Consumerism vs. self-realization (1 April 2011)

I have been reading Alternatives to Capitalism, a collection of essays edited by Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene. (I can't remember where I got the idea to read it from; possibly because Chris Dillow linked to it in a post.) The collection probably couldn't have been published at a worse time -- in 1989, just as the really existing alternatives to capitalism were collapsing and neoliberals were about to begin citing that collapse as irrefutable proof that there are no real alternatives. But while the discussion of worker-managed factories in Yugoslavia and subcontracting procedures in socialist Hungary are not immediately relevant today, much of the book's more-theoretical material seems as pertinent as ever, dealing with the question of persistent high unemployment and its various ramifications.

Martin Weitzman's essay about "profit-sharing capitalism" discusses profit sharing as a means of redistributing entrepreneurial risk, something that I tend to neglect when I am building my own post-capitalist castles in the air. It's probably fair to say that most workers dislike that sort of risk -- it's essentially the precarity of the freelancer life, having to continually rejustify oneself and one's productivity. Indeed, much of my complaining about social media revolves around how it pushes more and more workers into this condition of having to be entrepreneurial about their livelihood. It's probably an underrated virtue of most jobs, even when they are full of mundanity and unfulfilling tasks, that you don't have to constantly face the prospect of your work going uncompensated on an hour-by-hour basis and you don't have to work on spec. You don't have to invent the work for yourself and convince someone else that it is worth doing. But unfortunately, as recent evolutions in capitalism suggest, this is an inefficient arrangement for capital, and possibly can only be sustained through labor activism, unions, etc. Even then there are problems. Weitzman writes:

Our 'social contract' promises workers a fixed wage independent of the health of their company, while the company chooses the employment level. That stabilizes the money income of whomever is hired, but only at the considerable cost of loading unemployment on low-seniority workers and inflation on everybody -- a socially inferior risk-sharing arrangement that both diminishes and makes more variable the real income of the working class as a whole.

He proposes replacing steady wages with a profit-sharing scheme, which trades a predictable income for full employment,a public good with positive externalities for all of society. I'm not sure that his policy prescription fits contemporary conditions though, which seem to be dissolving firms into smaller units and making more and more employees free agents, who will increasingly have to try to piece together what income they can from various sources; profit sharing seems more likely to take the form of subcontracting from a vast pool of underemployed labor.

And Jon Elster's essay, "Self-Realization in Work and Politics," makes some interesting distinctions with regard to the sorts of activities that lead to "self-realization" -- which he defines as a "state that is essentially a by-product" of other practices but is in fact primary to our experience of the "good life." Market incentives don't necessarily point us to these behaviors, and consumerism often operates on a logic that positively thwarts them. Consumerism presupposes that satisfaction can be purchased, and that we know what we want going into an exchange. But often what we want is this by-product state, the experience of absorption in a task, of doing meaningful work, of surmounting challenges, of losing our self-consciousness. Consumption generally offers convenience, not challenges; opportunities for self-display, not self-forgetting; superficial novelty, not absorption. I don't think consumption becoming a form of production and hipsterism becoming a job function helps mitigate this any; it seems to worsen it. Drawing on Tocqueville, Elster makes the point that "with rapid technical change, the careful attention to detail that characterizes most forms of self-realization is pointless; conversely, pride in craftsmanship may block innovation." Self-realization is not necessarily something that can be made efficient, the way consumerism can be. And what we are incentivized to do economically in capitalism is not necessarily a reflection of what we want or what will be best for us.

"Every Person for Themselves" Economy (18 March 2011)

Justin Fox, who doesn't blog enough anymore, wrote a good post about this Democracy article by Andrei Cherny, about the "Individual Age." That's Cherny's phrase for what used to be called "the new capitalism" and what left-leaning types (like me) tend to describe as "precarity" or "post-Fordist labor conditions." The security that once came from long-term employment with large firms and the safety net supplied jointly by employers and the state (and secured through labor union activism) were discarded with the rise of neoliberalism, which preached deregulation, outsourcing, globalization and total worker flexibility (remember Who Moved My Cheese the 1990s ode to employee servility?). Neoliberal (or post-Fordist or postindustrial) relations of production dispensed with employer-employee loyalty and made most workers free agents, drifting from job to job, perpetually insecure, perpetually having to sell one's usefulness anew to employers always looking for reasons to get rid of you. Fox cites this 1997 Fast Company article, "Free Agent Nation" by Dan Pink, as an early reflection of these changes; Richard Sennett's The Culture of the New Capitalism and The Corrosion of Character are all about these developments as well, and more recently Tina Brown termed it "the gig economy."

Here's how Cherny explains this change:

The differences between the economy of the 19th century and that of the 21st are too many to list, but today, as in Jefferson’s time of independent farmers and shopkeepers, it is individuals, not large conglomerations, that propel the economy. The number of Americans working for themselves is growing rapidly and most Americans no longer work full-time for someone else. Yet it is not just the self-employed or entrepreneurs who are part of this new world. Every worker is grappling with the Individual Age. Lifetime employment with a single company is largely a thing of the past and the dependable health, retirement, and training benefits such a relationship held are fast disappearing. Americans born between 1957 and 1964 held an average of 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44. That trend is accelerating and is much more pronounced among those born in later decades. Untethered from large institutions, bouncing from one job to the next, today each individual is ultimately responsible for guiding their own career and economic future. Today, everyone is an entrepreneur; everyone is their own small business.

The way Cherny tells it, this "trend" is just sort of happening and no one is driving it or can do anything about it; it's just the world historical process playing itself out. This elides the actual concerted effort (ideological, political, economic, etc.) that has gone into making the neoliberal condition a reality, allowing for the needs of capital to dictate the living conditions of more and more people, subsuming more and more of everyday life.

Cherny hopes that government will change policy to support personal entrepreneurhood: "Health-care and retirement benefits should be made more personalized, portable, affordable, and universal." But as Fox points out, the emergence of the entrepreneurial self undermines the sort of solidarity necessary to lobby the government for this change to be implemented and for fairer tax treatment and the like. "To get us laws that reflect the new workplace reality, Free Agent Nation, by its very nature dispersed and allergic to large organizations, needs to develop a unified voice. Can it?" Fox asks. I'm pretty skeptical that it can; the destruction of such solidarity is almost explicitly the purpose of neoliberal reform, as the attack on public-sector unions' bargaining rights suggests. The goal is to get every person thinking and acting for themselves, which makes them most desperate and vulnerable -- oh, wait, I'm sorry, I meant free and flexible.

Pink, in the Fast Company article, paints a picture of precarity as knowledge workers making a savvy career choice to be independent, outside the corporate box and therefore "authentic." Various interviewees in the article gloat about their blissful work lives, like this serial small-time entrepreneur:

"I used to think that what I needed to do was balance my life, keep my personal and professional lives separate," she says. "But I discovered that the real secret is integration. I integrate my work into my life. I don't see my work as separate from my identity." The mask is gone. For this free agent, work is who she is.

As Pink stresses, in the neoliberal world, "work is personal" and there are no boundaries separating work and nonwork. This fits with the tendency for our consumption to increasingly serve a productive function in the economy as "immaterial" or "affective" labor, contributing to marketing innovations and enhancing brands' equity and devising new uses for goods, new consumer wants, new ways to get pleasure from spending. As more of our self-presentation can be captured digitally and tracked and amalgamated, particularly through social media and mobile communications, our identities themselves become productive factories of economic value.

