Rioting Nonconsumers (10 Aug 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marshall McLuhan Centennial (21 July 2011)

To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Megan Garber has an extensive post about his ideas at the Neiman Journalism Lab site, pointing out, somewhat cryptically, that "McLuhan’s theories seem epic and urgent and obvious all at the same time. And McLuhan himself — the teacher, the thinker, the darling of the media he both measured and mocked — seems both more relevant, and less so, than ever before." I think that means that we take McLuan's useful insights more or less for granted even as they shape the contours of the debate about the impact of mediatization. McLuhan certainly wasn't afraid to make sweeping, unsubstantiated generalizations, which definitely makes his account of history occasionally "epic," but almost unfalsifiable as well. So sometimes it seems like McLuhan is just relabeling phenomena (this is a "hot" medium, this is a "cold" one) without performing much analysis, translating things into jargon without necessarily developing arguments.

Garber notes a recent essay by Paul Ford about the media's role in imposing narratives on the flux of events and regularizing time and points out that "If McLuhan is to be believed, the much-discussed and often-assumed human need for narrative — or, at least, our need for narrative that has explicit beginnings and endings — may be contingent rather than implicit." That is, the norms of our reading, or rather our media consumption generally, are shaped by existing levels of technology and how that technology is assimilated socially. We don't come hardwired with a love of stories, as literary humanists sometimes insist. Narrative conventions are always part of what society is always in the process of negotiating -- they are political, ideological, like just about every other kind of relation. McLuhan believed that new media forms would retribalize humanity, undoing some of the specific sorts of freedoms market society (which he links specifically to books and literacy) guaranteed and introducing different ways to construe it. The danger, as Garber implies, is that we will get swallowed by real time, which old media broke into manageable increments but which mew media has redissolved. This opens up possibilities of deliberate disorientation and unsustainable acceleration of consumption.

Anyway, I recently read McLuhan's Undertstanding Media and this is what I took away from it. The general gist is that print media support individualism and economistic rationality: "If Western literate man undergoes much dissociation of inner sensibility from his use of the alphabet, he also wins his personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan and family" (88). Literacy, in McLuhan's view, makes capitalist-style consumer markets possible: "Nonliterate societies are quite lacking in the psychic resources to create and sustain the enormous structures of statistical information that we call markets and prices.... The extreme abstraction and detachment represented by our pricing system is quite unthinkable and unusable amidst populations for whom the exciting drama of price haggling occurs with every transaction" (137). This ties in to the idea that humans must learn to be rational in an economic sense -- that such calculation is not inherent but socially constructed. Capitalist society (and its media) equips us with this form of reason during the process of subjectivation.

But the atomized, anonymized individuals of the literate world are prone to anomie, to being "massified." Whereas subsequent media (more immersive and real-time; accelerated) are returning culture dialectically to a more "tribal" orientation -- the "global village." We collectively try to defeat time by pursuing the instantaneousness of new media; this speed, this accelerated transience begins to undo economism in favor of some new collectivity. "Fragmented, literate and visual individualism is not possible in an electrically patterned and imploded society" (51). So it's obvious why the P2P types and the technoutopian futurists are attracted to McLuhan, who more or less established their rhetorical mode. But McLuhan occasionally issues some warnings about the mediated future as well. This, for example, seems like a prescient critique of the attention economy and recommendation engines:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. (68)

And later he writes, "The avid desire of mankind to prostitute itself stands up against the chaos of revolution" (189). In other words, technology will be commercialized rather than become subversive.

McLuhan claims that "the effect of electric technology had at first been anxiety. Now it appears to create boredom" (26). That is, it exacerbates the paradoxes of choice, encourages us to suspend decision making for as long as possible, since switching among a newly vast array of alternatives appears easy. But such suspension, such switching may have hidden cognitive costs, may contribute to ego depletion. He points out how technology tends to accelerate exchange, noting that, for example, "by coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange." This seems to be a structural fit with capitalism's need to maximize exchange to maximize opportunities to realize profit. Photographs, too, create a world of "accelerated transience" (196).

He also notes that certain technologies seek to make self-service labor possible, eliminating service requirements and prompting us to take on more responsibility for ourselves as a form of progress (36). That is, technology institutes convenience as a desirable value that trumps other values; ease and efficiency make collectivity appear progressively more annoying, a social ill to be eradicated in the name of individualist freedom, the only freedom that counts.

