Fashion and intellectual property (9 June 2011)

Some parting thoughts on fast fashion and social media: A section that was cut from that essay I wrote for n+1 about fast fashion had to do with "open innovation," or the laissez-faire attitude toward design piracy advocated by some consultants. Here's how my essay read at one point:

By skirting the borderlines of stylistic piracy, Forever 21 exemplifies so-called open innovation, cherished by consultants who argue that an enhanced and highly exploitable creativity is unleashed under a less rigorous intellectual-property regime. A 2005 tract from the Norman Lear Center (pdf), a think tank, approvingly described how “the past is constantly being plundered for ‘new’ ideas. Stylistic elements are routinely appropriated from the most unlikely places -- Polynesian islands, urban street corners, stock-car races, bowling alleys -- and transformed into new trends. In fashion, nearly every design element is available to anyone for the taking. Any fashion design, one might say, is ‘ready to share.’ ”
Of course, share is the operative word for another burgeoning business. Facebook and other social-media companies have a similarly parasitic business model that depends on appropriating freely shared material and repurposing it as data for marketers. Just as Forever 21 pushes the boundaries of intellectual property, Facebook continually oversteps established norms of privacy, opting users into data-divulging mechanisms by default and backpedalling only when confronted with public outcry.

There are a lot of quotable passages from that "Ready to Share" paper about fostering an "ecology of creativity" and fomenting a "churning tide of innovation" that leads to hyperefficiency and so on, all of which double as useful rationalizations of enclosed communication channels like Facebook. My title for the essay was more or less inspired by this line: "We believe that the styles of creative bricolage exemplified by fashion and new digital environments embody a new grand narrative for creativity, born of ancient tradition." I, on the other hand, believe that the new "grand narrative for creativity" is the current ideological alibi for subsuming everyday life and sociality to capital. Social media allege to enable creativity when they are just appropriating it.

I was reminded of this lost material by this post by GMU economics Phd candidate Eli Dourado, who refers to IP restrictions in fashion as a "tragedy of the anticommons," following legal scholar Michael Heller (jstor). This is what happens when "multiple owners are each endowed with the right to exclude others from a scarce resource, and no one has an effective privilege of use." Dourado points out that fashion "is entirely about signaling. Inframarginally, signaling generates information and serves a useful social function, but at the margin, it’s better if fewer resources go into signaling. For instance, if you impose a tax on the signal that causes everyone to signal half as much, information is preserved and the status of every individual remains the same, but fewer resources are consumed." In other words (as I understand it), the fashion industry seeks to promote inefficiency in signaling, with lots of redundancy and confusion and overdetermination and interpretation problems, generating "information" that no longer serves a "useful social function" but instead drains resources from other uses and binds it to endless acts of decoding. The solution, Dourado suggests, is to stop rewarding fashion innovation by halting IP protection in the industry. I don't think that will work, as the utter lack of intellectual property rights has done nothing to stem the flow of "sharing" in social networks, though admittedly sharers don't perceive their self-fashioning explicitly as innovation (yet).

Also cut from my n+1 essay was a bunch of material from sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky's book The Empire of Fashion, which I think lays the groundwork for an argument that connects the dissemination of fashion with emergent neoliberal subjectivity. He basically argues that fashion accustoms us to accept constant change as freedom of expression rather than insecurity, as providing opportunities for creativity rather than conformism. Of course, it is neither one or the other of these things, but both simultaneously. One of capitalism's great psychological coups is that it allows us to be creative conformists.

Anyway, this is what I originally had drawing on Lipovetsky:

"The consciousness of being an individual with a particular destiny, the will to express a unique identity, the cultural celebration of personal identity were 'productive forces,' the very driving forces of the mutability of fashion,” Lipovetsky argues in The Empire of Fashion. Tracing the development of couture, Lipovetsky claims that "what formerly appeared as signs of class and social hierarchy had a tendency to become increasingly, although not exclusively, psychological signs, expressions of a soul or personality." This allowed fashion to corner the market on giving ordinary people opportunities for, in the words of haute couturier Marc Bohan, "the renewal of their psychological makeup." The promised transformational potential makes fashion, as Lipovetsky notes, "the first major mechanism for the consistent social production of personality" -- that is, our first reflexive sense of self, set in terms of those constantly shifting social meanings, an identity not foisted upon us by birth and tradition but one for which we must hold ourselves personally responsible.
As fashion strays from its role in expressing established hierarchies, it becomes a form of institutionalized insecurity, laundered by the personal expression and individualism it appears to authorize. It yokes us all to the zeitgeist, eradicating the orienting effects of tradition and leaving us all more vulnerable to existential doubt. What Lipovetsky tends to call a “right to personalization” is at once also an ontological burden, the emergence of a permanent identity crisis.
If we don’t have the right to a self simply by virtue of existing, then how do we justify our conviction that we are somebody? How do we prove it to the world? Lipovetsky argues that people respond to fashion’s destabilization of the self by embracing fashion more thoroughly. Having “generalized the spirit of curiosity, democratized tastes and the passion for novelty at all levels of existence and in all social ranks,” he argues, “the fashion economy has engendered a social agent in its own image: the fashion person who has no deep attachments, a mobile individual with a fluctuating personality and tastes.”
Lipovetsky’s “fashion person” is a precursor for the social-media enabled personal brand. A cursory glance at Facebook reveals all sorts of “fashion people” harbored there. We have to watch ourselves become ourselves in order to be ourselves, over and over again. This futile process crystallizes in the irrepressible ideal of youth, the time when all that reflexivity seemed like second nature, was authenticity itself. As Lipovetsky notes: "The exaltation of the youthful look is ... inseparable from the modern democratic individualist age whose logic it carries to its narcissistic conclusion. All individuals are in fact urged to work on their own personal images, to adopt, to keep fit, to recycle themselves. The cult of youth and the cult of the body go hand in hand; they require the same constant self-scrutiny, the same narcissistic self-surveillance, the same need for information, and the same adaptation to novelty."

For me, that is a pretty succinct description of what social media are for, preserving the illusion of youth in a space that doesn't countenance the past or the future but only the now.

Vanity Sizing for Men (9 Sept 2010)

In the U.S. men's pants are typically sized in inches, with one figure for the waist circumference and one for the length of the inseam. But as this Esquire piece by Abe Sauer rapidly making the rounds demonstrates, mass-market clothing manufacturers don't like standardized units like "inches" and have decided to make "36 Waist" mean whatever they want it to mean.

Sauer believes this is the migration of vanity sizing from the domain of women's wear into men's clothes.

The pants manufacturers are trying to flatter us. And this flattery works: Alfani's 36-inch "Garrett" pant was 38.5 inches, just like the Calvin Klein "Dylan" pants — which I loved and purchased. A 39-inch pair from Haggar (a brand name that out-testosterones even "Garrett") was incredibly comfortable. Dockers, meanwhile, teased "Leave yourself some wiggle room" with its "Individual Fit Waistline," and they weren't kidding: despite having a clear size listed, the 36-inchers were 39.5 inches. And part of the reason they were so comfy is that I felt good about myself, no matter whether I deserved it.

Such an interpretation is plausible enough, but I think retailers' facilitating the illusion that we are thinner than we are is a by-product of their chief goal, which is to force us to try on every item of clothing we are considering buying and let the endowment effect work its behavioral magic. Trying something on invests us in completing the purchase to a much greater degree -- we've gone to all that trouble already and want something to show for our effort -- and it also habituates us to the idea that we already own the thing we put on, and to not buy it feels as though we have lost something or had something taken away from us. So the sizes are just very vague guidelines to help us know which items to take to the fitting rooms.

Sauer also raises a different question, whether "comfort" has anything to do with the physical fit of clothes anymore, whether it has been entirely displaced and is now derived from what we think others will see or believe about us on the basis of our clothes. That we even have to wonder about this is a testament to the kind of commonplace alienation that consumerism fosters, muddling self-consciousness and the need for a specific kind of surface-based recognition with our physical awareness of our body in space. Less cryptically: we are always aware of our need to signify something with even our must mundane practices, and this puts us at an inescapable analytical remove from what we are actually doing and experiencing. There's no direct way to know even something as straightforward as how our clothes fit, since the standard is not absolute but has instead become mobilized, made into something affective, based on emotions and reactions and fantasy. Or to put this yet another way: every moment of communication in consumerism, even something as ostensibly straightforward as a waist measurement, must be exploited for its symbolic potential. It must be separated fro the real and made to function as part of a cycle of dreams and disappointments.