Pink assert this sort of thing makes work inseparable from fun. And maybe in a noncapitalist society the disappearance of work-life separation would mean freedom from alienation, pure harmonious praxis, meaningful and recognized work for one's livelihood. But under capitalism, this lack of boundaries yields limitless insecurity, and it leads us to entrepreneurialize ourselves, see ourselves as little firms and work hard to augment our personal brand (which seems to me synonymous with neoliberal subjectivity). Rather than work becoming fun, fun becomes work, and hipsterism in it current guise is born. Our identity work becomes anxious, calculating, inescapably reflexive, the opposite of spontaneous. We become conscious that every little gesture must ideally be turned to account somehow to help us get ahead and protect our standard of living.

I think the rise of social media -- beyond merely mobilizing immaterial labor -- has had a lot to do with structuring, promulgating, and naturalizing the entrepreneurial subjectivity necessary for neoliberalism to function smoothly. They support the concept ideologically and institutionally where government doesn't, giving us a sense that we are capitalizing on ourselves and compensating for the collectivity and security we've lost. So the personal brand supplants the personality or the lifestyle -- terms that horrified earlier generations of social critics worried about commercialized identity. Now we network and self-promote and see this as the extent and purpose of social life. Of course! How else could it be? Why wouldn't we capitalize on our friend quotient, our "social graph" -- why shouldn't we measure ourselves in terms of what we can sell about ourselves? That's now how we discover what is "authentic" about us. It seems that we are approaching a point that only what we can sell or hype about ourselves seems real to ourselves -- only what is retweeted or liked on Facebook speaks to who we really are.

Useless Labor and Production of the Self (18 Feb 2011)

Why won't hipsterism ever go away? Consider that technology (facilitated by capitalism's emphasis on efficiency; i.e., consider the assembly line a technology as well as the internet) is stripping people of what has been traditionally defined as "useful" or "legitimate" or "meaningful" work, and thus stripping meaning from their lives. "Nothing productive left to do since the robots came; better make my consumption more flamboyant and self-announcing!"

Ryan Avent, paraphrasing a point made by Steve Waldman in a great post on Tyler Cowen's recent book The Great Stagnation, writes:

The big innovations are all massively labour-saving. Humanity has gotten richer because new technologies have enabled people to wring ever more out of a given level of labour. And so through this long era of rapid technological change, people are constantly being thrown out of work and asked to find something useful to do. Throughout the 20th century, government has been there to provide that something. Governments at all levels have grown, in both absolute terms and as a share of the economy. So, too, has employment in government-like fields like health care and education. Maybe, just maybe, the growth of these fields isn't a drag on output. Maybe those fields have grown to absorb the increasing mass of more or less useless labour in "gainful" employment, and to provide those workers with an income—a share of the surplus generated by the productive sector that they can use to live off and perpetuate the consumption portion of the economy.

One might object that no labor is in fact "useless" if someone is willing to pay for it. If that is so, then we will naturally begin to increasingly locate our self-worth in net worth, since social recognition is not conferred by the quality of our social contribution in these useless fields (though the examples given, heath care and education, are not particularly useless, just somewhat immaterial). But if the "useless" work -- and I am thinking more of designy-ness, creative-class hucksterism, culture industry, etc., than care work -- must be subsidized via the government through a redistribution regime, theoretically something that might look like a negative income tax (Guy Sorman recently defended the idea in City Journal here), then what we make (money or stuff) can't testify to our personal value either. We're doing useless things and collecting the dole like the rest of our peers, so what makes us stand out?

Hence the field of consumption becomes the field of distinction and social recognition as well, and consuming becomes a sort of semiotic labor that absorbs more and more of our natural inclination to do something regarded as socially useful. (And Shop Class as Soulcraft-style retro crafts like carpentry and gardening and Etsy-ism start to register as consumerist hobbies, not "real" production.) Social media supplies the factory and distribution center for this sort of work, as well as the scoreboard in the form of data about just how many people are paying attention to you. We produce content and links to try to "connect" to others, that is, have them regard us as socially necessary the way, say, in the 19th century the village blacksmith was vitally necessary when the horse you were traveling on pulled up lame. (Okay, that was a somewhat far-flung, Downton Abbey-inspired example.) The point is we want to feel useful, and there are fewer opportunities for that in the sphere of production. So consumption becomes production, and the main way that happens is to make what we consume more salient and more socially significant, to have it inflect an ever-shifting language of status signifiers.

This whole set-up, in turn, fuels the view that narcissism and hipsterism are increasing society-wide, since self-production in the mode of marketing copy (developing the personal brand) is more and more what people do, if not for a living, then simply to appear, to be socially relevant.

Drug Stores Selling Groceries, Lifestyles (15 Nov 2010)

I haven't yet figured out how to synthesize Rob Walker's column about the drug-store chain Walgreens starting to sell fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods neglected by traditional grocers and produce sellers and my somewhat mind-blowing experience at the brand-new Duane Reade (a NYC drug-store chain) in the hipster haven of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Neighborhood activists have encouraged a boycott (on Facebook at least) of this particular Duane Reade location because it apparently represents the wrong sort of gentrification and is uncooling the area with its non-mom-and-pop-ness. It sits across from another local pharmacy that has served the neighborhood since before it was colonized by 20-somethings and is therefore acceptably authentic.

To counter the bad vibes, Duane Reade apparently did some market research and concluded the way to win over locals was to hide the pharmacy in a remote corner and stock the store with a beer counter where one can have growlers filled; a huge walk-in beverage cooler that features, as it says above the entrance, "retro brands"; haute niche brands in both the food and makeup departments -- Ronnybrook Farms, Skyr Icelandic yogurt, Demeter fragrances (including Paperback, Dirt and Riding Crop) -- in the immense and gleaming K-mart-size basement-retail floor with luxuriously wide aisles. We can't give you mom-and-pop authenticity, the store seemed to be saying, but we can collect more of your lifestyle accouterments in one store than you ever dreamed was possible. People were audibly cooing and gasping in delighted surprise as they wandered around and saw just how much Duane Reade was willing to pander to them.

It's at this point that I want to draw some righteous parallel between poor neighborhoods and crypto-bohemian ones, between the food desert on the one hand and the desert of the real on the other. Whereas the Williamsburgers apparently want to see their warped integrity reflected in their neighborhood retailers, the people in food deserts see only society's general intention to ignore them until they disappear. The oversaturation of symbols and the esoteric plane on which the lifestyle war is being fought in the one neighborhood reflects the dearth of social resources in the other, the misplaced energies of a social order seeking profit opportunities and thus reinforcing hyperindividualism among the privileged.

"Hipster on food stamps" (2 Nov 2010)

I haven't posted for a while, so I thought something with an SEO-friendly title would be a good idea. And I thought this was a pretty interesting essay by the Jacobin's Peter Frase, about misguided hatred for the "hipster on food stamps" discussed in this Salon piece from March. He points out how that phraseology invites contempt, because it trades on the idea that anyone who is arty and "creative" obviously has cultural capital and other ideological resources that should prevent him from being poor. Therefore the impoverished hipster must simply be a slacker (to reference a 90s-era proto-hipster archetype) who is voluntarily destitute, slumming it for hipster cred, thereby abusing a system designed to help the deserving poor, i.e. those social disadvantaged folks who, as Neil Young put it, "never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool".

Frase thinks working-class people who were enraged by "hipsters on food stamps" should stop scapegoating them and start, like Duke in Repo Man, blaming society. Frase writes:

People see others whom they perceive to have lives that are easier, cooler or more fun than theirs, and instead of questioning the society that gave them their lot, they demand conformity and misery out of others. But why? ... Even if creative and enjoyable lives are only accessible to the privileged, that’s not a damning fact about them so much as it is an indictment of a society that has so much wealth and yet only allows a select few to take advantage of it, while others are forced to waste their lives chained to their useless jobs and bloated mortgages.