McLuhan anticipates the rise of immaterial labor, as "commodities themselves assume more and more the character of information" -- they become signifiers, bearers of design distinctions and lifestyle accents. "As electric information levels rise, almost any kind of material will serve any kind of need or function, forcing the intellectual more and more into the role of social command and into the service of production." Hence the rise of the "creative class" and the importance of social production, building brands and meanings and distributing them authoritatively. Manufacturing becomes a pretense for information, where the real profit margins are:

At the end of the mechanical age people still imagined that press and radio and even TV were merely forms of information paid for by the makers and users of "hardware," like cars and soap and gasoline. As automation takes hold, it becomes obvious that information is the crucial commodity, and that solid products are merely incidental to information movement. The early stages by which information itself became the basic economic commodity of the electric age were obscured by the ways in which advertising and entertainment put people off the track. Advertisers pay for space and time in paper and magazine, on radio and TV; that is, they buy a piece of the reader, listener, or viewer as definitely as if they hired our homes for a public meeting. They would gladly pay the reader, listener, or viewer directly for his time and attention if they knew how to do so. The only way so far devised is to put on a free show. Movies in America have not developed advertising intervals simply because the movie itself is the greatest of all forms of advertisement for consumer goods.

McLuhan insists that "the product matters less as the audience participation increases" -- that is because that participation is the product, the manufactured good, the pretense. "Any acceptable ad is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience," McLuhan claims (228); by this I think he might mean that ads plunge us into visceral experience of what Baudrillard calls the "code" of consumerism. McLuhan asserts that ads draw us into neotribal experiences of collectivity; I think this claim is undermined by the rise of personalization and design ideology. We collectively participate in the idea of customizing our consumer goods, but finding a unique angle on this common culture is the main avenue for hipster distinction. We craft our own niche for ourselves, and become anxious to isolate ourselves from others within the various constituencies brands create for themselves. Belonging to the communities facilitated by media products fosters a simultaneous tension to escape their embrace, o make one's participation singular. That is to say, media participation is as competitive as it is collaborative.

In the last chapter, McLuhan says this of the future of work:

The future of work consists of earning a living in the automation age. This is a familiar pattern in electric technology in general. It ends the old dichotomies between culture and technology, between art and commerce, and between work and leisure. Whereas in the mechanical age of fragmentation leisure had been the absence of work, or mere idleness, the reverse is true in the electric age. As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved, very much as with the artists in all ages.

This sounds a lot like the autonomist idea of the general intellect, which kicks in after automation becomes standard in industry. McLuhan's way of putting it: "Many people, in consequence, have begun to look on the whole of society as a single unified machine for creating wealth.... With electricity as energizer and synchronizer, all aspects of production, consumption, and organization become incidental to communications." He suggests that the only profession of the future will be teacher. We will be all teaching each other new ways to please and divert ourselves, new ways to want more things. Learning itself becomes "the principal form of production and consumption" (351). That sounds like a good thing, but one must factor in the ramifications of widespread, institutionalized narcissism, which leads us to become experts in one very particular subject: ourselves. When the alleged structural unemployment subsides, this is the sort of service economy we will be left with -- the full flowering of communicative capitalism. We are consigned by automation to industrialized, mass-produced individuality that we must never stop blathering about.

Retracting the Concept of the Individual (17 May 2011)

There seems to be an object lesson in this O'Reilly article by Jen Webb about Openmargin, an iPad application in development that will force users to share their marginalia in one giant shared space. Webb asks the company co-founder, "Is there an option to notate only for personal use (i.e. notes for a class)?" And his response strikes me as deeply troubling:

Joep Kuijper: There are no personal groups. All the readers of one book are the group. Or even more specific: the readers around one sentence are a group. This also means you're not in a dialogue with friends, but with peers you've probably never met before. We think this is the interesting thing about Openmargin. It's an implicit network where the relationships are based on the specifics in a text. And your relationships develop and grow along with your reading habits.

It seems like he deliberately misses the point, or his response has been edited to make him miss the point. Instead the ideology of compulsive sharing is reinscribed. What possible reason could you have for not sharing all your thoughts so random strangers (and Openmargin) can profit from them? That would be unthinkable selfishness, and he won't even entertain that possibility. And that specificity of the context of a particular book (or even sentence, as he notes) makes the sharing, the mandatory dialogue, all the more necessary. Would a note function be useful for one's impromptu half-formed reactions to a text? Maybe, but every note you write on Openmargin must be ready for the world; those are the terms by which they are willing to provide the server space and the facilitating programming. They have learned from Facebook: "Community" is their product, apparently, more than the service itself, since it was so thoroughly eviscerated by capitalism. Now capitalism has come to rehabilitate it on its terms. This is just one example. Capitalism is solving the problem of alienated isolation it created by supplying more capitalism. Which makes one wonder if the contradictions capitalism generates will ever be enough to undermine it.

