so that they can conform to some other dogma about what cultural product is correct and appropriate. That replaces one politicized mystification with another. Yes, Netflix — like may consumer goods manufacturers — would probably love it if we consumed simplistic mind candy as quickly and as often as possible; that’s good business for them. And that incentive contributes to their trying to shape and promulgate a certain ideology about what it is fun to do. Their pay structure contributes to a materialization of that ideology. Convenience almost always serves an agenda of accelerated consumption, which is passed off as maximized happiness or efficiency. (You’ve consumed more, so you are better off!) But implying that people need to consume the “right” things instead of the convenient things seems to substitute an elitist ideology for a consumerist one, and may trigger reactionary retrenchment among the consumerists one may be trying to rescue with screenings of Bela Tarr films and copies of Metal Circus.

In 2007 I made the argument that subscription services “almost make the idea of having selective musical taste superfluous. Not there is anything wrong with that; musical taste’s centrality to identity seems a peculiar quirk. Nonetheless, taste in commercial music comes down to what music you are willing to pay for specifically. If you are paying to have it all, you effectively have no taste.” That is, in a consumer society we have this sense that you have to put your money where your mouth is to “prove” your taste. The idea that you need to suffer to acquire access to “real” art in order to appreciate it has a similar inflection to it — that art needs to be scarce to have an aura of significance, which derives from people earning/paying for the privilege to consume it. But it seems more interesting to break out of the idea that scarcity imposes some mystical meaning on things to see what they might mean beyond that.

Vagaries of attention (1 July 2011)

There’s an important distinction between attention and recognition, though I think we easily confuse them in speech and in practice. We seek attention when we want recognition, some sense of our worth or integrity to others. Attention is a necessary prerequisite for recognition, but doesn’t always lead to a feeling of having been recognized. My main fear about social media is that is becoming harder to translate attention into recognition without their aid. Increasingly, attention that isn’t in some way mediated seems inert, if not unsettling and creepy.

I have this feeling that people are going to become more and more wary of direct face-to-face attention because it will seem like it’s wasted on them if it’s not mediated, not captured somehow in social networks where it has measurable value. I imagine this playing out as a kind of fear of intimacy as it was once experienced — private unsharable moments that will seem creepier and creepier because no one else can bear witness to their significance, translate them into social distinction. Recognition within private unmediated spaces will be unsought after, the “real you” won’t be there but elsewhere, in the networks.

I have an essay up at the New Inquiry about artist Laurel Nakadate, whose work is, I think, about this emerging condition — about becoming increasingly unavailable to attention in the moment, wholly ensconced by self-consciousness. Receiving attention in real time can’t confirm anything about how you want to feel about yourself; it becomes a portal to a deeper loneliness — the way out seems to be to mediate the experience, watch it later, transmute it into something else. In short, we are losing the ability to feel recognized in the moment, which strands us further and further away from fully inhabiting our bodies in the present. We are always elsewhere, in the cloud.

Paying Attention (22 Nov 2010)

Nicholas Carr is not happy about this NYT Magazine column by Virginia Heffernan about the “attention-span myth.” Heffernan contends that technology critics like Carr err in imagining that something like an attention span exists.

The problem with the attention-span discourse is that it’s founded on the phantom idea of an attention span. A healthy “attention span” becomes just another ineffable quality to remember having, to believe you’ve lost, to worry about your kids lacking, to blame the culture for destroying. Who needs it?

Apparently Heffernan regards the pathologizing of short-attention spans as a disciplinary ruse to stifle children’s creativity and discourage the artistic temperament. There should be no normative correction of the ability to pay attention; distraction is only a different form of attention, or attention paid to things society disapproves of. Distraction is a refusal to pay attention to things you are supposed to in order to be conformed. The inability to concentrate, then, is the triumph of the human spirit and its refusal to submit. If you feel like you have a hard time concentrating, it’s just a lame excuse for procrastinating, a disguised form of nostalgia for a personal epoch of total focus that never really existed. Technology has nothing to do with it, because there is no “it”.

Carr responds by insisting that attentiveness in fact exists and takes different forms (not merely “long” or “short”), and these forms and their prevalence are affected by technological context.

