Work Refusal (25 May 2011)

I spent the past weekend at the Post/Autonomia conference, which, fittingly enough, mostly took place in a former anatomical pathology laboratory -- the sessions were held in a room that was apparently once a morgue. At first, I was afraid that the ideas we were about to discuss (derived principally from autonomist writers like Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzaurato, Mario Tronti, John Holloway, Harry Cleaver, etc.) were possibly coming there to die, but I left feeling much more optimistic about the possibility that concepts like precarity and affective labor and decolonialization can escape the lab and actually be effectual in social activism.

Discussions ran the gamut from hairsplitting (to the untrained non-Spinozan) philosophical discussions of ontological accumulation and being-as-becoming to more hard-core Marxist themes like the composition of the working class, the organic composition of capital, and who comprises the revolutionary agent of history to practical assessments of the efficacy of, say, social media to activate the "multitude" (or, if you prefer, to sustain the Badiouian "communist hypothesis"), and it ended with a discussion of whether academia was at all a useful place for the discussion of any of this or whether it was fatally subsumed by capital. (I contributed a paper about social media as sustaining the entrepreneurial neoliberal self, not sure where/when/if it will be published.)

I took lots of notes while I was there; now I am having a lot of trouble deciphering them. Many of them, if I recall correctly, refer to the evolving strategies of work refusal discussed. The term is a bit of a misnomer. The idea of refusing work can seem odd in the midst of widespread unemployment and generalized precarity (indeed, one of the papers that stood out for me was Maria Isabel Casas-Cortes's tracing of the broadening circles of whom precarity could apply to), but it makes more sense if work is interpreted in the broadest sense to include the various forms of self-production, self-exploitation, and affective, digital and free labor that often go uncompensated by wages anyway. Franco "Bifo" Berardi's paper adopted this theme, advocating what sounded like voluntary simplicity, presumably as a means of thwarting the "hypercomplexity" and overload of our accelerated information processing capacities, though possibly also to escape the labor of consumption that reinforces consumerism, "semiocapitalism" (which I think means something like Baudrillard's conception of consumerism as consumption of signs), and individualism. I'm not sold on voluntary simplicity or some sort of hermeneutics of asceticism; more interesting to me was the implication that resistance could be organized and targeted at choice architecture and over-friendly user interfaces, which tend toward quietly normalizing one-dimensionality. Some of the same themes appear in his essay "Cognitarian Subectivation", which I commented on here.

Matteo Pasquinelli's paper suggested, in line with Christian Marazzi's work, that capitalism is moving to a model of rent extraction through financialization rather than exploiting surplus labor more directly. One might conceptualize this shift as a reaction to mechanization reducing the input of "living labor" into production, which would also be a way to characterize work refusal. I thought it fit with what Adam Arvidsson and Elanor Colleoni argue in their paper "Value in Information Capitalism and on the Internet" (pdf, my summary) with regard to Facebook.

Emanuel Rota discussed work refusal in terms of the right to be lazy, à la Paul Lafargue, whereas Stevphen Shukaitis stressed the necessity of "learning not to work," and the different forms work refusal must take according to different class positions and situations. He seemed to argue that we needed to better recognize affective labor so as to refuse it and cataloged the history of "art strikes," or the refusal of cultural labor. I presumed he meant the refusal not of creativity as such but the supplemental labor necessary for making creativity subsumable by capital -- the organizational and infrastructural labor that supports creative labor as a product, makes it packageable, profitable. This would include, as I conceive it, the branding, the marketing, the "getting it out there" work as well as the sort of care work that allows people to create in a self-aggrandizing mode. Shukaitis seemed to want to repartition work from leisure in order to facilitate the time-space for autonomous personal development, though this is easier said than done, considering that social recognition is now bound up with forms of self-commodification more than ever thanks to social media.

Refusing work is thus a matter of recharacterizing work as "ludic activity" -- which is a way of saying "play" without risking trivialization. But that can't collapse into entertaining oneself -- I am not sure that an art strike is needed; it seems like an attention strike is what's wanted, a refusal to get caught up in interactive entertainments that make our pursuit of distraction productive. Instead, we need what Federico Luisetti described during the session Q&A as a right to be bored -- a right to refuse to be entertained or distracted. It's easy to see this idea gaining momentum as information overload continues to worsen. Boredom will become a figure for the repose and replenishing necessary before concentration is possible, or perhaps even as a metonym for concentration itself. When capitalism wants to hurry us through commodified information at ever increasing speeds to valorize it all, boredom becomes a way of slowing things down, of resisting, of holding out for a minimal self rooted not in accumulation of trivia but in a kind of open-ended blankness.

I suppose I understand refusal of work as resisting personal branding, of refusing to be, as one speaker said, "dragged into networks of consumerism" in search of identity but holding out for other kinds of nurturing community that social networks increasingly obscure. It seems to me a matter of defying the injunction to be reflexive, to instrumentalize self-awareness, and try for self-forgetting. Instead of pursuing measurable attention, which induces one to see the self in terms of capitalistic accumulation and expansion, one could seek forms of intersubjectivity that supply a reciprocal recognition without lapsing into exploitable performativity. (I am failing by my own standards of course.)

Music Cloud (10 May 2011)

The iPod's popularity has always implied the inevitability of a universal music library that anyone can tap into at anytime from anyplace. It would be a realization of the dreamspace in Twin Peaks: "Where we're from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there's always music in the air." I figured people would ultimately pay a subscription fee for "all music anytime" -- much as Netflix is evolving toward a monthly fee for "all movies anytime" (assuming bandwidth can keep up).

Google's launch of a cloud-music service moves us closer to that scenario: "Upload your personal music collection to listen anywhere, keep everything in sync, and forget the hassle of cables and files." That makes for a nice peg for linking to this First Monday article by Jeremy Wade Morris: "Sounds in the Cloud: Cloud computing and the digital music commodity." Morris contends that "the cloud metaphor obscures the fact that the transition is more than a simple shift from music as a good to music as a service. Music in the cloud ... enmeshes users in ... a process of continual commodification of the music experience." The article is mostly an explanation of how cloud computing works and makes some incontrovertible points about the surrender of ownership this implies -- we rent computing power (putting us at the mercy of Big Tech) rather than own the means of production/consumption for ourselves. Morris points out that subscription services make music "contingent" on providers' whims, subject to surreptitious control. But I think this hint is worth following up: "the more ubiquitous music appears, the more difficult it is to conceive of music as a separate and distinct experience from our everyday activities."