Clinging to our idiosyncrasy (15 July 2009)

Chris Dillow makes a good point about the similarities between Marxian and neoclassical assumptions about human behavior:

The basic premise of neoclassical economics, that people respond to incentives, echoes the Marxian notion that individuals are bearers of social relations. Both stress that an individual’s behaviour arises from the position he finds himself in - which influences the costs and benefits he perceives - more than from his character. Of course, both views can be pushed too far. But both remind us not to see human action as rising from mere idiosyncratic disposition.

Of course, the idea that our own action stems from our own uniquely idiosyncratic disposition is something we probably all have a tendency to assume. That seems to me the core of capitalist ideology, that we as individuals are essentially responsible for not only our actions but also for the surrounding circumstances that determine the possible range of actions. Dillow points out how this converges with behavior economists' findings:

there’s an important convergence between Marx and behavioural economics. Marxists believe that false consciousness can bamboozle workers into accepting capitalism. If we want to know how this happens, the cognitive biases and heuristics programme helps us. For example, the fundamental attribution error leads us over-estimate the extent to which the poor are to blame for their poverty, and to under-rate the importance of environmental or societal forces. The availability heuristic leads workers to blame immigrants for unemployment rather than less obvious forces. The just world phenomenon and system justification cause us to believe that capitalism must be fair. The status quo bias causes us to accept existing evils rather than risk new ones. And adaptive preferences cause the poor to resign themselves to their fates and want less, with the result that capitalist democracy sustains inequality.

If one's condition can be read as a statement of what is deserved, our empathetic instincts can be tempered if not squelched altogether. With empathy out of the way, the exchange process becomes more unfettered, and can grow to become the basis for more and more of social life, governing more of our interpersonal interactions. Our emotional responsiveness starts to register in our consciousness as irrational miscalculations of our interest, as maladaptive tendencies. In the name of preserving our individuality -- of hewing to the assumption that our idiosyncratic disposition determines our behavior -- we end up even more alienated, with a far more mechanistic view of our own behavior. The stubborn belief in our own special uniqueness is harnessed to a view of human behavior that allows for virtually no spontaneity whatsoever, that presumes our best self always acts out of the calculation of costs and benefits and explains away sacrifice or altruism as covertly self-serving.

Anyway, I know I have a tendency to cling to my sense of my own idiosyncrasy and take a peculiar pleasure in what I think it might prove about me, about my nonconformity, about my ability to resist manipulation, about my ability to transcend social norms and expectations and realize some higher originality. I'm into obscure music; I have a taste for difficult books; I don't watch popular TV shows. I won't go see the Transformers sequel. But I think that my presumptions of uniqueness are probably what guarantee my overall insignificance -- it keeps me motivated to remain deliberately apart, internally praising myself to the extent that other people don't get me, thereby guaranteeing that I will only be happy with myself to the degree that I influence no one. I wonder if this attitude truly is personal idiosyncrasy or the product of late capitalist ideology. Isolating individuals in their presumed specialness is an effective way of rendering them vulnerable to marketing appeals, to consumerism generally.

Public and private selves (30 Sept. 2008)

In continuing to think about whether social networking is engineered to make us more narcissistic, I picked up Christopher Lasch's study The Culture of Narcissism, the dour condemnation of 1970s America that helped prompt Jimmy Carter's infamous malaise speech. Early in the first chapter, after arguing that Americans are helplessly dependent on bureaucratic institutions, he unloads with this:

Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his "grandiose self" reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as am empty wilderness to be shaped by his own design.

The applications of this to social networked seem pretty self-evident. The empty profile page provides the illusion of providing that "empty wilderness" to conquer, but that is just the alibi for the real function of social networks, which is to gratify our bottomless need to be validated in as close to real time as possible. Clearly Facebook and Twitter serve to meet that need, and what's more, it taps into the latent narcissism of all its users, rendering self-involvement even more socially acceptable. It's now a perfectly plausible and respectable basis for a business model.

