More on the Future of Work (23 March 2011)

Following up on the themes of my previous post (and untold dozens of others -- maybe I should start using a tagging system?): the P2P Foundation blog linked to a write-up (pdf) of a round table symposium put on by the Aspen Institute on the future of work. Among the participants were analysts from McKinsey and Deloitte and executives from Microsoft, IBM and Infosys, along with a bunch of other Silicon Valley think-tank types. It delineates how business elites would like to put across increasing precarity for workers as "freedom" and details some of the ideological resistance they expect to encounter.

The participants identify the emergence of the "post-Sloanist" worker (that is, the worker who exceeds the constraints of 20th century "scientific management" and organization engineering):

Every worker will have to become a continuous learner, he said, and will likely hold multiple jobs over the course of his or her lifetime, if not multiple careers. Many workers will need to work at part-time jobs and perhaps hold down multiple jobs simultaneously, he added. The ability to multitask and deal with interruptions to work will become mandatory skills.

And eventually, ADD will cease to be regarded as a disorder and will instead be an institutionalized educational outcome. The report continues, "a great deal of work is likely to become less routine and more exception-based, especially in knowledge-based jobs." It will be reactive; workers will perform triage as information pours in rather than initiate work processes.

Lots of the round table's conclusions are similar to ideas I've been harping about in previous posts about how changes in how we regard work augment the mounting stressfulness of neoliberal subjectivity. To list some of the changes: that work organization is becoming less directed and hierarchical and more a matter of "crowdsourcing" and post hoc capture; that the fixed workplace is being dispersed into a "social factory"; that firms are being supplanted by "platforms" (think Facebook); that work and leisure are becoming indistinguishable; that identity construction is merging with work, that consumption skills are increasingly regarded as productive and innovative in their own right and are being incorporated into manufacturing processes; that what constitutes work skills is also becoming more nebulous and hazily linked to education. Now, some of the participants suggested, the importance of discrete skills is being supplanted by the significance of "disposition" -- a rough analogue for what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus.

Employers must recognize that they are not just hiring a set of skills, they are hiring people based on their personal temperaments. “In a world of continual and rapid change, maybe the most important things are dispositions that allow you to embrace change,” said John Seely Brown, Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.... “You can’t teach dispositions,” said Brown. “You cultivate them.” Employers cannot simply communicate information to workers; they must provide a hospitable, immersive environment for workers to satisfy their dispositions and talents.

So we are enjoined to always be cultivating an identity that will justify our worth to employers, and this perpetual process of becoming our better selves is expected to constantly throw off value. The disposition becomes our job; producing ourselves becomes mandatory, and linked to our economic survival. As a result, being "yourself" has never been more stressful. "Workers will regard their work lives as an experience, a lifestyle and an identity—not just a paycheck," the report suggests, and that is supposed to be a good thing: For some in the creative-class vanguard, work seems to be increasingly unalienated (these people are entrepreneurs of their personal brand and reaping a livelihood from it) and indistinguishable from the process of just living life. And this may be the model of the workplace of the future generally. But this sort of "freedom" comes at the expense of other forms, mainly the freedom from having to capitalize on every aspect of one's selfhood.

To paraphrase from Baudrillard's The Consumer Society, which repeatedly makes the point that our needs are not autonomous and not our own invention, the need to engage in conspicuous self-fashioning has become systemic; it's no longer the product of what individuals actually want, if it ever was so. Identity has been made productive in and of itself, and thus has been subsumed, integrated into the capitalist system. Again, to recast Baudrillard, the strenuously defended right to a unique self actually betokens the loss of such lived uniqueness, its transition to an exchangeable commodity, a form of abstracted labor.

The shift away from specific job skills to dispositions raises many other issues as well: If a disposition for creativity and symbolic-meaning making is the new valuable skill set, can it be differentiated from social and cultural capital that stems from class? Can a person be taught how to make distinction (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) if one lacks the proper class distinctions to begin with, or would the fact that you needed to learn them automatically disqualify you? How do you teach flexibility and a willingness to bend rules as well as follow them, depending on the situation? How do you teach an instinct for design and cultural trends? Can there be a school that teaches hipsterism? And how much hipsterism can the economy support? (Will Davies says not as much as many aspiring bohemians would like; he advises they drop aesthetic consumption for political organizing -- good luck with that!)

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.

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.

Why New Music Always Sucks (7 Jan 2010)

It occurred to me while listening to Veckatimist by Grizzly Bear for the third or fourth time. As the songs played, I was finding myself perversely satisfied when I could pin down for myself a reason not to like it (and not to try listening to it again), whereas I had a vague feeling of dread if I found myself reserving judgment, extending the benefit of the doubt. I realized I can't really hear it for what it is; I want it to suck too much.

Rather than hoping new music I hear about -- particular from hype vectors online -- will be good, I almost always want this music to suck, preferably in spectacular, self-evident fashion. But why? Why do I have this entirely counterproductive attitude? Is it because I am "curmudgeonly"? Is it because I have too much amour propre to endorse what's trendy, even to myself in my private listening moments? (Maybe it's no longer possible to believe in private moments in the era of real-time networking.) Am I just old and bitter about how everything was better when I was younger? All that may be.

Mostly, though, I have this pressing sense that to like something new will increase my already unmanageable cultural consumption burden. And that burden seems partly the result of technological developments that puts all this consumable culture a few clicks away on my computer, and partly the result of behavioral changes -- e.g., a burgeoning tendency to hoard -- that have come along with all that accessibility. If I end up appreciating Veckatimist, then I'll inevitably have to seek out all the band's other albums, and not only that, I'll feel obliged to investigate all the bands who are ever compared to or lumped in with Grizzly Bear. And I'll need to be predisposed to like those bands to a certain degree, and then the responsibility of fandom would just continue to ripple out from there. Soon everything becomes diluted, the passion for listening gets spread too thin as it strains to embrace everything.

It seems easier to be skeptical and wait to see if people still seem to care about the music six or seven years later. Or if they don't, I can "rediscover" it and champion it to myself against the heedless indifference of the masses and the cognoscenti. (Currently on my personal hit parade is one such "rediscovery": Fleetwood Mac's Mirage.) I'm content to live in a time lag rather than chase the zeitgeist.

I suppose an alternative is to be more radically married to the cultural moment, collect nothing in the way of music, and pay attention only to what's new. I could float on the sea of ubiquitous musical novelty, let it carry me wherever it's going. Then I can simply try to like everything without feeling as though that means something or makes me responsible for learning more. I don't know. Grizzly Bear is not the music that will inspire me to do this.

The social factory (14 Dec 2009)

I have a new post up at Generation Bubble about consumerism as disguised labor, uncompensated peer production. It draws heavily from "multitude" theory, and Paolo Virno in particular. The gist is that we don't have much labor to offer that could be exploited in terms of operating machinery or that sort of thing, so the new way of extracting surplus value from our "labor" in what the Italian theorists like to call the "post-Fordist economy" is to turn our social being into a kind of covert work that we perpetuate throughout the day, but in forms that can be co-opted by capitalist firms. The various ways in which we collaborate and socialize with one another becomes value for a business somewhere. Work processes, as Virno explains, become diverse, but social life begins to homogenize in the sense that our identity becomes something we must prove in the public sphere -- we all become concerned with the self as brand. (See Virno's claims here.) This results in the "valorization" -- Marxist jargon for value enhancement -- "of all that which renders the life of an individual unique" -- which is to say our concern for our uniqueness, our identity in social contexts, becomes a kind of value-generating capital, or rather a circulating commodity.