Beauty and inflated value (15 July 2010)

I'm skeptical about transcendental beauty, if only because the nature of the beautiful seems to change with time. Of course, that itself may just be an illusion. That all I can see is unceasing change in beauty could be the unfortunate effect of my being socialized as a consumer, trained to recognize value primarily in novelty. Beauty descends to the level of fashion, and though timeless is a commonplace in fashion-industry marketing copy, fashion cycles themselves seem much more salient than the specifics of any given trend.

Fashion is no proxy for beauty; it aspires to supplant it. But fashion cycles make explicit the logic that has long underwritten the cultural power of what has gone under the name of beauty. The power to dictate fashion as a series of apparent discoveries is akin to the authority to credibly assign beauty and shape the contours of social perception, to define the aesthetic. The particular usefulness of beauty as a category is that it serves to posit an eternal, elemental value. It connotes a transcendence even when it's nonexistant, so its privileges seem unquestionable.

Ashley Mears, in this essay for 3 Quarks Daily, examines why certain fashion models become ubiquitous and iconic when, for all practical purposes, they are interchangeable. Using Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha as an example, Mears asks, "how, among the thousands of wannabe models worldwide, is any one 14-year-old able to rise from the pack? What makes Coco Rocha more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants?" Mears argues that "there is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens," suggesting that her beauty-value is instead "bequeathed" to her by nature of the "unstable market" in which that value is realized.

Does the process of her elevation to fashion-industry fame somehow link beauty and value, allowing each to define the other for the rest of us?

The experts responsible for choosing models "don’t know what makes one model a better choice than another," Mears notes, which means that the process is ruled by the inarticulate whims of fashion's managerial class:

Like dozens of fashion producers I spoke with, Russell doesn’t really know what it is about a kid like Coco Rocha that excites him. He “just knows” if a model is right for him, and further, he “knows it when he sees it.”

But what Russell "just knows" is not some ineffable movement of his own sensitive spirit but a collective understanding of what image his industry has legitimized, something that is not set down explicitly but communicated instead through reciprocal patterns of protective imitation. Mears points out the importance of the social network to this project: "producers talk. They hang out throughout the week at lunches, dinners, parties.... They talk constantly, facebooking, texting, and drinking; they even date each other. They share social and cultural space, and they pick up on the gossip, or 'the buzz,' this way." This particular social network produces a time-specific ideal of beauty, reconstituted as the height of fashion -- an ideal which in turn authenticates the exclusivity of the network, whose members conserve the power of naming the beautiful. [herding and information cascades and the problem of arbitrary value with real social impact]

Beauty seems more an ideological effect than an intrinsic quality of things, a residue of the process of power that decides who should reap beauty's associated benefits. It's an expression of cultural capital, albeit one that strikes us with immediacy, as though it were a natural intuition. Beauty allows to grasp power in a glance as pleasure -- the hard, protracted work that went into establishing a particular hegemonic ideal vanishes into the instant, leaving behind only a sense of compulsory approval and attraction. We feel as though we are glimpsing both what we want to have and want to be, or what we are supposed to, at any rate, but also something far more insidious. In that moment of perceiving beauty, being and having are inseparably blended so that identity can seem a matter of owning things and seeing becomes a mode of possession.

"A finance market, like a fashion market, consists of speculators chasing each other’s tails in disregard for what things are really worth." But there may be no "real worth" to be ascertained, only ideology.

Beauty is our heart volunteering us for the gentlest form of domination.

Terry Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, argues that these cultural beauty myths serve the purpose of persuading us to recognize the premises of the prevailing social order as the spontaneous movement of our hearts

Of course there is a different way to commune with beauty --get metaphysical in conclusion.

Fashion As "Consumer Entrepreneurship" (23 April 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fashion Coercion (6 April 2010)

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

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

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

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

Performative shopping and "hauls" (22 March 2010)

Marisa Meltzer has an interesting piece at Slate about teenage girls who make "hauls" -- videos of the stuff they bought on shopping trips. Meltzer compares hauls to tech-unboxing videos; they reminded me of when I freelanced at Lucky.

Making haul videos probably seems entirely natural, like it might have seemed to form a garage band in past decades. The consumer society's great achievement is turning shopping into the viable medium for creativity and social connection. It seems natural, inevitable even, to relate to other people that way. Meltzer makes her own haul video and concludes, "With a camera on me, everything I bought felt inherently important." The way to intensify our feelings is to film them and launch them into the world, imagining someone will watch and care enough to judge us. That fantasy is not new, but the means for seeming to fulfill it are (you don't have to, say, start a band, practice, and try to book gigs at the VFW), and they are of course going to be commercially exploited. That's one way to interpret the long-term game plan of Facebook and YouTube.

It was predictable that hauls should start happening, considering the commercial inflection of online sharing -- and also because shopping is always getting harder and harder. There's inherently a vague dread in making the commitment to spend, considering the way that consumerism relates to identity, and these sorts of decisions are being logged permanently online. It's a semiotic jungle out there; the meanings are multiplying and teens especially want advice on how to buy what will send the messages they want to send in the appropriate way. Adults have more leeway in inventing their own meanings, or have come up with disassociative strategies about what we all have to do in terms of self-presentation. Teens have fewer defenses.

The sample that Meltzer provides is pretty polished; the girl shows the pieces she bought, models them, and explains why she pulled the trigger on them. I imagine there are less polished versions, that are more desperate or more ostentatious. Bourdieu-style analysis could break such videos down by class; you'd predict that as you move up the hierarchy, the more pretenses at being disinterested in the presentation there would be, the more likely the discussion would be couched in aesthetic terminology.

The rhetoric in the video is straight out of Lucky, in fact, and reminded me of the weird admiration I had for the copy there, the quixotic optimism in all products, that there was something unique and redemptive to say about everything if you were ingenious enough and mined the thesaurus thoroughly enough for new adjectives. I enjoyed the way the editors there would heedlessly and inventively transform nouns and verbs into adjectives to invent entirely new criteria by which to evaluate boots and jackets and lipstick shades. Here's a more or less random example that gets at what I mean: "The structured sweetheart neckline combined with the blousiness makes it super flattering--and the unusual mosaic pattern is so cool. To offset the girliness I'm going to wear it with some thick gray tights, these futuristic BCBGMaxAzria platforms and Diesel's oversize boyfriend blazer." (Before I worked there, I never had heard of "boyfriend" clothes." The paradoxical conundrum implied by that appellation -- clothes for women made to simulate clothes for men that women would borrow under intimate and cozy conditions? -- made me want to break out my copy of Barthes's The Fashion System to figure out what it meant. But I think this Sociological Images post shows how the phenomenon has reached dizzying ironic heights well beyond interpretation.)

Lucky taught me how shopping could be a vector for unfeigned enthusiasm strong enough to entirely mask the underlying cynicism. People who love shopping are not in bad faith, and they seem to honestly want others to experience the joy and confidence it can intermittently bring them. That same hopeful tone animates the haul video; she's not out to exclude anyone, though that could certainly be the effect. Instead, she is aping the mass-media tone of inclusion and eager solicitude. She's not doing anything wrong; she seems successfully well-adjusted. Meltzer notes that girls like the one in the video "resemble the popular girls at any high school, which is precisely why they are so appealing to other teens." The popular girl doesn't have to snub you, she can just make you a follower without following you back.

Anyway, that's what is so disheartening about online sociality to me: the likable girl in this shopping video is the face of marketing's future. Marketers will seem more well-intentioned than ever; they will be our peers. And we won't notice that our peers talk like a commercial because we'll be using the same idiom ourselves.