The working-class Joe's hatred for the hipster, Frase argues, stems from an ideology that perverts the work ethic and regards art-making as worthless and working-class drudgery as a heroic embrace of duty or something. Maybe so. The working class suspicion toward the would-be bohemian fringe certainly has a long history. For example, check out the end of this clip from the 1968 film Psych Out, where the hippies are mocked and menaced by Reagan Democrat types. And as Mark Greif of n+1 reminds us in this essay, the 2000s vintage hipster began by appropriating motifs from poor-white culture. "Let me recall a string of keywords: trucker hats; undershirts called 'wifebeaters,' worn alone; the aesthetic of basement rec-room pornography, flash-lit Polaroids, and fake-wood paneling; Pabst Blue Ribbon; 'porno' or 'pedophile' mustaches; aviator glasses; Americana T-shirts from church socials and pig roasts; tube socks; the late albums of Johnny Cash; tattoos." No wonder there's some skepticism toward the "hipster on food stamps," who can be understood as merely taking this appropriational logic to its endpoint.

Obviously, those thefts belittle and caricature an entire social group's lived experience, ironizing it, cutting away whatever integrity members of that group might feel about what they do from beneath their feet. Not only do hipsters seem to be playing at being poor (which may or may not be true) but they add insult to injury by seeming to make fun of working class culture, treating it like a costume. At play in such appropriations is the kind of capital that allows various folk practices (for lack of a better term) to become suddenly recognized as creative or hip when a non-native adopts them and exports them out of the ignored niche and into "society" -- the realm recognized by the media. The culture is then understood as a fashion choice, not the product of social realities.

What that process does is make "creativity" something that by definition is not accessible to the working class. The appropriators are lauded as "creative" (that is, they seize upon the symbolic usefulness of deracinated practices and bring that meaning value to a broader public), not the poor whites, who are treated as though they are some anthropological artifact, as though they fundamentally lack the ability to be reflexive about what they do. They are, as workers always are, a resource to be exploited. As a result of that, hipsters and the working class are mutually exclusive; by definition, you can't belong to both sets. Starving artists are not proles. The very ability to be recognized as "creative" already sets one apart and above. Rich or poor, hipsters everywhere are a sign of social expropriation, of the semiotic value of denying full humanity to certain social groups.

Frase wants to resolve the opposition between artists and proles by positing a sort of post-work future beyond the alienation of wages, where all will receive a social wage: "Against the invidious politics of the work ethic, it's time to argue that some things should be granted to everyone, simply by virtue of their humanity. Even hipsters."

Interestingly, he doesn't take this argument to the next level: free from having to do work that is necessary merely for capital's valorization, workers are liberated to pursue meaningful, socially necessary work, which all will appreciate and understand as a kind of social art. In such conditions, with no basis for connoisseurial superiority in how one lives and works (which would become synonymous), hipsters would necessarily cease to exist.

(A better title for this post, I think, would be "Artists only.")

Authenticity Crisis and the Dream of Escaping Irony (23 Sept 2010)

A section of Andrew Potter's mostly compelling new book The Authenticity Hoax deals with Soviet kitsch and mentions a park in Hungary that's now home to Soviet-era monuments and statues. Hungarian authorities, anxious that the park would be misinterpreted as a cynical move to cater to what Potter calls oppression tourists, have given it this motto: "no irony, memento."

That strikes me as a good motto for everyone laboring under the burden of authenticity, which seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid striking an ironic attitude about oneself. It's clear in the peculiar note of 2000s hipsterism, that mawkish nostalgia for juvenilia that passes for a "new earnestness," the evocation of the comforts of familiar things from the developmental period that predates cool -- the stuff people are into before puberty, before tastes matter to our sense of self. We want to build a self in the present that honors and remembers that pure self, before we had to try to be cool.

Potter, who previously co-authored The Rebel Sell, about anti-conformity marketing, argues that authenticity has supplanted cool as the au courant advertising strategy -- which, because he sees advertisers as following the proclivities of the consumer public rather than shaping them, means that authenticity is an idiotic fetish that middle class people have somehow managed to get stuck on in their quest for status. "Cool fizzled out when it was exposed as just another consumerist status hierarchy.... The trick now is to subtly demonstrate that while you may have a job, a family, and a house full of stuff, you are not spiritually connected to any of it. What matters now is not just buying things, it is taking time for you, to create a life that is focused on your unique needs and that reflects your particular taste and sensibility."

I agree with that analysis, but I think it's not quite fair to blame consumers for falling into authenticity traps, as Potter does when he declares "we should not blame those who are selling the authentic, but rather those who are buying." At that point the business journalist in him seems to get the better of him, as he ignores his own arguments about capitalism's role in trigger an authenticity crisis. Potter, a philosophy Ph.D who writes for Maclean's, a sort of Canadian Time magazine, does a good job tracing the history of the idea of authenticity, through Hobbes and Rousseau and Hegel and Benjamin (though it was a tease to use the phrase "jargon of authenticity" without citing Adorno), but that metaphysical spadework is dispensed with once we reach contemporary times, and individuals are expected to be able to transcend the social conditions into which they were born and reject myths of authenticity out of a common sense appraisal of the benefits of capitalism and liberal democracy. One of Potter's primary concerns is with the ways the fascination with authenticity is currently taking an aggressively atavistic form, with people yearning to roll back the Enlightenment and market capitalism and get in touch with pure nature. I don't think authenticity automatically implies a look back to a phony lost golden age (though it often does). Sometimes it is constructed as agreat leap forward; sometimes it is infused with technophilia, as when Mark Zuckerberg claims that people with integrity (i.e. authentic modern persons) share everything on Facebook to prove they have nothing to hide.

And Potter sometimes seems to border on adopting the right-wing narrative that regards eco-minded consumers and lifestyle connoisseurs as some sort of liberal fascists. But by and large his tone is shaped by an apparent desire to be accessible to general readers, which makes it reasonable and conversational. He gets into some issues in metaphysics without ever becoming obtuse or recondite (i.e., he wisely leaves Heidegger outside his bailiwick here).

Potter is quick to say alienated labor is simply "the way it is" -- you know, work sucks, get over it -- which strikes me as hasty. I don't quite understand his claim that alienation "does not mean that there is a problem and that something ought to be done about it," though I suspect it has something to do with his implicit rejection the idea of human species being (i.e. he implies that having meaningful work to do is not necessarily the goal/purpose of human life) and his advocation of tolerating a rigid separation of the private and public self -- which I am totally on board with. More on that below.

Anyway, blaming consumers for allowing authenticity to become a marketing tool holds them unfairly responsible for the ontological insecurity brought on by modernity (to put it in Anthony Giddens's terms). That insecurity, in my view, brings on the crisis of authenticity, which consumerism has attempted to ameliorate ever since. Marketing cool is one of many strategies, one that was especially suitable to a fragmenting media market that allowed each of us to regard ourselves as our own niche. Marketing environmental concern -- a point Potter is especially strong on -- seems to be the ascendant strategy currently.

But the goal of selling a claim to lost authenticity is as old as the forces that first broke up traditional ways of life and melted everything solid into air, to borrow Marx's phrase (from a passage Potter also cites). The first anti-irony wave was perhaps the cult of sensibility in the late-18th century, which was a response to the rising tide of commercialism and "interestedness" in English culture as capitalism began to reshape subjectivity and inculcate rational calculation as a socially tolerated morality. Hence all the literary fad novels full of weeping men and feeling heroines -- A Sentimental Journey, The Man of Feeling, the works of Fanny Burney and Frances Sheridan and countless other forgotten late 18th century writers. The characters are obsessed, just like we are, with displaying sincere emotions without letting the fact of the display and the self-consciousness of it invalidate the gesture -- and with outdoing the displays of others on the scale of "conspicuous authenticity" that Potter derides.

