new column up (6 July 2010)

My most recent column is posted elsewhere on PopMatters. I was trying to apply what I took away from crashing through several books by sociologist Anthony Giddens about "reflexive self-identity": self-consciousness about making ourselves into something, a fate consigned on us by the uncertainties and opportunities of modern life. We don't have much choice about undertaking the making of our own identity, and we can't help to be self-conscious about it, even though this self-consciousness seems to invalidate that resulting identity for us. To counteract that, we rely on close friends and family to substantiate what we believe of ourselves in a disinterested way: of course we will think the best of our own intentions, but have others see the same thing means a lot more to us and keeps us from going down a crazy spiral of self-recrimination. But, and this is sort of the crux of the essay I hope, social networking as a medium instrumentalizes friendship and negates to a degree its ability to serve that function of objectively confirming our identity -- we have structural reasons to doubt whether people are being straight with us, whether they are even paying any specific attention or are not just fixated on themselves with in a grand scheme of personal brand management.

Eva Illouz (5 June 2010)

I've been meaning to read sociologist Eva Illouz's books for a while now. She writes about "emotional capitalism" -- the production and trading in affect that is a big part of the service-based economy and obviously a concept that fits well with the immaterial-labor theme I've mentioned here a lot. (Speaking of which, this article by the guy who did Marmaduke Explained is a pretty good illustration of immaterial labor -- how the internet gets used to inadvertently add value to products, and how this sort of work affects identity. It's a case study in how one can become "responsible to the Internet" as he puts it.) In emotional capitalism, the product is cooperation, or friendship, or intimacy rationalized into measurable things. Social networks are on the cutting edge of capitalizing on these products, refining and furthering their reification.

Anyway, this interview in Guernica with Illouz (via 3QD) makes me want to get started on her books today. In the interview she makes a point about how technology increases the salience of choice at the expense of what earlier generations experienced as passion:

in the internet research I show that technology undermines what nineteenth century people called passion because of the way technology forces you to manage your relationships in a completely rational way and because of the way in which it creates a blasé attitude and cynical attitude towards the encounter. It’s the choice, the possibility of choice that changes completely the experience of passion because passion was based on scarcity.

Passion has perhaps been changed by the ever-present options into the experience of options itself -- we thrill at the array, at options being left open, rather than love making us feel as we have no other choice. Certainly, love as destiny is still celebrated in culture-industry product and in culture generally, but that seems to have an escapist air of nostalgia to it -- something more and more people want only vicariously.

Another interesting question raised: Can emotions be separated from the institutions developed to prompt and contain them? What happens when emotions are end products rather than orienting responses to situations? What guides our affect in the moment then, if we have made emotions into outcomes? Do we then need institutions to protect us from needing emotional guidance from moment to moment? Questions in a world of blue.

Love in the time of cultural-capital-acquisition strategies (9 April 2010)

I have an essay up at Wunderkammer about strategic taste formation and the difficulties faced in opting out of that sort of game. It was prompted by this strange dread I felt at the prospect of having to listen to the new Joanna Newsom album and investing the requisite amount of time to be fair to it somehow. I started to wonder if it even makes sense to try to be fair to cultural product, whether that isn't some sort of mystification for cultural-capital acquisition. Cultural capital seems to be the same sort of thing as the courtier's sprezzatura -- it needs to appear effortless and unselfconscious in order to be efficacious. The best way of accomplishing that is to try to take oneself out of one's own loop -- to trick oneself with the idea of "really liking" certain highly unlikely things.

Douglas Holt's 1997 paper (gated link) "Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu's theory of tastes from its critics" has some interesting insights on the subject of cultural capital. First, he captures the essence of Bourdieu's Distinction in this sentence, which is the animating idea of the Wunderkammer essay, though I don't think I stated it outright: "Bourdieu argues that cultural capital secures the respect and esteem of others through the consumption of objects that are 'difficult' and so can only be consumed by those few who have acquired the ability to do so."

But it is not as simple as that -- the signaling function of difficulty needs to be aestheticized, generalized, and hidden from ourselves. Basically, various genre-specific forms of cultural capital are useful only if they allows seemingly subjective tastes to become commensurable, weighed on the same scale, and to have that scale describe the social hierarchy in a direct and experiential way. In other words, cultural capital is a process by which we abstract from the specifics of what we like in order to understand where our tastes place us in the status hierarchy. But the tricky part is that this process of abstraction is less a cognitive operation than a praxis -- we don't calculate in our minds what our tastes mean; we live them and in the process reveal to ourselves the class status embedded in our habitus, or the approach to life we have learned from our upbringing and environment, plus the modes of cultural appreciation we have managed to master and internalize so that we operate them convincingly.

Why can't I ever seem to put this idea across without jargon? The display of taste can't be a tactic; it has to play naturally to have its desired effects. So our strategic acquisition of cultural capital has to disavow itself in our own minds. This leads to our living some contradictions: this is what I think I was experiencing in my dread about Joanna Newsom.

The problem we face is how to convert cultural capital into something "spendable" in social interactions without destroying its value in the process -- without seeming to be trying too hard. This involves all sorts of contortions and feints; it involves a perpetual process of becoming that mirrors the perpetual evolution of fashion. After all, if we achieve a sense of being what our cultural capital implies, we would nullify it.

Thus Holt makes the point that consumption style is more important than its substance, as the substance is designed to continually change. The specifics of fashion change, but understanding how and why it changes can provide an unchanging modicum of social status. We are becoming at the level of specific tastes, so that we have being at the level of consumption style (habitus). Consumption styles are commensurable, even when specific tastes are not. What's important about finding the commensurability is not being able to rank ourselves so much as it is to help us form our social bonds, to help us read the social terrain. It seems likely, in fact, that those social bonds are what mirror back to us the sense of our own status -- that confirm what we otherwise can only suspect about ourselves. Here's how Holt puts it:

Class boundaries are formed only to the extent that there exist social interactional processes through which otherwise incommensurate field-specific cultural capitals are aggregated into meta-field attributions of status. For example, does one, as a nonparticipant in the consumption field of leisure reading, acknowledge and grant status to friends and acquaintances who have highly developed tastes for prose? I believe that this conversion of field-specific to abstracted cultural capital - while a problematic iterative process - is a pervasive feature of contemporary social interaction. People constantly make such judgments to assess their affinities with others' tastes in the process of choosing friends, lovers, and business acquaintances. If this process is significant, it suggests that in an increasingly fragmented cultural world, status judgments based on shared interests are less important than those based upon similar styles of consuming, which can be applied to any cultural category.

I bolded the part above. The depressing implication (but maybe it shouldn't depress me) seems to be that we choose friends the way we choose any other consumer good -- it's all with an eye to cultural capital, how it will play. The process of cultural-capital conversion makes friends and lovers equivalent to tennis rackets and interior decor. It's all on the same continuum. As Holt puts it: "a single symbolic currency that functions as a status resource." I wonder if this has always been the case, or whether it is a manifestation of a more open and mobile society, or whether it is a reflection of capitalism reorganizing our personality structures.