It's worth noting how cloud-music services (Amazon has one already) posit that we hate the "hassle" of music as physical object and are liberated by the transformation of hard-to-lug collections into ephemeral lists. The implication is that we yearn to breathe music like air, at all times, and have been waiting for it to be dematerialized, decommodified. To a degree that is an ideological cover for the way cloud services intensify the circulation of music as a commodity. What do I even mean by that? It has to do with this part of the promotional campaign: "Mix it up. Create your own custom playlists with just a few clicks. Or use Instant Mix to automatically build new playlists of songs from your collection that go great together. All the playlists you create and all the changes you make to them are automatically available everywhere your music is."

Doing this sort of thing in the cloud makes that labor available to Google, along with your general preferences, and presumably associates them with everything else you do online while logged into a Google account. Google Music is another tool to keep you signed in, with music serving as another code for generating associative marketing data, regardless of whether or how much we listen to it. In the cloud, music is a much more labile signifier, a more flexible marker to denote emerging demographic niches. So in that realm, music is more commodifed, in the sense that it is enlisted to a more intensive degree as a signifier of nonmusical information. Those signifers circulate in ways we don't even know about, let alone control. Why does that matter? It makes music listening less autonomous an experience, and more an aspect of the online universe of sharing and self-presentation and immaterial labor. That means it is harder to hear on its own terms (if such an approach to listening "purity" is even to be taken as ideal or normative). Cloud music furthers the decontextualization process that commodifying music as recordings initiated.

Desire as craftsmanship (23 Jan 2011)

I wrote an essay for the New Inquiry about traveling. I argue that we travel to try to get away from the ease with which we can want things, a modification on Guy Debord's point that traveling can make consuming the same mass-produced goods seem fresh and exciting. "Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized."

With consumerism, the goods themselves are often a pretense; what we want is to consume ourselves in some new posture, absorbed by some new desire. (This is one of the dimensions of what Debord calls spectacular consumption.) In consumerism, consumption is a production of the self, not simply a matter of using up some utility-supplying good. In The Culture of New Capitalism Richard Sennett suggests that "for the consumer, stimulation lies in the very process of moving on" -- of finding something new to desire. This energizes and involves our imagination, and thereby seems to increase the dimensions of ourselves. The more we can think to want, the bigger a person we are by consumer society's terms. Expanding the capacity for desire builds the personal brand of the consumer, whose job, after all, is to consume well.

Our selfhood seems bound up with the ease with which we can desire the right things -- a facility that travel takes away from us, forces us to rebuild from guidebooks, instinct, conversation with strangers, and so on. That rebuilding process, I suspect, is what hard-core travelers enjoy most about the experience. But tourists, who lack such improvisational skills, get something else out of travel: the sublime pleasure of having that high-functioning consumer self destroyed -- knowing all along, of course, that it can be safely readopted and even cherished with invigorated appreciation when one gets back home again. How wonderful it is to know what to want, and to know where to be taught to want more. Never mind that this institutionalizes discontent at the very core of our self, thus making it hard to truly love anything. Committing to a particular desire, to nurturing and growing it rather than replacing it, finds little cultural support.

Marketing discourse works not only to make generating new desires easier, but also, crucially, to make the experience of new desires pleasurable, as an increase of personal possibility, as a paradoxical kind of freedom. Desire may seem like bondage, as if one is controlled by need. Consumerism instead makes it appear as the escape from monotony, from the iron cage of ordinary life -- the boldness to imagine alternatives. The consumerist utopia! Here's how Sennett, who's ultimately skeptical, limns it:

What I've described are pleasures which consumers make in things, imposed pleasure which a sober utilitarian would and doubtless should suspect. And the declaration that the "sky's the limit" could be defended on political grounds: people might be set free by dreaming of something beyond the routines and confines of everyday life. In the same way they might be set free by feeling they've used up and exhausted these perfectly workable ways of getting by. Aren't people set free when they transcend in spirit what they directly know, use, or need? The consuming passion might be another name for liberty.

Desire becomes an expression of the craftsmanship of consumption. And consumption itself becomes, as Sennett argues, theater.

The rise of connoisseurship makes this plain; we become proud of knowing how to consume better, how to refine desire to the point where it is never quite satisfied and we are always still hungering for the more exquisite experience. But this refinement doesn't represent the overcoming of restlessness; it becomes a way of perfecting its expression ans a positive quality -- I am restless, thus I am vital. Connoisseurship changes from being a deep, almost selfless knowledge of a subject that one has submitted to, and instead appears as a deep commitment to elaborate the self.

The ethic of connoisseurship seems to militate against convenience, but it's more accurate to say that convenience fuels connoisseurship, making us unimpressed with things simply working, with goods simply satisfying us. The inconvenience of travel makes this dynamic obvious for the tourist, who wants to consume for self-aggrandizement, but suddenly finds it hard to merely consume for sustenance. Sennett notes how convenience divorces us from how things actually work, freeing up that energy to be rechanneled as marketing (and human-potential psychology) encourages us, into the further fashioning of the self.

So connoisseurship no longer is an elitist matter of mediating "good taste" to heathens. It is instead within every consumer's reach; connoisseurship has become the craft of making a perfect self within consumer society's constraints -- namely how automation and capitalist relations have stripped away most other sources of craft knowledge in our lives. Sensual enjoyment falls by the wayside of performing desire -- having a food blog, say, rather than tasting food. Of course one can do both, but they are in constant tension; as fiction writers have always know, it is hard to observe life and live it at the same time. Consumerism tends to make us all life at a meta level, since the self is never given but always being constructed -- the self can never simply experience things but must be watched for what its experiences say about it. Social media is the platform for this metaconsumption of our identity and those of our friends. There, we share well-groomed information about ourselves the way old connoisseurs would have shared it about their particular ruling passion. Social media remakes the idea of "being useful to others" -- that is, of socially necessary labor that we all want to perform to feel recognized -- in its own image in terms of its peculiar version of sharing: sharing details about oneself first and foremost. Narcissism can then masquerade as utility.

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.

A defense of foodie-ism (21 Sept 2010)

Almost incidentally, in the course of positing the value of a liberal-arts education, Tyler Cowen presents a sort of defense of foodies:

I am interested in food (among other topics), not only because of the food itself. I also view it as an investment in understanding symbolic meaning, cultural codes of excellence, the transmission of ideas, and also how the details of an area fit together to form a coherent whole. I believe this knowledge makes me smarter and wiser, although I am not sure which mass-produced formal test would pick up any effects. I view this interest as continuing my liberal arts education, albeit through self-education.