In other words, the need to prove authenticity and the capacity to "really" feel things is not a new status hierarchy, but one that emerges with capitalism and consumerism (which was born in the late-18th century). It undergirds the class distinctions that come into play as aristocratic titles and such get washed away. It always serves along side of the conspicuous consumption that Veblen famously described to establish class boundaries. It's been there all the time, helping differentiate those who consume vulgarly from those who consume tastefully -- or genuinely, authentically, organically, etc. And since authenticity has no metaphysical basis -- there's no intrinsic "real self" to display; it's defined negatively, as Potter notes; it's always contingent, as Rorty argued among many, many others -- the grounds of authenticity can always be shifting in order to freshly reinscribe the hierarchy. Fashions can change as class markers get appropriated without posing an existential threat. The problem is that privilege gets laundered as authenticity and gets to pass without being questioned. It becomes authentic to be inegalitarian.

The "authenticity hoax" is precisely the Romantic idea that we have a true self to which we must display our faithfulness. We think our integrity is at stake in consumerism when really what we are doing is attenuating the status system, replenishing the "code". We think we are recalling something -- a memento of the real self -- that isn't there at all; we blind ourselves to the truth of irony, an inescapable and paradoxical self-awareness that our self is a construct, a work in progress, an open-ended (and mortal) set of possibilities rather than a timeless essence. As Potter puts in in his introduction, "we need ... an individualism that makes its peace with the modern world while allowing for a meaningful life free of nostalgia, reactionary politics, or status seeking."

That sounds pretty utopian, but it's also what Rorty seems to be after in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. He argues that, since there is no true self, we are burdened with a crushing anxiety of influence -- a sense that we are creating ourselves out of someone else's language and merely establishing our non-existence as a unique being. Each person has a "need to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own." That is to say, we need to create "authenticity" out of rhetoric, a unique personal vocabulary and point of view, through creative restatements of what has already be said, of what already simply exists. We can't be free of contingency, but must seek freedom through it. And we cannot mistake our own definition of authenticity as being the true, universal one -- we must keep it private while adhering to an ideal of cosmopolitanism in the public sphere. One needs to be an ironist, in Rorty's terms -- one must accept that our descriptive language is open to influence and is not permanent or true. So basically, when we are setting up our Hungarian statue park of the self, we should flip the motto, and make it "Irony, no mementos."

You can't ever complete the quest for the authentic self, but you can't really ever get it wrong either. You don't have to borrow someone else's notion of the authentic itself. But the idea of authenticity as it's deployed by persuasion professionals (who strive to amplify the feelings of ontological insecurity, since our feeling insecure gets us to buy goods), tends to militate against that idea obviously, positing instead the notion that we have an inner truth that we are in danger of betraying. The sustaining consumerist myth is that authenticity is a matter of manifesting individual novelty and nonconformity rather than a private mode of assimilating inevitable influences. Consumerism perverts romanticism by adopting its critique of modernity and using it to co-opt the quest for authenticity, generating a cultural environment in which most efforts at self-fashioning intensify the feeling of insecurity and phoniness. Potter notes that "selling authenticity is another way of making it self-conscious, which is again, self-defeating."

Creativity, even as it pertains to self-creation, appears as a strict matter of consumption -- not as something attached to a broader sense of practice. So all our efforts can tend to feel like poses, stabs at fashionability, attempts to crack the consumerist code and reap the social benefits. That's in part because the search for self can't take place in private anymore, as Rorty seems to hope. It is now situated in social media, wherein the various gestures and experiments we make searching for ourselves get redeployed automatically as marketing, as signifiers of what is trending.

So I think the specific way to resist the evils of commodified authenticity is to police the public-private boundary more carefully. Rorty writes that we have to "overcome authority without claiming authority" -- to slightly shift that, I think that means we have to find ways to validate our self-making project that don't rely ultimately on commercialized modes of validation, which appear to have transpersonal authority. And we can't broadcast our identity, mediatize it, because that amounts to the same thing.

A defense of foodie-ism (21 Sept 2010)

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

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

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

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

Worker = Hipster (15 July 2010)

Following up on the blogospheric/op-ed page discussion about job creation in America and the need for more "good" manufacturing jobs, Ryan Avent analyzes the dichotomy between manufacturing and services in this post, well worth reading in its entirety. Echoing this Matt Yglesias post, he basically claims that the distinction is irrelevant (arbitrary is the word Yglesias uses), arguing that...

economic activity isn’t about satisfying the demand for objects; it’s about satisfying demand, period, and people demand many things that have little to do with assembly lines and smokestacks — haircuts, mixed drinks, financial advice, dentistry, and so on.

Yglesias, likewise, suggests that all work could conceivably be seen as manufacturing:

The important thing is to not get too caught up in the words “making” and “things.” A farmer makes plants. A cook makes meals. A chef makes recipes. A restaurant investor makes business plans. A marketing specialist makes brand loyalty. A salesman makes sales. A personal trainer makes muscle mass.

Incidentally, this is why critics of capitalism sometimes complain about reification -- because capitalism encourages us not to be too hung up about the concept of the "thing" and "thing-ification." At the level of ideology we are expected to regard our social practices as a constant process of production of alienated things that can be separated from the context of their origin and exchanged, and to see this is simply natural, inevitable. What gets called a "good" and what gets called a "service" is always in flux, varying according to the amount of reification required by economic conditions.

But the point Avent and Yglesias seem to want to make is that it's more or less nonsense to argue, as Andy Grove does here, that the U.S. needs to recommit to manufacturing. We're always already "manufacturing," in some broad sense of the word, as long as people are getting paid to do something. The critical necessity, they suggest, is to be able to make goods and services cheaper, so more consumers will demand them. "As we get better at making things, more people can shift into the making of expensive luxury items and then those items become non-luxuries," Yglesias writes, and hence more people can desire and buy them. (He assumes a never-ending demand for "luxuries"; that supply creates its own demand -- Say's Law, which wishes away the problem of effective demand.)

It's important to think about what "getting better at making things" means exactly. Avent asserts that "economic growth ... is about figuring out how to do more with less," that is, improving productivity. Sometimes, technical innovation accomplishes that task. However, the quickest way to improve productivity is to fire people and make fewer workers do the work -- that's what the discipline of "management" and its type of innovation are all about. Hence Avent concedes that "economic growth is often about labor-saving innovation" -- an insight Marx emphasizes in one of the more cryptic portions of Capital, when he starts in on the "composition of capital."

The gist is that the amount of labor that capital needs to absorb in the process of "valorizing" itself -- turning a profit -- varies depending on the economic sector and on conditions, including levels of innovation and productivity. Marx regards productivity improvements at the expense of wage-paying jobs as a fundamental contradiction in capitalism. Value, in his view, stems from human labor, not productivity improvements like machines or management strategies, so when capital seeks to get more work done with less labor, they reduce the human input that makes the output have value. Such productivity enhancements may increase output but over the long term they also devalue that output, making it sell cheaper. As George Caffentzis explains Marx's logic (pdf):

Machines’ weakness – the fact that they cannot create value – has enormous consequences for the whole capitalist system. Industries that employ a large amount of machinery and a relatively small amount of labor cannot create within their production process the surplus value necessary to constitute an average rate of profit for the inconstant capital (machinery, for the most part) and variable capital (wages).