As a by-product of the cultural capital process, Holt notes, "status boundaries are reproduced simply through expressing one's tastes." This poses problems for cultural egalitarianism, if there is such a thing -- and I think there is and that "poptimism" is a expression of it. The cultural egalitarian wants taste to be a kind of democracy, with each person's taste validating that person's equal standing in the aesthetic realm. But the signaling we perform to find one another reproduces the social (not personal) hierarchy that makes us prefer some people to others, that allows us to experience love and friendship in the first place, such as it is in our culture. Companionate marriages, for instance, depend on "consumption complementarities", as this essay by Stevenson and Wolfers details. We need the hierarchy to order our social lives in a way meaningful to us -- to find the "one." And by reproducing the "code" of that hierarchy (the various nuances of consumerist signals defined in their expression) in our courtship rituals, we make that hierarchy stronger when we find that person (or thing). Ideally, the mate/consumption partner stays loyal and true even as the objects they consume together change. Hence our choice of partner substantiates our habitus (or consuming style) that might otherwise be lost in all the surface changes to the specifics of what we consume.

Choosing a partner then is first enabled by the little ephemeral choices: these allow us to find "the one". Then having the "one" stabilizes the overriding meaning of subsequent choices, reorienting them back to that original partner choice, which becomes a touchstone for their meaning even as the social meanings at large, at the level of the broader consumption code, are changing uncontrollably (and faster than ever with the advent of the internet.) That is to say, falling in love or choosing close friends is (among other things) a way of trying to seize control back over the meaning of our consumption, to create consumption communities that seem to stabilize the meaning of products and practices that, in the wild of the globalized meme market, change faster than anyone can keep up with. The consumption community defrays the damage, distributes it among the group so that one need not face it alone. It makes the whirlwind of fashion manageable, allows it to pass through our lives as harvestable energy - turning over our belongings and behaviors as a means of letting us grow closer to the loved ones in our lives -- rather than blowing us around like paper dolls.

Clouds in my coffee (3 March 2010)

I very much enjoyed the deep thoughts about "You're So Vain" in this post at the economics blog Cheap Talk, entitled "Carly Simon and Interactive Epistemology." The gist is that the song sets vanity and humility into an endlessly recursive dialectic, like a set of M.C. Escher stairs.

the song clearly accuses its subject of being vain. If he thinks the song is about him, then he is acknowledging his own vanity. Certainly the guy gets humility points for recognizing his own vanity, right?
But wait. The subject knows that Carly knows that the subject’s recognition of himself in Carly’s song is an admission of vanity, and hence an act of humility. And therefore “I bet you think this song is about you” translates to “I bet you think you are humble.” And given that, since the subject indeed recognizes himself in the song he is in fact claiming to be humble, an act of sheer vanity.
So Carly’s lyrics cut deep indeed.

Really, if you write a pop song complaining about someone else's vanity, aren't you just feeding it? Don't you become the problem then? It seems that the song sets out to condemn vanity but instead makes it seem pretty compelling and attractive. If you believe Simon, the song is about a composite of several men, each of whom falls into the vanity trap once they think it is exclusively about them. I was always under the impression the song was supposed to be about Warren Beatty, and also always thought it was genius to have Mick Jagger do "uncredited" backup vocals that stand out so prominently in the mix.

The Cheap Talk post barely scratches the surface of the song's many conundrums. Consider, for example, this line: "You're where you should be all the time and when you're not you're with some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend." If he is where he should be all the time, how could he then not be? Is being with the underworld spy where he should or shouldn't be? Is he in two places at once? Perhaps the point is to make the claim that he is a metaphysical contradiction. Are the wife and the spy the same person?

My best guess is that the incoherency of the lyrics make the song ring true as an expression of relationship frustration.

Loving things (10 Dec 2009)

Lisa Katayama, who writes nonjudgmentally and often about the apparently growing phenomenon of people falling in love with objects (pillows, computer game characters, dolls, the Eiffel Tower, etc.), had this to say about the practice in a recent BoingBoing post:

The idea of a person developing an emotional attachment to an object is easy to ridicule, but it's actually common. Whether the object of that affectionate bond is a teddy bear, a cardboard version of your hubby, or an imaginary character etched on a body pillow doesn't really matter. But within the spectrum of objects that people can have feelings for, some anthropomorphized things tend to make spectators feel more uncomfortable or weirded-out than others. The fact that some "love objects" are okay, while others stigmatize, challenges our notions of acceptable human behavior. As inanimate objects increasingly take on roles that humans used to fill, those challenges are likely to become more common.

Yes, but can't we agree that this is a bad thing? Shouldn't social policy, or at least the cultural conversation, aim to prevent this from becoming "more common"? I wouldn't want to ridicule adults who love dolls, but I hesitate to condone such behavior, even though it is ultimately none of my business (though when it is reported upon, it does seem to invite readers to have a response of outrage or condescension). Affection is wasted on objects; there is a shortage of affection out there for actual people. (Objects are never lonely.) It would seem sort of selfish to love an object as though it were human if it didn't already seem pathologically insane. And that the phenomenon is, according to Katayama, growing means that the worst fears about dehumanization and reification under capitalism are coming true. We are just abstract labor, ot abstract consumptive forces. We are so little developed socially as human beings in our culture that we can easily and more conveniently be replaced by things in the formation of emotional ties. Consumerism has brought us to a point where emotional ties are not expected to be reciprocal, that we can play out both sides of the relation ourselves in a sustained act of vicarious fantasy. Why go to the trouble of having human friends if we no longer want spontaneity or the unexpected or the responsibility of mutual obligation -- when we just want to be passively entertained? Why not enlist a pleasure robot instead?

I have always assumed that when we say we love an object, we are using a safe proxy for expressing a love for something about people or for something in ourselves that we want others to recognize. The object itself is just a sign; it can't partake in an emotional relation. This is my speculation: If I claim to love an object, I am merely being stubborn about admitting to the people I am trying to love through that object. That, or my ability to be human has become so severely compromised that I can't handle mutual relations with others of my species. I don't think there is anything liberating, revolutionary or transgressive in it.

'Twilight' and True Love-ism (18 Nov 2009)

Until I started writing this, my knowledge of the Twilight series isn't extensive: it's limited mainly to having noticed the covers of the books on the subway since they had chess pieces on them (for a brief moment of insanity I wondered whether they might be chess-related books -- maybe I had missed the birth of the hyper-hypermodern) and a brief discussion I had with a friend after seeing a giant poster of the goofy lead actor in a Target. (It seemed as though the photographer had him say "duh" to capture that perfect look of cuddly harmlessness.) I also know that it is about vampires and the author is a Mormon.

But the series' popularity can clearly reveal something significant -- does it herald something different, or is it a new bottle for old ideology?

Using this WaPo story as a point of departure, Tyler Cowen offers nine hypotheses, including this: "You know from the beginning that the plot twists will have to be extreme. Few movie makers offer up vampires who think pensively, talk inordinately, and live out ambiguous endings, sitting around in coffee shops." I actually would want to see that show, about the quotidian everyday life of vampires. Pace it like an Antonioni film. Explore the question of whether anything has meaning without death.