Hipster Expertise (17 March 2010)

Keeping the hipster theme going, here are my responses to questions put to me by Heba Hasan, a journalism student from Northwestern University. (It proves my point that everyone believes they are entitled to an opinion about hipsterism, especially me):

1. With everyone denying the fact that they themselves are hipsters, is anyone really a hipster?
The hipster is always the other, someone else who is making you question the legitimacy or impressiveness or timeliness of what you are doing. We see somebody else doing something that is obviously a ploy for a certain kind of recognition through a clever take on consumption, and it makes us feel self-conscious and inadequate. Then we want to lash out.

2. Why do you think people are so quick to deny the fact that they are hipsters, why has the title attracted so much loathing and criticism?
The term is pejorative because it often describes the coercion that others' ostentatious coolness exerts on us, making us feel inappropriately excluded or lame. People think of their own bids for recognition in a different way: we're not trying to be cool; we are just expressing who we really are. That other guy, though, what a douche.

The pejorative use of hipster also designates people who are invalidating the originality or authenticity of certain social practices by making them seem as though they are only about scoring points on identity, for seeming cool. "Hipster" describes that feeling that everything you do will be interpreted as a gesture made only for attention; the moment you realize you can't do something because other people will see you as just doing it to be cool is the moment you want to lash out at hipsters.

3. Many people say that today’s hipsters have no subculture of their own, that they merely take facets of certain eras. How do you feel about this statement?
Since there are no self-identifying hipsters for the most part, hipsterism has no positive agenda; it doesn't stand for anything, not trying to achieve anything, not trying to express anything. There is no manifestos for the hipster way. A hipster is always alone, with the problem of solving their own identity, how to make it seem more "cool." This usually comes at the expense of others, who must recognize they have been out-cooled. The hipster always seems to implicitly be saying "look at me," which others may experience as stealing the spotlight from them. When gestures don't seem to be crying "look at me" they aren't labeled "hipster."

4. How do you think that hipsters have evolved?
The term has changed meaning -- it doesn't refer to beatniks or anything like that -- the pre-2000 usage of the word is completely separate I think than the post-2000 usage. Hipsterism cannot evolve, because, in my view, there is no agenda to shift. Hipsterism is never about specific signifers -- wearing a certain shirt, believing certain things, etc. It is always a matter of form, not content. It's about trying to tweak trends so they reflect positively on you, and so that you show you belong without being a total follower either. We get called "hipster" when our efforts to do this don't quite come off, and it's obvious that we are trying too hard, or copying others.

5. Many people argue that Hipsterdom is long since dead and lacks originality. Would you agree with this statement?
Hipsterism is failed attempts at originality, almost by definition. If not referring to awkward attempts at cool, then it is a term used by one group to convey their exclusion from the "hipster" group they want to demonize. The mentality of trying to be original and cool is, if anything, so prevalent that it doesn't need a term. It's simply a matter of participating in culture in a certain contemporary way. Anyone trying to make a successful Facebook page is running the risk of hipsterism. Anyone trying to self-consciously express a "unique" identity through the way they consume is potentially in the hipster camp. All they have to do is try and fail, and almost all of us try now. No one belongs to the generic mainstream anymore.

6. Do you think that stores that capitalize on the hipster image like Urban Outfitters and American Apparel are helping or hurting the subculture?
I don't think there is a subculture to hurt or help. Hipsterism is always closely connected to commercialism because it is a phenomenon related to expressing identity through goods that take on "cool" connotations. Hipsterism isn't possible without brands like American Apparel. And likewise, hipsterism calls into being such retailers. Something always has to occupy that spot -- when they become too "hipster" something else will have creeped into position to be "genuinely hip" for a little while. And they use up their cool capital, and so the cycle continues.

7. Would you say that capitalism and the Internet have played a heavy hand on the current state of hipsters?
Hipsterism is an aspect of identity creation, which has taken on a greater significance with the self-publishing capabilities online. Capitalism has found ways of assimilating identity creation as a form of labor it can exploit -- to impress people, we talk about what we think is cool for free online, and thereby have built brand equity for manufacturers.

8. How would you, in your own words, describe a hipster?
It is not a specific look. It's instead a feeling someone gives you -- which says as much about you as them. Sometimes you are feeling inadequate; sometimes they have tried too hard to seem cool, sometimes it is a blend of the two.

9. Why do you think hipsters have become such a cultural phenomenon?
Think it's a development of consumerism that stems from the ability to reify personal identity, that is, to market oneself as a brand. Once that happens our manipulations of our own identity take the same form as the marketing efforts meant to enhance brands, and all of this stuff falls into the category of ersatz authenticity, aka hipsterism.

10. Is there anything else you would like to add?
I've probably said too much already.

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.

Victorian nostalgia (19 July 2009)

The NYT Ideas blog linked to this essay by Paula Marantz Cohen about the lack of modest swimsuits in The Smart Set, and I was reading along, completely buying into it. "Bathing suits: absurd, wrong-headed garments. I continue to be mystified by how people continue to buy and wear them." Yes, I thought. I have often heard these complaints. It seems crazy that bathing suits are so immodest. Why don't we wear dignified bathing costumes like they did in the olden days? "We laugh at the old bathing costumes, but we should be laughing at ourselves. It’s a lot more ridiculous to see her thunder thighs and his man breasts." Yes, there is something shameful about prurient self-display. Let's close up the beaches until common decency returns!

Then I mentioned the article to a friend, and she said patiently that it would be extremely uncomfortable to actually try to swim in one of those Victorian get-ups, and that the reason swimsuits have become more immodest is in part because they are more functional that way. It's not necessarily some crazed conspiracy to humiliate women concocted by the bathing-suit industrial complex. It's quite possible that the article is entirely ironic.

This seemed blatantly obvious suddenly, and I wondered how I couldn't have thought of that immediately. I had fallen under the sway of the peculiar fascination of Victoriana, the same sort of blinding lapse of judgment that must lead people to listen to the Decembrists.

It's easy to fall into the trap of conflating prudishness with proper respect for the mysteries of life, easy to imagine that widespread modesty might lead to a restoration of the link between sexual passion and some kind of holy transcendence like you read about in euphemistically engorged D.H. Lawrence novels. Maybe the bare ankle could again stoke the fire in the loins and heat our elemental urges and forge our link to the divine. Or maybe not. But the body of iconography that we know associate with the Victorian period -- bathing costumes, etc. -- exist to service those longings we may occasionally have for an era in which desire was more difficult to arouse and therefore must have seemed much more precious. Now, of course, an elaborate industry of persuasion and an ever-more infiltrative media apparatus works to keep us in a perpetual state of desiring from which it's hard to garner relief. Victoriana offers a fantasy of escape into an era of less intensive marketing, where desire felt sacred because it was much easier to believe it was generated from deep within oneself.

More on consumer disappointment (29 Dec 2008)

In Shifting Involvements, Albert Hirschman takes a prolonged look at the ways that disappointment is built in to consumerism. Drawing on Tibor Scitovsky's The Joyless Economy, Hirschman argues that what is pleasurable is not merely the use value of the goods and services we buy, but the process of their taking us from dissatisfaction to satisfaction. That move is what we register as pleasure, not the fact of being in the satisfied state itself. If we merely remain satisfied on account of something we've purchased, then we experience no joy. From this point of view, pleasure hinges on our capacity to be dissatisfied.

This may be in part why needs turn out to be such slippery things, in that we often think we want thing until we have it, whereupon we discover that we really want something else. This movement to disappointment may be less a matter of fussiness than a protective move to guard our capacity for pleasure. Hirschman points out that "we never operate in terms of a comprehensive hierarchy of wants established by some psychologist surveying the multifarious pursuits and 'needs' of mankind." In other words, the hierarchy is always in flux, always in the process of being articulated through our life activities -- in consumer society, predominantly through shopping. We discover who we are and what we want in the process of shopping for ourselves. Shopping becomes the end in itself and the acquired goods mere souvenirs of the pleasure process. (This is the "experience economy" that zealous marketers frequently champion.) But at the same time, we have an innate tendency to be disappointed with what we buy, to preserve the capacity to renew our expectations for surprise, for a repeat of the satisfaction-seeking process. When shopping and identity are conflated, as they are in a consumer society, the result is an inherent, structural tendency for us to be continually disappointed in who we think we are, accompanied with an increasing tendency to try to solve that problem through acquiring more stuff. Journeys of self-discovery launched in the mall are almost by definition never-ending. There are good reasons for our identities to be somewhat fluid and open-ended, but anchoring them to consumer goods subjects them to a distorted set of criteria that undermine any sense of stable accomplishment. Our self-concept gets linked instead to the vagaries of the fashion cycle rather than to our own rhythm of personal growth. We become alienated from our own development and start to feel like we harbor multiple personalities, all of them shallow and fickle.