One can, for instance, be attentive to rapid-paced changes in the environment, a form of attentiveness characterized by quick, deliberate shifts in focus…. There is a very different form of attentiveness that involves filtering out, or ignoring, environmental stimuli in order to focus steadily on one thing – reading a long book, say, or repairing a watch. Our capacity for this kind of sustained attention is being eroded, I argue, by the streams of enticing info-bits pouring out of our networked gadgets. There are also differing degrees of control that we wield over our attention.

I agree with that; perhpas the way to split the difference and avoid the semantic arguments is to say that technology has certainly changed the sorts of things we want to give our attention to. I would add that built into consumerism is an incentive to make sure people scatter their attention as wide as possible on the greatest number of things and experiences, all of which have now been successfully packaged (often thanks to technological change) as exchangeable commodities. When a person’s attention is fixed on a certain specific activity, it registers as lost opportunities to make sales — one for each infinitely divisible moment that passed in which the person could have been distracted, could have consciously shifted attention, but didn’t. That’s why unlike Heffernan, I see concentration rather than distraction as an act of cultural resistance.

The problem with reckoning with attention problems is not that it is ineffable but that it doesn’t correspond with an economic model that has us spending and replenishing some quantifiable supply of it. But the metaphors built into an “attention span” or “paying attention” or the “attention economy” imagine a scarce resource rather than a quality of consciousness, a mindfulness. It may be that the notion of an attention economy is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, bringing into being the problems its posits through the way it frames experience. It may not be constructive to regard attention as scarce or something that can be wasted and let those conceptions govern our relation to our consciousness. The metaphor of how we exert control over our focus may be more applicable, more politically useful in imagining an alternative to the utility-maximizing neoliberal self. The goal would then be not to maximize the amount of stuff we can pay attention to but instead an awareness that much of what nips at us is beneath our attention.

Paradoxes (14 Oct 2010)

I’m not sure that there is a unifying theme to what follows, but I wanted to clear some tabs and have a vague nagging feeling that these items should be blogged about together.

1. This is from the interminable recent profile of Nick Denton, the Gawker Media impresario, in the New Yorker:

“I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability,” Denton told me. “Which is actually terrifying if you’re a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.”

I think that is true about online sociality as well, that the measurability is more profoundly disruptive than the immediacy or convenience of it. In our friendships, we once were, like traditional journalists, much more apt to push the aspects of our personality that we thought they ought to like, to use Denton’s phrasing. But know we have the means to question that way of going about things, we have new tools to fuel self-doubt and second-guess ourselves and our social instincts. We have data-collecting tools to elevate our suspicions about what our friends really think of us, make all our paranoias viable. This can’t help but affect our behavior. The data doesn’t constitute real knowledge of some pre-existing truth about our social life, but instead posits its own truth, a new and, in my opinion, debilitating epistemology.

2. This is from a piece by Slavoj Žižek in the new LRB about the Chinese Communist Party:

An anecdote from Deng Xiaoping’s era illustrates the weirdness of the Party hierarchy. Deng was still alive, though retired from the post of general secretary, when one of the top members of the nomenklatura was purged. The official reason was that, in an interview with a foreign journalist, he had divulged a state secret: namely, that Deng was still the supreme authority and was effectively taking all the decisions. In fact everybody knew that Deng was still pulling the strings; it’s just that it was never allowed to be officially stated. The secret was not simply a secret: it announced itself as a secret. Thus, today, it isn’t that people are supposed not to know that a hidden Party structure shadows the state agencies: they are supposed to be fully aware that there is such a hidden network.

This exemplifies Žižek’s theory of ideology as a kind of open secret, a kind of doing it anyway despite knowing it is all lies and pretense. A variant on that is the Lacanian premise of the big other, the overriding social fiction that legitimizes localized bad behavior, allows one to excuse oneself. The Big Other makes us do bad things; it’s not our fault. This is the governing paradox of authoritarian regimes. I also think it governs Facebook in some way, but I haven’t worked it out yet.

3. This is from Jonah Weiner’s Slate article about GIF files making a comeback:

In the two minutes it might take me to load a viral video and watch it in full, I can watch the money shots of 15 different viral videos. Yes, we’re talking about decadent levels of impatience, inanity, and time-wasting here, but GIFs allow us to waste less time online—or, rather, to waste it more efficiently.

This on the other hand is the governing paradox of contemporary consumer capitalism. We are driven to find ways to be more efficient in our wastefulness.

Thoughts on Go-gurt (4 Oct 2010)

I have always been puzzled by the concept of Go-Gurt, yogurt that you squeeze into your mouth out of a tube. It seems sort of lewd. I don’t know if I could look the cashier in the eye if I bought some.

