Desire as craftsmanship (23 Jan 2011)

I wrote an essay for the New Inquiry about traveling. I argue that we travel to try to get away from the ease with which we can want things, a modification on Guy Debord's point that traveling can make consuming the same mass-produced goods seem fresh and exciting. "Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized."

With consumerism, the goods themselves are often a pretense; what we want is to consume ourselves in some new posture, absorbed by some new desire. (This is one of the dimensions of what Debord calls spectacular consumption.) In consumerism, consumption is a production of the self, not simply a matter of using up some utility-supplying good. In The Culture of New Capitalism Richard Sennett suggests that "for the consumer, stimulation lies in the very process of moving on" -- of finding something new to desire. This energizes and involves our imagination, and thereby seems to increase the dimensions of ourselves. The more we can think to want, the bigger a person we are by consumer society's terms. Expanding the capacity for desire builds the personal brand of the consumer, whose job, after all, is to consume well.

Our selfhood seems bound up with the ease with which we can desire the right things -- a facility that travel takes away from us, forces us to rebuild from guidebooks, instinct, conversation with strangers, and so on. That rebuilding process, I suspect, is what hard-core travelers enjoy most about the experience. But tourists, who lack such improvisational skills, get something else out of travel: the sublime pleasure of having that high-functioning consumer self destroyed -- knowing all along, of course, that it can be safely readopted and even cherished with invigorated appreciation when one gets back home again. How wonderful it is to know what to want, and to know where to be taught to want more. Never mind that this institutionalizes discontent at the very core of our self, thus making it hard to truly love anything. Committing to a particular desire, to nurturing and growing it rather than replacing it, finds little cultural support.

Marketing discourse works not only to make generating new desires easier, but also, crucially, to make the experience of new desires pleasurable, as an increase of personal possibility, as a paradoxical kind of freedom. Desire may seem like bondage, as if one is controlled by need. Consumerism instead makes it appear as the escape from monotony, from the iron cage of ordinary life -- the boldness to imagine alternatives. The consumerist utopia! Here's how Sennett, who's ultimately skeptical, limns it:

What I've described are pleasures which consumers make in things, imposed pleasure which a sober utilitarian would and doubtless should suspect. And the declaration that the "sky's the limit" could be defended on political grounds: people might be set free by dreaming of something beyond the routines and confines of everyday life. In the same way they might be set free by feeling they've used up and exhausted these perfectly workable ways of getting by. Aren't people set free when they transcend in spirit what they directly know, use, or need? The consuming passion might be another name for liberty.

Desire becomes an expression of the craftsmanship of consumption. And consumption itself becomes, as Sennett argues, theater.

The rise of connoisseurship makes this plain; we become proud of knowing how to consume better, how to refine desire to the point where it is never quite satisfied and we are always still hungering for the more exquisite experience. But this refinement doesn't represent the overcoming of restlessness; it becomes a way of perfecting its expression ans a positive quality -- I am restless, thus I am vital. Connoisseurship changes from being a deep, almost selfless knowledge of a subject that one has submitted to, and instead appears as a deep commitment to elaborate the self.

The ethic of connoisseurship seems to militate against convenience, but it's more accurate to say that convenience fuels connoisseurship, making us unimpressed with things simply working, with goods simply satisfying us. The inconvenience of travel makes this dynamic obvious for the tourist, who wants to consume for self-aggrandizement, but suddenly finds it hard to merely consume for sustenance. Sennett notes how convenience divorces us from how things actually work, freeing up that energy to be rechanneled as marketing (and human-potential psychology) encourages us, into the further fashioning of the self.

So connoisseurship no longer is an elitist matter of mediating "good taste" to heathens. It is instead within every consumer's reach; connoisseurship has become the craft of making a perfect self within consumer society's constraints -- namely how automation and capitalist relations have stripped away most other sources of craft knowledge in our lives. Sensual enjoyment falls by the wayside of performing desire -- having a food blog, say, rather than tasting food. Of course one can do both, but they are in constant tension; as fiction writers have always know, it is hard to observe life and live it at the same time. Consumerism tends to make us all life at a meta level, since the self is never given but always being constructed -- the self can never simply experience things but must be watched for what its experiences say about it. Social media is the platform for this metaconsumption of our identity and those of our friends. There, we share well-groomed information about ourselves the way old connoisseurs would have shared it about their particular ruling passion. Social media remakes the idea of "being useful to others" -- that is, of socially necessary labor that we all want to perform to feel recognized -- in its own image in terms of its peculiar version of sharing: sharing details about oneself first and foremost. Narcissism can then masquerade as utility.

Social-media psychodrama (25 Dec 2010)

The word psychodrama may seem like teenage slang invented ad hoc to label any of the number of quintessentially adolescent situations deriving from a failure of emotional perspective, or to describe the praxis of "drama queens" who perpetuate such behavior into putative adulthood. But actually the word was coined by group psychologist Jacob Moreno to describe the technique of having patients act out their emotional conflicts onstage through a number of therapeutic acting exercises so that the audience can assess them and give the patient a sense of how their conflicts are seen from an "objective" point of view. (One of the strangest and perhaps most telling things about my high school was its Psychodrama club, whose uncomfortable performances constituted some of the strangest assemblies I can remember experiencing -- bizarro-world pep rallies of the unconscious.)

Art critic Donald Kuspit, in the introduction to his most recent essay collection, uses the term to describe the general practice of the contemporary artist."The modern artist and her audience are implicitly in a group therapeutic relationship, that is, the artist acts out her emotional problems and conflicts in front of the audience." Citing the dearth of metanarratives that once kept us sane, Kuspit posits the artist, like the rest of us apparently, as inherently unwell mentally, someone whose purpose in making art is to mitigate personal emotional problems through works that almost incidentally prompt an audience to the critical consciousness that allows it to deliver therapeutic healing. Art pieces are nebulous expressions of emotionality that the audience, in its heightened sense of objectivity and clear perception, comprehends and puts into ordinary words, thereby solving the conflicts embedded in the work, making them amenable to more routine, conscious manipulation. "The critical audience completes the artist’s translation of her disturbed subjectivity into art by translating the art into a socially objective language."