In general, The Culture of Narcissism is a bit cranky and dated, and a bit too much of a jeremiad to be persuasive; its chief virtue is to reference Richard Sennett's far more comprehensive and convincing The Fall of Public Man, which charts the disappearance of the public sphere and speculates about what exactly caused it to vanish. The gist of Sennett's argument is that (perhaps for reasons that Habermas articulates in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) society was once such that we maintained public and private selves: We donned a public persona, guided by rules of public conduct, when we sought to contribute to society, and in private we had an intimate self appropriate for family life. The two were only tangentially related, and neither was considered the absolutely authentic, real self. With the rules of civilization clearly in place, public discourse was civil and impersonal, and therefore far more objective and constructive, a place for "rational-critical debate" --- the sort of thing Habermas celebrates.

But thanks to the individualism fomented by the rise of capitalism prompted a growing fascination with authenticity, "realism" in the novelistic sense, depth psychology, and the all-consuming importance of an integral identity that we establish in our own minds through our deeds and public behavior. (The roots of this can be glimpsed in the 18th century cult of sensibility and then romanticism. In those movements was the advent of studied spontaneity. The 18th century had vestiges of a theatricalized public sphere that is annihilated by a new emphasis on authentic personality -- one must represent rather than present emotion, so all public behavior is at a remove from the new standard of authenticity. Anxiety, and vulnerability to marketing campaigns, ensues.) Gradually we started to conceive as the public sphere as a place to establish our identity; it became a mirror rather than a realm for discourse and the shared social construction of reality. This makes social interaction difficult, since our whole personality is at stake, at all times, with all people we encounter. Consequently, convenience becomes synonymous with avoiding interpersonal contact (self-service begins in earnest). And we fall prey to "passive participation," or the impulse to vicariousness, which allows us to partake in society, now reconceived as a kind of pageant of self, but without the vulnerability. Hence deliberation and conversation are out; marketing and celebritization are in. And the next thing you know, there are tattoo parlors on Main Street.

Facebook and Twitter would seem to complete the erosion of the wall between public and private selves, offering us the technology to broadcast every moment of our private lives as if the world was nothing but an audience waiting for updates, or a canvas onto which to paint our ever-evolving self-concept. It moves us from vicariousness to a more direct kind of self-display, because the filter of the internet shields us from the rejection incumbent with social participation (aka "social anxiety"). I imagine, though, that apologists for the technologies view the matter in precisely the opposite way, regarding the space of social networking as a rebirth of the public sphere, where no identity represented should be regarded as authentic but as evidence of free play and an experimental testing of possibilities for the purposes of our collective edification. But I don't think that holds up: Most people would regard having multiple profiles on the same social networking site as sneaky, and a fictitious profile not as a expression of creativity but a pack of lies. Social networks seem to function as a more manageable substitute for actual presence in relationships, you get the upside of validation of your "true self" without the hassle of actual reciprocity. What distinguishes social networks from the blogosphere generally is that they are defined specifically by their not being forums for the exploration and debate of ideas. The prevailing purpose is to display yourself to your best advantage and "stay in touch" with people with whom it would otherwise take effort to remain in touch with.

Happiness as nodal point (12 May 2007)

The following thoughts were occasioned by reading two wildly dissimilar works in conjunction: Will Wilkinson's recent Cato Institute policy paper about happiness research and Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. First of all, they couldn't be further apart on the readability scale. Wilkinson writes clean, compelling prose sprinkled with wit and pointed, impassioned polemic, while Laclau and Mouffe evince the distinct aversion to active verbs and discernible grammatical subjects that you often find in works of nebulous social theory. And they initially seem to be coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Wilkinson, a libertarian, argues for as little governmental intervention as possible into the lives of sovereign individuals; Laclau and Mouffe are socialists trying to conceive of a method to bring about "radical democratic politics" to forward Leftist interests, arguing essentially that the individual has no identity outside of political struggle. Laclau and Mouffe are trying to find ways to build political blocs, to develop ad hoc unity among a disparate group so it can then effect social change. Wilkinson seems to be arguing against the social usefulness of collective will.

Nevertheless, maybe because I am misinterpreting them both, but I found a surprising potential for synthesis between the two works, mainly because Wilkinson's eagerness to discount happiness research leads him to take some rather nuanced, relativistic stances at various points about they way people comprehend their own interests, just as Laclau and Mouffe, eager to dispatch essentialist, given notions of what it means to be working class, systematically undermine all appeals to universal notions. There's no one determinant of class identity, any more than there is one definition of what happiness is, as experienced. (Whether an objective notion of well-being that we are not actively conscious of can be considered happiness is another question.)