This plays out in seemingly innocuous ways. It can be a matter of hyping a product free of charge but using it or talking about it. Or this can be a matter of going to parties with co-workers, learning to get along better and therefore increasing the efficiency of processes on the job. Or it is a matter of behaving politely among strangers, extending a system of politeness and trust that can be harvested economically as a reduction in transaction costs. Or it can be a matter of friending one another online and creating a social map whose byways can later be retraced by marketing concerns. Web 2.0 is basically a set of tool for capturing that labor, for which we are not compensated with wages but with a stronger sense of self (we shape our identity by promoting products, essentially, associating ourselves with them and attenuating their emotional valence) and a feeling that we are relevant, part of a broader discourse, being recognized for knowing things. As Virno claims, "wage labor is interaction" now. In The Wealth of Networks economist Yochai Benkler writes of this phenomena more positively, identifying ways in which non-market "social" production and "sharing" can nonetheless fulfill economic functions To put it in sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's terms, our habitus -- our manifest and class-bound way of being in the social world -- is transformed into a productive force without our conscious consent by the way various social media have infiltrated everyday life.

The concept threatens to be so broad as to be useless, in that seems to embrace all behavior and reinterpret it as productive consumption -- not clear if that is a product of consumer society or the febrile mind of theorists. Naturally I think it is the former.

The Urban Haute Bourgeousie (11 Nov 2009)

At Generation Bubble, Anton Steinpilz brings up Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan, which played as a sort of fond lament for the1980s. The film is extremely enjoyable despite being borderline reactionary -- it's open to an interpretation (not a likely one, but one useful for the suspension of ideological disbelief) in which the implicit politics are meant to be foibles of the characters rather than Stillman's own, which makes it pleasantly watchable. (I'm especially fond of its weird, stilted Hal Hartley-esque quality, it's closet-drama dialogue.)

The beaus and debutantes of Stillman's hyperstylized New York were meant to be old, old money -- so old that social-capital preservation was never supposed to be a concern for them. But as Steinpilz notes, the film is shot through with melancholy at the possibility that the whole social-capital system (which the film, with its coming-out balls and stilted drawing-room conversations and Victorian concerns about moral turpitude, lovingly depicts/invents) is becoming supplanted by a raw-money culture in which manners don't matter. The unleashing of the financial sector brought about a whole new class of "vulgar rich," the sort of people that Tom Wolfe (in many ways Stillman's artistic grandfather) scorns in his work. Stillman's characters -- even the crypto-Marxist among them -- all subscribe to the primacy of social capital; they are all entranced by the same chimeras of tradition, which they take to be lineaments of an eternal and proper social order -- the inverse of the Fourierist fantasy one of them espouses. Rather than an explicit program that must be imposed, entailing all sorts of overt dislocation, the traditional order Stillman idealizes works hegemonically, which means that it has an effortless grace, the sprezzatura of the privileged. Though the character Charlie appropriates the term "bourgeoisie" for his neologism "urban haute bourgeoisie" to describe the characters in the film, they are really anachronistic petit aristocrats (which makes sense, since they are styled after the gentry from Jane Austen's novels.) The bourgeoisie, in actuality, were the ones who routed Charlie's kind in the 19th century. The bourgeois ideals -- opportunity, mobility, enlightened self-interest, economic transparency, etc. -- are what Charlie rejects; he implicitly endorses a rentier system where social betters are ensconced in a divinely ordained hierarchy.

Arnold Kling recently cited a quote from Gordon Wood that I think is relevant here:

After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.

That's a justification for wealth betokening meritocracy, an order to supplant the unjust aristocratic one based on inherited social capital. The virtue of hard work supposedly replaces the genetic lottery, though humanity is basically consigned to eternally squabbling over status as part of its inherent nature.

Nowadays, the term "urban haute bourgeoisie" most likely does not conjure up debutante balls and Upper East Siders. For me, it evokes the scene on the Lower East Side, the cultural entrepreneurs and their hangers-on. It turns on cultural capital rather than old-style social capital, which has perhaps receded to an inaccessible demimonde, far away from hipsters and reality TV cameras.

Smooth-jazzed into submission (27 Oct 2009)

Having spent the weekend in a Hilton hotel in Hartford, Connecticut, this essay from Travel & Leisure by Peter Jon Lindberg, about "bad" music in corporate spaces open to the public, resonated with me (via NYT Ideas). The Hilton was particularly aggressive with the piped-in smooth jazz, which blared in the lobby and the coffee shop and the bar and the elevators and the indoor pool and the fitness center and possibly even the business center, which incidentally was basically an extortion scheme for those poor businesspeople who break their laptops during their stay. (The center offers you the opportunity to rent an old computer at the rate of 99 cents a minute. And don't think you get internet access included with that, or with anything having to do with your stay with Hilton. In fact, the Hilton was out to nickel-and-dime patrons at virtually every level of service. Parking for $18 a night? $15 for the internet? This is not at all how the resort is portrayed on Mad Men.)

Lindberg's essay is an intermittently amusing exercise in fussy snobbery:

Some people are irked by bad lighting, excessive AC, the reek of European men’s cologne. I’m hopelessly particular about music. Background sound tracks can make or break my impression of a place—and these days every place has one, from wine bars to Williams-Sonoma. Too often it’s employed with alarming incompetence.... I’ve walked out of otherwise appealing shops that elect to blare Maroon 5. I’ve hung up on reservations lines that put me on hold to “Groovy Kind of Love.” I bring earplugs on planes to block out not the roar of the engines but the insipid pabulum of the boarding music.

You get the idea. His taxonomy of Muzak is spot-on, though -- Bebel Gilberto, Gypsy Kings, Amadou & Mariam. The idea is to evoke thoughtless, non-intrusive cosmopolitanism, the fantasy that global homogeneity is just one slick programmed beat away. Lindberg reserves special opprobrium for Sade, whose 1984 release Diamond Life was one of the first non-rock cassettes I ever owned. Like Hiltons across America, I believed it would make me seem sophisticated.

Lindberg ends up focusing on Muzak as professionalized aural branding for corporations trying to negotiate the diverse tastes of their clientele, and he even celebrates it, as long as it is "hip" -- that is, suits his indie-rock tastes. That seems like a cop-out, but after all, the piece was published in Travel & Leisure, not Adbusters or something. But along the way, he cites an academic paper by business professors Alan Bradshaw and Morris B. Holbrook, “Must We Have Muzak Wherever We Go?: A critical consideration of the consumer culture,” which argues that the copious deployment of background music "support concerns that culture is degraded by marketers as a means of social control."

By methodically testing the effectiveness of certain types of music to elicit certain behaviors in commercial spaces, canned-music suppliers instrumentalize music, make it "deployable" instead of listenable. Simply schematizing our emotional responsiveness to music may ruin it -- giving credence to the frequent complaint that music criticism kills what it anatomizes. Music is "de-aestheticized": The songs remain the same, but the uses to which they are put (as "retail atmospherics," in the marketing jargon) irreparably alter how we can hear them. We can't pay attention to it with the goal of immersing ourselves in it. It becomes background music everywhere -- it gets iPodded, etc. Further, when music is deployed in this way, we no longer have the option of simply listening to it, of having an unmediated response to it. Music retains its emotional efficacy, but that efficacy is co-opted and used to achieve the ends of those deploying it. When we choose to hear something, we are giving our consent to be moved by it, but when it's foisted on us, we are vulnerable to those properties in music that slip by our conscious defenses. We are moved against our will, to purposes that aren't our own. These include efforts to make us buy more and buy specific things, but more surprising is the suggestion that "less pleasant music" affects our perception of time and theoretically makes waiting in line seem to pass more quickly. Bradshaw and Holbrook, pictures of academic neutrality, put it this way:

Apparently, more distasteful music will make the queue appear to move more quickly. Really loathsome stuff should make the wait breeze by in a jiffy. So can it be that the onslaught of diabolically annoying sounds that typically assaults the unwilling victim on such occasions – the most offensive canned drivel imaginable, epitomized by garden-variety vanilla-flavored squeaky-clean middle-of-the-road bland-as-blazes Muzak – actually makes the time seem to fly?