Profits then shift to the sectors with more human input. As labor intensive industry moves to places where labor is cheap, the U.S. faces the dilemma of how to keep people employed when much of its industry has become reliant on constant capital (machines) rather than variable capital (humans). It has moved away from traditional manufacturing, meaning more of America's workforce must shift into making other things -- including ideas and services. This would seem to require retraining. Avent argues that "what is really important is the level, supply, and transferability of skills. And it is here that we seem to have run into problems. We’re not producing enough skilled workers to keep up with the demand for skills, and we’re producing too many unskilled workers. Many of today’s jobs require a great deal of specialized knowledge, which takes a long time to acquire." That line of thinking often leads to a concern with improving education so we produce more engineers and computer programmers and the like.

But Avent also makes the more compelling claim that developing human capital is a primarily a matter of guaranteeing a certain level of "human input to economic activity, which, like it or not, we need to maintain." In that sense, the skills themselves are arbitrary as long as there are socially necessary (or socially demanded) production processes that make use of them, whatever they are. Maybe retraining isn't as necessary as a collective reconceiving of what can be considered a skill. Could it be possible that we've reached a point at which the requisite skills don't follow from specific needs, but instead skills easily acquired in a leisure-oriented society drive the creation of leisure-oriented labor processes that then invent social demand? Work and leisure would thereby become harder to differentiate, along with production and consumption. (This fits Baudrillard's assessment of the consumer society, as well as the "immaterial labor" thesis popularized by Hardt and Negri.) The nature of compensation also changes as wages start to take the form of fame, attention, recognition, credibility, autonomy, free time (since necessities in these societies come cheaply or are included -- in theory, anyway -- in the standard social safety net).

Increases in the standard of living may thereby have the paradoxical effect of turning "living" itself into a ceaseless work process. The more leisure eliminates work in the traditional sense, the more it becomes work itself in the immaterial sense. By making traditional types of skills irrelevant, productivity innovations are making us reconceive our leisure time activities as a skill set.

Another way of looking at structural shifts in the economy -- at the changes in the things we manufacture -- is that capitalists, in order to find profitable ways to employ the workforce in the U.S. (that is, to preserve the "human input"; to alter the "organic composition of capital"), have had to increasingly turn taken-for-granted practices and customs and beliefs of everyday life into "services" -- that is, into products. Reification has had to be intensified. With basic needs sated by goods made cheaply abroad or with minimal labor input, new needs have to be systematically invented. That means things people were comfortable with have to be turned into problems for them -- they need new desires and new anxieties. Thus life becomes a lifestyle that is sold to us and which grants us our identity, now an ongoing construction project.

The nature of the "skills" being reproduced in U.S., the ones that we can still incorporate into production, are oriented more and more toward lifestyle making. The sector of "productive jobs" in the U.S. seems to be in those areas sometimes decried as inessential if not corrosive to the human spirit -- cultural meanings, identity tokens, marketing, etc. Given the proclivities of our workforce, the U.S.'s comparative advantage is in manufacturing desires and refining them in the realm of language and feeling, as opposed to making things. These jobs can seem frail and frivolous, the work not socially necessary and therefore not psychically rewarding in the same way. It commercializes the process of making one's social world, emptying it of trust and the feeling of authenticity. The approval we seek to stabilize our sense of self is suddenly explicitly bound up in public, commercial enterprise.

Correspondingly, production is more and more a matter of cultural reproduction -- making selves in lifestyles, enhancing identity-oriented pursuits. As a result, we come to see more of our identity-shaping activities as work -- they are subsumed under capital. We can't help but regard our self-fashioning in capitalistic terms, as building our personal brand. So, on our current path, more and more U.S. workers are likely to be turned into knowledge workers, meme generators, hype merchants, identity mongers -- making "cool" while transforming their social life into a stream of branded idea-products. Soon, if that trend continues, worker = hipster.

Surreptitious Selling Out (9 July 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hipster Hipster Hipster (16 March 2010)

Carles (of all people) links to this Village Voice piece by Foster Kamer about how the word hipster can drive internet traffic. He cites this egregious example from Salon, titled "Hipsters on Food Stamps." There's an interesting angle to the story of young people using government money for food, but making it sound as if they are trying to be hip by doing it is patronizing and counterproductive. It's backlash bait, and young people (who suffer disproportionately in recessions) don't deserve that. The article, by Jennifer Bleyer, doesn't even push that angle, but the headline writers have to attract hits, and readers apparently want to read stories about how hipsters are lame.

As Kamer suggests, if the term hipster has any sort of meaning beyond "young-seeming person," then it doesn't seem to apply to the people in the article. His description of the word's history seems pretty accurate:

The truth is that "hipster" - which once only mostly signified only a superficial engagement of certain consumer habits, like tight jeans, Pitchfork-approved bands, and maybe an enclave in whatever part of your town is being gentrified by the moneyed children of baby boomers - has been used so much, it's now just an amorphous term for "young person doing interesting young person things, maybe even some of which could be considered 'cool' or groundbreaking in some way." In the same way we're all "emos" because we're all "emotional beings" who all listen to "emotional music," because most music is inherently emotional. Maybe now that the word has peaked, maybe if we say it enough, maybe if we just read better writing (or write better for our readers), it'll go away. But probably not.

But hipster has become SEO gold, and as such, as meaningless as "hot" or "sexy" or any other marketing word that fires an emotional trigger by evoking a mood rather than something concrete and definable. The term probably thrives at this point because it seems to be something that people feel empowered to voice their opinion about, in a two-minute-hate sort of way. No special insight is required, and nearly everyone believes they have expertise on fashion and consumption -- which makes hipsterism an ideal hot button issue. All you have to do is experience a moment of alienation or exclusion or noncomprehension at the sight of somebody wearing or doing something that seems designed to be noticed. Then you are an expert on hipsters, and can start complaining about how they have ruined everything. Hipster is a reaction, not a person.

A Historical Note on the Hipster (12 Jan 2010)

Five or six years ago a commenter suggested I read Hal Niedzviecki, a Canadian journalist who writes about pop culture and consumerism. I went ahead and ordered his 2000 book We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture and when it arrived, I promptly filed it into the nether regions of my bookshelves and forgot all about it. Yesterday, in the midst of a sweep for a bag of books I was putting together to take to the Goodwill store, I came across it again and started reading it.

I don't agree with everything in his argument -- he dismisses the Adornoesque view of popular culture and tends to champion cultural consumerism as an integral, inevitable mode of identity production -- and much of it seems to have been rendered obsolete by the emergence of Web 2.0 and social networking and the like. (He has to explain what an MP3 is and spends a chapter explaining the concept that listening to one Girl Talk song conveys much more thoroughly.)

What is interesting though is who he means by "we": a generational cohort he sees as obliged to define their identities solely in terms of pop culture: he calls this "lifestyle culture" and he seems to regard it as inescapable. "To negate pop culture is to negate the very foundation of our lives -- a foundation that is no longer found in religious instruction, in the moral precepts of the state, in the bosom of the family, but in the frantic embrace of a pop emancipation we crave despite, and because of, who we are." (No wonder he hates Adorno -- he rejects and argues for the "negation" of the very basis of identity as Niedzviecki is willing to conceive it.) Since we define ourselves in terms of our tastes and our familiarity with pop culture, we can't admit that it is trivial. Instead we inflate its importance even more as we prolong our adolescence and nostalgize over Saturday morning cartoons.