This process is akin to what sociologist Eva Illouz calls emotional capital -- a facility with handling emotions so as to turn them to account. Illouz details the ways in which the middle-class habitus conserves the social power that adheres in being able to talk about feelings in a persuasive way -- how this preserves families under stress, smooths over work frictions, enables one to succeed in the managerial class. Art, if Kuspit's representation of it is correct, has become a procedure for building emotional capital.

Yet some artists are less intent on building the audience's emotional capital than enhancing their reflexive sense of their own aesthetic integrity. Kuspit differentiates between artists who perform the psychodrama successfully and those who intentionally short-circuit the process:

“Authentic” art – cognitively convincing as well as emotionally exciting art – is art that has therapeutic results, in the sense of affording some objectivity on the emotional problems and conflicts the artist and audience unconsciously share, which is why it has universal appeal.
But if the artist acts out her emotional problems and conflicts simply to expressively expel them, that is, without wanting to gain objective understanding of them, then she is performing for her omnipotent self alone. She has no need for an understanding audience, because she doesn’t want to be understood: she wants to mystify. She doesn’t want to help herself, or be helped by the audience, but proclaim her uniqueness. Her emotional problems and conflicts are unusual and unsolvable, the audience’s are ordinary and easily solved. And she can act them out, but the audience is too inhibited to do so, which makes her even more superior to it. She confuses her audience because she expects nothing from it – not the slightest understanding – even as she strips herself emotionally naked in front of it.

Naturally, this reminded me of performativity on Facebook and Twitter. I wonder what sort of artists those media make of us, or if the media can be shaped to suit our quasi-artistic ends, be they selfish or not.

When I first tried to think of what to put in a status update, I could only approach it in the manner of Kuspit's bad artists; I wanted to write things that would baffle anybody who bothered to read them. I thought I would try to freak everybody out. I was going to "act out," in the therapy sense of the phrase, and try to offend and alienate people, thereby proving how square they are, how little they are capable of understanding where I am coming from. My updates would be for my own amusement; like the great Individual Artist that Oscar Wilde and other aesthetes postulated and deified, I would write to please only myself.

I wish I could blame Facebook for instilling this logic in me: Plotting outrageous things to write, I intended to use Facebook as a "lying mirror," as Kuspit puts it, to reflect back to me my self-importance, which depends on blotting out other people's actual indifference and allowing myself to believe that I have transcended them. The lying mirror lets me see their ignoring me as proof of my genius. The more alienating I am, the more I appreciate myself, for as long as that sort of farce is sustainable. Eventually, I imagine, the sheer unmitigated fact of loneliness makes it untenable. I'm not sure, though, because in the end I opted not to put any status updates on Facebook at all. In Kuspit's terms, I refused to attempt "authentic" gestures, refused the "aesthetic transmutation" of my psychic unrest through sharing my unrefined emotional ore and having it collectively processed.

This analysis suggests that typical Facebook usage, the good-faith sharing that is meant to please and delight one's friends or that reaches out for their help to assuage loneliness, is akin to genuine art, or least genuine, efficacious psychodrama. That conforms with the occasional reports one sees about therapists observing their patients' social media usage and encouraging it. But it also suggests to me why I find logging on to Facebook somewhat overwhelming, as though I am being thrust into a group-therapy session with everyone I've ever known.

Then again, the Last Psychiatrist offers a different perspective in his discussion of a New York Times story about a couple who "found love at the wrong time" -- i.e. while married to other people. This didn't stop them from divorcing and marrying each other and announcing it in the Style section.

Putting their otherwise quite shameful story in the NYT wasn't dumb, poor judgment, or even damaging to their reputations no matter how many people end up hating them. It was necessary to their own emotional survival. As long as you hate them for it, they don't have to hate themselves.

This also seems like an apt description of how broadcasting the self on social media works. People who say embarrassing or revealing things in updates may not be naive psychodramatic artists, but they also aren't clueless about how they come across or particularly shameless. They are instead offshoring their shame online.

Facebook and the New Narcissism (10 Dec 2010)

This post has a rather grandiose title and will in no way live up to it. But anyway, I have been mulling over the possibility of writing a book, and one of the possible topics is the "new narcissism" -- this despite narcissistic personality disorder being dropped from the DSM, presumably because it is so ubiquitous, the diagnosis no longer distinguishes anything. Who isn't self-important and pathologically attention-hungry?

I certainly am, and maybe I am just projecting. This is obviously a serious problem if I would want to have any credibility on the subject; most likely I would have to write a sort of survivor memoir, a sort of Narcissist, Interrupted. One of the main things that has cued me to the depth of my self-centeredness is Facebook, but not in the ways one might expect. I may have fallen into the trap at times of calling the compulsive desire to share things online narcissistic, and perhaps that is, though I think it is perhaps better understood as a consequence of (1) changes to the labor market for certain kinds of information services that brings about a need for workers to present themselves as creative, adaptable personal brands, and (2) changes to social relations brought on by the intense competition for attention and the acute squeeze on time that follows from having so much media to consume. Social life now comes with much steeper opportunity costs, and social media is one tool for managing them.

What is narcissistic for me about Facebook is my intense aversion to it. I find it hard to encounter all this evidence that all these people who are purportedly my friends are enjoying their lives without making any reference to me. It's almost as if I am not at the center of their universe. This is hard to face. Most of the time I am so ensconced in my private world that I don't realize my friends are doing fun stuff without me. And when I see them in person, they generally appear interested in interacting with me, which is mollifying. But when their communications reach me but are not for me, I feel insulted and threatened. It is clear that they can go on perfectly well without me. I get an intimation of my death.

If I understand him right, Freud has a somewhat crazy and highly economistic view of narcissism (See On Narcissism [doc], which includes his classic admission in response to a question about a detail of his own theory: "I no longer recollect what it was I had in mind at the time") that involves various psychic drives achieving a more or less tenuous and workable equilibrium. This balance is a moving target requiring all sorts of repression and accommodation and adaptation, a variety of various mechanisms for venting the unconscious, for letting various drives exhaust themselves or replenish themselves and so on. If you accept that theory, then it's worth wondering whether Facebook and other social media have caused a sort of epistemic break that has rendered old strategies for managing the drives ineffective, overwhelming our psychic defenses. In fact, that is how I feel when I am confronted by the landing page of Facebook after I log in: defenseless. This will sound crazy, but I typically wince and sometimes I actually cover my face with my hands for a moment. (Does anyone else do this?)