Grasping food as a cultural system and understanding how it works makes one smarter, as long as you agree that smarts are a matter of mastering these kinds of decoding and recoding procedures. Liberal arts education, to put it as technocratically as possible, teaches students how to process information in a number of different codes, how to manipulate their idiosyncratic structures of meaning. The problem with foodies (and perhaps libaral-arts types like myself generally) comes when they attempt to assert a kind of dominance through the mastery of these codes -- they try to make the possibility of mastery exclusive, a zero-sum game. That is, they try to impose a status component to the coding/decoding that shifts the original or inherent or latent meanings of the food (or whatever) in a new way that suits their pretensions to becoming an elite. Then connoisseurship threatens to become the only relevant meaning possible to decode from a certain practice. (This is what Baudrillard feared in his ruminations about the consumerist code.) In other words, foodie-ism threatens to take all that rich cultural information inherent in making and enjoying food and flatten it out so that it only indicates where you stand in relation to some food-related trend, as an early adopter or an arriviste. Worse, we can only interpret it that way, and the original data begins to become inaccessible.

I think this sort of pattern fuels a lot of the culture-war animus directed at university-bred "elitists," who are seen as reducing/reifiying the richness of traditional everyday life and making it a big status game.

Surreptitious Selling Out (9 July 2010)

The Arvidsson article (pdf) I mentioned in yesterday's post about jobs pinpoints precisely what is so troubling about being engaged with pop culture in our particular cultural moment. The economic engine of consumer capitalism is increasingly fueled by the good intentions of people who want to be engaged and critical and oppositional. But by assimilating their critique, consumer capitalism invalidates it at a higher level, negating the idea that there can be any other set of social relations within which we could experience culture at this point.

Arvidsson writes about the advertising industry's need to make distinctive messages capable of standing out in the ceaseless hum of informational noise that the spread of formula-reliant, capital-intensive mass media has brought on.

In an informational culture marked by almost infinite reproducibility, media culture thus tends to loose its grip over meaning. It is no longer able to command anything but the partial attention of its audience, much less provide it with a meaningful and coherent worldview. Instead it recedes into the background, losing its control over the practices in which meaning and affect are constructed. Media culture thus becomes a sort of white noise, a noisy environment for the more or less autonomous production of a common social world of common affective intensities.

Media industries have generally lost their power of imposing meaning on its products, imposing how they will be received and used, so they have shifted strategies. Because the mass meaning they once created for us no longer adheres, that means we are all out there producing meanings of our own -- Arvidsson calls this a "flowering productive externality" to the culture industry's ordinary bailiwick of designing and circulating products. With the advent of interactive media, those meanings circulate much more broadly and rapidly, becoming a source of value to industry beyond what money they manage to collect for their products originally. Our spontaneous conversation about culture adds value. Our self-made meanings, from our own point of view, establish our uniqueness, our identity, our particular point of view on culture. But from industry's point of view, they have the potential to reinvigorate their business.

Precisely because this externality has autonomy in relation to capital, it provides a tempting source of innovation, rejuvenation and creativity for the system, the very standardizing logic of which tends to eliminate such results a priori. In the most advanced factions of immaterial production users are indeed in charge (to use the motto of the present Web 2.0 movement), their agency creates the kinds of products that have the greatest use-value for the capitalist system.

Since these meanings are made outside advertising and culture industry auspices, they can be credibly touted by those industries as "authentic" or "genuine" rather than merely contrived to dupe us. Our own agency -- our autonomy, our reflexive self-identity, our affect, our motivation to do something or create something, whatever you want to emphasize about it -- becomes both an input and an output of marketing and entertainment. Those businesses threaten to become perpetual-motion machines, subsuming culture altogether.

That probably sounds a little bombastic. But it helps me understand why I sometimes dread my own "agency" -- why I become particularly ambivalent about trying to write theoretically informed commentary about pop culture. No matter how Adornoesque one thunders about the reifying effects of the culture industry and the curtailment of autonomous creative thought and so on, one is still left feeling that nothing has been accomplished but the further validation of the phenomena one meant to denounce and discourage.

It's not just that the culture industry absorbs critique and rechannels its energy into its own reinvention -- it's not merely that ceaseless flow of amateur criticism powers the mighty fashion wheel. Maybe I am alone in this, but I find that I experience my efforts to be objective about culture simultaneously as efforts to sustain some sort of "cool" subjectivity. And that unwanted synthesis is incredibly frustrating. I don't have any "authentic" experience, I often realize. It seems as the space for it doesn't exist amid all the cultural participation I put myself in for.

I find I inhabit the subject position of pop culture itself to write about it, if that makes any sense -- as though I am parasitically sucking the zeitgeist from it, becoming of the moment myself, culturally "relevant" as Carles likes to say. I become conscious of my immanence in a way that's unbearable; my inescapable existence within culture suddenly produces cognitive dissonance for me, driving me to further reflexive gyrations of opinion-making.

I think that to be at home in consumer culture, it helps to either (a) not engage too far or too self-consciously with pop culture, a sort of fatal strategy of willed ignorance or silence; or (b) sell out completely and openly, and recast the cynicism as pragmatic realism like the former underground folk Arvidsson describes who turn entrepreneurial and get into self-branding, or ironicized futurism along the lines of Takashi Murakami. I find that I fall somewhere in the middle, and I feel like I have no home.

Bourdieu and Bouncers (16 June 2010)

TMN linked to this article about recent research by sociologist Lauren Rivera, who worked in a New York City nightclub that preys on the status conscious. She earned the trust of the doormen there and interviewed them about how they decide to let people in.

“Bouncers are status judges who make hundreds of status decisions every night. They do it by having hundreds of patrons line up and on the basis of very little information, they size up who will be an esteemed customer,” Rivera says.

Basically, she was investigating how status can be conveyed and interpreted in an instant, and what sort of skills are required for both signalers and decoders. Also, to what degree are those skills consciously and reflexively deployed, and to what degree are they simply internalized, an automatic way of interacting with the world -- assimilated into the habitus.

The article foregrounds this finding:

Through conversations and observations, she found that bouncers ran through a hierarchical list of qualities to determine in seconds who would enhance the image of the club and encourage high spending. Social networks mattered more than social class, or anything else for that matter.

If you are recognizably famous or connected to someone who is, you get in. You generally don't get in, apparently, if you are (a) not white or (b) not a woman. Not exactly a startling discovery.

More interesting is Rivera's report that bouncers look down on bribes, suggesting that they are invested in their ability to accurately assess something more nebulous than raw wealth -- that they are proud of being able to distinguish souls of gold from souls of bronze. This suggests that they have a nonfinancial stake in making the sort of social and cultural capital that gets you into clubs nonconvertible. The value of those capitals lies in their inability to be priced and sold -- they are not commensurable. They serve as a kind of stringently controlled currency of which the bouncers of all people are the de facto central bankers.

It may be that status is always trying to wash itself of the taint of the money or the primitive accumulation, as Marxists call it, to which it is ultimately traceable. People with status want to close off the route they took to acquire it, protect their place on the perch, so always there is the effort to make status ineffable, a matter of subtle distinctions and elusive signifiers of style. Status must obfuscate its origins; it must seem inevitable and inborn, a matter of blood. But in order to maintain that illusion, would-be aristocrats need to hire gatekeepers, like these club bouncers -- in other words, you still need muscle, an authority that arbitrates what is stylish and what isn't, and enforces the distinction so you don't have to dirty your own hands. The effortlessness, the sprezzatura of the stylish is enabled by minions.