"Lifestyle culture," he claims, "is our last, desperate, pervasive attempt to rebel against those who seek to reduce us to cogs in the machine." If that was the point of lifestyle culture, it has failed spectacularly; our everyday lives are more integrated with the machine than ever; social networks are harvesting and reselling the details of our cultural cry of self, conveniently translated already by our volunteer labor into terms of brands and trademarks already on the market. (After all, Facebook's founder has declared the end of privacy. Everything we do is fair game for corporate exploitation.) We continually need to assert our own coolness, and our efforts fuel the evolution of new cool signifiers. We work the lifestyle treadmill.

It's shocking that this seemed a new phenomenon in 2000. By 2010, that cohort had become generally known as "hipsters," and everyone was coming around to agreeing that their moment had passed. Not because anything they did has gone definitively out of fashion, but because they truly have become a "we" -- the mode of identity-fashioning through pop culture has become too ordinary a thing to demand a special label. People who behave like hipsters did back then are just normal now.

But when Niedzviecki was writing, there was still such as a thing as a consumer "underground" in which devotion to pop obscurities was expressed in hand-mimeographed fanzines and home-taped mix cassettes and other arduous analog means. That culture was just beginning to die its digital death, and outlines of hipsterism -- the zine mentality without the trouble of zines, the proud consumerism without the effort of digging up trivia and the sacrifice of marginalizing oneself -- was just beginning to become recognizable. Hipsterism is born when the cultural underground dies. It stems from the "crisis in authenticity" -- which is to say, it emerges when authenticity becomes a commodity. The mainstream expands and flattens out, lulls us with promises of mass participation: The internet was basically a build-out of the mainstream, and a way for it to incorporate all the stuff that once was considered outre or unmarketable.

Though often prescient about the incipient dilemmas of consumerist identity, Niedzviecki at times seems blind to how the proto-hipsterism he celebrates ("This process -- in which passive consumers become semi-active hobbyists and then, finally, full-blown creators -- challenges the gatekeepers of culture by asserting the power of the everyperson to be hos or her own critic and creator") would metastasize. He is hopeful about what would become the definitive hipster strategy, what he calls "noncompliant compliance" -- "intelligent, meaningful creative actions that nevertheless acknowledge the primacy of pop culture." Without an underground, there is no other choice, he argues. Maybe he's right about that, but that still sounds like a Baudrillardian fatal strategy to me. I see no upside to the "collapse of the underground" -- what the Frankfurt schoolers talk about as the negation of negation.

I wish I had Niedzviecki's optimism. But he is able to sustain it because he hadn't anticipated how mainstream media companies and culture industries would be able to adapt to the long-tailing and nichefication of audiences, how our identity seeking becomes free immaterial labor for corporations -- no matter how small-scale or insular it may seem. Piracy and peer-to-peer sharing has hurt their profits, but the amateur culture and brand co-creation Niedzviecki sees as somewhat subversive and hopeful has more or less been a boon for businesses and hasn't proven a haven from the hegemonic ideologies of consumerism. Alienation endures. Niedzviecki recognizes that lifestyle culture leads to apolitical narcissism: "cogent political activism" is difficult, he notes, "in an age where everybody wants to be their own personal cause, their own undergound myth, subject of their own fan club." That sounds like a description of Facebook to me.

With hindsight, it's easy to see how Niedzviecki misdiagnosed the problem. He was concerned that inundated with culture, we would lose our identity. He imagines us all as desperate to do something that "can't be decoded and marketed back" to us. We never receded into the mass; instead mass culture mutated to cater to us as individuals and we thrived on the way it could decode us. Identity, as that kind of decoding, has become ubiquitous, a compulsion. Our identity is at once more palpable and more fragile that it has perhaps ever been -- we have a rich and subtle language of objects with which to express it, yet no one seems to understand who we really are, and we keep trying to understand ourselves. We can't escape turning ourselves inside out and signing over our desire to consumerism to try to ease the dislocation, solve the riddle.

Cultural-jamming as guerrilla marketing (16 Oct 2009)

Metafilter linked to this interview with Andrea Natella, director of Guerrigliamarketing.it, which (I think) pursues culture jamming under the auspices of being an advertising agency. The translation isn't great, but as far as I can tell, the idea behind this is either that ads have become their opposite, or that resistance to ads has become a latter-day form of advertising in itself. (I prefer the far more cynical second interpretation.) In Natella's own words: "Guerrigliamarketing.it was born out of a bet. Is it possible to imagine modalities of radical participation on the universe of brands and at the same time present oneself as an advertising agency? Is it possible for the professionals of communication not to give up their own political ideas in carrying out their job?"

What happens when you make "resistance to marketing" your brand? Is that some sort of parallax approach to advertising? Can you converse in the discourse of brands without tacitly endorsing it? Doing Wacky Package-style art seems to vindicate the power of brands rather than subvert it. I guess I am skeptical of the whole "culture jamming" concept, which seems less like Situationist detournement than borderline-cruel pranksterism (sort of like Improv Everywhere). I know it is supposed to "make us think", but culture jamming often ends up mocking the consumers it purportedly wants to win over.

It strikes me that a strategy of less clever nuisances might be more effective in slowing the juggernaut of thoughtless consumption. When an effort is made to mitigate the inconvenience that inevitably arises from monkeying with the retail market with what can be taken as hipster humor, it alienates the discomfited even further. That makes the subversion of culture jamming into advertising a weird sort of dialectic that ends up vindicating consumers, if you believe Natella, anyway: "What we try to do is to increase the awareness that true value is produced by the consumers." This is a familiar theme in cultural studies, that consuming culture is an underappreciated form of production -- users innovate new techniques to use things, and produce signs and cultural capital with regard to what cultural goods mean. But that doesn't mean marketing is ultimately benign; it just suggests that its modality is depressingly easy for laypeople to adopt. The value we produce is often something that marketers most appreciate; it is our doing their job for them. So while Natella touts the more obvious capacity of guerrilla marketing to be confrontational -- "We made people think that in order to sell a company [the agency] is ready to do anything, also on the border of illegality. We tried to confuse these borders" -- the more radical implication is that we are all being drafted as guerrilla-marketing recruits without especially realizing it. Marketing has so saturated culture -- with people adopting the discourse of branding, with online activity being tracked and parsed by companies to serve ads, with people embracing hype as a conversational strategy, and so on -- that we produce ads simply by virtue of living our lives.

(Incidentally, do not follow the link to thisman.org. It will haunt your nightmares.)

The Biking Life: Is It the Fault of Hipsterization or Social Media? (6 Oct 2009)

Matt Yglesias makes an interesting observation in this post about the normality of biking in Copenhagen.

Thirty-seven percent of Copenhagen commuters use bikes. And given that presumably some people are walking to work, some people are using the bus, some people are using the Metro, and some people are using the S-Tog the resulting situation is one in which cyclists and drivers are really equals.
It’s actually impressive to a degree that’s somewhat unsettling. Regular bicycle commuting in the United States is, among other things, a somewhat meaningful identity category. Initially it’s thrilling to see so many of “your people” everywhere. But looking closer you start to see exactly what was explained to me—the whole reason you have so many people biking around is that cycling is totally mainstream in Copenhagen and doesn’t constitute an identity at all.

I think this constitutes an obstacle for becoming a bike commuter in America, over and above all the infrastructure obstacles and the safety issues. Biking in the U.S. -- much like, for example, shopping at farmer's markets -- constitutes an identity many people want no part of even though it offers an ostensibly healthier and/or saner way to live. You have to become one of "those people"; you enter a peculiar spotlight and invite all sorts of assumptions about what you are like. People may treat you as though you have a Greenpeace sticker pasted on your forehead. They may assume you are some sort of free-range zealot brimming with judgmental self-righteousness when all you are is someone who doesn't drive a car. When I bike, I'm not doing it for attention, but the thought that someone might reasonably draw that conclusion inhibits me. I don't want to involuntarily be attributed to belonging to anyone's "people." Maybe I am too sensitive.