Does social media give us a chance to pretend to manage those drives technologically, through well-designed GUIs? If Facebook is a sort of externalized subjectivity, interacting with the site is a bit like sitting at the control panel of one's own personality -- not a responsibility I want. I really, really don't want to consciously tinker with my psychic balance in lonely, impulsive moments, and have my adjustments broadcast immediately to everyone I know -- particularly when their evident ability to get along without me makes me panic. It all reminds me of the wizard of Oz sailing off in the balloon: "I can't come back, I don't know how it works! Good-bye, folks!" (Though perhaps the movie quote most appropriate to my Facebook dismay is this Lebowski standby: "Nothing is fucked? The goddamn plane has crashed into the mountain!") The sense that Facebook is making me see how self-centered I am -- not coincidental, since it promises to organize the web around you -- makes me wonder if should be sharing a lot more to get over myself. But them I'm afraid of effacing myself with each new attempt at self-definition, that eventually I will disappear over the rainbow into my own babble. I don't want my status update to be just another one among the many that confront me; I don't want anyone else thinking my life can be reduced to that mere stream of content.

One of my many suspicions is that social media use our guilt about our self-centeredness and our narcissism against us to provoke us to give them more free content. I can feel less an egomaniac by sharing, by liking, by reading others' comments and adding my own. Interacting in these prescribed ways can feel therapeutic and benevolent without becoming overwhelming. Thus sites like Facebook play both ends against the middle, intimating that our sharing will somehow negate our inner megalomaniac while simultaneously giving it full play. It whispers to us, "No one cares about you; everyone cares about you." The resulting dissonance is apparently pretty productive and eventually will be very profitable, if it isn't already.

Facebook as vanity press (15 Dec 2009)

At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten offers an interesting way of conceiving the problem with Facebook and its efforts to commercialize sociability. This is the key paragraph:

Some of you may be wondering why Facebook users are complaining about privacy, given that the site's main use is to publish private information about yourself. But Facebook is not really about making your life an open book. It's about telling the story of your life. And like any autobiography, your Facebook-story will include a certain amount of spin. It will leave out some facts and will likely offer more and different levels of detail depending on the audience. Some people might not get to hear your story at all. For Facebook users, privacy means not the prevention of all information flow, but control over the content of their story and who gets to read it.

Facebook offers a commercial tool to help people shape and present their story, and an infrastructure through which to tell it. By Felten's logic, it is an interactive vanity press, only it doesn't charge users up front for the self-flattery it enables. Instead, it is trying to find sneaky ways of monetizing the information users provide without their feeling like their information has slipped out of their control. If we want to pay upfront for the sort of service Facebbok provides, we could simply pay to register our own domain name, and hang our shingle on the open internet, and send out updates to all our friends at regular intervals.

What Facebook proves is that we want to control our story, but we don't want to have to generate the form for that story or manually produce and distribute it. We sacrifice control over the particulars and submit to some standardization of our self-constructed story so that its broadcast can be automated. Facebook's business model is about increasing that sacrifice, intensifying our laziness about the finer points and details, prompting us to permit more standardization and more shaping of our story at their hands, so it fits commercial uses. Hence we tell our life story in terms of the pop cultural product we enjoy, by becoming fans of various brands, by playing games like FarmVille in which we involve a third party to secure the privilege of sending tokens of approval to one another. It's yet another example of the dubiousness of convenience as a value. The lesson is always the same: What we gain in convenience, we give up in autonomy. We have an easier and easier time personalizing ever-smaller compartments in which our subjectivity must fit.

Nanostories, etc. (31 Aug 2009)

Harper's editor Bill Wasik, the inventor of the purposely pointless internet-driven media event known as a flash mob, has expanded on what that experiment taught him in a book, And Then There's This. Fittingly enough, I finished reading it while I was down the shore, in the land that the internet seems to have forgot. (When they hear wi-fi, many in Wildwood would probably think you are talking about WIFI 92, the top 40 station in Philly circa 1978.) The book is primarily about how the internet encourages the acceleration of our cultural consumption by prompting us -- now no longer passive consumers but media operatives ourselves, fascinated by our own impact and keen to play at being an insider -- to refashion news as "nanostories," microstories whose popularity (measured by internet metrics) peaks quickly and then rapidly dissipates. Whatever real underlying fundamental trends there might be get lost in the noise. Culture accelerates, becomes quicker in its payouts, and becomes more compulsive and addictive. This, as Wasik notes, makes the internet just like a slot machine, whose quick-hitting but apparently random rewards are engineered to make players addicted: "games of chance seem to be more addictive in direct proportion to the rapidity and continuity of their 'action' -- how quickly, that is, a gambler is able to learn the outcome of his wager and then make another." Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet's archiving capacity means there is an excess of the narratives from which we shape our sense of self. "With the Long Tail of Truth, telling ourselves new stories about ourselves has never been easier: abundant, cheap distribution of facts means an abundant, cheap and unlimited variety of narratives, on demand, all the time."

But the internet is not only a machine for generating memes, but also for manufacturing spurious hermeneutics. Wasik contends that we have all become conscious analysts of how media narratives operate (we have the "media mind," as he puts it); the presence of so many independent operators in the media space compresses those narratives, turns them over quickly as we all experiment to see which framing techniques attract the most attention. (Popularity tends to snowball, since popularity is factored in to what choices are given prominence.) The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we've embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools (the data on popularity the internet makes available to use for our personal pages) as markers of moral value. The potential scope of our reach invalidates previous mores:

When your words or actions or art are available not only to your friends but to potentially thousands or even millions of strangers, it changes what you say, how you act, how you see yourself. You become aware of yourself as a character on a stage, as a public figure with a meaning.

As a result, we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring -- meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it's about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion.

What's lost in the focus on the meta-story of something's popularity and usefulness for our own carefully monitored identity is obviously the thing itself, which becomes difficult to recognize and consume in traditional ways. Artists are seen as the "instantiation of a trend," and their work is assessed in that regard -- the mythical organic reading is even harder to achieve or even simulate. "Call it the age of the model" Wasik writes. "Our metaanalyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem mroe relevant and vital than the content of culture itself.... The real vigorish is in learning not about what is cool than learning about how cool works." When all that resonates about a meme or idea is its viral potential, all ideas are ideas about marketing.