Cowen also makes the often overlooked point that "some of the popularity is arbitrary with respect to the vampire theme itself. There is a clustering of production in any successful cultural meme, once that meme gets underway. You might as well ask why there is so much heavy metal music today." Culture is subject to momentum, to booms and busts, cycles of overproduction. Once a particular solution for an ideological social need is devised, it can perhaps crowd out other solutions. Then "Harry Potter" or "Twilight" becomes the all-purpose answer to a shared wish for fantasy that might have drawn a variety of nuanced responses. That is to say, network effects and the rewards for individuals that come from them begin to preclude the pleasure that might derive from choosing our own fulfillment from a more diverse field of cultural products. Slate had a piece arguing that since 1960 we have always been in the midst of some sort of vampire craze or other.

But what, then, is the underlying issue that we as a culture have settled on vampires to solve? A month ago, Esquire ran this story arguing that vampires are metaphors for gay men -- fundamentally inaccessible to teen girls:

Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet.

Girls not yet ready to enter fully into mature sexuality find in vampires/gay friends something both threatening and harmless at the same time.

Karl Smith draws a related conclusion: "A vampire wants you, in the absolute worst possible way. And, once he has you, at best you are transformed forever, at worst you are dead. This is a clear metaphor for the most pressing issue in young teenage minds." Basically vampires are about ambivalence toward sex, and a way of processing in coded form all the mixed messages girls receive about sex.

This Salon article about adult Twilight devotees views the Twilight books as essentially romance novels with enough genre stylization to not seem as such to those who get into them. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance might be useful, then, in figuring out the appeal -- Radway argues that romance novels ameliorate the conditions of patriarchy by dignifying female roles within it. In the Salon article, this is related to the myth of true love:

"This is what I call 'true love-ism,'" Laura Miller told me. "True love-ism is the secular religion of America, one that all of us can believe in. What's appealing about Edward is his certainty. He craves Bella monogamously. The book feeds the delusion that an erotic god could love you, and that he'd also be faithful."

In Miller's review of the books, she argues that

Even to a reader not especially susceptible to its particular scenario, Twilight succeeds at communicating the obsessive, narcotic interiority of all intense fantasy lives. Some imaginary worlds multiply, spinning themselves out into ever more elaborate constructs. Twilight retracts; it finds its voluptuousness in the hypnotic reduction of its attention to a single point: the experience of being loved by Edward Cullen.

Miller quotes an adult reader, who describes the books' appeal like this:

Twilight makes me feel like there may be a world where a perfect man does exist, where love can overcome anything, where men will fight for the women they love no matter what, where the underdog strange girl in high school with an amazing heart can snag the best guy in the school, and where we can live forever with the person we love

(Coincidentally, this is how I interpret Just One of the Guys.) Miller's gloss on this -- "The 'underdog strange girl' who gets plucked from obscurity by 'the best guy in school' is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join" -- relates it straight back to the first novel in English to become a popular sensation, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. So perhaps this is proof that we haven't progressed very far ideologically; conservatives would perhaps see this as proof that certain roles and fantasies are hard-wired into humanity's circuitry. (I don't endorse those conclusions.)

Free love on the free-love freeway (17 Oct 2009)

Christopher Shea linked to this post at the Awl, in which Tom Scocca threw up all over Mark Greif's earnest look in n+1 at sexual freedom as a way out of capitalism's confinements. Greif writes,

“Sex without consequences” becomes the metaphor for cooperative exchange without gain or loss. For basing life on the things that are free. For the anticapitalist experience par excellence.

Scocca's retort to this sort of sentiment: "What is this CUDDLE-PUDDLE BULLSHIT?"

Though Scocca is taking a deliberately obtuse and unsympathetic tack to squeeze out a few laughs at Greif's expense, this is a fair question. Greif is polemicizing about "repressive sentimentalism" but puts forward his own sort of sentimentalized absolute -- sex for pleasure. (What David Brent celebrates as Free Love on the Free Love Freeway.) Greif's interpretation of domination as repression ignores Foucault's arguments about the political uses of pleasure. I'm tempted to call this move repressive tolerance, though that doesn't quite fit. Actually, Greif is arguing that gay-marriage rights are a form of repressive tolerance, masking the underlying domestic system of oppression. Power, however, can work through permissions as well as through prohibitions in the sexual sphere as well. One can end up in the trap of competing to see who can become the most liberated, a competition that suits consumerism -- which aids this pursuit with a variety of lifestyle accouterments -- just fine.

Greif's take on free love is grounded in an essentialized version of libido:

Yet you have to stick with sex, as a utopian—even when you’re not a particularly lubricious person yourself.
You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies.

The amount of qualifications Greif has already had to put in that proposition is a clue that it's pretty dubious. I'm reluctant to agree that a sexual relation is "a deep intuitive process." It seems more a labile, tentatively constructed thing, highly normative as opposed to instinctual. I'm totally with Greif that marriage supports patriarchal arrangements regardless of the gender of those marrying, and that a radical restructuring of society would require a drastic reordering of domesticity. (Laura Kipnis makes a similar argument in Against Love.) But free-love utopianism feels like a short-circuiting of the sort of theorizing necessary to address the problem, which is ultimately one of who performs the socially necessary emotion work. Sex is great and all, but it is not the only "authentic" form of pleasure. To regard sexual relations as directly given to our consciousness is to submit to a fantasy about sex's pure spontaneity, the final destination in the quest for an unmediated private and personal relation, independent of society.

But sexual desire is far from "universal" in its expression. The sexual relation is not necessarily economic in nature, but that doesn't it mean it pre-exists economic relations or is capable of purifying them or that it is automatically egalitarian. Sex doesn't inherently make you "love people." That claim reimports the sentimental cant about love that he began by wanting to banish. Also, "Sex without consequences" is not really possible because all actions have consequences. Ruling out one particular set of consequences does not mean there are none at all. It seems morally foolish to posit as the ideal the ability to act without consequences -- not to go all existential, but that makes for a freedom that is inherently meaningless. Acting in the world is the self's pursuit of responsibility, but advocating the pursuit of pleasure "without consequences" as model behavior seems like a wish to abdicate it in the search for oblivion.

It seems to me Greif is more on the right track when he talks about the seductiveness of the existing system of marriage:

Domination depends rather on the beauty of sex with consequences, the pleasure of sex with consequences, to guarantee commitment to the family-centered fold. Women’s straight desire and wish for love and pleasure is the thing that’s supposed to seduce women back into the system of inequality—a beautiful inequality mentally structured by childbearing and the determination of your life course by the consequences of desire. It is beautiful, in its way; as oriental despotism was beautiful, too. You must give something up to leave the system—or else the system is revealed as naked and weak. Thus feminism always needs to be pictured publicly as sexless, man-hating, or just manless—not to mention babyless—or it would become appealing. (Indeed, baby love may furnish the greater lifetime erotic satisfaction for straight women, on the traditional system.) If desire fails to pull people back into patriarchy, patriarchy’s arsenal is diminished.