I wonder if at any point it would have been possible to arrest this development of biking into a lifestyle -- is anything "nonconformist" doomed to be seen as an attempt to self-promote? Or is that the fault of hipsterization? Of social media?

As I was writing this, I came across a timely Metafilter link to Copenhagenize, a blog devoted to replicating Copenhagen's success in encouraging biking commuters, and to this essay by sociologist Dave Horton about cycling fears. What I thought was interesting is the way he shows how ostensibly bike-friendly promotional campaigns may actually serve to dissuade would-be riders -- much as efforts to make biking cool turn it into a dubious lifestyle.

Horton contends that the fear of cycling is deliberately produced, with safety lessons and helmet-wearing campaigns tending to increase a potential rider's sense of vulnerability. "Danger comes not from cycling, but from cars," he says, but this notion is systematically suppressed. Similarly the creation of safe spaces for bikes reinforces the notion that bike-riding is an exceptional activity to be set off from the spaces of routine life. "‘Normal’ roads are no place to cycle; they are to be feared." He also attempts to show "how the identity of 'the cyclist' tends to invoke fear," arguing that cyclists have been culturally marginalized and stigmatized, becoming gutter trash since they have been forced to ride in the gutters on the side of the road. Cyclists have become "strangers" -- which now, I think, makes cycling seductive to certain identity questers seeking activities that can typecast them. So though I think this is true:

People's fears of cycling will become more real and powerful as the prospects of their cycling grow greater. And people will feel and fear the loss of a way of life as it has come to be lived, as automobilised. When these anxieties become intense and the calls that cycling is too dangerous become really vociferous, we should I think take them as a sign that - as a culture - we are getting really serious about once more getting on our bikes.

I disagree completely with this:

Many people who cycle today - racing cyclists, touring cyclists, cycle campaigners, bike messengers - belong to cycling cultures which produce and reproduce positive experiences and representations of cycling.

No they don't -- they make biking seem weird and aggressive and annoying. And I can't think of anyone who has has a "positive experience" with those douchebag bike messengers in New York; it's far more likely that they have run you over as a pedestrian or yelled for you to get out of the way while they were blazing through a crosswalk while running through a red light.

We don't need "positive representations of cycling" -- we need cycling to seem inevitable and inescapable, as normal and boring a part of our environment as cars and advertising.

UPDATE: Yglesias links to a site called Copenhagen Cycle Chic, which has made me much more afraid. The campaign to make cycling boring must begin.

Hooverville Williamsburg (8 June 2009)

I feel a weird responsibility, as though I am required to link to this New York Times story about the hard times trust-funders in Williamsburg are now allegedly facing. As you would expect, the story is a bit anecdotal, and full of contempt bait for those who have to work, and those for whom unemployment would be truly devastating. I'm surprised anyone ould consent to be interviewed for a piece like this, but I should stop underestimating the narcissism of people in the Facebook age.

It would be easy to languor in schadenfreude at details such as these:

Luis Illades, an owner of the Urban Rustic Market and Cafe on North 12th Street, said he had seen a steady number of applicants, in their late 20s, who had never held paid jobs: They were interns at a modeling agency, for example, or worked at a college radio station. In some cases, applicants have stormed out of the market after hearing the job requirements. “They say, ‘You want me to work eight hours?’ ” Mr. Illades said. “There is a bubble bursting.”

The photo caption is pretty amusing as well: Under a photo of a casting-call hipster, it reads: "Misha Calvert, 26, relied on her parents during her first year in Williamsburg. Such financial arrangements carry a 'giant stigma,' she said." A stigma, you say?

There's nothing inherently wrong with "relying" on one's parents, but at the Atlantic's business site, Derek Thompson highlights the problems with the parental subsidy. Regarding the report that parents are shutting off the tap, Thompson writes:

The upside and downside of this development is pretty clear. Williamsburg real estate prices have skyrocketed in the last few years -- partially on account of incomes that weren't earned in Williamsburg -- so this should help the little 'burg move toward the rest of Brooklyn in terms of affordability. It is, it must be said, unfortunate for anybody to have their lives shaken dramatically by the recession, but much as the downturn has fostered a culture of responsibility and savings, so too should the demise of trustafarianism make the sons and daughters of the affluent more cognizant of basic human things like bottom lines and debt. The ability to pursue your life dreams in your early twenties on the back of your parents' earnings is a kind of awesome gig, but in the long term it insulates you from an understanding of what life costs.

The time spent "pursuing life dreams" on the parents' dime is probably wasted if during that time one is hanging around with other trust-funders who are detached from the actual economy. Success in the "glamour" fields usually involves forming the right friendships when the opportunities arise. If trust-fund ghettos also included a mix of cultural-broker types, the time spent socializing together in the neighborhood might ultimately prove worth subsidizing. But it seems to me that the artists and creative types unsullied by the taint of employment have little in common with the realists who have managed to compromise with the way the economy works. Those compromises, for better or worse, may actually constitute the real skill of a creative person in a capitalist system -- the ability to get paid for what you make, to convince other people that you should be paid for doing it, that you believe in what you are doing enough to subject it to the bottom-line criticism of those who mean to regard you professionally. But professionalizing is the main thing that I imagine trust-fund types are trying to avoid. The whole point of places like Williamsburg, I assume, is that they are insulated from that sort of impersonal, professional failure; they are romper rooms removed from the competitive grind, from the grim scramble to make a living. They are enclaves where people can scorn money and call it bread (to paraphrase Joan Didion paraphrasing Time magazine, circa 1967). Instead of adapting to capitalist compromises, the pseudoaristocrats of Williamsburg, and places like it, can feel haunted by inconsequential failures of trendiness, the vicissitudes of purely private life.

Meme moments (30 May 2009)

At Murketing, Rob Walker notes the rise of an ironic T-shirt, "Three Wolf Moon," which looks like something that Brett from Flight of the Conchords may have worn. As Walker explains, lots of people wrote silly reviews praising the shirt, and sales took off. If you look on Amazon, you can see the gallery of images Photoshopped to show celebrities wearing it, and so on. Very creative and fun, a contemporary collective experience. So why does it creep me out?

Here's Walker's analysis of the shirt phenomenon:

This is an example of an object acquiring a narrative, and meaning. At first, it was simply a bad T-shirt. Then it became that bad T-shirt, the one that attracted a reviewer-flash-mob. If you were wearing it, and someone asked, you could tell them a story. In fact you could tell them the story even if they didn’t ask -- it’s a good story! -- particularly if you submitted a funny review which you can then recount.
The object becomes a souvenir of a moment and an experience: The time we all got together and made fun of this T-shirt.

I can't tell how serious Walker is about this being a "good story" that anyone would want to hear -- I guess I found it interesting, which is why I am writing about it now, but I would think anyone who was wearing the shirt telling me that story was sort of annoying. I'm sure there are scads of opportunities for this sort of pile-on participation online at any given moment, which seems to rob them all of a significant ingredient of serendipity that would tip the resulting personal stories from lame to not lame. That is to say, the fact that this occurred online on a retail website makes the whole event seem contrived, even though it probably wasn't. The network effects, the rapid scaling-up of online viral phenomena, generates the air of contrivance -- for me at least -- which makes all such spontaneous events seem feasibly pre-plannable. It seems as though there are always enough bored yet clever people out there on the internet to latch onto memes.