This speaks to Bradshaw and Holbrook's more general point: Background music is meant to manage us, not entertain us. Whether people "like" it doesn't figure in to the decision to pipe it in. They cite Adorno's lament over our loss of the right not to hear music. (This puts a different spin on Keats's verse: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.")

If background music can be so effectively instrumentalized, is its ultimate purpose not any particular local effect but a general conditioning of consumer-citizens? Is it subliminal orientation to our role in the totally administered society, or some such? "As we have demonstrated, music plays a complicit role in creating this conveyor-belt style of organized consumption, coaxing customers to travel at suitable speeds through a retail setting dependent on the manager’s manipulation," Bradshaw and Holbrook write. They critique "consumer-culture theory" -- that version of cultural studies that regards consumerism as a form of expression and rejects ideas that social control could be implemented top-down through cultural products. Consumers, to that view, are "more than capable of defending themselves against the onslaughts of commercially-entrenched brain washing." But the efficacy and ubiquity of background music suggests otherwise. Consumers don't transform it; they tolerate or ignore it while it works semi-subliminally. Music helps regulate our internal rhythms and synch them with the necessary flow demanded by capital. Often, we ignore background music, which suggests it's working as it should and we are in that flow. When we notice it, when it galls us, we have become sand in the gears of postindustrial society.

I used to think this meant we should complain loudly and often about piped-in music, to prove that we are still alive. The melodrama helped me regard a gesture that cost me very little effort as something truly revolutionary -- that is where I would take my last stand, against Natalie Imbruglia in the supermarket. But is this a matter of my performing my discontent, which gives me a stake in the persistence of background music, to give me my rebel identity? Bradshaw and Holbrook note how resistance is typically co-opted, and perhaps only registers when it is available for co-optation:

despite the tendency toward market resistance, the ultimate performed resistance is ironically market-mediated (Kozinets 2002) so that resisting one market discourse of power merely generates another (Thompson 2004). The phenomenon of a countercultural brand community entails a basic paradox.

The problem with resisting Muzak is that it plays immediately into self-presentation, how we use our tastes to market ourselves. The critique of background music is always already defused by the fact that the credibility and motives of the complainers can always be questioned. Many things in consumer society seem to work this way. The idea that we are all "brands" engaged in our ongoing identity projects, just like the corporations, levels the moral playing field and preempts resistance.

Functionality as design trope (24 Sept 2009)

At Design Observer, Dmitri Siegel looks at the design of products in ordinary supermarkets -- design not selling itself as "design-y". "To end up here, Design ideas need to trickle down well past the middle-brow and survive extreme pressures of low margins and fast turn," he somewhat snobbishly remarks (and I think the capped D in design is a telling typo).

He points out the ludicrous ergonomic features of grooming products and the ubiquitous easy-pour spouts and remarks that these pseudo-functional additions to packaging are mere ornament. The convenience these things are supposed to supply (but most likely don't) is also, I would add, ornamental. Siegel's conclusion is that the design trades in functionality as a sign rather than anything that is actually useful. Rather than an after-the-fact evaluation of a product's actual ease of use, functionality becomes a design trope. Convenience as a value works the same way, I think -- an appealing idea in the abstract even when it never manifests itself in practice. Our craving for convenience is so inculcated in us that it suffices for a package to evoke the possibility of it for the package to have an added appeal. We can buy "convenience" without experiencing it.

Siegel cites architect Alfred Loos's "Ornament and Crime" (pdf), a manifesto from 1908 that's as insane as you could want any manifesto to be, impossible to tell how serious he is from our irony-saturated point in history. ("One can measure the culture of a country by the degree to which its lavatory walls are daubed," Loos declares in a typical aphorism.) Loos's main argument is that ornament is atavistic, though Siegel emphasizes Loos's claim that approving of ornament "was a tacit endorsement of society’s disregard for the quality of its workers’ lives." Siegel thinks the reverse is now true: "The ornament of today is the complete opposite of that described by Loos — to him ornament symbolized excessive labor, today ours symbolizes pervasive leisure."

He defends that claim with a reference to Veblen's notion of conspicuous consumption. Siegel suggests that the fake functionality of supermarket design allows for a conspicuous consumption of unnecessary utility.

Veblen describes how a rich man’s cane is a symbol of his membership in the leisure class precisely because he will never need to use it. The grip strips on a toothbrush and easy-pour spouts are exactly the same. They symbolize effort we will never have to exert.

We want to consume utility we don't need and then laud ourselves for the effort we have been saved from making, that is presumed to thereby be held in reserve and accrues to us. This then becomes a mark of distinction; the product's design allows us to claim for ourselves the effort it saves us from making. The contradiction takes on a signaling significance, in Siegel's view:

The fully equipped chef’s kitchen is a potent symbol of affluence precisely because anyone who can afford it clearly does not need to cook. The $400 Patagonia rain shell and the sport utility vehicle symbolize physical challenges and confrontations with the elements that their suburban owners can easily avoid, and so on.

Today's ornament mimics utility so that we can make a show of unnecessarily amassing it. When we have the finest kitchen equipment money can buy, every night we eat out becomes eve more redolent of our wastefulness, and therefore our wealth (if you accept Veblen's logic that gratuitous waste equals a proof of status). The overdesigned products in the store allow the middle class to experience a version of this joyous profligacy.

I think there is something to that, but I found Loos's take on this idea more compelling: "Humanity is still to groan under the slavery of ornament," he declares, though as a species we have "progressed far enough to find pleasure in purchasing a plain cigarette case, even if it cost the same as one that was ornamented." This still seems relevant. Products for the wealthy are those that can eschew ornament, transcend it, because the stratospheric prices obviate the need the products to compete on the more mundane level of superficial ornament. The lack of ornament connotes engineering expense, the effort of clean design, the quality of the manufacturing, the pride in the workmanship as it is expressed through the functionality. They are made for those people who don't need to indulge in shopping for leisure, people who don't need to amaze themselves with the unfathomable bounty in supermarkets and 99-cent stores, people who can afford more expensive pursuits and don't want disposable goods to allow to shop more. Shopping provides the lower class the ersatz, compensatory thrills of purchasing power over an array of crappy manufactured goods -- highly ornamented to make them more disposable and to justify the investment of more of our energy in the foibles of retail. But the rich don't have to resort to such cheap thrills.

Ideology and Aesthetic Pleasure (15 Sept 2009)

At the Valve, Bill Benzon was wondering about ideology and aesthetics:

I’ve got a question about people’s expressed aesthetic preferences: Does it reflect their sense of immediate satisfaction with the work, a superimposed identity or ideology, or something else?

This is something I've thought a lot about, for better or worse. Most of my ideas about it are derived from Bourdieu's Distinction and Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic.