Conspicuous consumption is only a clumsy first step toward a different sort of command over social resources, one which can mobilize large pools of labor devoted to nothing more than protecting your status. An entire bureaucracy of status workers are made necessary by the need to keep social and cultural capital distinct from money, comprising not just bouncers but designers and editors and trend spotters (the ideological bouncers) as well as the more traditional types of servants, the personal assistants and the groomers and so forth.

Status laundering calls for a delicate balance. This bureaucracy must be ceded enough power (or cultural capital) to make status distinctions credible, real, efficacious, but it can't have enough power to acquire too much status for its own ranks. The bouncers can't get the idea to let themselves into the club.

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.

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.

Curatorial compulsion (22 Jan 2010)

Nick Bilton writes in the NYT about the curatorial impulse that living online has unleashed.

I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain.
Most of us do this to some degree. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.
If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

This is a perfect example of how performing free immaterial labor is starting to rule our days, become a compulsion. No longer a hobby, it's an entire mode of being. Life is winnowing down to operations of this limited scope and scale -- pointing and thumbs-upping at texts and images.

If we don't curate online, it's as if we cease to exist. The efforts are existentially significant to us, but we only get back the sense of being alive; the companies and peers who we are producing for can harvest the value of this labor. But as Bilton points out, we recoup some of the value of the labor by capitalizing on the curatorial work of others: "Without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis." But should we even feel obliged to? Isn't that a grandiose and hubristic pursuit? To know the best of everything that is going on everywhere? When the urge strikes me to "keep up with music," I feel what Bilton is talking about most keenly, but instead of feeling caught up, I instead feel hopelessly behind, as I often do when I log in to my Google Reader.

Bilton cites Maria Popova, a curator he follows, who discusses what she does as "controlled serendipity" and "content discovery." These cold, oxymoronic phrases are apt in that they convey some of the mechanistic nature of the process, which Bilton labels a "reflex." But what happens is more like forced serendipity, a demand that the world give forth "content" to satisfy our curiosity, which atrophies, becomes lazier. Online, curiosity loses its active component as it becomes accelerated. I feel it when I fire through the 500 articles in my RSS feed, much of it densely written articles and essays that I cast aside with a glance. Maybe I file it in a shared folder with a satisfied sense of completion. Job well done, curator.

A "tyranny" of hits (7 Jan 2010)

Yesterday I was lamenting about having too much choice in cultural product, and how that has made me take a skeptical attitude toward anything new --I'm too busy keeping up with what I already allegedly like to start liking more and more. (That is, I have a finite amount of desire to invest.) This Economist article from a few months ago brings up a related issue: it looks at how culture industries have become even more dependent on huge-selling hits, which have paradoxically become more prominent as consumer choice has proliferated.

Offer music fans a virtually infinite choice of songs free of charge, and they will still gravitate to hits. That has been the experience of We7, a music-streaming service based in London which has 2.5m users. Only 22% of We7’s 4m songs are streamed in any given week, says Steve Purdham, who founded the company. The top 100 artists account for more than half of all streams. Users of Spotify, another ad-supported music service, are similarly unadventurous. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties for British songwriters, calculates that the most popular 5% of tracks on Spotify account for 80% of all streams. He is counting only the 3m tracks that were streamed at least once between February and July. Another 1.5m were not touched at all.

Industry people explain this by pointing to the social nature of media consumption; though we tend to hide from this truth, what we like has more to do with what everyone else likes than with the qualities of the product itself. In a sense, though the theoretical range of our choices in culture has become nearly infinite, the real range of options we experience is delimited by who we know and what we read and what we pick up from the zeitgeist. That range may be contracting as the mass media contracts and rallies around the hit products that can still produce profits. That may offset whatever broadening could come from social networking tools that allow people to share their preferences easier. (I'd suspect that such sharing -- the uncompensated brand-building labor I've whined about elsewhere -- also contributes to hit-making.

At the end of yesterday's post I posited the possibility of just loving whatever is hot at the moment and nothing else as a way of evading the trap of having to hate everything in order to protect oneself from becoming overwhelmed. I was sort of joking about that -- seems more like repressive desublimation to me -- but maybe that is what people generally do: Accept hype as a rational solution to questions of taste and search efficiency. If we consume less, and only what is popular, we don't have enough breadth of experience to become disgruntled the products we are consuming and we are popular at the watercooler too. Consider this:

Tom Tan and Serguei Netessine of Wharton Business School have analysed reviews on Netflix.... They find that blockbusters get better ratings from the people who have watched them than more obscure ones do. Even the critically loathed “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is awarded four stars out of five.... Perhaps the best explanation of why this might be so was offered in 1963. In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type.... A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

These people tell other people about their experience, and "the hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill."

This analysis side-steps the question of objective merit, which I think is more or less impossible to determine and is ultimately a red herring in understanding popularity. Objective taste is a myth; those who want to distinguish themselves as cultural connoisseurs merely use the idea of objectivity to differentiate themselves from the masses of Lost Symbol readers. Embracing hits can be a way to opt out of the cultural-capital-accumulation game, which is what seems to be behind the "popist" trend in music criticism. These critics are trying a new approach to objectivity by signaling indifference to the cultural capital embodied in certain tastes, but that signal inevitably becomes its own class marker, becomes a gesture that feels forced, or positional. They don't take it far enough -- to the point of ceasing to be critics altogether and keeping their opinions to themselves and to their word-of-mouth-range friends. Perhaps the only sure way to authentic taste is to abdicate it entirely.

Important art (30 Sept 2009)

Ainsley Drew, a guest blogger at Kottke, linked to this essay by Shane McAdams about how art collectors use the word important in describing the art they have invested in.

There is no better way to shield something from real criticism than to make it taboo or sacred. When that collector said “important” he was without knowing it creating a protective cloak of mystique around the work of art, because “important” is to culture what “holy” is to religion.

What was being protected was not the art's allegedly important meaning, but its actual value in capitalist culture -- its price. Investing in contemporary art is a matter of investing in the highly variable reputation of the artist; it makes more sense if you are in a position to bully public opinion about what sort of art is worthwhile -- which makes it smart for collectors to get involved with museums and other institutions that validate art's importance, staffing their boards and guiding their acquisitions and so on. The reputational issues provoke a lot of aggressive promotional and misleading talk -- "over the course of the last 20 years we’ve watched 'bad' work somehow turn into 'sensational' work, 'sensational' turn to 'provocative,' 'provocative' into 'important,' and 'important' back into 'good.' It’s a collecting world’s semantic shell game" -- that drowns out meaningful criticism, which presumably decides what is truly good. I'm skeptical of that -- I think cultural capital is always at stake in determining what is "important" or aesthetically "good", and the critics merely fight with words because they lack the money to fight on the collectors' turf. That cultural capital plays in determining who is included and excluded in the art world more generally, which in turn feeds into the larger stakes of social class.