A similar paradox adheres to our efforts to customize consumer goods. These efforts seem to make the product more durable and less prone to dissatisfy in that it is reshaped to express and suit our needs, and in that we remain actively engaged with it, remaking it afresh. But the customization process may in fact reflect a dissatisfaction with the good's durable usefulness -- we want to distract ourselves from its humdrum utility and render it more exciting, though this excitement can only be short-lived, more so than its utility in most cases. Hirschman points out that in many durable items, we long for a "certain amount of 'built-in obsolescence,' " since this makes for a "radical shift in the pleasure-comfort balance." Replacing a good gives pleasure; getting more use out of something we already have merely supplies unrecognized comfort. By customizing something, and tying it to an expression of identity in a particular moment, we can build in an object's obsolescence by ourselves, without having to rely on the thoughtfulness of manufacturers making goods shoddy for us. By foregrounding a good's ephemeral function of articulating an ever-fleeting sense of self, we undermine its lasting quality of being prosaically useful and make it far more likely that we will want to replace it before it's entirely kaputt. By fusing our personal fashion whims to a durable item, we make its depreciation more recognizable; it becomes something that more evidently falls out of date. It becomes something that gets used up rather than being merely useful. Customization, then, is a matter of adapting useful things to disposability.

Guys with cats: "extra special" (7 Oct 2008)

I stopped getting the Sunday New York Times several months ago, mainly because having Sunday Styles in my apartment made me feel gross. The news is depressing enough and it's far too easy to be cynical about the intelligence of Americans without being goaded by inane trend pieces, navel-gazing personal narratives, and painfully earnest and hyperbolic fashion coverage. If I accidentally began reading anything in the section, I would become irrationally angry and start ranting as if someone cut me off in traffic or something. Other times I feel like the wounded Kyle McLaughlin in Blue Velvet and whine desperately, "Why are there things like Sunday Styles in the world?" Complaining about it only makes it worse, raising its profile and playing into its transparent effort to be talked about. The best thing to do would be to pretend it doesn't exist.

Slate's Jack Schafer notes that the section exists to "advance the bogus" but even he couldn't tolerate this especially idiotic Sunday Styles story by Abby Ellin about straight single guys who own cats, an article which includes this priceless data point: "Many women agree that guys with cats are extra special."

(I wish I could believe this article was written ironically, but nothing else that's ever run in Sunday Styles justifies such a view.)

Schafer systematically demolishes the piece in an essay that's reminiscent of an angry rock critic reviewing a piece-of-shit record track by track, spewing venom all over it. He's particularly irritated by the use of the word seems as a crutch (one of my favorite tactics when I feel like making a speculative assertion with scanty support).

How can it be made to "seem" that the number of single, straight, male cat owners is increasing? By presenting the most anecdotal of evidence, which Ellin does. An executive at the Humane Society of New York alleges that "she had seen an increase in the number of single, straight men who are adopting cats." Does the Humane Society of New York really determine the marital status and sexual orientation of cat adopters? If it does, I demand that a picket line be formed around its office now. If it doesn't, I want the executive's finding stricken from the record.

I found it suspicious that several of the anecdotes in the story involved people in the magazine industry, which suggests that what is represented as a citywide trend is most likely just a trend among Abby Ellin's friends.

Of course, Abby Ellin is probably having the last laugh and will most likely have many more articles assigned to her, as this gem is currently the most emailed style story on the NYT website.

Regarding "Channels of Desire" (9 Sept 2008)

A few ideas derived from the Ewen's Channels of Desire, a look at the history of using images to stoke consumerism.

1. The core thesis: "The mass media and the industries of fashion and design, through the production and distribution of imagery, have reconciled widespread vernacular demands for a better life with the general priorities of corporate capitalism." In other words, consumerism becomes the solution to the political threats that might have otherwise arisen from inequality; consumerism deals primarily with images, the goods end up being somewhat secondary to what they are purported to represent -- i.e. the good life.

2. Images can be disseminated widely and cheaply, and technology assures that they are never scarce. Access to such images comes to stand in for actual lived experience of the life represented in the images. Digitization of culture allows more of the world to function as images; in fact, "image" in the Ewens' usage may be reinterpreted to mean "digital culture," which has become as cheap and ubiquitous as images were in earlier decades. We can all possess the symbolic representations of things that prompt satisfying fantasies of the good life, of a richer self with a greater range of reference points through which to express itself. Tallying and cataloguing the images/digital cultural goods we possess becomes a shorthand way of conducting our life. We gather ersatz experiences, and then we struggle to defend these experiences as authentic. The consequence of this may be that we see the presentation of self as image as the essence of life -- life is a project in which we attempt to perfect our user profile.

3. The book hints at the role of consumerism in healing the wounds of hegemonic rationality -- the disenchantment of the world by scientism and industrialism and the cash nexus. The gist is that capitalism tends to make money the measure of all things, eroding the sentimental value of things and traditions. But consumerism works to reenchant the social realm in a manner suitable to capitalism -- reviving magical thinking in a commercial context. (The recent series of posts at 3 Quarks Daily about philosopher Akeel Bilgrami's "Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment" explores the fate of enchantment in Western culture at great length.) To reduce the argument to a platitude, shopping functions as secular religion. What we end up with after our shopping pilgrimages are just souvenirs of our spiritual quest, with little inherent usefulness in and of themselves. Of course, these goods have objective, practical functions, but those functions -- usually a matter of helping us get on with everyday life, or enabling us to have some type of experience through their use -- are being degraded or occluded by the spiritual, identity-fashioning aim. So the depth and breadth of our everyday life and lived experience is suppressed in the very acquisition of the goods meant to facilitate it.

4. The Ewens cite soapmaker Benjamin Babbitt as an innovator in the creation of branding. Babbitt figured out that you sell the soap wrapper, and the soap itself is ultimately incidental. "Babbitt -- and other innovators like him -- wrought massive changes in the daily life of Americans. Taking a staple of home production and turning it into an attractive marketable commodity, he established a basic principle of American marketing -- masking the ordinary in a dazzle of magic." This tends to be the thrust of the Ewens' critique throughout, which seems to unduly champion the drudgery of home production and the dignity of what's "ordinary." They acknowledge that Americans may have embraced brands to escape ordinariness, to spend less time making things at home that bear little stamp of individual creativity. Consumerism thrived on the promise of beauty and ease -- the "substance of style." The trouble is that the pendulum swung too far, or worse, the pendulum metaphor doesn't apply, and we have shifted permanently into a world where passive consumption and perpetual self-branding through goods are the default life experiences for most Westerners.

5. A few 1890s-era quotes from Simon Patton, whom the Ewens describe as an "apostle of industrial consumerism," captures the logic behind why consumerism is basically an addiction to images, not things in themselves:

So cheap are many kinds of pictures that they are largely distributed as means of advertisement. Everywhere the homes of the poorest people are full of beautiful objects, many of which have no cost; and when their taste is improved by contact with these objects, others more suited to the new condition can be obtained at a slight increase in cost.

Consumerism hinges on this question: Is it possible to enjoy the implications of the images without their being activated by acquiring the objects advertised? One of the promises of the internet is to keep our supply of images teeming without our being subjected to the slight increases in cost. If the functions of objects are made irrelevant by the enhanced accessibility and functionality of images, will we be able to do away with material possessions altogether? That probably makes no sense, but I'm thinking of how I no longer have a physical music collection; chances are I won't have a book collection once they are digitized and portable electronic-book readers become more prevalent. At that point, the space I inhabit will have about 90% less objects in it. Will there be a counter-trend that emerges to preserve our physical habitat? Will my apartment come to resemble a museum of self even more, when the objects seem to have even less practical necessity? If I got rid of things I don't really use (but only fantasize about being the sort of person who uses), how much would be left?