This concern with only the momentary impact of any story and its metasignificance decontextualizes them, allows ideas to function as commodities: "The meme vision of culture -- where ideas compete for brain space, unburdened by history or context -- really resembles nothing so much as an economist's dream of the free market. We are asked to admire the marvelous theoretical efficiencies (no barriers to entry, unfettered competition, persistence of the fittest) but to ignore the factual inequalities." In other words, nanostories, not surprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.

Wasik takes a look at the decisive role of boredom. We are not inherently disposed to be bored -- Wasik cites research that suggests boredom is a defense mechanism that we invoke when we are confronted with too many choices. But those choices are what capitalism offers us as proof of our purchasing power as consumers. So we experience boredom as proof of our centrality in the consumerist cosmos, and this boredom is a deliberate achievement of the existing social order -- it fixates us on novelty as a value, and drives us to consume habitually, for ideological rather than material fulfillment. It's pretty self-evident, I guess -- boredom is a product of awareness of choice, and the advertising infrastructure does nothing but make us aware of choices. Wasik argues that the ubiquitous boredom helps drives the acceleration of media consumption by fostering backlashes on schedule; I would only add that the boredom is market-driven -- the oversupply of ideas and goods are stimulating the demand adequate to them, changing the attitudes and self-concepts of consumers in the process.

So the market imposes the possibility of novelty on everyday life, which engenders boredom, the feeling of being hopelessly overwhelmed by choice and the drift into aimless lassitude. In this state we are unwilling to commit to anything deeply -- it might grow boring -- so we invest our time and effort on into shallow things that are quickly disposed of, or the most convenient experiences, things which are by their nature not very satisfying. So we become temperamentally insatiable.

In the final chapter, Wasik suggests strategies for fighting the acceleration and compression of cultural consumption: one is rationing our information supply and adopting a renunciative attitude toward the internet. Just say no. Another is time-shifting -- "delaying one's experience of a cultural product long enough that any hype or buzz surrounding it has dissipated." That is something I wholeheartedly endorse and practice: I am currently watching the second season of Dallas -- and loving it. I don't know that it helps anything though. I needed there to be buzz before to even think of watching it now. Ultimately Wasik has no answers -- we must strike a balance, he suggests in Aristotalian fashion, but gives no sense of what that might be. We must choose "judiciously" what information we consume, but offers no criteria for this. He advocates "sustainable approaches to information" but little sense of what that would entail. Like Žižek argues, it is easier to imagine the end of the world -- the destruction of the internet by some super virus or something -- than to imagine a way to consume it temperately.

Is authenticity born in recessions? (29 April 2009)

First, I saw this PSFK item that posited a link between the economic downturn and the reutrn of some grunge-fashion tropes.

Ripped stockings, boots, and short babydoll dresses (in floral and solids) are being donned by women, while boys are sporting the ubiquitous flannel button down and tights pants.... One theory on why these trends are re-emerging is that perhaps in times of economic instability youth prefer to dress down out of modesty and solidarity with those experiencing hardship, as opposed to showing off an opulent style, which is prevalent during boom times. This idea isn’t that far-fetched in that grunge fashion as we know it grew to popularity during the recessions of the early '90s, and that the king of all British fashion movements, punk, was in theory started as a social reaction and act of rebellion as opposed to merely a fashion statement. While for some time trend watchers have predicted the demise of heavily branded logo apparel, it seems that conspicuous consumption has truly become gauche in the fashion world.

I am highly skeptical that this is an expression of "solidarity" or a rejection of brands and conspicuous consumption. Fashion can't really be a medium for solidarity -- it is inherently about differentiation and stratification, about making sure one is perpetually insecure about one's fashionability or ultimately one's status. And if I was poor, and some trust-funded kid in Bushwick let it be known that they were wearing purposely shredded clothes in my honor, I doubt that I would feel flattered or recognized. I'd probably feel condescended to, if not utterly effaced. That said, it may be an attempt to capture an ephemeral social mood in one's clothing, an attempt to be timely and at the same time reinforce fashion's supposed vitality and relevance.

If fashion can be made to seem "relevant," than so can narcissism, thereby redeeming all the energy spent fretting about the currency of one's look. At that point both fashion and one's own carefully groomed and signfied identity take on an all-important air of authenticity, seeming to connote something deeper than the ability to predict and track trends. Adhering to fashion, participating in it, for a fleeting moment becomes a way of simultaneously expressing subversiveness, the real, the truth -- about oneself, about the world. In better times, the "truth" is irrelevant, valueless, unnecessary to fashion, which can revert to its more natural function of connoting that special frivolity that comes with purging the accursed share.

Incidentally (speaking of narcissism), in 1992, I was hardly a doctrinaire flannel-wearer, but I certainly listened to the music that would be labeled later as grunge. It never would have occurred to me to consider its relation to the economic climate at the time. I had no idea about the recession at all. Back then I was young and took for granted the notion that economics and art were separate, autonomous spheres -- good music was kept unpopular by some conspiracy of bad taste and ignorance. I was dismayed then was the idea that bands like Nirvana were going mainstream, creating the reified category of "alternative" and ending the viability of the crypto-rebellious subject position I had stake out for myself in college. (It involved wearing a leather motorcycle jacket, going to City Gardens a lot, and donating plasma to buy CDs.) I had thought I was outside fashion, but fashion trends sort of engulfed me -- perhaps I was always already breathing inside its bubble -- perhaps I still am.

Then, I read this Peter Schjeldahl essay about an exhibit of early 1980s "Pictures art" at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, including Barbara Kruger, David Salle, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, etc. -- artists that he says "demonstrate the limits of critical knowingness as an artistic strategy." He regards them as also consciously responding to down economic times (which seems more plausible than the argument about fashion): "Born of recessionary, disenchanted times, Pictures art shared menacingly cynical attitudes toward mainstream culture with punk rock, in night-life venues, and with deconstructionist lucubration, in academe. It yawed between those poles: sardonic burlesque and stilted critique."