McAdams cites an essay by art critic Dave Hickey, “Frivolity and Unction” (pdf), where he imagines resigning from the art world after watching its emissaries try to defend themselves from an attack on its frivolity and corruption on 60 Minutes -- a middlebrow attempt to demystify the art world and devalue its cultural capital. (Hickey calls it "bourgeois punditry.") "The presumption of art's essential 'goodness' is nothing more than a political fiction that we employ to solicit taxpayers' money for public art education," he concedes, though that is just one example (as McAdams points out) of the many political struggles art can be recruited to figure in to. Hickey ends up essentially wishing that cultural capital didn't figure in at all -- that contemporary art had no cultural capital and was widely ignored, regarded as unimportant, unvirtuous. Then we could go back to appreciating the actual work again rather than what it signified in class struggles, and in struggles for funding. "I could practice art criticism by participating in the street-level negotiation of value. I might disregard the distinctions between high and low art and discuss objects and activities whose private desirability might be taken to have public consequences." His rallying cry becomes: "Art is bad, silly, and frivolous, so what?"

His contention is that the art world is or at least should be "an ongoing referendum on how things should look and the way we should look at things" -- but in so doing, it also lays down aesthetics along class lines, with moneyed interests weighing more heavily in the referendum. Ordinary people, it seems to me, do their best to ignore the dictates of the art world, which doesn't have their ability to appreciate art in mind at all, and instead derive their aesthetics from a hodgepodge of sources as a means of resistance. Taste is best-kept provisional, a work in progress, and all the judgments we share are probably best expressed that way, as theses rather than passwords into some discriminatory club.

Against sharing (12 July 2009)

Matt Yglesias makes a point about cultural display in response to this James Wolcott essay, which explores the ways in which it is threatened by technology. Wolcott believes that rather than show our personality through the culture we consume, we'll indulge instead an ethical poseurdom -- "I suspect that once this downturn plateaus and shrinks in the rearview mirror, we’ll just stock up on other possessions, which will be arrayed and arranged to show off not our personal aesthetics or expensive whims but our ethics—our progressive virtues." (Like I was arguing yesterday, consuming conservation.)

But Yglesias is obviously right that cultural display is not simply going to disappear.

I note that one thing a lot of people, myself included, sometimes do is use the Adium feature that automatically sets your IM chat status to the title and artist of the song currently playing on your iTunes. One way to think about that is as a substitute for the old game of visually displaying the physical records or CDs you own in your house. It’s a way to turn your music consumption into something quasi-public. Perhaps reading books in groups and writing blogs about what you’re reading will be the new way to share your cultural consumption with the world.

As much as I joyously do the last thing he mentions -- blog about what I read and listen to, try to solve what interested me about it in public -- I can't imagine doing the other, that is, deliberately show off what I'm listening to with no analytical value added by me, as though to advertise the degree to which I am reliant on the symbolic power of the cultural product to define myself. I wonder if my distinguishing between those two sorts of behavior is a generational difference, a residue from having been a music listener in a pre-digital time. Perhaps I'm too old to appreciate how "showing off" has now become "sharing." If I made an effort to let people know what I was listening to, I would only be able to see what I was doing as trying to score points, trying to beat out whoever was paying attention by one-upping them with something cooler than what they were listening to. Maybe that kind of competition is a contemporary potlatch, but to me it just seems weird. It seems to supplant the pleasures of me in my apartment listening to the music, which should theoretically be enough, with a different and more uncertain pleasure of showing others up -- I mean, sharing with them my superlative tastes. But pop culture consumption ultimately has little to do with sensual qualities and more to do with signaling, with participating in a zeitgeist, with nailing down one's social identity for a particular moment in time. Wolcott suggests that new media forms are undermining that signaling function -- but it's instead forcing us to think of consumption display differently. It seems more likely that technology will make an even larger part of our consumption into signaling ('sharing") rather than extracting whatever utility is in the work itself.

It would be a delightful consequence as far as I am concerned if the changes in media-consumption technology end up requiring us to have to add something from ourselves -- our reaction, our interpretation, our pleasure, something -- before we can carry out a signaling gesture with some piece of culture. You can't just carry a copy of The Rainbow around on the subway and have people think you are in touch with the elemental, passionate human soul as captured by D.H. Lawrence. You would not be able to wear a book like it's a T-shirt and get away with it. In other words, it would be great if everyone came to understand "sharing" as adding something significant and interesting to the public conversation about the things we are doing (though "doing" typically means "consuming"), instead of merely preening. With all tthe information readily available to us, it's easier than ever to make that attempt.

But unfortunately, I think we are far more likely to see add-ons to the new media forms, along the lines of Adium, to allow for pure signaling displays that require no input from the one making the display. It's part of the imperative to share, of which Facebook and Twitter are the current cultural harbingers. I don't believe our culture would allow for a technological development that makes being a poseur harder rather than more convenient. Poseurdom is too seductive and useful an opportunity; it lets us deploy cultural capital without risk. I can carry around The Rainbow without losing points for having no clue what the hell Lawrence is talking about 95 percent of the time.

Commodified intelligence (26 March 2009)

At the site for the Economist's Intelligent Life magazine was posted this rebuttal to an earlier piece about "the Age of Mass Intelligence." The earlier piece, by John Parker, took a sort of quantitative view of culture and argued that we live in the most cultured time ever. Parker's evidence is familiar, a cultural spin on the argument that capitalism and consumerism has democratized style and material possessions. More people are going to museums than ever before! More people are reading Tolstoy! Since, it is being broadcast online, more people have the opportunity to hear opera! Huzzah!

Not that these are disturbing developments in themselves. The fact that more people have access to cultural goods is a good thing. People encounter fewer barriers to developing tastes for what once were highbrow cultural redoubts. But the improving raw numbers of cultural consumption matter mainly to entrepreneurs in the culture industries. Consumers care more about what their cultural consumption signifies.

Mass cultural consumption can seem like it constitutes an assault on one of the upper class's power sources -- its elitism. Parker suggests we have to call into question the idea of cultural capital thanks to this higher demand for what he has judged to be "intelligent interest":

the growth of intelligent interest may help resolve an argument that exists in universities between those who say culture is really all about class or income, much as it always was, and those who say that, no, sweeping statements about class are no longer relevant, and that these days personal taste, not class or money, is what matters. The new audience suggests both schools are partly right (or wrong). Taste has become fantastically heterogeneous: people do indeed watch and read whatever they want; intellectual snobbery is breaking down. But as Drs Wing and Goldthorpe have shown, one group--those with university degrees--read more, watch more and mix and match more than anyone else.