The other Patton quote: "The standard of life is determined not so much by what a man has to enjoy, as by the rapidity with which he tires of the pleasure. To have a high standard means to enjoy a pleasure intensely and to tire of it quickly." An odd definition of standard of living, in that it's based on opportunities to shop rather than the usefulness of what is owned. If you can consume something faster, it's better, because then you can move on to the next thing. Something that must be understood slowly is less "intense", and bogs consumers down. This sets up the justification of convenience as a virtue -- convenience increases consumption throughput, which allows for more shopping, which is where the real pleasure lies. But isn't increasing consumption throughput a defensive measure -- a desperate and futile attempt to keep up with new things that is then reconceived as pleasurable? Increased throughput only serves the positive interests of manufacturers. The quote also speaks to the consumerist ideology of novelty as a virtue in its own right, and the pressure that places us under to refuse to return to familiar things. The assertion that novel pleasures are "more intense" seems purely ideological. It seems just as valid to argue that familiar pleasures are deeper because our past experience with them enriches the possibilities in them. Novelty and boredom are the key concepts of consumerism; any effort to beat back consumerism must invalidate boredom and repudiate novelty for its own sake. The arbitrary fashion cycle would have to be a fundamental target. We follow the fashion cycle to keep up with what people around us seem to know; we don't want to fall behind and into irrelevance. But what pleasure is to be had in the cycle itself? It just imputes boredom to a populace and then offers its arbitrary variations as the cure. But people aren't bored; they are worried boring others by being conversant in what's happening now.

Fashionable apathy and the power elite (3 August 2008)

Wright Mills's The Power Elite is pretty dated now, especially the first 200 pages of so, which elucidate the specifics of the nascent 1950s military-industrial complex in mind-numbing detail. But it's worth plodding through all that to get to the thundering denunciations of American complacency that follows, which have lost none of their sting over the years. He laments the loss of a Habermasian public sphere (though the degree to which this ever existed is debatable) and blames a media-sponsored celebrity cult for keeping the public, disintegrated into a mass of alienated individuals capable of thinking only of their own limited self-referential interests, stupified and distracted from the workings of the true "power elite" -- the Ivy League-educated managerial class who come from the established rich families. The media fosters a "psychological illiteracy" that encourages stereotyping over thinking, making it harder for us to perceive the totality of society in its functioning (as Lukacs laments about in History and Class Consciousness). "The man in the mass does not gain a transcending view from these media; instead he gets his experience stereotyped, and then he gets sunk further by that experience." This in turn makes us more vulnerable to media manipulation, since we lack the basis to critique its representations.

The media provide much information and news about what is happening in the world, but they do not often enable the listener or the viewer truly to connect his daily life with these larger realities. They do not connect the information they provide on public issues with the troubles felt by the individual. They do not increase rational insight into tensions, either those in the individual or those of the society which are reflected in the individual. On the contrary, they distract him and obscure his chance to understand himself or his world, by fastening his attention upon artificial frenzies that are resolved within the program framework, usually by violent action or by what is called humor. In short, for the viewer they are not really resolved at all.... There is almost always the general tone of animated distraction, of suspended agitation, but it is going nowhere and it has nowhere to go.

This leaves people in a state of semi-helplessness, incapable of complex thought. "Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, he is accompanied through his life experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue. He has no projects of his own: he fulfills the routines that exist. He does not transcend whatever he is at any moment, because he does not, he cannot, transcend his daily milieux. He is not truly aware of his own daily experience and of its actual standards: he drifts, he fulfills habits, his behavior a result of a planless mixture of the confused standards and the uncriticized expectations that he has taken over from others whom he no longer really knows or trusts, if indeed he ever really did." And since the media is controlled by the elite, its effectiveness enriches them further.

As a consequence of the degraded citizenship, democracy is a hollow illusion, an ideological alibi for the status quo. Voting is a mere expression of nationalism as opposed to a true political choice. And a "conservative mood" overtakes intellectuals who are disillusioned by the failure of liberalism to preserve a thinking public. At the heart of this mood "there is a knowledge of powerlessness without poignancy, and a feeling of pseudo-power based on mere smugness. By its softening of political will, this mood enables men to accept public depravity without any private sense of outrage, and to give up the central goal of western humanism -- the presumptuous control by reason of man's fate." The word smugness serves as a trigger for me, and it makes me want to link this conservative mood with today's hipsters, as per the previous post. The problem with hipsters is not their fashion-following phoniness; it's their smug abdication of responsibility in favor of an egocentric apathy. Hipsters are conservatives posturing as progressives, often professing to be liberals while their practice refutes the claim. Mills's description of the 1950s conservative mood suits hipsterism to a tee:

it is not a snobbery linked with nostalgia, but on the contrary, with what is just one-step-ahead-of-the-very-latest-thing, which is to say that it is a snobbery based not on tradition but on fashion and fad. Those involved are not thinking for a nation, or even about a nation; they are thinking of and for themselves. In self-selected coteries, they confirm one another's mood, which thus becomes snobbishly closed -- and quite out of the main stream of the practice of decision and the reality of power.

(This reminds me of my own indifference to the business world when I was a graduate student, and thought I was well informed on everything important -- you know, semiotic theories of gender and decentered subjectivities in 18th century novels and that sort of thing. My arguments about these subjects with my peers were so vital. Mills saw the conservative mood as facilitating "historical development without benefit of idea." This is the sense, perhaps, in which hipsterism is the dead end of Western civilization. Mills's book is useful for linking hipsters to the larger problem of the meaningless political sphere, which seems to have spawned them. But it doesn't shed much light on how to reinvigorate political involvement, how to make the basic acts of citizenship in a democracy not seem trivial or merely self-referential. Could "youth" culture -- in reality the culture of grown adults who can affect the structures of society in a meaningful way -- form for itself a politically literate, unified, and efficacious sphere of action? Is there anything else to do but resist what is currently dominant, or does any positive action stand only to be co-opted and reassimilated by the forces of conservative "smugness"?

The relation between hipsterism and conservatism-in-effect apathy makes it almost ironic that McCain's campaign is trying to paint Obama as a kind of king of the hipsters. Andrew Sullivan makes the obvious point that this is no substitute for actually crafting policy positions (the Republicans are the dead end of Western Civilization). But this of course makes them the natural allies of hipsters, who also stand for nothing. These attacks are just another feat of projection, as when McCain plays the race card by accusing Obama of playing it.

Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?

Prolific Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written several books over the past decade about consumerism -- which he for some reason prefers to call "the world of consumers" -- hence the verbose title of his most recent book, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? -- in what he has dubbed the "liquid modern era." (He also dislikes the term postmodern, and this is his way of avoiding semantic arguments about what it precisely means.) There's not much suspense about the question the title poses: The answer, as you'd probably guess, is basically no.

It's a not a question you'd ask if you were actually optimistic about it. Bauman, while not as thoroughgoingly pessimistic as such past consumer-society critics as Jean Baudrillard, is still left dispiritedly positing utopian scenarios after laying out his grim analyses of our social situation -- he calls it a "battlefield" in the introduction -- which, in his view, technology is rapidly worsening. The characterological changes brought on by consumerism are accelerating, he argues, turning the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood into the diminished qualities of security, parity and networking.