Yes. It seems that feminism needs to reach a point where it need not be deliberately "represented" at all -- a point at which it so thoroughly saturates our values that the fact that someone is a "feminist" wouldn't jump out at us. In other words, it needs to cease to be an identity and simply be a practice.

Chris Dillow linked to a paper that takes an entirely different approach to marriage.

I’m intrigued by this new paper on the economics of marriage by Gilles Saint-Paul.
He begins from the premise that the gains from marriage arise from innate biological differences between men and women - that men can have loads of children, but don‘t know which ones are theirs, whilst women cannot. Given this, marriage is a potentially mutually beneficial trade. Men get to know which children are theirs, which is utility-enhancing if they care about the human capital of their offspring. And women get someone to help (if only financially) with child-raising.

This, in Dillow's interpretation, means that "repression of women’s sexuality operates to the benefit of second-rate men. If women were free to shag around, they’d only go with the best men and ignore lower-quality ones. Repression and marriage thus give second-rate blokes a chance." When women pursue "sex without consequences," by this reasoning, they curtail the possibility for sexual liberation for those average men who won't find willing partners. That sounds a lot like the "nice guy syndrome." Here's a definition from the Urban Dictionary:

A annoying mental condition in which a heterosexual man concocts oversimplified ideas why women aren’t flocking to him in droves. Typically this male will whine and complain about how women never want to date him because he is “too nice” or that he is average in appearance. He often targets a woman who is already in a relationship; misrepresenting his intentions of wanting to be her friend and having the expectation that he is owed more than friendship because he is such a good listener. He is prone to brooding over this and passive aggressive behavior.
He is too stupid to realize the reason women don’t find him attractive is because he feels sorry for himself; he concludes that women like to be treated like shit.

As Greif notes, Houellebecq's novels are about this problem -- free love becomes institutionalized, yet "nice guys" find themselves under more pressure than ever to use prostitutes in order to get in on the action. Maybe Greif in his essay is trying to find a way to circumvent nice guyism without giving way to Tucker Max-ism, intellectualizing what is easily reduced to an alpha-male evolutionary premise in order to redeem it, dignify it, preserve it as "hopeful." But as anyone who has seen the preview for Tucker Max's movie knows, there is no hope for humanity.

Manufacturing loneliness (11 Feb 2009)

"The End of Solitude," William Deresiewicz's recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, is well worth reading, though I probably would have given it the title I gave this post. Deresiewicz's argument (simplified for effect) is that just as TV prepares us to be bored, the internet intensifies our loneliness.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that solitude is this cherished opportunity for soulful meditation that we are tragically losing, but I think there's also something snobbish in that framing -- maybe because it is associated with ultra-egotist Romantic poets like Wordsworth. (A love of solitude can sometimes seem to imply that one feels an inherent superiority that makes the company of others tiresome.) It seems bogus to presume that only in solitude is wisdom hatched, as Thoreau's example is used to demonstrate. It's a species of the great man theory of history, that presumes geniuses operate in isolation to shape the destiny of worlds. It seems more likely that social frictions produce ideas that individuals express and take credit for. Maybe solitude is necessary for noticing those frictions and framing coherent thoughts about them, but the romantic idea of people getting in touch with their real selves outside of society is pure ideology.

Besides, solitude is not simply available for the choosing for everyone -- as Virgina Woolf pointed out, a room of one's own is a privilege. An ability to appreciate solitude in the high-minded sense is probably a part of the habitus of the middle and upper classes. There's an art to being alone. It's often an elegant pose.

The problem is less that we don't respect the concept of solitude anymore and more that the internet makes us self-conscious about our pseudocelebrity; it invites us to imagine we are celebrities and distorts our relationships accordingly. We start to scheme for recognition rather than rest more comfortably in the recognition we are already receiving from those close to us.

Anyway, Deresiewicz wants to divide the recent past into eras based on technology.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.)

As for the theorists who have been banished to obscurity by the passive voice in that parenthetical, I assume that Deresiewicz has in mind sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu, who argued in Distinction that "the ethic of liberation" may be "supplying the economy with the perfect consumer." These consumers "are isolated...and therefore free (or forced) to confront in extended order the separate markets ("juniors," "teenagers," "senior citizens," etc.) of the new economic order and untrammeled by the constraints and brakes imposed by collective memories and expectations" -- traditions from family life and that sort of thing. That seems right to me -- the status hierarchy, confronted with emerging consumerism and democracy, yielded a situation in which marketers could exploit the idea of liberation to leverage insecurity. The migration of sociality to the internet is giving them a new playing field, a way to make us feel lonely in the midst of more communication than ever.

Deresiewicz continues:

So it is with the current generation's experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn't call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn't always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn't always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

Solitude has been transformed into loneliness by the prevalence of tools that make it possible for us always to be connected. The tools assume an always-on status, so we do too, whether or not we need to. Why? Deresiewicz is not clear on this point, but I would chalk it up to technophilia, expediency, and social norms that have evolved to reproduce consumerism. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel lonely, since loneliness creates a market for communications.)

At some point, if this line of argument is correct, the capabilities of a particular technology begin to be experienced by users as a kind of compulsion, a command. Because you can text your whereabouts at all times to your friends, you should do so. Because people can be contact you always, when they aren't, it can begin to feel like a slight. Let's say you post a comment on a friend's Facebook status update and they don't acknowledge it, even though you can see they are online. You shouldn't take that personally, but I know I would. It's one of the things that makes social networking hard for me. It's bad enough checking an email inbox. Something about knowing people out there on line could be paying attention to what we are doing can bring out the borderline personality in all of us. I see that someone I hardly know but have friended on Facebook is online, and I have this awful urge to write a new update, just to see if they'll notice. This feeling is what I understand Deresiewicz to be talking about when he talks about manufactured loneliness.

The immediacy of the new medium for friendship sets friendship up on a customer service model, on which we are encouraged to expect immediate satisfaction on our own terms, since we are paying with that newly scarce currency, our attention. This commercial reciprocity threatens to preclude the possibility of the gratuitous reciprocity of friendship. The customer is always right, but the customer is always alone.

Deresiewicz rightly points out how the internet once relieved feelings of social isolation for misfits. And refuges still exist where people can find each other. But social networks seem to undermine that kind of alternative connection, importing the norms of high school to the online space that once afforded an escape. At the same time, real loneliness -- the soul-sapping sense that there is no one to share your thoughts, your life with -- is trivialized by the new loneliness, of not getting a text from your BFFs every five minutes and not having enough followers on Twitter. Worse, Twitter and Facebook are tacitly offered to us as cures for real loneliness, with the implication that if you still feel lonely despite these great commercial social-networking tools, there must really be something wrong with you.