But what I most fear -- and maybe I shouldn't -- is that these sorts of experiences may be the only sorts of experiences we will have in the future. For those of us used to different experiences, the transition may be painful. I think this was what I had been feeling at Yellowstone. All our experiences may come with this prepackaged feeling of being contrived, of being designed to be reported on, if only by ourselves. The moments that don't seem worth blogging about or "sharing" will become harder for us to fathom, undigestable, sitting in our minds like the stones in a bird's gullet.

Sundry music-related matters (29 May 2009)

I just crashed through two weeks of blog posts on my RSS reader and my brain has become a bit scrambled. I feel I must now blog about just about everything in the world in one comprehensive post and find some way to tie the 30 or 40 posts I starred together into one master narrative, one grand theory of everything (and that's not even considering all the HRO Exegesis posts I need to write). Maybe I should put another pot of coffee on.

One thing I discovered was that Richard Florida's newish blog at the Atlantic has been consistently compelling over the past few weeks. He has had a series of posts about evolution in the music industry, positing the theory that the music business is a media-industry canary in the post-internet coalmine. In this post, he notes that in some ways the industry is retreating from forms that had become technologically necessary -- the album, thanks to vinyl, the 74 minute CD, etc. -- to the forms that may arguably be more "natural" to pop music:

But the enormity of the creative destruction sweeping the industry goes far beyond the iPod killing off the CD. The Gang of Four's Dave Allen argues that we are seeing the "end of the album" - a construct initially created by the limitation of vinyl technology in 1930 - as the organizing principle of musical production. He sees this as potentially liberating for musicians - or those musicians that can adapt. Industry veteran Bob Lefsetz predicts a return to the pre-LP era, when artists constantly pumped out singles and toured. He even draws a comparison to the way that Toyota has succeeded by building a reputation for reliability gradually through word of mouth.

These ideas tie in to this related lament, from Rob Cox at the Big Money, for the now moribund live album. After valiantly trying to explain the success of Frampton Comes Alive! he argues that the live album was spawned by a specific and now vanished nexus of record-label needs for product and the corporate rock artist's need to produce that product in the absence of inspiration. Now anyone with a phone can bootleg shows, and the labels are more or less finished, so the live album has no purpose. I always thought the function of the live album was to provoke a more-complete fantasy in pre-teens (mostly) of participating in an impossibly awesome concert experience, back when big bands and tours were relatively rare. I can remember staring at the back cover of Kiss Alive! and wishing I could be one of those burned-out kids holding up that sad homemade banner.

But then at some point, live albums became souvenirs of the show you were presumed to have already seen, rather than a hyperidealized presentation of the experience. (Think of the Stones' 14 live albums since 1990.) Cox suggests that YouTube now fulfills that function of making the effort to go to rock concerts seem worth the trouble.

Elsewhere, Florida revisits, via the excellent Carl Wilson, the findings that popular songs are somewhat paradoxically popular because they are popular. Wilson believes this tends to highlight the power of the music editor, or the critic -- the filtering types who are in a position to establish the pop-culture discussion: Of the investment in liking a particular song or other, he writes, "What’s more the ensuing exchange of information and opinion is the primary way that these choices become meaningful." I've long argued that pop music has little to do with the intrinsic music quality but with being able to consume the zeitgeist through an emotionally immediate artifact. I was thinking about this a lot on my recent road trip, during which I listened to hours and hours of radio. I heard plenty of oldies and that sort of thing, far too many songs by Boston. The two songs that really stood out to me, that made me feel aware of being alive specifically in 2009, were "Blame It on the Alcohol" by T-Pain and some song whose chorus runs: "I'm so 3008, you're so two thousand and late." That these songs are ridiculous and totally dated right from the get-go is pretty much the point of them. No one would argue that these are "good" songs, but whenever the station-scan stopped on either of them, we didn't change it. (I guess I would have to lump another ludicrous song in with those two, one that goes "You'r hot then you're cold, you're on then you're off," etc., etc.) The fact that these songs of all things out there had made it onto the radio in South Jersey and South Dakota seemed to warrant some kind of response, seemed to demand that we pay attention, that we ignore them at the peril of making ourselves irrelevant. Much as HRO is a blog worth blogging about, I suppose, these were songs worth talking about, if not all that great to listen to in the abstract. But there are no abstract listening conditions; there is always context, and the context is everything, is the whole of the moon.

Wilson (also via Florida) has a good comment about hipsters/hipster bashing -- it involves "bogus ethnography" (sadly one of my specialties) and speaks to a kind of craving for a real leader to come along and put an end to status anxiety once and for all:

There’s also a self-serving decadence narrative where the hipster serves as the negative exaggeration of one’s own apathy, helping to exonerate it. The hipster serves as a locus for fears of lost control, of social disconnection. Yet it’s a hysteria to focus that anxiety on these kids personally rather than on, say, the system of cool and cultural capital, and what’s more the genuine lack of control you have over hypercapitalism, of which their look uncomfortably reminds you. The hipster-monster is the face of a cultural death wish, along the vector of a snarling circle jerk hurtling towards social atomization and collapse.

Analysis along these lines reminds me of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, which was his attempt to figure out what made people embrace authoritarian leaders. Here's what I wrote about Hoffer before:

Hoffer regards the rise of mass movements as the almost inevitable consequence of widespread mediocrity coupled with the unreasonable expectations that democracy generates for the common person. “Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of one ardent young Nazi, ‘to be free from freedom.’ “ Democratic ideology leaves the impression that all men are equal, whereas it has the effect of making one’s place in the irrepressible hierarchies in society seem entirely the individual’s fault. Thus the frustrated people in a capitalist democracy “want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.”

If I am reading Wilson right, he's suggesting that the hipster bogeyman stands in as a symbol of how freedom can weigh as a burden, or rather how consumerism can reduce freedom to a burden of perpetual self-redefinition along aesthetic lines that seem like someone else's whimsy. But the symbol shouldn't be mistaken for the person behind that facade, who is most likely feeling the same way. Wilson puts this elegantly: "There are no hipsters, only anti-hipsters - or at least the ratio is approximately the same as that of actually existing Satanists to anti-Satanists during the heavy-metal and Goth panics of the 1980s and 1990s.The question is what in turn the hipster allows the anti-hipster to deny, and what’s being lost in that continuing deferral."

What I found especially interesting, though, was this: "Flamboyant aesthetic display...still makes a lot of people uncomfortable and resentful in itself. At its best the hipster is the new Dandy, the semi-subversive who overloads the system by over-subscribing to it (conspicuously consuming) and yet undermines it by seeming as if the real source of their cooperation is that they can’t take the system seriously enough to bother to oppose it. Sites like 'Look at this Fucking Hipster' reek of a paranoid craving for a restoration of social order." I have written my share of reactionary screeds about hipsters and must acknowledge that some of my anger had stemmed from this anguished sense that they still have youth to squander that I don't. Some of the anger came from the larger structural issue, of how evolutions of youth culture are used commercially and how those standards are seemingly foisted on adults with more efficacy now. I suppose there's enough evidence of past generations heaping contempt on youth style to question whether there is really anything new in this, but it seems that an equal amount of evidence can be marshalled to show how the concept of "adult" has rapidly eroded in recent decades.

I also must admit that "flamboyant aesthetic display" has always offended my sense of propriety, my futile adherence to the anonymity ideal. A certain species of ersatz egalitarianism will always yearn to obviate the superficial distinctions of such display in favor of something "deeper" and more intrinsic to uniquely human capabilities -- it's just not clear whether that is an even more dangerous fantasy. Feel depressed now. Maybe need to start wearing a wig.