In Bauman's account -- and it is a familiar, comfortable story to anyone schooled in leftist, Adornoesque social theory -- the liquid modern world's problems start when aspects that traditionally limited our possibilities in the world (religion, geography, class, occupation, family, ethnicity) gradually became less restrictive, thanks mostly to capitalism's modus operandi of creative destruction. Things once regarded as more or less permanent or unmarketable were subsumed by the market, reified, branded, and made subject to neoclassical economic truths about privatization, rational choices, and marginal utility. No longer assigned a specific role in the community from birth, we are alienated, atomized, cut free as an individual, forced to make our place. This has tangible benefits, obviously, in expanding our freedom to act. But it also brought with it the scourges of insecurity and boundless responsibility. (This is Frankfurt school orthodoxy -- not unlike Erich Fromm's and Herbert Marcuse's ideas about freedom, in Escape From Freedom and One-Dimensional Man respectively.) "As Alain Ehrenberg convincingly argues," writes Bauman, who frequently selects choice quotes from other thinkers (one of the nice things about Bauman's book is that it serves as a kind of index to recent theoretical trends), "most common human sufferings tend to grow from the surfeit of possibilities, rather than from the profusion of prohibitions as they used to in the past" -- an insight he may have attributed to any number of behavioral economists as well. Overt coercion in the pre-consumerist world was replaced by the regime of flattering persuasion, which is just as coercive, only we feel like we are in control, volunteering to participate in it (we shop because we want to), making the meaningful choices (between the things supplied by the market to satisfy the needs it has trained us to adopt). "As Pierre Bourdieu had already signaled two decades ago, coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires."

At this point, I'm nodding in agreement, but none of this is new -- this is more or less the case that all left-leaning thinkers have made about consumerism. It seduces us to control us, replaces the ideal freedom of citizens in the public sphere determining a future for society collectively with that of a a bunch of individuals free only to choose among doodads after having their brains filled with bafflegab.

But Bauman turns an interesting corner. He cites philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's notion of society as not a limit on our selfishness, as Freud, for instance, claimed in Civilization and Its Discontents, but as a limit on our boundless ethical responsibility to our fellow humans. "Using the vocabulary of Levinas, we may say that the principal function of society, 'with its institutions, universal forms, and laws,' is to make the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility for the Other both conditional (in selected, duly enumerated, and clearly defined circumstances) and limited (to a select group of 'others,' considerably smaller than the totality of humanity and, most important, narrower and thus more easily manageable)." Society may be not the force that stops the Hobbesan war of all against all, but "an outcome of tempering their endemic and boundless altruism with the 'order of egotism.' " (It's like bizarro Ayn Rand.) That altruism -- that feeling of ethical responsibility to others -- is an impossible, crippling burden. Only by curtailing it can we accomplish anything. But in doing that, we also curtail the spontaneous impulse Levinas believes that we have to trust and help others. And possibly we curtail the source of life's meaning.

The way consumer society allows us to escape from that responsibility -- its innovative method, perhaps -- is to train us to fix it on ourselves. "Responsibility now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself ('You owe this to yourself,' as the outspoken traders in relief from responsibility indefatigably repeat), while 'responsible choices' are, first and last, such moves as serve well the interests and satisfy the desires of the actor and stave off the need to compromise." The celebration in consumer society of individualism and our "right" to convenience mean that we have a duty to free ourselves from having to consider other people's needs -- and the market works to supply us the tools to avoid impinging human contact. It sells us ways to avoid having to deal with other people and the hassle they represent. "The privatized utopias of the cowboys and cowgirls of the consumerist era show vastly expanded 'free space' (free for myself, of course)," Bauman explains, "a kind of empty space of which the liquid-modern consumer, bent on solo performances and solo performances only, never has enough. The space consumers need and are advised on all sides to fight for can be conquered only by evicting other humans -- and particularly the kind of humans who care for others or may need care themselves." (This ties in another subject Bauman has written about frequently: the systematic exclusion from society of the victims of the Holocaust.)

Along with that championing of individuality and training of responsibility on ourselves instead of others comes a newfangled responsibility for shaping and projecting our own identity, which used to be dictated entirely by our circumstances but is now subject (seemingly) to our control. As a consequence, we are now all required to continually fashion our identity and project it in social symbols, which are supplied by the language of consumer goods and brands. In order to keep the consumer economy dynamic, the meaning of these symbols are constantly in the process of redefinition, and we adapt our identities to follow suit, let our identities function as brands for ourselves. What Bauman doesn't mention, but is sort of implied, is that in making identity formation a never-ending process, consumer society sells that process as pleasurable. Actually, it probably is in fact pleasurable -- it makes real life into a kind of daydream in which we can impersonate anyone and fantasize freely and openly, playing pretend games in public. And when you embrace novelty as an end in itself, it becomes a need easily (albeit temporarily) gratified. If you're a dog who likes chasing your tail, you'll never want for entertainment. The point is that pleasure comes not in some final achievement of the right identity, but in the multiplicity of identities always available to us, and the freedom we feel in swapping them out. If we were easily satisfied, it would take a lot to motivate us as workers (we could just sit in the park and watch butterflies rather than work overtime to buy a flat-screen). Not accidentally, our consumerist refusal to be easily pleased, to demand more, is routinely portrayed as a positive trait, a testament to our superior discrimination.

Bauman argues that we all are forced to become pseudo-artists, with our identity as our chief work, a kind of temporary installation in our own bodies. At the same time, any continuity between identities is discarded, leaving us living through a series of discrete moments in which it is possible for us to be anything. Bauman argues,

What follows is that the sole skill I really need to acquire and exercise if flexibility -- the skill of promptly getting rid of useless skills, the ability to quickly forget and to dispose of the past assets that have turned into liabilities, the skill of changing tacks and tracks at short notice and without regret, and of avoiding oaths of life-long loyalty to anything and anybody.

As individuals, we need to embrace capitalism's creative destruction at the personal level, seizing upon a moment's given opportunities with no recourse to past or future inclinations or sentimentalities. The most important aspect of that flexibility is the ability to forget -- to believe that we have always been at war with Eurasia. Skirts have always been knee-length. Crocs have always been stylish.

The institutionalized contempt for continuity encourages us to replace friendships with the network: "relations set by and sustained by network-type connectedness come close to the ideal of a 'pure relationship,' one based on easily dissolvable one-factor ties, with no determined duration, no strings attached, and unburdened by long-term commitments." What this gives individuals is "the comforting (even if ultimately counterfactual) feeling of total and unthreatened control over his or her obligations and loyalties." Of course, if you control obligations, they aren't exactly obligatory -- they are voluntary. That is what conceals from us the larger dimensions of our cultural obligations.

Bauman implicitly likens this situation to the notion of "groups of belonging" and the conditions of exclusion that set up the parameters of the Holocaust. The illusion of control may mask our obligations to play the game. The coercion to be a consumer is experienced generally as freedom (our ideology's accomplishment), but if you resist it, you run the risk of social exclusion -- not on a stateless-person-headed-to-concentration-camp level, but moving in that direction. "All of this may be intuited," Bauman writes, "from the dark premonitions that haunt them at night after a busy shopping day -- or from the warning that goes off when their bank account falls into the red and their unused credit reaches zero." To be without credit takes on multiple meanings -- you become worthless as a human being.

This is a roundabout way of point out that in a society where purchasing power is how we experience freedom, being poor means being very unfree. In other words, poverty really sucks, moreso than it did when society was less open. (Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation explores this simple truth at length.) The poor, and those who are sympathetic to them, or nostalgic for old roles, or repulsed by the identity shuffling were expeced to relish, perhaps "do not view this life as a kind of life that they themselves, given genuine liberty of choice, would wish to practice." But these people obviously need reeducation. "Those who go solely by what they believe they need, and are activated only by the urge to satisfy those needs, are flawed consumers and so also social outcasts." If you aren't worried about keeping in tune with the zeitgeist, you are seen to be expressing some kind of contempt for the socially-agreed-upon way of being happy.

It is often said of such people that they are indifferent if not downright hostile to freedom, or that they have not yet grown up and matured enough to enjoy it. Which implies that their nonparticipation in the style of life dominant ... tends to be explained by either ideologically aroused resentment of freedom or the inability to practice it.

If they only loved freedom a little more, they wouldn't be concerned with how the system is basically rigged to assure that they will never be regarded with dignity in the public sphere, that they will always seem helplessly out of touch. Their fashion backwardness seems to justify their social exclusion, as we are invited to see how they manifest their identity as an expression of their own poor opinion of themselves. "If 'to be free' means to be able to act on one's wishes and pursue the chosen objectives," Bauman notes, "the liquid-modern, consumerist version of the art of life may promise to all, but it delivers it sparingly and selectively."