That fails to resolve anything as far as I can tell. The question remains how do we narrow down from "whatever we want" to manage our cultural consumption? The nature of those desires still have signaling functions, regardless of how heterogeneous the signal pool seems. With no hard and fast sumptuary laws, the boundaries between classes need to be constantly rearticulated -- the pool of signals and symbols from culture serve that function; their meaning is constantly being renegotiated. There need to be constant displays of cultural prowess, constant interpretations. That is why culture becomes a privileged site for political battle in capitalist society -- it seems like a credible route to power to seize control over those symbols. (Whether that is a matter of mistaking the superstructure for the base is a whole other question.)

Cultural proliferation doesn't do away with elitism; it forces elitism to refine itself, to burrow in more deeply into the existing institutions and social mores. It may become even harder to root out as it becomes more attenuated. (That may be impossible to prevent and is no reason to restrict the dissemination of culture, but it's also no reason to pretend that dissemination has no perverse effects.) The increase in culture does not increase the amount of cultural capital, which is relative -- a positional good. One can argue that cultural proliferation has led to there being multiple status hierarchies (this maps to the cultural omnivores in Parker's essay) in which one can have cultural capital (though I think these are ultimately reducible to a master hierarchy which maps onto social class, the hierarchy that permits the conceptualization of power relations in society in the broadest way). But even still, cultural capital is inherently unequal in its distribution; it consists of the leverage gained by a superior working understanding of a given aesthetic domain -- the unspoken rules of taste, the procedures of politeness, the deployment of the proper terminology and allusions, the cultivation of critical authority, and so on. There can be no leveling in these realms -- "de gustibus non est disputandum" is the alibi of the dominant and the last refuge of the dominated.

That is to say, "dumbing down" is a relative concept, and it's always happening at any given time in a society, from the perspective of a group trying to retain whatever power it derives from its cultural capital. So I think Parker is wrong when he writes this: "It is hard to believe that those who accuse arts institutions of dumbing down would want audiences to be smaller." I think that is precisely what they want; smaller audiences, and a consolidation of culturally derived power. Some of that consolidation, though, will always take a concern-trolling form of worrying about "dumbing down" -- this is a subtle method of policing class boundaries.

In George Balgobin's rebuttal, he highlights a point that I've tried to make in the past: The new emphasis on the quantity of culture consumed and the signals it can be deployed to send (over the new mediums available to send such signals) has led to the development of a widespread collector's mentality toward culture:

Facebook is devoted to cataloguing this cultural rebirth. Here people curate their personas and project them at the world. Characteristic of the younger generations, the mood strains for the eclectic while feigning nonchalance. The alchemist arranges lists in search of gold: Shostakovich, Dresden Dolls, Justin Timberlake, Miles. "Mrs Dalloway" is popular, perched between "Harry Potter" and, simply, “The Russians”. Status updates remind you that a friend has just returned from an “HD Mozart Opera” while another is “getting into Herzog films”. This is an achievement panopticon; the participants are its prisoners.

The key question ends up being whether we believe that performing our appreciation of something -- indulging in what Balgobin calls "credentials kabuki" -- means we don't really appreciate it. He asks, "if we fail to distinguish between attendance and appreciation, we may end up poorer for it, left with a corporate caricature of our cultural richness. The 'intelligent' masses will work hard mining the store of culture artefacts, but will they read the texts and learn from them, or only use them as objects for trade?" I think that built into this question is an assumption that signaling through cultural goods precludes the possiblity of authentically enjoying them -- that culture must be regarded as an end in itself or else it has been violated. That's an assumption that's built into a lot of what I've written in the past. But that identity isn't something that can just be assumed; rather it's the essence of the dilemma of consumerism. I guess I frequently worry that concern for signaling erodes the ability to appreciate culture on its own terms, because of my own experience of being a poseur.

Shepard Fairey and notoriety art (20 Feb 2009)

Graphic designer Shepard Fairey, now famous for the "Hope" posters for the Obama campaign (which has kicked up a legal battle about fair use), had a retrospective recently at the ICA in Boston. Peter Schjeldahl, writing in the New Yorker, was not particularly impressed.

Warhol sublimely commodified images of Mao and the hammer and sickle four decades ago, in keeping with an ambition—to infuse subjects and tones of common culture with powers of high art—that has not grown old. Warhol’s revelatory games with the cognitive dissonance between art and commerce have galvanized artists in every generation since. But you can stretch a frisson just so many times before it goes limp. Like the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who included a Louis Vuitton boutique in his Los Angeles retrospective, Fairey reverses a revolution achieved by Warhol, along with Roy Lichtenstein. He embraces a trend in what the critic Dave Hickey has called “pop masquerading as art, as opposed to art masquerading as pop.”

That remark is a bit cryptic, particularly if you are skeptical about the dichotomy between pop and art. Around what concepts can that dichotomy be organized, anyway, in our culture? Can you refer to the intentions of the work's creator? And then which intentions are artistic, and which ones aren't? Evaluating how purposefully commercial a work is no longer lets us pigeonhole it along these lines. Art, after all, is big business, an investment category. Artists have become self-conscious businesspeople, producing their work along industrial lines and with a mind to maximizing its market value by controlling its scarcity and promoting it with various stunts. And the nature of the audience has changed, with the democratization of cultural consumption and the ease with which certain sorts of works can be distributed. Whether something is pop or art may depend entirely on the spirit with which it is contemplated by the viewer -- the aesthetic quotient of a particular piece may rely as much on the cultural know-how of the audience as the proficiency of the artist. If we are conditioned to judge visual works by how effective they are in capturing our attention -- the way marketing efforts are judged -- than is it inevitable that artists will move toward catering to that principle?

These are the sorts of questions Rob Walker gets into in an essay he posted to his site about Fairey from a few years ago. At the time Walker was writing, Fairey was working in marketing but also conducting guerrilla art projects, blurring the lines (at least in his own mind) between the two.

When I interviewed Fairey for that magazine article, I of course asked him about the contradictions involved in, say, being someone who has both wheat-pasted the icon face over Sprite billboards – and who has actually done professional design work for the company that owns Sprite. “People make this very black-and-white delineation,” he said. “But I say, ‘How would you feel about it if it were a little more ambiguous? If all companies had marketing materials that didn’t insult the consumer? That were somewhat creative and intelligent and almost like an art piece with a product behind it?”
In other words, instead of responding to the encroachment of evil branding into the supposedly pristine authenticity of the street by withdrawing – why not engage? If the idea of spreading the Obey image is to see how far the Obey image can spread, doesn’t it make a certain sense for it to show up on apparel that is sold in chain stores? If a multinational can put its icons on the street, maybe the street should put its icons into the shopping mall.