As if the phallicism weren’t salacious enough, Go-Gurt has a flavor called Bikini Bottom Berry. Who is doing their branding? Al Goldstein? Presumably this “flavor” has something to do with Sponge Bob, and if I had children I would understand that the idea of eating Bikini Bottoms is not dirty or scatological but cute. Still, it makes me want to break out Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and get to the bottom of it.

A few decades ago, a product like Go-Gurt would probably have been advertised as space-age, a product that lets kids emulate the astronauts, like Tang (another oddly named product, come to think of it — perhaps the sexual promise of adulthood is being encoded/coopted in cheeky brand names). But it doesn’t seem like too many products are sold to kids through heroic images of adulthood anymore. Now we all learn to want adolescence to last forever.

Conversation and Convenience (9 Sept 2010)

A few prefatory remarks: I dislike talking on the phone and generally avoid it if I can. I dislike voice mail even more, a moribund technology that I wish would be discontinued so that those behind the curve don’t accidentally use it and expect people to listen to their messages. I am not proud of my attitudes though, despite frequently airing them. These attitudes reflect my fear of being engaged in a conversation I can’t control, having to expending my precious time on discourse from another human being that I can’t skim through. Not to be overdramatic, but I think I am in some small way psychically murdering those people who are trying to reach me when I refuse to listen to their messages, when I choose my convenience over their relative inarticulateness and the slowness of the technology they have chosen to use. The same goes for timeshifting the act of conversation so that it can cease to be reciprocal and take the form of broadcasting. It’s a casual act of cruelty to deny that reciprocity, to withhold the possibility of spontaneous sympathy and understanding.

It makes me think of that section of My Dinner With Andre in which Andre talks about having to endure small talk while he was in the midst of watching his mother die.

ANDRE: [Long pause.] Well, you know, I may be in a very emotional state right now, Wally, but since I’ve come back home, I’ve just been finding the world we’re living in more and more upsetting. I mean. Last week I went down to the public theater one afternoon. You know, when I walked in I said “hello” to everybody, ’cause I know them all and they all know me, and they’re always very friendly. You know that seven or eight people told me how wonderful I looked, and then one person, one, a woman who runs the casting office, said: “Gee, you look horrible! Is something wrong?” Now she, we started talking, of course I started telling her things, and she suddenly burst into tears because an aunt of hers, who’s eighty, whom she’s very fond of, went into the hospital for a cataract, which was solved, but the nurse was so sloppy she didn’t put the bed rails up, so the aunt fell out of bed and is now a complete cripple! So, you know, we were talking about hospitals. Now, you know, this woman, because of who she is, you know, ’cause this had happened to her very, very recently, she could see me with complete clarity. [Wally says “Un-hunh.”] She didn’t know anything about what I’ve been going through. But the other people, what they saw was this tan or this shirt, or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan, so they say: “Gee, you look wonderful!” Now, they’re living in an insane dream world! They’re not looking. That seems very strange to me.

WALLY: Right, because they just didn’t see anything somehow, except the few little things that they wanted to see.

ANDRE: Yeah. You know, it’s like what happened just before my mother died. You know, we’d gone to the hospital to see my mother, and I went in to see her. And I saw this woman who looked as bad as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. And I was out in the hall, sort of comforting my father, when a doctor who is a specialist in a problem that she had with her arm, went into her room and came out just beaming. And he said: “Boy! Don’t we have a lot of reason to feel great! Isn’t it wonderful how she’s coming along!” Now, all he saw was the arm, that’s all he saw. Now, here’s another person who’s existing in a dream. Who on top of that is a kind of butcher, who’s committing a kind of familial murder, because when he comes out of that room he psychically kills us by taking us into a dream world, where we become confused and frightened. Because the moment before we saw somebody who already looked dead and now here comes a specialist who tells us they’re in wonderful shape! I mean, you know, they were literally driving my father crazy. I mean, you know, here’s an eighty-two-year-old man who’s very emotional, and, you know, if you go in one moment, and you see the person’s dying, and you don’t want them to die, and then a doctor comes out five minutes later and tells you they’re in wonderful shape! I mean, you know, you can go crazy!

WALLY: Yeah, I know what you mean.