First, when tastes become reflexive, consciously curated, they become predominantly signaling mechanisms: we want to project a certain identity through the tastes we choose to advertise and by managing carefully to try to conceal the tastes we think are less flattering to us. That's almost self-evident, I think. At the point when we are trying to catalog our own tastes, the sense of it being our "real" taste is gone -- one can't know one's own aesthetic response, for to think it is to destroy its spontaneity. Identity -- if there is such a thing that predates our self-fashioning -- is probably like that too; we glimpse it only by accident, only while we are trying to see something else. It's much easier and much more convincing when others tell us who we are and what we are like and even what we seem to enjoy than for us to know ourselves directly -- our self-knowledge is too distorted by wishes, secret shame, denial, grandiosity, modesty, and a variety of other expectations we are always in the process of juggling.

Our efforts to signal identity through conscious control of our tastes are shaped by ideology. We are guided by what we understand as representing the class to which we think we belong and how much we mean to struggle against that affiliation. Our skill in reading signals and assigning interpretations to them are all inflected by class habitus, which itself is thoroughly ideological -- meant to protect class boundaries and generally speaking, reproduce the existing social order and power structure. That's not to say our tastes are phony to the degree they are calculated. But taste is not ever free of all calculation, an expression of pure spontaneity and of our inner quality -- that is the most ideological position of all: My inner refinement is revealed by my altogether genuine and natural pleasure in Brahms while your innate vulgarity is inevitable and unavoidably revealed by your unthinking joy in Coldplay. We respond to what we have prepared the way for, and that often can be controlled through deliberate planning, i.e., I will read about the French New Wave filmmakers and the associated criticism so that I will understand and "really" appreciate Godard's Week-End, which in turn will make me think that I am cool. If we don't seize upon that preparation process and make it conscious, we will be signaling our contentment with being guided by coincidence, the tastes of our friends and family, marketing information, the zeitgeist, and so on. We probably won't reveal our inner taste so much as become a barometer for prevailing popular taste.

So there is no point in our trying to figure out our "real tastes" so that we can tell ourselves that we have become more authentic. We should forget all about making authenticity to ourselves a criteria for pleasure. Pleasure may or may not be spontaneous, but it is all too frequently rare, so we probably shouldn't spurn it when it comes. But we can't opt out of the ways in which our pleasures are imbricated with class snobbery. Class identity seems to be one of enabling conditions for experiencing many, many forms of pleasure (if not all of them) -- the pleasure of belonging, of excluding, of knowing where you are and what you might become, the pleasure of winning. Pleasure is not necessarily a social good. Likewise, aesthetic pleasure is not virtuous or politically innocent. When I listened to abrasive music as a teenager, it was because in part I hoped it wcould serve as a kind of nonviolent weapon as well as a nonpermanent tattoo -- marking me as a certain type and driving the wrong sort away. IO tried to elevate these desires to feelings -- incontrovertible and irreversible -- by feeling them in the music. Then I could feel as though the music carried me to where I belonged.

Anyway, what is more interesting, I think, is that the tastes we aren't entirely conscious of -- the aesthetic responses we don't guide or manufacture for ourselves, are also ideological, in a more profound and insidious way, shaping the field in which we conceive our identity projects. Eagleton's thesis is that the aesthetic is how we experience the law -- the demands of the state, or of power more generally -- spontaneously, as though it was our own desire and entirely natural, unquestionable. This does wonders for replacing coercion (what repressive socialist states needed to maintain control) with consent (what Western democracies/plutocracies make do with). The category of the aesthetic is how we come to embrace and seem to invent what was already necessary; it is how we love Big Brother while still feeling free enough to work within "free markets" and contribute to the "spontaneous order" they are held to produce. Eagleton:

For power to be individually authenticated, there must be constructed with in the subject a new form of inwardness which will do the unpalatable work of the law for it, and all the more effectively since that law has now apparently evaporated.... Power is shifting its locations from centralized institutions to the silent, invisible depths of the subject itself.

Later he calls the aesthetic "no more than a name for the political unconscious," "shorthand for a whole project of hegemony," and he verges close to simply equating "ideology" and "aesthetic" -- "lawfulness without a law" in Kant's formulation.

This sort of logic leads to skepticism of depth psychology as a whole -- all forms of identity making -- as a kind of insidious plot to make us all slaves to an idea of ourselves that really comes from the state. Hence, a particular strain of radical counterattack, which consists of "free play" -- destabilize your identity, embrace sundry forms of anarchic behavior (free love, squatting, drifiterism), and escape into the margins. This seems a bit impractical. Also, this would entail surrendering all the pleasures and comforts of being somebody.

Carl Wilson's 'Let's Talk About Love': A Journey to the End of Taste (3 Aug 2009)

I'm reading the 33 1/3 book about Céline Dion by Carl Wilson (who is not to be confused with Carl Wilson), which is less about Dion than it is a sociology of pop culture taste. It appeals to me because it dispenses with the obfuscating fictions that taste is autonomous (i.e. intrinsic to one's inner being and the music itself), or that taste can be "right", and looks instead at what social functions taste plays, which class boundaries it helps regulate in a society that pretends to be without them.

The book is framed by the ongoing debate over what the function of pop-music criticism should be, or whether there should be any pop criticism at all. I waver on that question. Wilson mentions the rockist/popist debate, which seems like a red herring; at their worst both approaches are condescending, only in different ways. Embedded in most pop criticism is the idea that listeners need their preferences justified or vindicated by a better-informed outsider. Generally, I get impatient with will-to-power would-be tastemakers, and my experience in the magazine business has confirmed for me without question that pop music critics don't have any special listening expertise -- their ears aren't refined like a wine connoisseur's palette. They aren't doing the sonic equivalent of philology. Perhaps their class habitus affords them the instinct of authority. Usually, though, they are compromised by their own supposed qualifications, the concessions they make to be published for pay. At best, reviewers are clever writers who can startle with a turn of phrase; their work should be appreciated on a formal level, not for anything they might say about a particular record. What reviewers and their editors seem good for is establishing the horizons of relevance -- picking out the dozen records worth hearing and talking about in various genres every year. I like reading what other people have to say about a record I already know pretty well; then I can pretends I am part of a conversation, internally agreeing or disagreeing, coming up with objections. I don't read reviews of records I haven't heard already; since it is so easy to sample music or yourself rather than rely on recommendations, I imagine I am not alone in this.

It used to be that reviewers also established the parameters for pretending to your own expertise. They taught the grammar of snobbery. When I was younger, reading about music helped create the context within which I, a nascent taste bully, could enjoy it, positing the elitist club I can earn my way into by mastering various facts and references and attitudes. Music critics in the 1960s and 1970s taught where the cultural capital might be in pop music, basically inventing the idea that mastering the canon of pop could have any cultural value. In other words, they helped integrate the free field of pop where anything was permissible, listening-wise (it all failed to register as anything but trivial) into the matrix of social class determinations, so that it suddenly became like an investment, something that could open some door for you and allow you to shut the door on others.

But that need for a context is not limited to aspiring music snobs. Without a listening community, literal or implied, it's hard for an individual to get much pleasure out of pop. Listening to pop is a way to consume the zeitgeist as pleasure, and critical conversations (which are now more dispersed and democratic than ever) are a part of that zeitgeist, helped render it material. The depth we recognize in music is supplied by the listening context, which works both ways -- some rich music is emptied of its potential depth; some rudimentary music is enriched with contextual content. But a pure listen, without the compromising effects of context, is impossible, though bogus criticism will pretend to such purity.