Drawing on cultural historian Jackson Lears's Fables of Abundance, Walker contrasts Fairey with Joseph Cornell, another artist who appropriated materials from pop culture and refashioned it into art. But Cornell's work was obsessional, private. It didn't seem to be made with the idea of seeing how far his influence, or his trace, could be spread, as is the case with Fairey's work. At the Cornell retrospective I saw in Salem, Massachusetts, the intimacy of the work was unmistakable; peering at his boxes made me feel a bit voyeuristic, even as I was inspired with a notion of my own potential creativity, the ways I could indulge my own obsessions (whatever I discovered them to be) with certain motifs of imagery, certain juxtapositions. Cornell's art doesn't seem to want to redeem his found objects so much as to render them mysterious, with all the mystery that a specific person's peculiar and ineffable fascination can supply them with. Cornell's work would not make for effective marketing material. The resonance of his designs are too inward and idiosyncratic. They are what no effective advertising can be: creepy.

Advertising is never creepy, always cool. And Fairey's work seems to fit that aesthetic, prompting viewers to respond with the recognition that something hip is happening in Fairey's mode of appropriation. Once you recognize that commercial persuasion has crowded out the space for art appreciation for just about everyone in our culture, the natural response is to try to function within commercial persuasion, adapt its ends to one's own purposes. You can turn yourself into a brand, or you can take personal pride in how effective you shape the image of a product's brand. Or you can work as though influence (cool, or hip, or what have you) was a medium all its own, with a meta-aesthetic beyond a given work's persuasiveness. (You see this when people judge Super Ads in terms of their creativity rather than in terms of how many more people purchase the thing advertised.)

Popularity has become a medium in which artists now prefer to work. Artists can now treat the delineation of their influential scope as the measure and the message of their work; this iss perhaps the most characteristic aesthetic for which contemporary culture can take credit -- the essence of art in the early-internet era. Artists can extend and measure their reach, "subvert" mass persuasion by perfecting it. But the pursuit of such scale, of making notoriety art, corrupts the intimacy that art like Cornell's had succeeded in achieving in the past. Or worse, it permits that intimacy to be refashioned as marketing, so it seems like our closest intimates, those privy to our deepest desires and concerns, those who can give them form that can stir and move us, are advertising copywriters.

The evils of word-of-mouth advertising (4 Dec 2007)

I found a copy of Lewis Hyde's The Gift in the free pile at work -- a quite appropriate place to find it in some ways (somebody's giving it away), totally inappropriate in others (the copy of the book was distributed in a commercial setting solely for marketing purposes, which Hyde argues destroys the gift's essential nature). Hyde's fundamental point is that gifts necessarily form relationships between giver and recipient, while commercial exchanges pointedly do not -- they are arranged to be reciprocal and neutral, to balance out and eradicate any need for gratitude or graciousness or indebtedness. Hyde writes, "In commodity exchange it's as if the buyer and seller were both in plastic bags; there's none of the contact of gift exchange. There is neither motion or emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn't consume anything or involve one person with another." For some, that lack of intimate contact or interpersonal obligation is the whole point; it's much more convenient to accumulate things without accumulating relationships, even though relationships are likely much more fulfilling and are often the point of having things in the first place. We want to have certain things all to ourselves to project a certain kind of identity, but we also want to share things with who we choose and erect the boundaries we seek to make concrete around our family or our circles of friends. Consumerist ideology works to persuade us that the convenience and the identity display of collecting goods and market exchange are more satisfying than the sharing and the network formation of gift exchange; that isolation from ties and evasion of responsibility is the whole of freedom. But in reality, most people don't want to be free on those terms. We like to feel obliged; it gives us a reson for being, a sense that we matter. Consumer society is set up that you can live your entire adult life without having anything but frictionless, emotion-free commercial interactions with other people -- an arrangement preferred by commercial interests, since it may then take a cut of the action that occurs every time people interact. Every bit of human interaction in such cases requires market mediation, which allows the intermediaries to extract profits. Ordinary human relations, decommercialized and inconvenient with all those feelings and junk, are not so reliably lucrative. The fair, impartial exchange idealized in the market in which you get what you pay for (caveat emptor and all) is a way of stifling relationships that occur outside of commercialization. Making a fair deal as a cornerstone of morality may foster isolation.

It occurred to me that my contempt for word-of-mouth advertising has something to do with opinions as gifts -- when one offers a word-of-mouth recommendation, it functions as a gift; it fosters a relationship that in some way supersedes the specific thing recommended. The opinion is only an occasion to enrich a relationship. But word-of-mouth advertising, obviously, corrupts that process and invalidates the gift, turning it into a tactic or a product. Few people are soulless enough to spread bogus word of mouth intentionally, but the goal of Facebook and other social networks seems to be to commercialize sincere word-of-mouth recommendations or to automate the opinion-giving process, so that every time you do something online, your actions generate an automatic recommendation to those who are on a feed, receiving updates of your every move. This deprives you of the chance of making a gift of your opinion, transforming it instead into a sales tool preemptively, poisoning the ground of friendship.

Instead of promoting the sharing of ideas and opinions among friends, social networking sites promote posturing and marketing, friendship as spectatorship, surveillance, and imitation. The reciprocity it provokes seems thin, encouraging discourse that is typically taken for granted in friendship -- you don't need special notification that someone is paying attention to you or validating your choices; you don't need testimonials from friends to the effect that they actually really do like you. Social networks offer a way to conduct a friendship without putting forth any specific personalized effort -- it removes the gift of friendship from the relationship and leaves the marketing opportunities.

Top-down culture (30 Nov 2007)

Consumerism tends to drive us to want more and more culture (more is always better) and thus it requires an apparatus that foists new options on us and strenuously tries to encourage these new and improved options will give us more than what we've already got, and probably haven't exhausted -- can one ever really exhaust works of art, after all? The nature of that appartus is changing, though, as the old monolithic culture industry -- empowered by economies of scale, driven by profit-seeking, and hewing to the lowest common denominator among the large audiences it hoped to muster and hold together -- is falling apart under the stress of new ad hoc distributional networks made possible by digitization of works and the internet hooking together consumers who love to share. Part of this sharing is sheer generosity, part of it is an aggrieved feeling that the really good stuff needs to be heard by more people and that filesharing is a way to strike a blow against the industry that has made its money stifling or neutering independent voices.