ANDRE: I mean, the doctor didn’t see my mother. People at the public theater didn’t see me. I mean, we’re just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we’re all in a trance! We’re walking around like zombies! I don’t think we’re even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we’re just going around all day like unconscious machines, I mean, while there’s all of this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us!

I think our communication devices are making it harder to escape the dream world; it’s making us all conversational butchers who deny one another’s reality because we can’t be bothered to look beyond our own fantasia. And signs of the resultant passive-aggressive hostility seem to be everywhere — to me anyway, it seems obvious in myself, when I find myself cursing at my phone like I have Tourette’s because it tells me there is a voice mail for me to listen to. I know then that I live in an insane dream world.

Not everyone sees it this way. At the Economist’s Free Exchange blog, Ryan Avent responds to a Kevin Drum post about hating the phone. Avent defends the drift toward textual communications:

Younger people want to talk on the phone less because the opportunity cost of setting everything else aside is higher, and because the substitutes for phone conversations are better than ever.

At any given moment, I’m carrying on many, many different conversations. Some of these conversations are conducted through blog arguments. Others, via email. Still others take place using instant messaging or Twitter. Other people use other modes—Facebook, Flickr, comment threads, and probably other social network tools I’ve not heard of. But what all these options have in common is that the participants in the discussions can engage in them at their convenience. I can return an email whenever I have a spare moment….

A phone call, on the other hand, requires both participants to be talking to each other in real time…. time spent on a constrictive phone call is time not spent on the many other conversations an individual has going.

Of course, this takes some getting used to. What is actually an increase in productivity feels to those used to long phone calls like an overwhelming and thought eviscerating wave of distraction. Plus, it’s hard to hear over cell phones! But if phone calls feel burdensome to young people, it’s because they’re often actually burdensome. And the conversion of a convenience into a burden is representative, above all else, of progress.

Here I must disagree with Avent. I don’t regard the experience of convenience or lack of it as an automatic indication of “progress.” I think putting a private illusion of productivity ahead of the fostering of a shared psychic space through conversation is a terrible mistake, an inhumane selfishness that our gadgets make all too easy for us to indulge. I don’t think the ability to conduct “conversations” at our convenience is especially beneficial. It erodes the very concept of social reciprocity, of necessarily willed attention in the moment, even if it is against one’s inclination. If there is to be a meaningful public sphere, it requires resistance, friction, argument, confrontation. It requires inconvenience, the inconvenience of focusing our attention most of all. It requires the difficulty that Jonah Lehrer talks about here with regard to e-readers.

I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.

Difficulty prompts contemplation. It disrupts the insane dream world; it forbids the caustic solipsism that ultimately doesn’t even serve ourselves, but shuts us in a crypt of incomparable and thus impotent self-regard.

The more convenience we introduce to conversation, the more we’re winnowing away the difficulties that preserve the possibilities of discourse. Instead we get a simulation of communication that precludes a confrontation with anything outside the dream world, and makes sure that the world we share with others will not change in any meaningful way. Convenient communication lets existing power relations further entrench themselves; the convenience assures that discussions of their inequity can never be broached.

Convenience and Neoliberalism (13 Aug 2010)

Jodi Dean makes an interesting point in this post about “neoliberal appetites.” At issue is the question of whether the neoliberal regime we are all familiar with now — deregulated markets and post-Fordist production processes and so on — allows individuals to assume more responsibility and have more flexibility with regard to how they fit into economic relations. Bosses are less domineering, workers are more autonomous and collaborative, and self-regulation dictates the terms of self-exploitation. This is sometimes discussed in terms of “bioproduction” and “governmentality” — terms from Foucault’s later work. Occasionally, left-leaning types will celebrate this development as empowering a deterritorialized “multitude” that is paving the way for a postcapitalist world.

But the aggressive brand of individualism promoted by neoliberalism — the sorts of subjects it requires — doesn’t allow for personal development so much as it indoctrinates us into a myopic insatiability. Dean argues:

The very incentive structure that would be necessary for competition to replace something like normalization is missing. The internet, pay for view, video on demand, DVR, instant messaging — our entire media habitat conditions us to immediate gratification rather than self-discipline, self-control, self-governance. Fast food and convenience — again, we focus on what we want now, not what we might need or use later. The neoliberal attitude is that markets and competition induce certain behaviors (laws of supply and demand) and that this is sufficient for self-governance on its own. It isn’t–as Hegel and Adam Smith already knew.