If we want to opt out of the zeitgeist, the music bound up in it is lost to us -- what happens is we have to discover certain music years after its popularity (as when I started listening to Dookie last year), with some other rationale than belonging to our time, sharing in the pleasure all the other people seem to be getting from whatever it is. In that case, the pleasure may be in the illusion that one's own tastes are unique, consuming one's own special ability to resist conformity. With all this, the quality of the music itself doesn't matter -- it just needs some marked peculiarity, some relative novelty, to hang all the posturing on. The notion of taste then mediates the contradiction between our desire to belong and our desire to be unique, ineffable individuals. Macro-aspects assure us that we're within the appropriate boundaries, where as the particularities seem to speak to our uniqueness. Tastes can shift routinely and tactically yet somehow seem to us as if they never really altered but merely came into clearer definition.

Of course, when we listen to music, nothing but its intrinsic quality seems to matter; all the identity building and social participatory aspects are suppressed. Clearly our experience of our own taste is visceral, spontaneous -- I hear the Red Hot Chili Peppers and my body wants to vomit; my intellectual preferences seem to have nothing to do with it. It seems beyond questioning, like asking why you wouldn't want to eat a chocolate bar smeared with mustard. That's why it seems that criticism's most important function should be to demystify taste so that the ideological freight it carries is at least exposed. Wilson's book is a model for this; it's great at showing the sort of class contempt that gets disguised and authorized by manifesting as musical taste (especially in Chapter 8, which lays out sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's ideas in an accessible way). Wilson suggests that middlebrow, straightforward, sentimental conformist music like Dion's is hated because it is associated with average people who don't register on the media landscape. It's "schmaltzy" -- it's engineered to succor the status quo. Wilson explains, "It is not just cathartic but socially reinforcing,a vicarious exposure to both the grandest rewards of adhering to norms and their necessary price." It's blandly aspirational for what has already been endorsed, for what seems given, in all its inequities and imperfections. Hating such music makes us feel above average, with bigger dreams, until the opportunity opens up to become avant-garde by salvaging it, loving it. Musical taste, from this perspective, is sublimated prejudice, social bias turned into something you might be proud to display. Which is why it can seem that a good default position to always insist that people's tastes are wrong.

But in hating other people's music, we may perhaps fall prey to a different quasi-utopian illusion, a kind of aesthetic eugenics: that if we messianically hate what seems like average, mediocre music with enough ferocity, mediocre and average people will somehow vanish also. Everyone will be special and wise in their own way, and society will so attenuate itself that conformist mediocrity simply won't be possible. We won't have the option to like blah things (and thus be blah people) if we make impossible for the culture industry to manufacture blah art. Social classes determined by cultural capital will be obliterated along with cultural capital itself. Everyone will be forced to be free. It's a contemporary, secular variant on the recurrent fantasy of ending religious wars once and for all by simply forcing everyone to convert to your faith. It can be difficult to resist this and adopt a kind of indifferent tolerance when we yearn to make the music that moves us into a religion.

Is it possible to avoid these pitfalls, or should one discreetly drop the subject of music from one's conversational repertoire? Is what's left a tepid relativism that forces one to feel guilty every time one doesn't like something? Not long ago, a friend randomly sent me a link to this video of "The Witch", by the Rattles. I'd never heard it before, and it was reassuring that I knew someone who would know that I needed to hear it. Discourse about music always has a chance to open up the possibility for feeling recognized, understood, like that, and that can makes the discrimination and mockery it engenders seem a price worth paying. And Wilson's book itself exemplifies what careful attention to taste can reveal, though the price then is a endlessly recursive conversations on the level of meta-tastes.

Customer satisfaction and American Idol (9 June 2009)

Robin Hanson, an economist who frequently writes about signaling -- how cultural capital is deployed -- notices this WaPo account of the flaws in customer-satisfaction surveys. It turns out that people are systematically biased toward giving people who are (in Hanson's interpretation) perceived to have higher status a better evaluation.

Hekman [the study's lead author] found that these objective measures of performance correlated with patient satisfaction reports only when the doctors were white men. For women and minorities, extra quality, accessibility and diligence not only did not result in better evaluations by patients -- they produced worse evaluations.

As someone who, as a college instructor, was frequently rated by my "customers," the study's findings ring true to me. I could coast on my white maleness where my female colleagues couldn't; they, meanwhile, were being told how unfashionable their clothes were and how they should smile more. I always resented the way universities would rely on evaluations in their decision-making, and the idea that teachers' pay could be affected by it seemed like a great reason to get out of the profession altogether. Some evaluators will do their best to be objective but have their opinions colored perhaps unknowingly by their desire for what Hanson calls status affiliation; others will gleefully regard the survey as an opportunity to vote in a popularity contest.

Hanson seems eager to differentiate status affiliation from outright racism:

People usually invoke two explanations for such behavior:

1) Irrational or ideological racism or sexism.

2) Rational stereotyping that just happens to go wrong in these cases.

But a third explanation seems to me more plausible:

3) We prefer to affiliate with higher status folks. If female doctors, black or female sales clerks, or latino golf club employees are considered lower status, then customers will be less satisfied with them even if they do exactly the same things.

That seems like splitting hairs to me -- racism, sexism, income inequality, class bigotry, and so on are better justified if they can be displaced and relabeled as status concerns. Ideological racism is precisely what this study describes, the systematic association of status and better performance with otherwise irrelevant characteristics. The close association of status with race and gender and so on is what makes racist ideology seem perfectly rational, excusing us for our prejudice. And that association is justified, in a tautological sort of way, through surveys and such that seem to instantiate democratic participation. Hey, we're voting! We matter! But in that spirit -- that voting is about boosting our own self-esteem -- we vote as a way to express what we would like to be affiliated with, not what we have decided about the matter at hand. If we have no comprehension of the matter at hand, so much the better; our ability to vote our ego becomes that much easier to countenance.

Democracy is all well and good, but it seems to be evoked at times to justify and glorify something altogether different, when uninformed people are invited to rate the performance of those whose work they aren't that qualified to evaluate. Such surveys, popularized by shows like American Idol, end up having the function of negating the idea that objective standards are relevant, and promote the idea that status and popularity are always trustworthy proxies for quality. This durable species of capitalist ideology is a close cousin of the kind of market-think that views price or brands as always-reliable signals of quality. This shifts the responsibility for perpetuating status-quo inequities onto ordinary people, making it seem the natural order of things and an expression of the people's choice. So, any time we cast an ignorant vote, fill out some comment card or cast a vote on So You Think You Can Dance out of some vague and unquestioned impulse about their "talent", we strengthen the grip of this ideology.

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.

Weak reading (20 March 2009)

In a footnote to a post at The Valve about "weak reading," English professor Rohan Maitzen adds a footnote that well sums up the problem with academic literary criticism. It's a bit long, possibly longer than the post itself, but it warrants quoting in full

One phenomenon with which anyone in literary studies is certainly familiar, for instance, is the interpretive strategy by which something seemingly incidental in the text is seized upon and ‘discovered’ to have great interpretive significance -- usually because it can be read symptomatically, helping turn the text, as Attridge says, into an “illustration of historical conditions or ideological formations." Here’s a mildly parodic (but fairly accurate) example of how it works. Suppose the text is a 19th-century realist novel -- say, Barchester Towers, which I happen to be reading now. Imagine there’s a scene with a dinner party at which pickles are served. Now, the immediate action of Barchester Towers has everything to do with the internecine rivalries of English clergyman and the moral and social crises flowing from them, and nothing to do with pickles, but now that we have noticed the pickles, it becomes irresistible to follow up on them. Lo and behold, nobody has done pickles yet (though I could give you quite a list of what has been done). So we produce a pickled reading. What are the cultural implications of pickles? Who could afford them, and who could not? Were pickling techniques perhaps learned abroad, maybe in the chutney-producing regions of the eastern empire? Or maybe pickling was once a cottage industry and has now been industrialized. We learn all about these issues and make that jar on the table resonate with all the socio-economic and cultural meanings we have uncovered. Though the pickles seemed so incidental, now we realize how much work they are doing, sitting there on the table. (Who among us has not heard or read or written umpteen versions of this paper?) And perhaps we are right to bring this out--after all, for whatever known or felt reason, Trollope saw fit to put pickles there and not, say, oysters or potatoes. But do we really understand more about Barchester Towers, or just more about pickles -- not in themselves, but as symptoms of industrialism, colonialism, or bourgeois taste in condiments? It’s not that our pickle paper might not be interesting or, indeed, accurate in all the conclusions it draws about the symptomatic or semiotic or other significance of the pickles. But it’s hard not to feel somehow that such an analysis misses the point of the book and thus has a certain intrinsic irrelevance.