The temptation to tell people what they should like is always strong. And people often like to be told -- that's why there are so many services supplying cultural criticism. I remember how seriously I took the album reviews I read in Rolling Stone or even in the local newspaper -- now, having had some exposure to what such reviewers are actually like, I can't even believe that I ever paid any attention to what they thought. Consequently I'm driven even further toward the unfortunate egomaniacal position that I probably know more than many of the people writing these things; then there's the problem also that I'm starting to have decades more experience listening to music on many of them, leaving me in a position where I have nothing to learn from them that's not wrong or superseded by something that I already learned about years ago. And then there's the fact that so much highly recommended new music is rehashed old music that is best appreciated when you don't know the antecedents. It makes me feel very old, as though I have outgrown the opportunity to enjoy contemporary culture, and have become instead one of those relics, living in the past and arguing how everything was so much better before. This still seems preferable to being one of those old guys trying desperately to stay young and "relevant," as if what teenagers determine that relevance for anyone other than marketers looking to tap a lucrative demographic segment.

Those advocating legislating taste in various ways, whether through censorship or some form of sumptuary laws, typically believe that when individuals are left to their own devices, they are too easily influenced by advertising or by other parties who are in bad faith in making their suggestions. Those who oppose top-down culture believe that individuals should be free to choose to enjoy whatever they want, and that their authentic wishes supersede any attempts at influencing or shaping their choices. Of course, everyone likes freedom in the abstract, and everyone likes to believe that they know their own mind and know what they like without having to be told. But in practice, people tend to seek out opinions, because they may enjoy the suggestion of human company in opinions more than the works of art in themselves. People look to culture to invest them with a sense of belonging, and sharing opinions or liking something that is liked in general is a way of simulating that feeling of inclusion. So a work's reception can be more significant than the work itself, which makes the dogma about individuals following their own tastes and a work's popularity reflecting its intrinsic quality suspect.

If people aren't really following their own hearts in choosing what culture to consume, the question becomes, who should they follow? People want to follow the tastes of people they like and want to count themselves among, absent that, they'll go along with who seems to be liking the same sorts of things -- an impression that can be created either by advertising or by the opinion-making media or by both in conjunction. The alternative would be to mandate popular culture through state-funded educational systems -- this would provide a much more uniform harmony of tastes, but would discourage variety. It would restore much of the meaning to the currently meaningless terms independent and alternative, however.

But there isn't really enough at stake to warrant state intervention, unless you believe that culture is primarily didactic, teaching people how to behave and interact with one another. Those who want censorship usually invoke this argument, that the loose morals on display in commercial culture -- the sexual objectification of anything beautiful to turn it into a lure, the promotion of giving in to temptation always (how else to keep consumerism rolling in the face of economic crisis?) -- warrants a clampdown. Snobs, on the other hand, claim that commercial culture is vulgar, playing to the tastes of the most ignorant, and encouraging everyone else to become stupid too, as in Mike Judge's film Idiocracy. But snobs are in bad faith when they argue that culture should be subjected to top-down control (presumably by wise people like themselves) because their sense of esteem comes from the superiority they feel to common tastes, which would vanish if their wish for power over culture was granted.

This is meandering a bit, but the reason I started thinking about this was because of the questions I was trying to get at in the previous entry, about what will be lost if commercial culture truly gives way to some new form of cultural participation enabled by technology. The culture industry, that Frankfort school boogeyman, was one way of controlling culture in the name of a popular taste gauging and tested by functionaries and agents and middlemen who just wanted to make money off other people's talents. In some ways, this is a pure, paradoxically selfless motive -- they weren't trying to foist their own talents on the world or skew what culture was produced with their own idiosyncratic vision. They just worked as conduits, trying to find the easiest way to please people. Sometimes that meant trying to brainwash them and feed them shit that was already on hand, sometimes that meant responding to an unexpected turn, a sea change in demography or popular expectation. Absent a culture industry, these people are out of jobs, but they may be replaced by strict opinion makers, who filter the mass of what artists make available directly to audiences to pick out stuff worthy of attention. A&R men will work after the fact rather than before, and will deal directly with the public. They will perhaps be like stock pickers, marketing their track record. But in order for this to happen, they will need to set their opinions off from the mass of freely offered (and easily aggregated) opinion that's already available on the internet. Opinions would have to become scarce in order to have any value, and that seems unlikely. What is scarce is people who put money behind their opinions, who have "skin in the game". Perhaps what is needed is a futures market in culture to replace the signal investments made by the culture industry.

So instead, tastes will perhaps be formed by aggregators, who collect data on what different groups are actually doing -- so you can tailor your choices to who you want to fit in with. You can have a Muzak like service supply culture for Brand You the same way they do for retail stores. More likely, the data about what stuff individuals should be getting into to belong to a specific set will be aggregated within social networks on social networking sites. It is up to clever marketers to figure out how to infiltrate these networks or co-opt the opinion leaders within these networks, the sort of people Malcolm Gladwell profiles in The Tipping Point. Social networking sites should make these people easier to track down, and will yield them opportunities to reap rewards for their natural proselytizing talents. So these folks will have the opportunity to become the new A&R people. And groups of friends will come to be organized as mini-culture industry firms.

Opera for the masses (6 Sept 2007)

I have had so little time to read lately that I'm blogging on consecutive days about material I heard on the radio in my morning wake-up stupor. Today, the BBC news hour on WNYC spent an eternity covering the death of Pavarotti, one of the famed three tenors. In the middle of the segment, I shut my eyes for what I thought was only a moment, because they were still yammering on about him when I drifted back into consciousness. Then I realized nearly 15 minutes had passed and I was going to be late for work.

The interminable segment was something I was trying very hard to block out, but one comment made by one of the newsreaders nonetheless stuck with me: She noted that though Pavarotti was often criticized for his limited repertoire and refusal to take risks and test the limits of his ability, he should be praised for having done as much as any other singer to bring opera to the masses. Not to be too elitist (or perhaps too philistine) but why is that particularly praiseworthy? What difference does it make whether or not the masses are exposed to opera, an aristocratic indulgence held over from previous periods of opulence and saturated with the mores of a rigid caste system? Is it some great favor to the masses that Pavarotti can make it appeal to them by apparently simplifying it? It seems somewhat condescending for one -- "He was so great, even the masses could appreciate it" -- and it implies that what the masses were already preoccupying themselves with was vulgar. Thank God they at least got to hear a little Pavarotti in their time. I've got nothing against Pavarotti's singing, which I'm sure is impeccable. Reaching a mass audience is an achievement of a sort, but it's not automatically an important or laudable one. It seems more a symptom of what media makes possible and the extent to which we as a society all feel obliged to pretend to care about high art.

The expanded coverage for Pavarotti's death and the condescension in the reportage seem to be part of some cultural instinct to kowtow to certain recondite art forms that have little broad cultural significance other than serving as class boundary markers. We're supposed to revere Pavarotti for having transcended those boundaries, but all he really did was remind us that they persist.