Gendered gift-giving angst (20 Dec 2008)

Though the idea of using potlatchess to take the edge of of capitalism often seems appealing, I'm not big on programmatic gift-giving. It seems to me that the spontaneous gift generates far less angst, simply because it need not ever be given. You just give something when you happen to come across something you know would be appropriate for somebody. Of course, if there is no schedule for gift-giving, you may not make a point of looking for such things as would be appropriate and never come upon them. Giving gifts is something of a full-time hobby, and requires certain habits of mind -- reading magazines, taking frequent trips to stores, having conversations with people about their stuff, etc. -- if one is to be successful at it. I don't do any of that, so I only ever know what stuff I want for myself, and even that sometimes can make for a paltry list. (I try to be wanting for as little as possible; if it occurs to me that I want something, I go out and buy it.) In general, I don't like the routine of showing consideration for other people by paying attention to their stuff; I'd rather be considerate by listening to their ideas, responding to them, and in general spending time with them. Gifts can materialize that sense of simpatico, but they also seem to threaten to replace it. Though I like it when someone buys me an apropos gift, it also makes me feel a little uneasy, as if the giver has secured themselves a get-out-of-jail-free card with their gift and now don't have to put in any time with me. Gifts express our social relations in things; that can seem like an amplification and a realization of them, or it can seem like the termination of the relation as a living, changing thing. In particular, unwanted gifts can make a healthy relation suddenly seem dubious. If its the thought that counts, what in the hell were they thinking?

Both PsyBlog and BPS Digest have taken timely note of recent research by psychologist Elizabeth Dunn and colleagues into how men and women react differently to unwanted gifts. The PsyBlog posts points out the problem with gift-giving in romantic relationships:

Psychological research on how gift-giving affects relationships hints at this no-win situation. Studies suggest that good gifts only affirm similarity between couples, and so do little for the relationship. Poor gifts, though, may lead people to question their similarity with each other, thereby damaging the relationship.

Dunn's research shows that the intensity of revulsion felt at a bad gift varies by gender. Men readily interpret an ill-suited gift as a sign that the relationship won't last; women are more likely to rationalize away a bad gift to protect the relationship: "women are more motivated than men to marshal psychological defence mechanisms to protect against the damaging effects of poor gifts." Obviously, this reflects a certain power dynamic at work, likely a legacy of patriarchy. Part of the "domestic angel in the household" stereotype for women involves "effortlessly" coming up with the right gifts for people while evincing all sorts of inherent holiday cheer. The holidays become an arena where those confined to the domestic sphere can show off their worth and excel, demonstrate competency and secure recognition for it. But the consequence is that the effort starts to be taken for granted; men expect the elaborate holiday performance of women as a domestic tour de force; women don't expect the same from men.

To me, the clear response to this is to rid relationships of gift-giving expectations to remove this patriarchal hangover. And then give gifts when you feel like it. If you dare it, you might declare that every moment you spend with a partner is your gift to them, and vice versa.

Feeling single (14 Feb 2008)

As my Valentine's Day gift to you, here's a paean to the single life, and a useful reminder of the many ways society tries to convince us that being single is shameful. (Valentine's Day, of course, is just one of these.)

So single people typically are happy, and getting married does not make people lastingly happier, even for those who get married and stay married. How can this be? Single people do not have the official, legal coupled status that is so celebrated in our society—and many are not part of any couple, formal or informal, same-sex or different-sex. Plus, they are targets of stereotyping and discrimination. Why aren’t they miserable and lonely?
The ways we have come to talk about people who are single is misleading. We often say, for example, that they are “alone” and that they “don’t have anyone”. In fact, though, single people (perhaps especially single women) are likely to have whole networks of important people in their lives. They often have friendships that have outlasted many marriages. They have not invested all of their emotional and interpersonal capital into just one person.

Society, after all, has much more at stake in our being married than we do, since it is fundamentally a system of social control and property management.

Scientific sanction to love (1 Feb 2008)

John Tierney wrote a piece in the NYT about the pseudoscientific algorithms online dating services use to help people meet the one. Arguing that computers do a better job than people themselves at picking from prospective mates, this is how the story concludes:

Until outside scientists have a good look at the numbers, no one can know how effective any of these algorithms are, but one thing is already clear. People aren’t so good at picking their own mates online. Researchers who studied online dating found that the customers typically ended up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they studied, and that those dates often ended up being huge letdowns. The people make up impossible shopping lists for what they want in a partner, says Eli Finkel, a psychologist who studies dating at Northwestern University’s Relationships Lab.
“They think they know what they want,” Dr. Finkel said. “But meeting somebody who possesses the characteristics they claim are so important is much less inspiring than they would have predicted.”
The new matchmakers may or may not have the right formula. But their computers at least know better than to give you what you want.

It's not surprising that shopping for a mate would turn out to be less effective than having a computer more or less randomly select one. This is not a testimony to the effectiveness of the algorithms but an indication that spontaneity and unpredictability are important ingredients in launching a relationship -- perhaps more important than liking the same music and reading the same books and professing to have the same sort of hobbies. What would-be lovers want is not so much to see Godard films together but to share a sense of destiny.

No matter what the methodology, the idea that some particular person was scientifically chosen to like you is likely a strong argument in that person's favor, so the proposed matches probably go into their dates feeling fairly confident of being charming. After all, this person has to like you or else the computer wouldn't have spit their name out, right? It's a sanction to love, trusting to the almighty power of Science. Whereas when you pick a person yourself, based on some fantasy of what you wish appealed to you, you become responsible for the choice (as opposed to Science) and are obliged to second-guess yourself and to wonder whether you might have done a better job -- the person's shortcomings become a comment on your own inability to shop effectively. That responsibility can lead to self-doubt and an unwillingness to trust that anything will work out. "It's not that I haven't taken the time to get to know this person," one might think, "it's just that I didn't think hard enough about making my selection." There's always one more profile to look at before making a choice anyway. Shopping for a person based on your own personal preferences seems to lead to an illusion of control over the object sought after, turning the date partner into a kind of commodity and generating an expectation that you should be able to return it if it doesn't completely satisfy. That's probably why the online dating thing seems to work better for people who want only sex. There, pragmatic calculation is welcome and necessary.

In general, we tend to define what is romantic in terms of the absence of the sort of rational calculation processes we use to strike good bargains. Romantic feeling is typically set in opposition to that kind of thought; the feeling is residual, what's left over after everything that has been purposely sought after is accounted for. It only feels like love when we can't quite account for it, and it doesn't seem to have been manufactured by our cleverness or practicality. When a relationship serves some pragmatic end, it doesn't seem like love, and hand-picking a partner according to a laundry list of expectations is far too pragmatic. Instead, our love stories tend to be framed in terms of overcoming obstacles, rejecting the protests that loving some particular person makes no sense.