The point here, I think, is that you don't really need Barchester Towers to write that historical study of pickles, which is more interesting than Trollope, in a way. What more is there to understand about Barchester Towers? Why privilege it? Why not say Barchester Towers (which by the way is a very funny book worth reading) is intrinsically irrelevant to pickles, rather than vice versa? As objects for historical study, Trollope is no more important an object than pickles are. It's just that most universities don't have a food studies department, whereas they do have literature departments.

What are the reasons for that? Part of the point of having English departments, the argument goes, was to codify national greatness. This is especially obvious in classes dealing with American writers, which often adopt the theme of American exceptionalism as an important point of class discussion. Literature classes also serve as lectures in secular moralism, with English professors resolving ethical problems in texts to show both how the authors were deep, insightful souls and we the readers have become nearly as deep and insightful by reading those authors carefully. I find that dubious. In the main body of the post, Maitzen quotes from this exchange between scholars Derek Attridge and Henry Staten about this kind of reading.

The notion that it is smarter to read “against the grain” rather than to do what one can to respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work can compound this disregard of what is truly important. This is not to say that the use of literary works as illustrations of historical conditions or ideological formations (including abhorrent ones) is invalid or reprehensible; just that to do so is not to treat the works in question as literature.

Somewhere Pierre Macherey is groaning. In A Theory of Literary Production, he argued that we should read for what texts specifically can't say. The point of analysis is to determine what conditions make the work and its reception possible. "The real critical question is not: What is literature? (What does one do when one writes, or reads?) The question is: What kind of necessity determines the work? What is it really made from? The critical question should concern the material being used and the implements so employed."

That's a bit extreme, but Attridge and Staten veer in the wrong direction, I think, when they suggest one can define the "literary" for its own sake, as a transcendent quality worthy of study rather than a political tactic. Deeming something to be literature is only interesting in so far as we know what that dignified status accomplishes for those involved in articulating it. In itself, who cares what is literary?

As much as I am inclined to agree with Attridge and Staten and find clever counterintuitive, beside-the-point analyses of tangential elements in texts tiresome, their definition of "weak reading" has problems, some of which Maitzen points out. Namely, as she writes, that "a text’s own 'theme' is rarely obvious" and what is obvious to any given reader is "very much a result of one’s experience and preparation." These differences in preparation and experience measure a specific kind of cultural capital -- and bringing up poems presents an occasion for those with greater experience to realize that capital. In discussions about literature (another term that presents definitional problems, to say the least), literature professors get to dictate (for once) what is "truly important."

What's at stake for literature professors is maintaining control over the definition of what counts as literature, and maintaining the authority to impose that definition -- the source of their capital -- on everyone else. They tend to disguise this by maintaining that a concern for literature is a concern for the deep soundings of the human spirit -- hence their tendency to generate ersatz moral philosophy. The pickle-centric sort of readings of texts go half the way toward dispensing with literature qua literature, but they still nod to the necessity of a literary occasion for launching into a study of material culture. But in these cases, the literary occasion serves as an excuse for doing history or anthropology without the same sort of rigor that historians and anthropologists might require from one another. This drives literary studies into further disrepute in the academy, which only then intensifies the calls from within the discipline for a return to a concern for "literature" to redeem the field. It devolves into what appears from the outside to be a racket, a self-protective fog of vague language and unfalsifiable assertions about "literariness," which justifies the continued existence of literary scholars within universities which have become corporatized, instrumentalist.

Virgin Megastores (15 March 2009)

I'm not glad that people will be out of work, but I can't say that I'm too sentimental over the demise of Virgin Megastore. Other than the time when a boss gave me a gift certificate, I never shopped there, and I never understood the appeal -- they seemed noisy and disorienting, overstocked and poorly organized. There was too much stuff, too much sound, too many racks, too many ads -- it all seemed designed to drive me away as rapidly as possible. Joy Press, who wrote a swoony obituary of the store for Salon (link via Rob Walker) , describes it somewhat differently:

Virgin had an in-store D.J., private listening booths and plenty of room to mingle with records while also flirting with cute, lanky boys in eyeliner. Alongside the diversity of music, the megastore stocked a selection of culty and esoteric books, adding to the sense that Virgin offered a magical combination of mall-like consumer convenience and independent-minded cool.

Nothing could seem further from my experience. It seemed to take the stuff my peers had painstakingly discovered in quirky corners of the retail world, or had passed to one other in shoddy photocopies or beat-up, well thumbed editions, and made it all too easy, invalidated it. The store inevitably seemed full of teenagers who'd wandered in from Hot Topic, who were either sulky, giggly, or vaguely menacing. (Fittingly, the Times Square megastore is becoming a Forever 21.) The idea that anyone would flirt or hang out amidst the cacophony never would have occurred to me. The place revolted me viscerally.

I was born too early for the Virgin Megastore, perhaps. When I think of chain music stores, I think of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Tower Records and HMV. These were alienating places, too, but I shopped in them. They were a step up from Listening Booth and Wall to Wall Sound, the only record stores I knew while growing up in the suburbs and going to the mall. They had a wider selection, but were still fairly homogeneous. At college, I eventually discovered well-curated indie record stores, but I was always a little put off by the coolness tests you seemed to have to pass to hang out in them. One day, I finally somehow managed to pass the test, which in retrospect meant far too much to me and contributed somewhat to my general antisocial orientation.

The problem with record stores generally was that they embodied the idea that you could buy integrity or superiority by getting the right albums and knowing the right musical references. The poster-heavy, shit-pile aesthetic in the stores -- mirrored in the teenagers' rooms depicted in 1980s movies -- emblemized a certain dream of abundance, one which seems extremely juvenile to me now. If you could have access to it all, it seemed as though you could pass as if you knew it all -- and for some reason I thought that this was a good thing, trying to be a know-it-all. Records stores made it seem as though that smug posture was the height of accomplishment, that nothing could be more justified, nothing was a better use of erudition, than to insult the ignorance of others about niche pop culture. So having a pile of records -- owning more stuff -- seemed like material proof that you were smarter and better than others when it came to music, and music was a metonym for our entire identities. The music you could reference was an index to how you wanted to be regarded, who you wanted to impress. (Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style details this phenomenon well. Allegedly this is not the case anymore, and music doesn't loom so large as the basis of subcultures. Is that right?)

In truth, the stores encouraged the formation of a specifically consumerist self-concept that was especially insidious, because it left those of us prone to the stores' allure believing we were cooler than ordinary consumers, and perhaps not even consumers at all but refined aesthetes. The irony that we spent hours and hours each day in a record store managed to escape us. We thought we had found a place to escape the system.