In other words, it was among the first recognizably postmodern art movements, and it foreshadowed the whole idea of a stable "alternative" culture that could be something other than hermetically avant-garde. Here we see taunting political gestures presented with no corresponding belief that the audience will be inspired to do anything about things; instead viewers will be permitted a smug satisfaction of having "gotten it" and escaped being one of the clueless folks who make perpetuate mainstream culture's oppressiveness. This sort of art creates the possibility of unifying an audience around the idea of indifferent resistance. This group of would-be rebels are always conscious of the impotence of their pastures, but rather than lament it, they find it affirming, guaranteeing as it does their outsider status, their transcending ordinariness. It's a short leap from this sort of ironic aesthetic to the constant self-consciousness that fashion and technology have also conspired to induce.

In general, these two items have prompted me to wonder: Do recessions provide the appropriate, or perhaps requisite, climate for manufacturing authenticity? And by authenticity, I mean not a measure of how true to oneself one may have been as an artist but an aesthetic quality that connotes subversive cynicism without verging into actual revolutionary politics or anything else remotely practical. If so, is that because it is functioning as a valve for unrest that might otherwise find political expression or contribute to populist ferment? Do culture producers, artists, and their agents instinctively recognize the market potential of pseudo-subversive art during downturns, art which also happens to allow discontent to find social expression in a harmless way? It's probably not calculated. But downturns seem like the time when, for example, having the image of being a "band with no image" is a successful strategy. Authenticity is manufactured along those lines, to redeem the culture industry of its frivolity in more buoyant times.

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.

Fomenting narcissism (28 Sept. 2008)

A few weeks ago, a NYT Magazine article prompted me to speculate about the implications of microblogging, but I thought I should at the same time, try to use Twitter in earnest and see what it was really like. At first, I had a really hard time writing anything. I had a strong inclination to lie, basically because I didn't want to be frank about whatever it was that I was doing. Then it struck me to not mention what I was doing but instead transcribe random half-baked thoughts I may have had and use the space constraint Twitter imposes to transform them into gnomic, oracular pronouncements. This was sort of fun for a few days, and I started to get a sense of what might prompt someone to Twitter obsessively. I started to take my half-assed asides seriously. For the day or two that I was into it, I started living my life in search of snappy sentences, and this seemed like a life being lived poetically for about 24 hours, and then it just seemed totally contrived. But before that, I began to believe that I owed a report on my important thoughts to the world, that it was imperative that I share. I had this notion that people were out there eager to have bite-size pieces of my mind, and I was anxious to be consumed this way, as if my ideas were like those little Halloween candy bars. In other words, Twitter started to stoke my egomania (even more than mere blogging already does).

It may be that I don't have a robust enough online network, or enough online-offline confluence to make Twitter work as anything other than a chance for me to try to make pithy, oblique observations. I'm not, for example, going to Twitter my whereabouts in the hopes that someone will find me in the real world, and I am not going to Twitter some personal dilemma I'm confronted with and expect someone out there to suggest solutions. And I am not interested in reading anyone else's Twitters. I have too many blog posts to catch up with as it is, and yes, I know they are short and easily consumable, but it just seemed pointless. I would only be interested in the ones that were cryptic, and then these would take time to decipher that I could be spending reading up on, say, the bailout follies instead.

But the main reason I quit twittering is because it made me feel like a phony; I found myself trying to think of clever ways to describe what I was "doing." Being honest seemed beside the point, and the more I twittered the less representative my posts were of who I actually think I am, and I started to think that some new dangerous personality I could become was starting to manifest. I didn't want to get stuck there.

Anyway, I was reminded of this by this recent study about social networking and narcissism, which found "Narcissism predicted (a) higher levels of social activity in the online community and (b) more self-promoting content in several aspects of the social networking Web pages." The main upshot is that one might be able to indentify narcissists through their online profiles. As one account of the study describes it:

Some researchers in the past have found that personal Web pages are more popular among narcissists, but Campbell said there's no evidence that Facebook users are more narcissistic than others.
"Nearly all of our students use Facebook, and it seems to be a normal part of people's social interactions," Campbell said. "It just turns out that narcissists are using Facebook the same way they use their other relationships – for self promotion with an emphasis on quantity of over quality."
Still, he points out that because narcissists tend to have more contacts on Facebook, any given Facebook user is likely to have an online friend population with a higher proportion of narcissists than in the real world. Right now it's too early to predict if or how the norms of online self-promotion will change, Campbell said, since the study of social networking sites is still in its infancy.

I wonder, though, if maintaining online profiles doesn't foment narcissism. If narcissism is a matter of privileging quantity over quality, then online networks -- which are mainly a means of processing friendships more efficiently and with less spontaneity and more command-and-control through personal press releases on profile pages -- would seem to provide fertile ground for narcissism to bloom. They encourage us to regard the pseudo-reciprocity of frequent updating for the actual commitments of friendship. This seems like the slippery slope to full-blown self-centeredness, in which sharing oneself seems an acceptable substitution for the ability to listen.

By providing the illusion of a world out there waiting for you to upload new photos and provide an urgent update about what you are doing right this instant, it certainly prompts self-aggrandizement. When I was Twittering, the imagined audience prompted me to post when I had nothing to share and encouraged me to invent something. And sometimes I log on to Facebook and feel jealous of all this activity logged there that my "friends" have been engaged in. I wonder if I just started dumping stuff into my Facebook page, it will make me feel more important, more connected, more interesting. I think that making a broadcast makes me register in some indelible way on the universe, and I suddenly have the moment of illusory control over my own fame, my own significance -- and it seems so easy. Just cough up a clever line, or post an ambiguous photo, and just like that, I have (in my own mind, imagining the minds of others) intriguing.

Social networks and microblogging allow us to always have a stage on which to perform our personality successfully, and the allure of making that performance instead of engaging life more directly becomes pretty powerful -- spending time thinking about what to Twittter instead of actually doing things that one might report about.