Here's a sweeping generalization: In coming to reject arranged marriages and the like, our society has strongly shifted in the other direction, and we balk at any whiff of instrumentality in the procurement of intimate partners. So we have to play elaborate tricks on ourselves to avoid accusing ourselves of being calculating in our love, of loving for the "wrong" reasons, which is to say, for any reason other than a blind willingness to be in love. This we call chemistry or sympathy, the force of attraction that can't otherwise be explained rationally. Computer-assisted dating is one trick for masking our own intentionality, transferring the calculation to the computers and absolving ourselves of the pettiness of actively deducing what we should want from another person and scheming how to get it, leaving us to blithely and passively react to the suitor supplied, just as we are used to, incidentally, from consuming entertainment.

Hedonic marriage (24 Jan 2008)

Cato Unbound has an interesting series of essays about the future of marriage, by historian Stephanie Coontz, and the economic factors driving the evolution by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. (Wolfers has a related post at the Freakonomics blog as well.) Its no surprise, considering the Cato Institute's involvement, that a great deal of skepticism is directed at the State's involvement in the institution, i.e. the bigoted American obsession with "protecting" marriage. But the history here is interesting in its own right, and absolutely essential if you want to have any understanding of what's going in pretty much every novel written before World War I. Novels in their heyday dramatized the shift from more or less arranged marriages to love matches, offering all sorts of prescriptions for what love really is and proving a host of psychological and sociological defenses of the change. If I hadn't sold all my lit-crit books when I moved to New York, I could probably even cite the appropriate scholar on this, but it has been argued that the commercial novel pretty much emerges from that shift; it's a salient dramatic set piece that everyone in Western culture could relate to. (Maybe I need to go reread Denis de Rougemont.)

As Coontz explains, it made sense for state institutions to involve themselves in marriage when the practice was fundamentally a matter of broader family alliances than the preference of the betrothed individuals.

Because of marriage’s vital economic and political functions, few societies in history believed that individuals should freely choose their own marriage partners, especially on such fragile grounds as love. Indeed, for millennia, marriage was much more about regulating economic, political, and gender hierarchies than nourishing the well-being of adults and their children. Until the late 18th century, parents took for granted their right to arrange their children’s marriages and even, in many regions, to dissolve a marriage made without their permission. In Anglo-American law, a child born outside an approved marriage was a “fillius nullius” - a child of no one, entitled to nothing. In fact, through most of history, the precondition for maintaining a strong institution of marriage was the existence of an equally strong institution of illegitimacy, which denied such children any claim on their families.

In short, marriage was a system that supplied a legal framework for inheritances (and maintain gender roles, but that's other story). That changed with the rising discourse of happiness, and marriage as permanent property arrangements was replaced with marriage as a public recognition of companionate love. A great deal contributed to orchestrating this shift; it correlates with the rising middle class and relaxing of the rigidity of the class system. But whatever the causes, it has left us with an institution patently rife with contradictions.

The same things that have made so many modern marriages more intimate, fair, and protective have simultaneously made marriage itself more optional and more contingent on successful negotiation. They have also made marriage seem less bearable when it doesn’t live up to its potential. The forces that have strengthened marriage as a personal relationship between freely-consenting adults have weakened marriage as a regulatory social institution.

Stevenson and Wolfers put this in a more explicitly economic framework: when we say couples are together because they love each other, what we mean is that share "consumption complementarities" -- they share similar tastes about all the good stuff consumer society brings us.

Most things in life are simply better shared with another person: this ranges from the simple pleasures such as enjoying a movie or a hobby together, to shared social ties such as attending the same church, and finally, to the joint project of bringing up children.

No longer preoccupied with productive concerns -- with capital formation and division of labor in producing a household -- couples now can focus on consumption; this Stevenson and Wolfers call "hedonic marriage." And this change seems indisputable. But as our tastes are subject to change, complementary tastes seems a flimsy pretense to enter into contract with someone that lasts until death does you part. Though I am sure this happens all the time, it's probably not necessary to marry the people you might like to, say, play bingo with. This shift likely puts implicit expectations to share all tastes on a couple, and probably subjects marriages to all sorts of undue pressure. Making the marriage commitment can in some ways become a kind of pledge to never change your tastes fundamentally, to become, to a degree, static. Obviously this doesn't happen to all wed couples; perhaps some share a taste for curiosity.

Texting love (14 Dec 2007)

Bookforum linked to this article about the effects of text messaging on traditional courtship practices in the Philippines. I know that sounds fascinating, and you're probably not even reading this sentence because you eagerly clinked on the link. But as I never have understood the allure of texting, I found the story illuminating.

Clearly it makes sense when to send messages when they are cheaper than talking, as they are in the Philippines, as the article points out. I don't know if that is true with the typical American cell phone plans, but it ought to be. I have long wished there would be a plan that would allow nothing but text messages, because I'm not much for chitchat -- when forced to use the phone, I generally just want the pertinent information, two or three of the the five Ws maximum. And I don't think I would want a smartphone, which seems like too much technology for my simple needs. I think I need the stupidphone.

Anyway, Randy Jay Solis, the article's author, suggests that texting is apparently well-suited for courtship because it creates an extra-intimate space in which the communication takes place.

Texting allows for depth in the courtship stage, an efficient way to exchange a variety of important, intimate, and personal topics and feelings. “The mobile phone screen is able to create a private space that even if you are far from each other physically, the virtual space created by that technology is apparent,” Arnel [a random Philippine teen] explains. “No one can hear you say those things or no one else can read them, assuming that it is not allowed to be read or seen by others.”

This is probably obvious to everybody who has ever texted, but it never occurred to me that this would be so, that technology would produce a virtual space that users would regard as more intimate rather than one further step removed from intimacy. I usually construe this kind of technology as a filter, a level of protection, a way to deny presence, whereas it probably can seem more intimate than a whisper in the ear when satellites are recruited into bringing you into a sweet nothing.

Solis points out how texting facilitates the ability of strangers to meet and become intimate whenever boredom strikes. But this intimacy, perhaps because it is technologically amplified, becomes more addictive.

Texting answers the need for a sustained connection necessary to increase and maintain intimacy, but it has also made couples more dependent on each other. “It became a habit,” *Emmy explains. Partners text each other as often as they can and have a compulsion to keep the communication constantly moving. One respondent attributed this to the “unwritten rule of texting.” Clara elaborates, “Once a person has texted you, you have to reply. If you don’t reply, the person will automatically think you ignored him or her on purpose. So you have to reply no matter what, even when you really have nothing to say.”
Since most of the couples initiating a romantic relationship do not have the luxury to meet up in person or talk over the phone regularly, the frequency of texting becomes a distinct indication of their seriousness about the relationship. “To commit is to be there for the person, 24/7. Texting helps in achieving that despite of the barriers in time and distance,” *Von explains.