No one in Virgin Megastore felt like they escaped the system, of course. Though it was always a distortion, the huge chains symbolized for indie- record-store denizens a homogeneous mainstream taste; the megastores were necessary in order to believe it was distinctive and important to listen to alternative music. It's tempting to argue now that those who did their record shopping at Virgin were the true escapees, the ones who better avoided pegging their identity to a particular mode of consumerism, but that seems too facile. I wish I took music less seriously in my 20s, but I don't wish that I was in Virgin Megastore lackadaisically buying into the zeitgeist. I wish only I had made my vocation then something other than having a encyclopedic knowledge of what in the end is just a species of consumer goods. I wish I would have actually been doing something instead of listening and categorizing and posturing.

Compensatory chocolate (10 Feb 2009)

Rob Walker's latest Consumed column in the Sunday NYT magazine looks at criminally overpriced chocolate as a vehicle for "compensatory consumption." Professors at Northwestern University found in a study that "subjects who had put themselves in a powerless frame of mind were willing to pay measurably more than the other group for high-status items" and that "individuals who felt less powerful showed a preference for clothing with larger and more conspicuous luxury logos." In other words, our status anxiety may register to us as a lack of autonomy, as powerlessness, and we may compensate by exercising the sort of autonomy with which we are all familiar -- making a wasteful shopping choice to prove that we can. Hence, spending $8 on a chocolate bar.

If this phenomenon of "compensatory consumption" holds, there would be seem to be incentive for marketers to make us perpetually anxious about our status, in good times and bad, and to make sure that status remains a meaningful social category with as much salience as possible. This implies that there can be no end to the social barriers derived from class as long as there is a robust advertising industry. That industry, of course, is not so robust currently; unfortunately, its services in making us anxious about our future are not especially necessary right now.

Could the chocolate taste so good that it would be worth that much? That question is irrelevant, as it is for wine as well. The causality must be reversed; it tastes better because we spent the extra money on it, because we are eating our own sense of power.

Because I live in a neighborhood where cheap imported chocolates from Eastern Europe are readily available, I have a different relationship with chocolate. I get to enjoy not the ersatz thrill of pseudo-luxury spending but the ersatz cosmopolitanism of consuming unusual imported goods. Apologists for consumerism tend to celebrate this sort of access to goods as a kind of "power," but really the variety of goods is not improving my life so much as it is further articulating the status hierarchy. In this case, the status boost I get comes not from my sense of extravagant spending on an overpriced chocolate with a fancy brand name but from a different sort of privilege: the undeserved sense of superiority that comes from living in the sort of neighborhood where I can find Bulgarian and Croatian candy bars that other Americans can't get so casually. Nevertheless, I can't give you an honest appraisal of whether this chocolate tastes better or worse than Hershey's for the same reasons mentioned above. On the level of relative obscurity, they rate highly. What I worry about is the way the status value masks the flavor; it becomes hard for me to tell the relative "objective" worth of things in the ordinary course of life. I would have to go through life blindfolded to really taste anything as it is.

Competitive consumption in dormancy (30 Jan 2009)

The GDP figures for the fourth quarter of 2008 are something I've never seen as an adult -- a decline in growth of 3.8 percent (the number is by no means final either, and is susceptible to being revised later). It's hard to cheerlead the economy with numbers like these, but The NYT gamely tries with its headline ("Steep Slide in U.S. Economy, but Not as Dire as Forecast ") which stands in stark contrast with the lede:

The United States economy shrank at its fastest pace in a quarter century from October through December, the government reported on Friday, in the broadest accounting yet of the toll of the credit crisis. Consumer spending and business investment all but disappeared, and economists said the painful contraction was likely to continue at an alarming pace well into the summer.

Felix Salmon thinks the timid consumer has become the new normal:

I don't see any sign of a recovery any time soon: America's culture of competitive consumption has disappeared entirely, and it's not coming back.
I walked past a brand-new high-end casual menswear store last night, and it struck home to me how much things have changed in the past few months. It was always a bit weird that anybody would pay hundreds of dollars for a flannel shirt, but somehow, such shops managed to survive during the boom years. I certainly wouldn't want to be the owner today, though, or even in the years to come, should the store survive that long.

Merrill Lynch analyst David Rosenberg (who has been calling a consumer-led recession for a while) has a similar view in this dire commentary. He argues that the debt overhang from the boom must be eliminated before there is a recovery. Consumers, therefore, will be forced to save rather than spend. Rosenberg goes further and posits a lingering shift in consumer mentality (at least for baby boomers) that outlasts this necessary debt elimination:

in this post-bubble, mean-reverting process, the ability for policymakers to re-create the credit cycle, reinflate asset values and ignite a consumer-led recovery is going to be thwarted by secular changes in attitudes towards credit, savings, discretionary spending and homeownership. In other words, even after enough debt is paid off, the baby boomers’ spending years will be focused on putting their money in the coffee can.

Rosenberg elaborates on the "secular change" in consumption habits he expects, the shift from frivolity to frugality (already a popular theme in the mainstream press).

There are lags between changes in household net worth and changes in consumer spending patterns, and the $13 trillion loss to-date is a harbinger for sustained consumer spending contraction in coming years. The reason for the lags is because households only change their behavior after a shock, negative or positive, if it is considered to be permanent or at least semi-permanent. For example, the institutional changes over the decades in 401k plans and matched employer pension contributions helped reduce the steady 10-12% savings rate of the 1950, 60s and 70s down to 8% by the late 1980s. But it was the increased boomer reliance on asset inflation for savings rather than organic income that drove the savings rate down to 2% by the time the dot-com boom was in full swing in the late 1990s.

If Salmon is right about the end of the hundred dollar flannel shirt, then maybe this depression thing really isn't all bad. But will the same marketing ideology merely be used to promote something cheaper for the time being? I'd expect the consumerist ideology to be more tenacious than that -- when we can't spend, we don't immediately adapt to that new reality; we just experience want more painfully. We probably haven't been in a depression mind-set long enough for our consumer behavior to change in a fundamental way and are still in the lag period Rosenberg mentions. Collectively, American consumers could be overreacting in the short term, cutting back like crazy with the assurance that we can resume spending stronger than ever when the storm passes. (Kind of like trying to catch up on sleep all at once on Saturday rather than changing one's habits to get more sleep every night.)

Rosenberg suggests we may well come to accept our reduced means as a permanent condition just as economic trends are reversing, causing our recession mentality to persevere and act as an added drag on recovery. BUt virtually every form of public discourse is aligned against that possibility; the commercial media may be too robust to ever allow us to resign ourselves complacently to a penny-pinching mentality.

In other words, we may never reach the soul-searching stage, in which we reject the entire set of social relations that can produce a $100 flannel shirt or makes $300 jeans seem normal. It may be easier simply to suspend our consumerist hopes, manifest in so much of the material belongings that surround us, rather than interrogate those hopes and reject them for a new way of life. The competition that had been taken place through consuming has shifted to a more fundamental level -- for now we are competing to hold on to jobs. Maintaining what we had already achieved will probably feel like relative progress. But the useless ethic of status competition and possessive individualism, the endless war of all against all that capitalism breeds as an inevitable by-product, won't disappear. We are still likely to regard any cooperation brought on by hard times as a type of humiliation, even if we are grateful.