The way I interpret this situation is that neoliberalism necessarily promotes convenience and expediency as its values to accelerate the circulation of commodities, the consumption of goods and services, as a consumerism-based economy requires. Repressive desublimation, to use Marcuse’s phrase, characterizes neoliberal subjectivity more than any sort of internalized self-control. Consumers work better for the system when they have outsourced self-control, seek it in further acts of consumption — buying diet books and exercise books, subscribing to magazines that preach simplifying your life, etc. Dean notes that “the culture of immediacy, of communicative capitalism, dissolves these sorts of mechanisms [of self-governance] and instead provides instant tidbits (lichettes) that entrap us in circuits of drive.” My translation: the emphasis on real-time applications and technology short-circuits the possibility of reflexivity; we become too focused instead on updating and refreshing the content available to us instead of governing our own output and intake. As a result, we become to incompetent to be trusted with power, and democracy, as Dean points out, begins to seem impossible.

Digital Addiction (unfinished) (12 Aug 2010)

It’s easy to amass anecdotal evidence of rising internet addiction. The marathon Asian gamers who prefer to starve rather than leave their terminal; the couples at restaurants, ignoring each other as they engage with their iPhones; the compulsive sharers on social networks who leave no private experience unmediated and recapitulated online; the restless oscillation between email accounts and Twitter and RSS readers looking for a personalized jolt of novelty; the sheer volume of content on YouTube — where did it come from and who is watching it? — these all suggest the dissolution of boundaries that many would have thought impervious even five years ago. The lines that once separated, say, public from indiscreet, consumers from connoisseurs, sharing from stealing, and enthusiasm from compulsion, have been progressively blurred. TK here.

The relentless encroachment of the internet into our everyday lives can feel out of our control. Suddenly, we palpably risk social exclusion if we can’t keep up, if we lack online presence. The vaunted network effects that the Web harnesses begin to come at the expense of our autonomy. We have to maintain a Facebook page. We have to shop through Amazon.com. We have to Google ourselves to check up on our reputation. We must have a smart phone. We yearn for unlimited data plans.

But does that TKTKTK constitute addiction? Recently Paul Graham, an early Web pioneer, argued that technological innovation inherently focuses on enhancing the addictive properties of any given good. Because of this, “increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much.”

Built into this is the assumption that quantity is the only quality.

Says we’ll need social antibodies, but digital natives already seem immune to the internet issue–

Love in the time of cultural-capital-acquisition strategies (9 April 2010)

I have an essay up at Wunderkammer about strategic taste formation and the difficulties faced in opting out of that sort of game. It was prompted by this strange dread I felt at the prospect of having to listen to the new Joanna Newsom album and investing the requisite amount of time to be fair to it somehow. I started to wonder if it even makes sense to try to be fair to cultural product, whether that isn’t some sort of mystification for cultural-capital acquisition. Cultural capital seems to be the same sort of thing as the courtier’s sprezzatura — it needs to appear effortless and unselfconscious in order to be efficacious. The best way of accomplishing that is to try to take oneself out of one’s own loop — to trick oneself with the idea of “really liking” certain highly unlikely things.

Douglas Holt’s 1997 paper (gated link) “Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu’s theory of tastes from its critics” has some interesting insights on the subject of cultural capital. First, he captures the essence of Bourdieu’s Distinction in this sentence, which is the animating idea of the Wunderkammer essay, though I don’t think I stated it outright: “Bourdieu argues that cultural capital secures the respect and esteem of others through the consumption of objects that are ‘difficult’ and so can only be consumed by those few who have acquired the ability to do so.”

But it is not as simple as that — the signaling function of difficulty needs to be aestheticized, generalized, and hidden from ourselves. Basically, various genre-specific forms of cultural capital are useful only if they allows seemingly subjective tastes to become commensurable, weighed on the same scale, and to have that scale describe the social hierarchy in a direct and experiential way. In other words, cultural capital is a process by which we abstract from the specifics of what we like in order to understand where our tastes place us in the status hierarchy. But the tricky part is that this process of abstraction is less a cognitive operation than a praxis — we don’t calculate in our minds what our tastes mean; we live them and in the process reveal to ourselves the class status embedded in our habitus, or the approach to life we have learned from our upbringing and environment, plus the modes of cultural appreciation we have managed to master and internalize so that we operate them convincingly.