Post-commercial entertainment (27 Nov 2007)

The Hollywood writers' strike certainly helps throw this in relief, but it seems clear that the commercial entertainment industry is in trouble. Digitization and dispersed internet distribution has made it impossible for them to control supply, and the intellectual property concepts their business models depend on seem likely to come under attack or undergo extreme revision in an era where anonymous collaboration and open-source development become more and more customary. Not to wax too utopian about it, but it seems like the idea of commercial artists working for industry middlemen is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, and as that changes, the means by which our society defines what makes for an artist or entertainer will change as well. Reality TV and blogging are just the most obvious examples of semi-professional and, in some cases, post-commercial entertainment supplanting the work of pros. The expectations we have of polish and high-end production values may continue to become more and more relaxed; what lo-fi indie rock helped pioneer could become acceptable in every genre and every medium, as YouTube would suggest. (Though all I ever seem to use YouTube for is watching old clips of bands from the 1960s and 1970s appearing on European TV; it's become sort of a random-access collective memory. In fact, I can safely say that the internet, by enriching my access to obscure culture detritus from past decades, has guaranteed that I won't pay any attention to contemporary culture for the foreseeable future.) While paid ads still support part of the distribution medium for these works (i.e. Google's ad brokering makes it worth its while to host all this junk), the creators themselves, who are confronted with very little overhead for making and self-distributing their own product, are not necessarily compensated monetarily and seem to have attention (becoming more and more measurable, more and more useful as a means for status competition) rather than monetary reward as their motivation. This seems like a good thing, at first, but is it actually a license or a prod for all art to become even more about ego than communication? in other words, is self-expression as a goal wildly overrated, especially now that it's so easy, now that we are in the so-called age of microcelebrity Clive Thompson notes in this Wired column? Is art being subsumed to an even greater degree by the (commercially derived) ideology of personal branding? Are we getting the worse of both worlds -- the superficial, narcissistic culture without the discipline brought on by the need to make money?

In his book In Praise of Commercial Culture, economist Tyler Cowen points out that on the 18th century, when the printing press was having similar effects on culture as the internet is having now, critics worried that the commercialization of art, the market for books, would erode the power of fame as an incentive, without which writers would produce nothing but trash. But with fame devalued now that the trappings of celebrity are open to all, it seems like money and the professionalization that went along with it were last-ditch means to uphold standards. In Cowen's view, 18th century critics sought to impose aesthetic standards and use fame as the reward that would induce writers to adhere to them. In a similar fashion, centralized cultural production enables a few media corporations, or the state (as in China, Soviet Russia, etc.), to impose similar standards. In a market economy, mass popularity seems to justify after the fact those decisions made early on about which works met the approved standards and were worthy of being supported. But mass popularity, or monetary reward may not be as significant when you can bask in the recognition of a niche audience and feel righteous about not having sold out. The "microcelebrity" thesis perhaps bears out Cowen's argument that there is not a limited supply of fame, and that technology and the density of intertextual references multiplies the amount of fame there is to go around, albeit in ever finer measurements. But conversely, the demands on our attention may be stretched to the limit, leaving us in even greater need for filters and organizers of what's available. Commercial gatekeepers once served this function; perhaps now social networking tools (linked in to targeted advertising) will replace them. Nothing, though, stands to discourage anyone from producing culture and "cluttering" the public sphere with it. I waver between thinking this is a pervasive triumph over passivity and fretting that it's a disaster that's made self-branding and the commercialization of our intimate identity commonplace -- an eagerly sought accomplishment that we hope to confirm in the public sphere.

Having cheered for so long against the culture industry Goliath (without ever really suspecting it was actually vulnerable), it hasn't often occurred to me to consider what we lose with its decline. The need to make art that will sell is usually derided as forcing artists to pursue the lowest common denominator and compromise their vision. But it may also have required artists to focus, to consider how effective their work would be on audiences. Respect for the bottom line typically makes people more receptive to criticism, and criticism from invested parties generally improves things. And the commercial entertainment industry performed a useful filtering service, putting hurdles between artists and audiences that eliminated some poetasters (and, unfortunately, some talented but easily deterred entertainers). One could be critical of what made it through that initial filter, but usually the fact that it made it through meant it was worth taking the time to criticize -- it had been chosen and produced among thousands of other contenders. But free from the restrictions of commercialism, artists can ignore criticism and be as self-indulgent as they choose, selecting self-referential topics and making no effort to generalize subject matter so that others may get more out of them. Instead, artists can develop the expectation that others should be interested in their work for the sake of person making it, that it be interesting only on a personal level, the way Facebook pages are supposed to be.

Permanent recording and unremembered pleasures (30 June 2007)

A few weeks ago, Nicolas Carr, who's generally a reliable source of technoskepticism, had a column in the Guardian about the capability we now have to record every aspect of our own lives -- "life logging", as it was called in a recent New Yorker article Carr links to. Carr points out that this trend is likely only to intensify as technology improves and companies become more aggressive about marketing it:

As surprising as it may seem, we're probably only in the early stages of this phenomenon. Big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Google, as well as many internet startups, are working hard to give us new and even more powerful tools for recording our lives. They want to make self-recording automatic, as natural as breathing. Their goal isn't just to sell us more computers and cameras; they know that the more details of our existence that we encode and send over the internet, the more they'll learn about who we are, how we act, what products we'll buy and what advertisements will catch our eyes. The more we reveal about ourselves, the more attractive we become as targets for marketers.

That's a pretty grim prognosis; our narcissism will allow advertisers to target us in real time, and we'll probably be flattered by this, that we are known personally to these large transnational institutions. The more personalized the ads aimed at us become -- the personalized recommendations on Amazon, etc. -- the more intense our narcissism may grow, as our expectations will adjust to having everything tailored for us. We may grow intolerant of one-size-fits-all offerings and choose to channel more of our existence through virtual reality, where more personalization and customization can be blended in seamlessly. Of course other people will be annoyed that they can't escape from themselves, that their environment always seems to anticipate just who they are and doesn't permit them the fantasy of becoming a different sort of person with different desires.

But because we can record every aspect of our lives, does that mean we must? And what do we sacrifice for all this self-mediation? By attending so much to recording our lives, are we putting ourselves at one remove from the life we are supposed to be living and recording?