This pinpoints what is the probably the main reason I have resisted getting a phone all the years, beyond Luddite inertia. I'm a little bit terrified of this kind of dependency and compulsion, of being unable to ignore a message without guilt or to go without sulking when my message garners no response. It's bad enough with email -- I had to abandon instant messaging for the same reason. When the messages are flowing back and forth in rhythm, its like you are wired into your correspondent, but then if there is a gap, it's like a betrayal, like being abandoned. I would get too impatient and paranoid in the delays, as though I were waiting for someone to pass me the crack pipe. It may takes more maturity than I can muster to presume innocence when an urgent or intimate message goes out there and just hangs, and it seems like the texting life would be filled with such mishaps and emotional misfires. In general, communications technology promotes impulsive immediacy over consideration, yielding a fraught, fragile intimacy that is only as a deep as the last message. All intimacy requires continual reciprocal contact, but accelerating that contact may be more than our limbic systems can handle. That, anyway, would seem to be part of the argument of an essay Solis cites, Heidegger, Habermas, and the Mobile Phone by George Myerson. According to these notes Myerson argues that "mobile communication is fragmented, accelerated, highly commoditized, and ultimately meaningless." He suggests that mobile phones are a critical step in the effort to meter all communication, to translate it into a purchasable object, to have it measurable in money. It ceases to be communication and instead becomes a species of exchange. That argument verges on a semantic trick, and my susceptibility to it is probably rooted in my bias for pragmatic talk, but it still seems an apt description for texted testimonials, and their cousins, the messages exchanged on social networking sites that are little more than acknowledgments that people are scrutinizing one another.

It seems curmudgeonly to complain about there being more intimacy in the world thanks to technology, I know. But ultimately, the way communication is quantified may be what seems so sinister about the heightened intimacy of texting; it turns the freedom of love into a kind of dope high purchasable on demand. And our bodies are supplanted by the devices we use to reach one another, the ones that let us be everywhere at once, and nowhere.

Sprezzatura and style (16 July 2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this love or just revolution? (14 Feb 2007)

Via Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber comes these slogans from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, ready-made for inscription on a card to your beloved (that is, if you are enough of a reactionary bourgeois to enslave another spirit in a property-based relation that negates the unbounded potentiality of your comrade for participatory joy):

Proletarians And Oppressed Peoples,
1. Progressive And Revolutionary People Everywhere, Resolutely Uphold The Militant Bolshevik Spirit And Revolutionary Romanticism Embodied In Comrade Valentine!
2. Decisively Smash Retrograde And Joyless Ultra-Left Lines Which Disparage Proletarian Love And Desire!!
3. Warmly Celebrate The 20th Anniversary Of ACT-UP, A Militant Organization Which Attacked The Bourgeois State and Big Capital On Behalf Of LGBTQ People And All AIDS-Affected Oppressed Communities Worldwide In 1987 And Has Remained On The Offensive For Two Decades! ! !

Ah, the inimitable tone poetry of Maoist jargon. Note how (1) every word is capitalized, (2) no verb can be left unadorned without an adverb to amplify it. The earnestness is extremely poignant, yet it brings out the reactionary bully in me who wants merely to mock it. I need to practice some revolutionary self-criticism and purge myself of my capitalist-roader ways.

If you go to the FRSO's site looking for more Valentine's Day fodder, I recommend you also read "Loving in the Movement: Revolutionary Task or Unity Crusher?" The post asks this essential question: "Does the person have to be a hard-core Marxist-Leninist for you to love them, or is anarchist, or simply anti-capitalist, enough?" And this is useful advice when it comes time to extend the praxis of radical critique to your relationship: "The important thing to remember in all cases is that the person is someone you love or once loved. They are probably not intending to take power from the people or cause oppression (though they may be doing so). Please be very kind to each other even as you raise your criticisms in a principled way."

How do I love thee? Let me show you my brain scan (13 Feb 2007)

The run up to Valentine's day is a good time for journalists to file stories like this one, from today's WSJ. The headline: "Is It Love or Mental Illness? They're Closer Than You Think." This is not exactly breaking news; people been describing love in terms of madness probably since the time of Sappho. But given a technological sheen, this information can seem reinvigorated, scientifically proven rather than the idle speculation of poets. The article, by WSJ's health writer Tara Parker-Pope, describes recent research into the neurochemistry of love, using brain scans to measure activity in its various parts while test subjects were shown pictures of people they love versus people they felt neutral about. "Everything that happens with romantic love has a chemical basis," explains Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and the lead researcher. (Love and chemistry? Who would have thought?) This raised methodological questions for me: How do the researchers know that the subjects are really in love with the people whose pictures they provide? Isn't there a kind of confirmation bias when you've provided a stack of photos, one of which you have said is special? Of course you are going to react to that one. It would be more interesting if there were unexpected brain activity in relation to one of the others.

Also, this invoked for me an ultimate Valentine's Day activity -- the day is already a show trial of romantic feelings through a variety of commercial rituals, so why not pay for the privilege of proving your love for your partner by having your brains scanned while you look at each other. Then your MRIs could be compared to other lovers to prove any number of things: that your love for each other is stronger that others' loves, or that one partner loves better than another, that you are still in love at all. Perhaps a business could be run in which couples prove their fidelity by having their love tested the way you might have your cholesterol measured. The brain scan could be a sophisticated lie detector; one could show a spouse pictures of various acquaintances and see just how they feel about them. The opportunities for exploiting jealous paranoia seem limitless, so there are many potential Valentine's Day marketing opportunities here. (Also, is there anything brain scans can't be alleged to show? A recent Washington Post article discussed how "brain scans and hormone fluctuations in our bloodstream show that our brains are designed to know where we fit into the pecking order, and we're uncomfortable when we're not among equals" -- not only can they provide scientific basis for romance but also for class difference.)

Parker-Pope points out that "the dramatic changes evident on the brain scans may help explain bizarre behavior that is often associated with love. It can also help explain why marital problems are such a serious health worry. Studies show that people in troubled relationships are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and high blood pressure." Then she suggests the fix:

Studies show that trying something new with a spouse can go a long way toward reigniting love. In one study, couples were assigned a weekly activity they both found new and exciting -- such as sailing or taking an art class. Another group did pleasant but familiar activities, such as dinner with friends. Based on answers to relationship tests, the couples doing new things showed far more improvement in the quality of their marriage after 10 weeks than couples who did the same things every week. The lesson is that sharing new experiences with your spouse appears to trigger changes in the brain that mimic the early days of being in love.
"We know that novelty and new experiences engage the dopamine system, and when it's associated with your partner it creates a link with the partner," says Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at New York's Stony Brook University who conducted the study. "It creates a dramatic increase in the sense of passion and romance.''

So this Valentine's Day, don't just go out to dinner. Go snorkeling or something.

Other societies, according to Lust in Translation, a book about infidelity in various cultures that Brad Plumer blogged about a few days ago, may have a different, more-straightforward solution to the novelty problem: new lovers, which spouses keep private and unobtrusive. Only in America, the book implies (at least to Plumer), is infidelity considered proof that a relationship is failing: "Now, obviously, anecdotal reporting isn't the same thing as doing extensive surveys and the like, but it was interesting that the people in France whom Druckerman interviews were mostly dumbfounded by the notion that couples should never have any secrets between them. That largely seems to be an American idea. (French people also don't appear to think that an affair is always a symptom of some horrific flaw in a relationship.) But then, looking at the statistics, French couples aren't any more prone to infidelity than American couples. It's just dealt with differently."