So what do you do if you don't want to include yourself in the consumerist economy, you want to preserve an ethical code, but you don't want to risk living as a semi-persecuted outcast. Do you "go live in a jelly jar"? Bauman's text doesn't offer much in the way of answers. He urges that we become better educated in the sorts of things I was taught in civics class -- fundamentals about the how politics works and so on -- and that we become citizens instead of consumers. But it seems that in order for that to happen, citizenship will have to assume some of the technique of consumerism -- it will have to be able to generate the personal, individualistic pleasures we have come to expect from consumerism and which we now regard as the guiding purpose of our lives. We need to make the pursuit of happiness an explicitly political matter once again.

The travails of the megawealthy (5 June 2008)

When you read the New York Times Styles Section, you get what's coming to you. I learned this lesson yet again when I encountered this gem of a story. The headline sums it up well: "It’s Not So Easy Being Less Rich." It's about how the supermegawealthy are concerned about becoming merely megawealthy, and it is worth remembering when someone wants to discount Veblenesque approaches to understanding social behavior.

THEIR spouses could leave them when they discover that their net worth has collapsed to eight figures from nine. Friends and business associates could avoid them as they pass their lunchtime tables at Barney’s or the Four Seasons. And these snubs could trickle down to their children.
“They fear their kids won’t get invited to the right birthday parties,” said Michele Kleier, an Upper East Side-based real estate broker. “If they have to give up things that are invisible, they’re O.K. as long as they don’t have give up things visible to the outside world.”
So New York’s very wealthy are addressing their distress in discreet and often awkward ways. They try to move their $165 sessions with personal trainers to a time slot that they know is already taken. They agree to tour multimillion-dollar apartments and then say the spaces don’t match their specifications. They apply for a line of credit before art auctions, supposedly to buy a painting or a sculpture, but use that borrowed money to pay other debts.

Is the conspicuous consumption and invidious comparison animating this article supposed to make us feel better or worse about being among the anonymous middle? And is it endemic to that strata discussed or simply manufactured through selective anecdote for the purposes of the article, which has other ideological fish to fry. After all, promulgating the notion that conspicuous consumption is a pervasive preoccupation makes good business sense for the fashion pages.

"The Hype Cycle" (12 May 2008)

I referenced this n+1 article about the "hype cycle" in the previous post, but it's worth, well, hyping. Mocking the odious New York magazine-style approval matrices, the author compares the fluctuating social capital of cultural goods to asset bubbles, lamenting that media hype "transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value." In other words, we don't judge art by its underlying fundamentals; instead we trade on their momentum. I'm skeptical that those things can be separated. The degree that pop culture is enjoyed privately isn't going to be expressed in the public sphere, where opinions become hype because they become part of one's identity posturing. The private enjoyment can simply be experienced; the direct pleasure of listening to a song need not be mediated to be felt. What does need mediation is the pleasure of being culturally relevant, being part of the zeitgeist or ahead of it.

So how we "use" culture depends a great deal on how we regard it contextually. Without context, there isn't much there to consume -- it's not as though the intrinsic qualities are so deep and sophisticated. That private pleasure goes only so far, and if we were after that private pleasure alone, we'd consume something other than the culture that's mainly relevant because it is contemporary. Rather, with pop culture, we are consuming context in object form; we are choosing to engage our times through an artifact, be part of the cultural conversation. This may be why most people don't mind hype and, in fact, respond positively to it. Hype gives us a reason to consume, an opportunity to get something beyond the things' intrinsic qualities. We can passively consume things that were once required activity: participation, a sense of belonging to something larger, a sense of being excited. Hype sucks primarily when you have a lot of free time to discover things to be excited about on your own -- a luxury for most people who are not pop-culture connoisseurs. For everyone else, the vicarious excitement of hype is welcome -- an efficient solution for not having enough leisure (or imagination) to become excited from scratch, entirely on our own.

The main use value of popular culture -- what makes it popular -- is its ability to signal one's personality in the public sphere. (The n+1 article limits what one might signal through culture to the reputation of connoisseurship, but most people don't seem to care about that. They want to belong, not be singled out as snobs.) What gives popular culture that capacity is its widespread distribution and its malleable substance, and often it's made with that kind of negative capability in mind. It is intentionally indeterminate, or in other words, "shallow." Hype, then, does reinforce the generic, insubstantial qualities of pop culture by expanding the base that can relate to it, creating network effects and magnifying the feelings of participation it conveys and communicating potential it has. A feedback loop is created: the shallower culture is, the more useful it is to us in the ways hype amplifies, and more hype proliferates and highlights cultural superficiality. This cycle tends to abrogate pop culture for those who want to experience it as connoisseurs (the brunt of the n+1 complaint). Hype makes us (happily, for many of us) have to consume culture as zeitgeist; it ceases to be an occasion to express our refined tastes. Instead, it liberates us from having to worry about tastes at all.

Of course, there is still public discussion of culture that is not hype, but it happens on a parallel track, only among parties that have established their bona fides with one another. Often, that means talking to oneself.

Rolling off a cliff (22 August 2007)

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported on the precipitous drop in the value of shares of Heelys, manufacturer of those rolling shoes that were popular a season ago with kids looking to break their necks. (I guess the WSJ is still good for something. My flight to quality and the FT won't be complete until my WSJ subscription runs out.) My first reaction to this was delight; the shoes were a stupid trend, and there's schadenfreude in seeing its inevitable demise. You have to wonder what sort of investor saw a sustainable growth potential in a business that sells novelty shoes to ten-year-olds? Optimistic neophytes, or opportunistic daredevils? Anyway, I started to wonder why I had anything invested myself in the fate of this company, even if it was only emotional investment. Why was I so pleased?

Initially, the failure of such companies as Heelys seems to prove that it's a bad move to base businesses on frivolous fashion, which by extension seems to suggest that fashion itself is a dubious force, something better eradicated, like volatility in the markets. When the Heelys of the world fail, it should theoretically remind everyone not to get too wrapped up in fads, and to look elsewhere for engines of growth -- to technology that breeds efficiency, for example. This is in keeping with my general skepticism regarding retail stocks, which are always dependent on fickle and unpredictable customers spending irrationally in a way I wouldn't otherwise condone.

But if I'm hoping that the failure of fashion-forward companies somehow portends the end of the industry, I really need to consider more carefully this passage from the WSJ article:

Industry analysts said [Heelys'] sales drop stems from a more prosaic cause: An increasing number of youngsters said they would rather wear something else. Amy Braunstein, 14 years old, who was shopping at Dallas's NorthPark Center mall last week, said Heelys were popular among her classmates two years ago. Now, the eighth grader said most children wear Nike Inc.'s Converse shoes, leaving their Heelys at home. "They're old," she said.

If anything, Heelys' failure demonstrates the remorselessness of fashion, and how deeply it has been entrenched even in the mind of preteens. It's influence is far from showing any signs of mitigating; instead its stranglehold on culture grows stronger. Were Heelys able to establish itself and maintain its stature perpetually without having to come up with "new shoe designs, including nonwheeled sneakers and a wheeled boot" -- pointless innovations (nonwheeled shoes sort of defeats the whole company's raison d'etre) -- then foes of fashion would have reason to be pleased. Instead, I'm thoughtlessly celebrating the opposite. This probably means that I actually take more pleasure in trends than I ordinarily admit to myself -- I just happen to enjoy the side of the cycle when trends fade and companies fail rather than when they rise, like a craps player playing the don't-pass line. Foolishly, I think this makes me a contrarian, and I pretend that I'm not really interested in the craps game at all, while I am making private little bets all the while.