What exactly is behind our rage to document the minutiae of our daily existence? That's hard to say. Maybe it's just another manifestation of modern-day narcissism. Maybe it's a byproduct of our media-saturated culture, with its sense that nothing's real until it's been recorded and broadcast. Or maybe it goes deeper than that. In striving to preserve the moments of our lives, to immortalise them, might we simply be expressing our fear of death?
As for Socrates, it's hard to imagine that he'd be pleased with any of this. We're so busy recording our lives that we have little time left to examine them. And perhaps that, more than anything else, is the real point.

So the real point is that we are using technology to reject the prospect of an examined life, of considering more deeply what it is we are actually doing? Instinctually I want to agree with this. I recently got a digital camera, and I took it on a trip I made recently to the California desert. I took some pictures while I was there:

And I was pretty happy with how they turned out. But I spent most of the time I was out on the dunes thinking about taking pictures rather than the vast nothingness I had hoped would be meditative, would take me away from the world I would share the pictures with. The camera became a tie, holding me to a conceptual place where the photos would reside and be shared.

But at the same time the camera gave me a way of focusing, a way of taking the time to really look at the landscape around me. It made me ask questions I wouldn't otherwise have thought to ask. Like, who is receiving mail here?

This was in the wasteland that rings the Salton Sea, one of the most bizarre places I've ever been. Amid the scary shacks like the one above are brand new McMansion looking houses but they are detatched from their natural environment in planned developments and are out here where nothing apears planned. These three-garage houses will have port-a-potties in the front "yard" (strange to call it a yard because nothing grows) because there aren't any sewage lines out there. Anyway, having a camera made my meandering through this forbidding landscape much more interesting and compelling. It didn't feel like self-recording at the time. The idea that you're recording could have the effect of making one choose more interesting things to do or work harder to make things seem more interesting in the way they are recorded. But such a life, artificially heightened, would probably become exhausting, crowding out the time when one could replenish one's capabilities to take things in and process them at a more-than-superficial level. What permanent recording deprives us of most of all is that contemplative "dead" time in which we restore ourselves -- the sort of time Wordworth describes in "Tintern Abbey":

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

If Carr is write about the future, the very idea of an unremembered pleasure will become impossible; the phrase will become an oxymoron.

The meosphere and behavioral targeting (20 June 2007)

Why use the Internet to find out the world beyond your nose? Wouldn't that just ultimately be a waste of time? Aren't we all wishing for more sites about the topic that truly interests us, namely ourselves?

This seems as though it should be a parody, but it's not: In today's WSJ, Walter Mossberg's minion Katherine Boehret writes about Meosphere, a new website that prompts you to make lists about yourself so that you may then use the site to regard yourself, preen and plan for the future. The site bills itself as a kind of Web-based scrapbook where you can store memories and have dormant ones reawakened by prompts devised by Meosphere's staff and by the site's other users.

This free site is a lot of fun to use, not to mention addictive. Once you start checking off items in one list, you'll want to complete other lists to beef up your meosphere. And when friends and family share their meosphere with you, you'll learn things you never knew about them.

The idea here, as with every social networking tool, is that the site provides a central repository for signaling information about yourself that might otherwise be lost or underexploited -- we don't generally blab to strangers about our many fascinating experiences because we may have the strange idea that we are not universally and inherently fascinating at all times. Like booze or sodium pentathol, the site seeks to disinhibit us. (Writes Boehret, "Chances are that almost everyone you meet has done something fascinating, but it's not always easy for people to spit out these facts about themselves. Meosphere gives you a chance to do so, through the Web.") On the internet, no one needs have any scruple about putting themselves forward or to convert all their experience into ruses to impress other people. Even if we had no thought other than the experience itself as we did thing in our lives, sites like this one allow us to retroactively convert them into conspicuously consumed commodities.

So on the one hand, these sites supply encouragement for us to turn activities into identity-fashioning goods that signal our place in a consumer economy. We generally do this without thinking, regarding ourselves as little more than a catalog of belongings (our memories are objects belonging to us from this perspective) -- they bolster a possession-oriented subjectivity, rather than a process-oriented one. At the end of the day, it's not what you've done but what you have that makes you who you are. On the other, these sites supply marketers with extremely useful data in order to better target ads toward you. As Boehret explains,

Web sites know how valuable lists can be; wish lists and automatically generated recommendation lists provide encouragement for online shoppers.

When you are enticed to feed these recommendation generators, they become that much more persuasive in convincing you that you need more stuff than you imagined, a thought that many people likely find reassuring -- I'm always glad when I "discover" new albums I need to buy or books I need to read; future consumption plans make me feel like I have a purpose.

This article, from yesterday's WSJ details how thrilled companies are with what advertisers call behavioral targeting, "in which marketers analyze consumers' online activities to figure out who is most likely to be interested in its product -- and then place ads on whatever sites those consumers are visiting." Now, though advertisers love this technology, let's not forget that it's really for our benefit, helping to construct a more perfect meosphere:

"The future of digital media is less about distribution and more about understanding the audience's interests and being able to project that anywhere," says Bill Gossman, president and chief executive officer of independently owned behavioral-targeting firm Revenue Science.

The web is about projecting our interests, which couldn't in the end be anything but bound up with commercial interests -- what could we be interested in doing that wouldn't open up the possibility of selling us stuff, stuff that would extend our interests further? When we volunteer information on social networking sites, it's close to affirming the idea that we don't mind targeted ads, that we are in fact in a way soliciting them.

The moral sense and the evolution of advertising, self-love (16 January 2007)

More of what precisely no one has been clamoring for: amateur analysis of 18th century moral philosophy. Prompted by the sudden popularity of Adam Smith's brand of morals (and the argument that it provides an ethical foundation for self-interested capitalism), I read An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, by Smith's friend and fellow Scot, David Hume. This volume, a reworking of a portion from Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, appeared in 1751, a dozen years before Smith's own work of moral philosophy, and Smith was almost certainly influenced by it. In the Enquiry, Hume is anxious to do two things: (1) refute the Hobbesan argument than men are motivated entirely by self-love and all behavior can be reduced to selfishness of some sort, and (2) rescue moral behavior from religiosity (which he regarded as a source of human strife and division) and metaphysical notions of the soul (i.e., we are good so we can avoid punishment in the afterlife), and found it in the inherent sociability of humankind. Though he is skeptical of the soul, Hume is no strict empiricist, as he is willing to posit an a priori moral sense akin to the one Hutcheson and Shaftesbury argued for. Hume was adamant that emotions and not reason guided our behavior, and that our untutored emotions were basically benevolent.