Americans may view it differently because of the commercial incentives to make them do so: Plumer notes how the book reveals that "an entire industry has sprouted up to help couples deal with the post-traumatic stress of an affair" -- stress created perhaps because of the way the stakes of infidelity are already raised. American counselors and Christian organizations prescribe radical truth-telling as a cure: How radical? "Many therapists believe that a wife is entitled to ask her husband for the details of every text message and encounter. The rationale is that the relationship between a husband and wife should be transparent. Some couples create a detailed chronology covering the entire period of the infidelity, even if it lasted for several years. The process stops when the wife can't take it anymore, or when she's satisfied that she's overturned every lie she's ever been told." It's easy to see where brain scans might fit into this. What better way to ground the truth of your feelings than in science, in hard data. A brain scan could be like a pee test for recovering addicts -- it could be checked to make sure a spouse isn't harboring untoward feelings for an ex-lover. It's a good way to reinforce the vision of marriage as sharing property, head space included.

But aside from the relationship industry (and its manufactured holidays like Valentine's Day), it may be that Americans register infidelity as more of a threat because other social pressures to maintain commitment are absent or weakened. I wonder whether divorce rates are lower where infidelity is regarded as less of a threat. Infidelity in such countries may be as much of an institution as marriage, with the same sorts of humdrum institutional hassles -- it may not seem all that exciting and thus may not seem to warrant an elaborate confessional. Perhaps some political science theory can shed some light here. Albert Hirschman, in Exit, Voice and Loyalty, notes the existence of "lazy monopolies" that welcome competition as a means for doing away with the troublesomeness of voice (intra-institutional complaining). Marriages in cultures where infidelity is tolerated may work similarly; that other subordinate relations can be conducted drains away the impetus to make major alterations to the dominant relation, which can lumber along quiescently, in "comfortable mediocrity" (to use Hirschman's epithet for ghetto grocers). Infidelity allows relationships "the freedom to deteriorate" without stirring up all that much stress.

Moreover, in order for couples to communicate like they must in order to maintain a relationship, the barriers for exit must be sufficiently strong. Hirschman explains that "specific institutional barriers to exit can often be justified on the ground that they serve to stimulate voice in deteriorating, yet recuperable organizations which would be prematurely destroyed through free exit." He's mainly talking about patrons of political organizations and business firms, but he remarks also that this logic rationalizes otherwise arbitrary procedural difficulties in divorce proceedings. With these barriers eroding, infidelity may seem more and more like outright exit, leading Americans to view it as a desperate spur for using an extreme version of what Hirschman calls "the voice option" -- radical truth-telling.

Sexy ads for girls (22 August 2006)

Marketers who specialize in getting teen girls to buy things can always be counted on to have their chosen demographic's best interests at heart. After all, marketers just want people to become who they really are, as the firms' market research has revealed them to be. An ad provides useful information that empowers consumers; it never tries to befuddle them or attempt to exploit their insecurities. And marketers certainly wouldn't want to reinforce any retrograde stereotypes. Never, no way. Here's proof.

The "all-girl talent team" at marketing firm 3iYing, which "specializes in marketing to girls ages 15 to 25," has a column in BusinessWeek this week in which they (somewhat self-servingly) criticize the existing state of advertising targeted at teenage girls. "Girls cringe at overtly sexual ads, yet paradoxically, marketing campaigns targeted at teen girls are sex-obsessed. It's impossible for us to browse, shop, and surf online without being bombarded with groping bodies, akimbo legs, come-hither gazes, and other provocative imagery. Even when we escape to teen magazines, we find sex staring back at us." They are so right; everyone knows that teen girls shouldn't be interested in sex, and that if they are it needs to take a higher form then models pretending to make out in a photograph: "Girls want a deeper storyline. To us, sexuality is more than physical. It combines visual, intellectual, and emotional elements." As for us guys, we just close our eyes, empty our minds and steel ourselves for some stoic, emotionless orgasms. Teenage girls are far more "sophisticated." For them, sex comes with a storyline, probably one that ends happily ever after with wedding bells (and hopefully with lots of expensive clothes and jewelry and cosmetics other such products one has to market to girls purchased along the way).

In other words, what girls want is true love. "Often, ads are so sexual, it's not clear what is really being sold. By relying on sex to sell your product you are not only getting lost in the steamy sea of marketing erotica, you're not highlighting what you want us to love in the first place—your product." Girls are ready and waiting to fall in love with branded objects, if only advertisers would stop treating them as if they enjoyed sex for its own sake. That, as "modern girls know," is "raunchy" and "cheap": "Raunchy is when the message is strictly graphic and physical, when there is no mystery, romance, sincerity or deeper meaning. Raunchy campaigns communicate only one idea—'girl wants some'—using the same visual messaging typical of pornography. Raunchy is a cheap play for attention. It shows lack of imagination and depth in the people and brands that use it." Girls, you see, don't "want." Such passion would be unseemly, base and immoral, as well as being shallow and without imagination. And looking raunchy, i.e. expressing sexual desire, just gives men an excuse to exploit you. "When a girl acts or dresses raunchy she doesn't get respect, at least no one takes the time to look beyond her body and appreciate her mind. The raunchy look signals to every nearby male 'Hi! I'm game for action.' " A "modern girl" should never seek action. She is a passive, frail flower, who'd best wait for the true love that comes looking for her. She understands a true courtier when he comes calling. "If the marketing community thinks [a sexy ad] is what girls find hip and edgy, then they grossly underestimate how mature and cultured we are. Girls' aesthetic tastes and relationship requirements are sophisticated. So if you want your messages to be relevant, give us more than animal urges." Girls don't want something shallow in their relationship with an ad; they want something deep and lasting. They want a sophisticated relationship. They want their ads to be polite, gentlemanly. If you can't trust an ad to be hip, sophisticated and relevant, what can you trust? Luckily modern girls have lots of products to choose from when looking for a knight in shining armor: "We girls have more product options than ever and very limited time to be hooked before we turn our attention to the next product or advertisement. In this competitive environment, advertising must deliver visually, intellectually, and emotionally interesting content that builds the brand and seduces us. Marketers must demonstrate the unique properties of a product so that we instantly appreciate its relevance in our life and fantasies."

I can't speak for teenage girls, but I really doubt they are pining for ads that will absorb more of their attention and be more "relevant". I don't know that I believe stylized eroticism is "irrelevant" in that respect. (In fact, research suggests women's brains react quickly and strongly to erotic images.) I'd guess girls don't need emotional connection with an ad, even if they do expect it from their teen boyfriends (though I wonder if that requirement is not exaggerated). And they are probably better served by sexualized ads that let at least them know how much of the world intends to see them and allow them to react accordingly. To be fair, I agree with this 3iYing statement entirely (though the grammar seems a bit off): "Sensitivity, playfulness, authenticity, and emotional expression between couples is far more fascinating than being a trinket for men to play with." I just don't believe marketers are in any position to lecture anyone about "authenticity."