Wilkinson cites approvingly a passage by philosopher Nicolas White, who argue that "As we develop a picture of what life is to be like, we don't start from a 'framework' concept of happiness (an idea of what the picture on the puzzle will be), to which to tailor our particular aims so that they'll fit into it.... For the most part we build up a conception of what happiness would be out of the aims that we have." Compare that with this passage from Laclau and Mouffe: "The fixity of every social element in the first theorizations of hegemony proceeded, as we saw, from the indissoluable link between the hegemonized task and the class that was supposed to be its natural agent.... But, insofar as the task has ceased to have any necessary link with a class, its identity is given to it solely by its articulation within a hegemonic formulation. Its identity, then, has become purely relational. And as this system of relations has itself ceased to be fixed and stable -- thereby making hegemonic practices possible -- the sens of every social identity appears constantly deferred." In other words happiness is contingent on aims, and aims are contingent on given social formations, and what values can become dominant (hegemonic) through the way they are articulated and their appeal broadened or made constitutive of identity for those swayed by them. The inefficacy of happiness research to pin down a consistent definition opens up the space in which hegemony can be constructed. Political work consists of defining happiness in such a way that suits a particular bloc while conveying a sense of individual empowerment (a sense of concrete identity and fulfillment of that identity's potential) to those throwing support behind the bloc.

Happiness research, then, is discourse attempting to perform this work, constructing happiness in a politically useful way and presenting that definition as natural and inevitable. Individual happiness and the collective good administered politically thereby merge into a single conception, albeit one that is always contested and is ever-shifting, no matter how much it insists it is objective and transcendent and eternally true. To gloss White, not only is the picture on the puzzle indeterminable until you start to work at putting it together, but the pieces themselves are always shifting, as is the logic of the rules for solving the puzzle.

In short, happiness may be what L&M (not the cigarette) call "nodal points," semi-fixed notions in the field of relations that seem universal and transcendent but are actually up for grabs. Despite their tendency to shift, we still rely on them to orient ourselves in construing our own goals and in conceiving how to relate to peers and how to structure who the enemies are.

Management theory (26 March 2007)

It's pretty easy to mock management theory for its proclivity for taking something that's fairly commonsensical and presenting it as if it were a miraculous discovery. Amazing but true, but people dislike "change" and resist it! Believe it or not, workers feel "empowered" when their opinions are solicited. And they even like it when you explain to them why they have to do what you tell them in the way you've requested, as this WSJ piece by Phred Dvorak (not Fred) reports with wide-eyed surprise.

Management gurus agree that employees are most likely to get on board when they are involved in the decision-making process. In the many cases when that's not possible, the next-best thing is to make employees feel as if they were involved, consultants say.

I don't want to even think about what these consultants probably got paid. Dvorak does point out some of the niceties behind this insight, namely, it rarely suit management to have their authority undermined by opening up decision-making processes to criticism. Management can often justify its existence by conserving and mystifying its knowledge of the systems it has put in place -- this makes them indispensable and irreplaceable. In other words, it's not usually an innocent mistake when you are kept ignorant by a boss, but on the plus side, if you deduce their reasons and start disseminating them, you may very well find yourself co-opted into a management position yourself.

Oddly enough, workers dislike being treated like interchangeable parts being plugged into a system that has no regard for their individuality -- and the task of the manager is to overcome this fundamental obstacle. The obfuscating discourse of the pseudoscience of management furthers this end, helping to mask the humanity of those being managed and institutionalizing their needs into the production process -- so many 15-minute breaks and ritualized pats on the back, as advised in whatever management guru's (and they are invariably gurus) book is in vogue at the time. Management theory is useful in that it abstracts interpersonal behavior away from our ordinary human impulses, or tendency to drift toward the golden rule, the categorical imperative or whatever you want to call it, and allows managers to treat other people instrumentally -- precisely how the managers themselves would not wanted to be treated. This is not to criticize managers -- industrial-scale production and the division of labor forces the integration of a variety of individuals into a unified mechanism, one that requires the surrender of that individuality that elsewhere we are taught to prize and proudly flaunt. Managers have the unhappy task of enforcing that surrender of individuality, of breaking the sad news that you can't simply do things your own way any more.

The consequences of this surrender of individuality is that workers stage small-scale clawbacks -- decorating their cubicles with signs of the person they are outside of management's clutches. I tend to resist this impulse personally and try to blend into anonymity; it just feels too desperate, like admitting that the battle for my soul has already been lost.