Why can’t I ever seem to put this idea across without jargon? The display of taste can’t be a tactic; it has to play naturally to have its desired effects. So our strategic acquisition of cultural capital has to disavow itself in our own minds. This leads to our living some contradictions: this is what I think I was experiencing in my dread about Joanna Newsom.

The problem we face is how to convert cultural capital into something “spendable” in social interactions without destroying its value in the process — without seeming to be trying too hard. This involves all sorts of contortions and feints; it involves a perpetual process of becoming that mirrors the perpetual evolution of fashion. After all, if we achieve a sense of being what our cultural capital implies, we would nullify it.

Thus Holt makes the point that consumption style is more important than its substance, as the substance is designed to continually change. The specifics of fashion change, but understanding how and why it changes can provide an unchanging modicum of social status. We are becoming at the level of specific tastes, so that we have being at the level of consumption style (habitus). Consumption styles are commensurable, even when specific tastes are not. What’s important about finding the commensurability is not being able to rank ourselves so much as it is to help us form our social bonds, to help us read the social terrain. It seems likely, in fact, that those social bonds are what mirror back to us the sense of our own status — that confirm what we otherwise can only suspect about ourselves. Here’s how Holt puts it:

Class boundaries are formed only to the extent that there exist social interactional processes through which otherwise incommensurate field-specific cultural capitals are aggregated into meta-field attributions of status. For example, does one, as a nonparticipant in the consumption field of leisure reading, acknowledge and grant status to friends and acquaintances who have highly developed tastes for prose? I believe that this conversion of field-specific to abstracted cultural capital – while a problematic iterative process – is a pervasive feature of contemporary social interaction. People constantly make such judgments to assess their affinities with others’ tastes in the process of choosing friends, lovers, and business acquaintances. If this process is significant, it suggests that in an increasingly fragmented cultural world, status judgments based on shared interests are less important than those based upon similar styles of consuming, which can be applied to any cultural category.

I bolded the part above. The depressing implication (but maybe it shouldn’t depress me) seems to be that we choose friends the way we choose any other consumer good — it’s all with an eye to cultural capital, how it will play. The process of cultural-capital conversion makes friends and lovers equivalent to tennis rackets and interior decor. It’s all on the same continuum. As Holt puts it: “a single symbolic currency that functions as a status resource.” I wonder if this has always been the case, or whether it is a manifestation of a more open and mobile society, or whether it is a reflection of capitalism reorganizing our personality structures.

As a by-product of the cultural capital process, Holt notes, “status boundaries are reproduced simply through expressing one’s tastes.” This poses problems for cultural egalitarianism, if there is such a thing — and I think there is and that “poptimism” is a expression of it. The cultural egalitarian wants taste to be a kind of democracy, with each person’s taste validating that person’s equal standing in the aesthetic realm. But the signaling we perform to find one another reproduces the social (not personal) hierarchy that makes us prefer some people to others, that allows us to experience love and friendship in the first place, such as it is in our culture. Companionate marriages, for instance, depend on “consumption complementarities”, as this essay by Stevenson and Wolfers details. We need the hierarchy to order our social lives in a way meaningful to us — to find the “one.” And by reproducing the “code” of that hierarchy (the various nuances of consumerist signals defined in their expression) in our courtship rituals, we make that hierarchy stronger when we find that person (or thing). Ideally, the mate/consumption partner stays loyal and true even as the objects they consume together change. Hence our choice of partner substantiates our habitus (or consuming style) that might otherwise be lost in all the surface changes to the specifics of what we consume.

Choosing a partner then is first enabled by the little ephemeral choices: these allow us to find “the one”. Then having the “one” stabilizes the overriding meaning of subsequent choices, reorienting them back to that original partner choice, which becomes a touchstone for their meaning even as the social meanings at large, at the level of the broader consumption code, are changing uncontrollably (and faster than ever with the advent of the internet.) That is to say, falling in love or choosing close friends is (among other things) a way of trying to seize control back over the meaning of our consumption, to create consumption communities that seem to stabilize the meaning of products and practices that, in the wild of the globalized meme market, change faster than anyone can keep up with. The consumption community defrays the damage, distributes it among the group so that one need not face it alone. It makes the whirlwind of fashion manageable, allows it to pass through our lives as harvestable energy – turning over our belongings and behaviors as a means of letting us grow closer to the loved ones in our lives — rather than blowing us around like paper dolls.