Preppy paradox (20 July 2007)

Ordinarily I would have ignored this, but it seemed relevant to points I was trying to get at in the post about sprezzatura. A dubious trend piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day charted the return of the preppy look. This sort of story has a boilerplate feel to it, and you probably know without even having to click through how it reads -- a list of consumer goods that have been marketed heavily recently are rattled off to establish the appearance of a trend, and then some fashion industry flacks are quoted to produce the illusion of substantiation. Let me tell you, if a retailer or an industry analyst confirms an "important" trend , then it must really be happening. This article cites John Murray, co-owner of Murray's Toggery Shop, veteran rap-video director Julien "Little X" Lutz (who proclaims ""Hip-hop is rapping about money and power and women, which is perfect for preps"), and Susanna Salk, the author of A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style.

Anyway, what caught my attention was this paradoxical statement by Salk: "Preppy fashion is so iconic now. There's a nostalgia element to it. It's certainly a privilege to live in a manner that doesn't evolve, doesn't change." Put aside for a moment the fact that this makes no sense on the face of it -- how can something that doesn't change come in and out of fashion? And it's very easy to adopt a wardrobe that doesn't change; wear a uniform -- put on a gray-flannel suit. This requires no particular privilege, except that which supplies the strength of mind to transcend trends, the allure of belonging to the zeitgeist -- the bonuses of being alive in this particular time. Perhaps we fantasize of such transcendence while realizing we don't really want it -- we want to buy a consumer good that just evokes it for us, gives a chance to daydream about long summer months, year after year in Nantucket, without having to live out the tedium and the coruscating snobbery.

But in the sense that preppy fashion offers the opportunity to purchase the illusion of permanence without the rigor that comes with upholding a standard, it makes sense. The statement is true not merely of preppy fashion but of all fashion which often attempts to sell timelessness as a transient, thrilling experience -- the exciting thrill of participation in the present moment and the fleeting sense that this moment is the most important moment and will last forever. Through nostalgia fashion, you get the thrill of participating in something with an ersatz tradition without actually having to do something as boring as adhere to a rigid code. Via well-marketed products -- iconic nostalgia for the now -- you can dupe yourself into believing you can get style without propriety -- you can be like Castiglione's courtiers without actually having talent or ethics.

Sprezzatura and style (16 July 2007)

Seemingly apropos of nothing, the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal had an appreciation of Castiglione's Renaissance era conduct manual The Book of the Courtier. The article has a smattering of biographical detail and some by and large unsubstantiated praise for the man; in short it's the typical warm-bath-of-genius article in which you are supposed to take away cocktail-party-level familiarity with an alleged great mind. (Sample insight: "Castiglione's life, from beginning to end, was in pursuit of the ideal, and peopled with leading names of the time. His portrait, which hangs in the Louvre, was painted by Raphael (a native of Urbino); his tomb was designed by the architect-painter, Guilio Romano, with epitaph composed by the literary light, and future cardinal, Pietro Bembo.") I take some umbrage at this because Castiglione has been a touchstone reference point for me for a while now, and it's sad to see an opportunity to promote his ideas squandered. I find myself evoking him in order to make use of his notion of sprezzatura, the paradoxical ideal of planned nonchalance. It's an pernicious sort of goal to set for yourself and it anticipated the great achievements of contemporary advertisers and their marketing of ersatz authenticity, of selling the idea that you can find yourself by using consumer products.

It's hard to imagine a fashion industry without a version of sprezzatura in operation -- usually it takes the form of "style," the indescribable and ineffable quality that is intended to mystify the periodic changes in fashion that the industry requires. By pointing to models with "timeless style," the awkward question of why what was timeless last season has become suddenly all too dated is avoided, particularly for those who want to play along with the game, who want to believe that now is the only possible time it could be meaningful to be alive. (Hell, for us it is, right?) The humdrum commercial mechanics of the fashion business disappear, and instead we enjoy a parade of consumer society's values in their most attractive packaging -- beautiful people seeming to live the possibility of effortless spontaneity, with looking the part merging with the pleasure presumed from living it, only the pleasure seems accessible much more conveniently when all it seems to require, as we indulge the fashion fantasy, is donning a costume. The problem with this is that if you believe in these ideals despite the evident contradictions in them, and you stake you sense of self on them, you can end up losing your moorings, beguiled by your own pretenses and left with no stable, operational identity. Since spontaneity is artfully feigned, it's no longer of use as a way to confirm sincerity, and every emotional state can seem contrived, including one's own. And one begins to labor to turn one's own spontaneous reactions into managed signals, expressions of "natural style" and inborn refinement.

This dilemma is evident in The Book of the Courtier, and the strange depiction of ideal love that it develops. Since words are suspect in expressing love, a courtier is instructed to use reason to comprehend the "message written in his heart" in order to entrust his eyes to articulate that message without words to a beloved. Through this message, the lover knows that he is, in fact, in love. But still, his eyes must be "carefully governed," so that message is not expressed "to others than the one whom it concerns". He must be able to say to himself what he is forbidden to say to his beloved, and embrace the falsity assured by this situation as preferable to the falsity that might be assumed if he spoke. Exhibiting a "certain shyness," as the Magnifico, one of the book's interlocutors, suggests, becomes a self-consciously contrived gesture, as conscientiously offered as the "gesture of respect" that should accompany it. So the shyness, which first informs a lover of his own feelings of love, becomes, like the lady's timely blush, a pretense. What makes a lover sure of his own sincerity becomes dubious testimony of his sincerity when displayed. Both the ideal lover and the ideal lady then are in this precarious position: they must be able to govern the representation of feelings which if sincere, would be beyond governance, and they must recognize sincerity in acts they know can be contrived.

Perhaps this would not be a problem for that courtier who can "practice in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry". But underlying the whole notion of sprezzatura is the idea that the value of an action is in how it is received rather than any essential quality of the action itself. A courtier's action becomes arbitrary, which leads in The Book of the Courtier to the ludicrous equivalence of disparate practices: from Castiglione's point of view, how one appears on the battlefield and how one appears at a masked ball are subject to the same criteria, criteria which have nothing to do with why one fights, or why one dances. How the courtier appears when in love, too, is evaluated according to criteria that abrogates any actual emotions involved. What emerges is a picture of how the ideal courtier would appear when in love (e.g. "the man who loves a lot, says only a little") that makes the actual feelings of love superfluous. (As another noted belle-lettrist, Howard Jones, once asked, What is love, anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?) Those actual feelings are precisely those awkward sort which the doctrine of sprezzatura intends to suppress, urging instead a grammar of representation whose rules are divorced from those feelings that presumably necessitate the display. The representation of a feeling replaces the feeling itself.

But if the appearance of love is to be managed, and is, at the same time, the means of determining the sincerity of that love; then how is one to ascertain the sincerity of one's own feelings? Because those feelings are arbitrary within the sprezzatura system, the question is apparently moot. It is as insignificant as the reasons why one goes to the masked ball; one goes, perhaps, simply because one's presence is required. One loves simply because one is expected to. In that ideal world where sprezzatura is realized -- in the world pictured in fashion ads and Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs -- men and women interact with each other without needing an understanding of why.

However, when this is compared with what Castiglione seems to expect of love, a great disparity arises. One speaker remarks, "No other satisfaction" equals that of knowing his lady "returned [his] love from her heart and had given . . . her soul". A female salonista argues that a person in love should have his soul "transformed" into his beloved's, "for this is the way of those truly in love". Another count agrees that "the greatest happiness" is to share "a single will" with his beloved's soul -- "the feeling that one is loved himself" is that which most "stirs" the heart. All these dreams of love depend on certainty: one is assured of the other's will, and that assurance provides satisfaction. These hopes are all characterized by the freedom from deceit; in fact, having one's soul "transformed" into another's makes deceit impossible. Such hopes would seem to betray a deep-seated uneasiness with the deception that sprezzatura requires, revealing a wish for a relationship that would be a haven from perpetual contrivances.

But, as Castiglione has one of courtiers explain, the ability to love properly is "one of the most useful and important of the endowments yet attributed to the courtier". The court lady, too, "needs most of all to be knowledgeable about what belongs to discussions on love". Love is considered a learned skill, not a natural predilection of the heart. With no reference point to judge another's sincerity except a code that dictates the propriety of certain appearances, it is mutual love, rather than mutual suspicion, that becomes impossible.