Consumerist society has for too long emphasized possessions as the route to social recognition, not collaboration. The tangibility of objects seems to substantiate the argument -- the inarguable presence of more stuff seems to testify to a richer life, and marketing gives all that stuff rich meanings and fully developed fantasies we can readily enter into vicariously. And our ability to soberly question consumerism's role in our lives is hampered not only by our hedonism (the familiar and common-sense-seeming logic of "more is better") but by the persuasion industry's relentless collective efforts to invalidate ways of life that are not reliant on consuming products. Lifestyle magazines and the styles sections in newspapers help by making frugality into a trend that is marked by buying certain products and shopping at certain stores. The underlying message: We can spend less but remain consumers. So we don't need to fear.

Taking its cue from the press, the ad business will try to sell us anticonsumer goods, goods that paradoxically promise to fit in to our new recession-minded lifestyle. This not only helps ad firms continue to sell ads in a downmarket, but also helps ads maintain their prominence in the sum of our daily thinking. Ads preserve a lever in our minds, so they can reorient us to luxury when the time comes. Then it will be morning in America all over again.

Volunteer critics (28 Jan 2009)

Stephen Baker had a recent BusinessWeek article (via PSFK) that explores the kind of labor arrangement that by and large makes PopMatters possible: It's called "Will Work for Praise."

The gist is this: The Web makes it possible to aggregate the labor of volunteers, who hope to be paid in publicity -- who want to build their "personal brand" and feel like "mini-Oprahs." The marketing-oriented site Baker mainly looks at is reminiscent of the "BzzAgents" who offer to promote products for free, merely so that they can feel as though they have been an "influencer". Such is the centrality of marketing in our culture (it is arguably our culture's dominant, defining discourse) that people seek to to seize some of its relevance by merely mimicking it -- they don't care what they are influencing people to do as long as they are speaking the language of influence, channeling its power through themselves and thereby becoming socially relevant.

Laura Sweet...searches intently, unearthing such bizarre treasures for sale as necklaces for trees and tattoo-covered pigs. As usual, she posts them on a shopping site called ThisNext.com. Asked why in the world she spends so many hours each week working for free, she answers: "It's a labor of love."
Later this morning, a half-hour's drive to the west, a serial entrepreneur named Gordon Gould strolls into the Santa Monica offices of ThisNext. Gould has managed to entice an army of volunteers, including Sweet, to pour passion and intelligence into his site for free. Traffic on ThisNext is soaring, with unique visits nearly tripling in a year, to 3.5 million monthly. What's in it for the volunteer workers? "They can build their brands," Gould says. "In their niches, they can become mini-Oprahs."

That sounds a lot like he's saying "My volunteers are daydreaming dupes." And maybe that's right. Gould seems pretty cavalier about his star contributors, assuming that the amount of volunteer labor he can throw at any problem compensates for the singularity of any individual's efforts. Baker writes, "The trick in the volunteer economy is less to keep a superstar from quitting than to make sure that plenty of eager volunteers are ready to work to take her place." Volunteer laborers of this sort are almost always implicitly assumed to be gullible and deluded, misunderstanding what their real motive should be -- namely moneymaking. Free labor devalues paid labor, of course, and challenges the underlying concept of labor itself: Work is compensated in wages because it is presumed to be a disutility -- a pain in the ass. What we do for free is socially regarded as hobby activity by definition; it's unserious, leisurely play.

Consequently, uncompensated work tends to be regarded as inherently suspect, as is the case with the way "amateur" critics online are often regarded by the professionals they are rapidly superseding. An article (annoyingly firewalled) in the Columbia Journalism Review by David Hajdu offers a good example. He quotes New Republic writer Leon Wieseltier:

Every crisis in criticism supposes that it is unprecedented, he says, but now there really is a new reason for alarm. Criticism has always been a mixture of opinion and judgment, judgment being something more learned and more seasoned and more intellectually ambitious than mere opinion. But beginning with Amazon, which made anybody who could type into a book reviewer, and now as the Web sites and the blogs have proliferated, we have entered a nightmare of opinion-making. This culture of outbursts, and the weird and totally unwarranted authority that it has been granted, has been responsible for a collapse of the distinction between opinion and judgment. It’s one of the baleful consequences of the democratization of expression by the Web.

This seems like pure elitism to me. The chief distinction between "judgment" and "opinion" in his account basically boils down to whether or not the opinion giver is properly credentialed, and that is typically a matter of who you know and who is paying you. It's not as though book reviewing is phenomenology. The problem is that the "weird and totally unwarranted authority" of noncommercial critics threatens to devalue the cultural capital of people like Wieseltier, which is why professional opinion givers like Wieseltier bluster about amateurs, trying to discredit uninstitutionalized opinion. Reviews on Amazon are generally not "outbursts" but often attempts to articulate a useful explanation of a work's value. And the reviews here, many written by academics, don't presume a "weird authority." What's weird is the monopoly on judgment that crypto-sages like Wieseltier seem to believe is their unique entitlement.

Worse, the implication is that judgment as exercised by the wise Wieseltiers of the world should do nothing to truly educate their readers, who, perpetually incapable of their own judgment, remain ignorant sieves waiting to have wisdom poured through them. The "baleful consequences" of democratization are that Wieseltier faces more competition, and his publishing-world connections aren't as valuable anymore. Wieseltier basically admits he has no stake in seeing cultural capital more widely distributed and shared in the world; instead, covetous of its relative value, he would like to keep opinion making as hierarchical as possible. (Requiring that a capitalist bankroll you in order for you to have credibility is a fine way of accomplishing that end.)

So paid critics often don't have the best interests of readers in mind; they want to undermine readers' feelings of expertise. Also, as Hajdu details, paid journalists often end up co-opted by the entertainment industry that readers expect them to evaluate objectively. "Music critics, too, feel the pressure to make nice. In an era in which home-studio software and social networking sites have greatly simplified the production and the distribution of popular music, the sheer quantity of new releases by unknown artists has, among other effects, made it more tempting to accentuate the positive." Since the music-business is threatened by disintermediation, it behooves its support system in the print media to give it a boost. The writers end up as an adjunct of that entertainment industry, working for the big media companies themselves. Otherwise, constraints on their editors force writers to eschew critical discourse for consumer-guide-style advice.

I'm not sure how the criticism on PopMatters is regarded out in the world. But in many ways, the volunteer status of most contributors makes the criticism published here potentially more valuable -- it vouches, at least, for the writing's integrity (though I suppose one could argue that, like underpaid judges, unpaid critics may merely be susceptible to being bought off more easily by PR people with tickets to shows and free DVDs and the like). Thanks to internet publishing, it becomes possible to read a different kind of critical voice -- sure, one that emulates the paid press at times, but one that is more likely to preserve an earnest sense of its critical mission. Cynicism is thereby usually reserved for deserving subjects. The writing can grow indulgent in places, but in general there is a sincere effort to be disciplined by the craft of criticism itself, rather than the need to be snappy, or to accommodate column-space concerns, or attract advertisers. I know, that's hopelessly idealistic, but it's an ideal that could only ever blossom outside of capitalist relations.

Anyway, as more outlets for uncompensated content creation proliferate on the Web -- Amazon.com and social networks being the most conspicuous ones right now -- the perception that it's all hobby writing and/or self-branding online (it's all "weird" pseudoauthority; "baleful" democratization; untoward "outbursts" of silly plebes with their silly opinions) will become even more entrenched. Sites may have to go more explicitly capitalist -- pay writers, collect subscriptions, feature advertising, etc. -- to ensure that they are regarded as "professional" and worthy of being read by people who otherwise limit their consumption of amateur copy to those they have friended.