Though reason, when fully assisted and improved, be sufficient to instruct us in the pernicious or useful tendency of qualities and actions; it is not alone sufficient to produce any moral blame or approbation. Utility is only a tendency to a certain end; and were the end totally indifferent to us, we should feel the same indifference towards the means. It is requisite a sentiment should here display itself, in order to give a preference to the useful above the pernicious tendencies. This sentiment can be no other than a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and a resentment of their misery; since these are the different ends which virtue and vice have a tendency to promote. Here, therefore, reason instructs us in the several tendencies of actions, and humanity makes a distinction in favour of those which are useful and beneficial.

He then rejects separating reason from emotion, and proclaims emotion to be the source of all morality: "The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains, that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary. We then proceed to examine a plain matter of fact, to wit, what actions have this influence: We consider all the circumstances, in which these actions agree: And thence endeavour to extract some general observations with regard to these sentiments." Reason enters this picture later, to rationalize the judgments emotion has already delivered. This sentiment has the bonus of being unmotivated by self-interest and is thus free of the taint of calculation: "Now as virtue is an end, and is desirable on its own account, without fee or reward, merely, for the immediate satisfaction which it conveys; it is requisite that there should be some sentiment, which it touches; some internal taste or feeling, or whatever you please to call it, which distinguishes moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and rejects the other." He presupposes that virtue must be its own reward, and reasons backward from that to come up with a moral sense that transmits its findings to our consciousness without being distorted by our immediate interests; this allows our instinctual concern for a happy society to override our immediate selfish interests in personal pleasure.

For Hume, "sentiment" and "humanity" are basically synonyms, and both refer to that moral sense that makes us feel something about observed behavior, and our own behavior, as though we were observing it from without (which becomes the basis of Smith's program). Because sentiment is so central to our humanity, those who can sharpen our sentiments -- poets and the like -- become crucial to social life. Here's how Hume puts it:

Virtue, placed at such a distance, is like a fixed star, which, though to the eye of reason, it may appear as luminous as the sun in his meridian, is so infinitely removed, as to affect the senses, neither with light nor heat. Bring this virtue nearer, by our acquaintance or connexion with the persons, or even by an eloquent recital of the case; our hearts are immediately caught, our sympathy enlivened, and our cool approbation converted into the warmest sentiments of friendship and regard. These seem necessary and infallible consequences of the general principles of human nature, as discovered in common life and practice.

This is all well and good -- a classic restatement of the humanist position that art is good for us and can illustrate morality. But I wonder whether this notion, were it widely distributed, would make us collectively susceptible to stimulation and excitation for its own sake, i.e. the blandishments that the contemporary entertainment industry provides (this was one pillar of reasoning behind my aborted dissertation). If anything that exercises our emotions and provokes a sentimental reaction makes our moral sense stronger, then the most sensationalistic materials are justified and should be preferred. Anti-intellectual culture is okay then as long as it moves us. Also, advertisements that manipulate our emotions are performing a good service for us as they persuade. Thus, we might accept that retail-friendly notion that it's pleasant to be persuaded (the way P.T. Barnum assumed his customers enjoyed being tricked and duped) and antisocial to resist the emotional manipulation, vicarious indulgence, and fantasy mongering advertisements inspire. (Notably, Adam Smith seems to correct for this, conjuring the notion of an impartial observer whose judgments we should imagine when evaluating our own moral behavior. The vicariousness remains but is subtly shifted to something more panoptic and less pleasurable.) Anything with strong emotional content is good,for its own sake, regardless what other ends it may be trying to serve. Hume might have believed that nothing morally reprehensible could inspire positive feelings in us, but he wasn't subjected to modern media's power and reach, and the incentives that media provides to subverting our emotional reactions.

In his efforts to separate morals from self-interest, Hume rejects what he deems a false slander on the power of imagination, that it can mask from us the true selfishness that motivates our interests in others. (Hume would have no patience for Gary Becker-like arguments about human capital or the irreducible rational self-interest behind all behavior -- for Hume, behavior is emotional and reactive first, then explained later.)

An EPICUREAN or a HOBBIST readily allows, that there is such a thing as friendship in the world, without hypocrisy or disguise; though he may attempt, by a philosophical chymistry, to resolve the elements of this passion, if I may so speak, into those of another, and explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances. But as the same turn of imagination prevails not in every man, nor gives the same direction to the original passion; this is sufficient, even according to the selfish system, to make the widest difference in human characters, and denominate one man virtuous and humane, another vicious and meanly interested. I esteem the man, whose self-love, by whatever means, is so directed as to give him a concern for others, and render him serviceable to society: As I hate or despise him, who has no regard to any thing beyond his own gratifications and enjoyments. In vain would you suggest, that these characters, though seemingly opposite, are, at bottom, the same, and that a very inconsiderable turn of thought forms the whole difference between them.

Here Hume seems to suggest that character ("a turn of the imagination") is inborn and immutable, which corresponds to the quasi-Calvinist notion, ironically enough, of some people simply being born with a maladjusted moral sense, of not being among elect. Hume refers to common sense to dismiss the sophistic idea that virtue is really selfish in deep disguise. But he relies on a fairly subtle argument of his own to ultimately reject self-interest as the source of all (the Archimedian point, the transcendental signifier, etc.):

there are mental passions, by which we are impelled immediately to seek particular objects, such as fame, or power, or vengeance, without any regard to interest; and when these objects are attained, a pleasing enjoyment ensues, as the consequence of our indulged affections. Nature must, by the internal frame and constitution of the mind, give an original propensity to fame, ere we can reap any pleasure from that acquisition, or pursue it from motives of self-love, and a desire of happiness. If I have no vanity, I take no delight in praise: If I be void of ambition, power gives me no enjoyment: If I be not angry, the punishment of an adversary is totally indifferent to me. In all these cases, there is a passion, which points immediately to the object, and constitutes it our good or happiness; as there are other secondary passions, which afterwards arise, and pursue it as a part of our happiness, when once it is constituted such by our original affections. Were there no appetite of any kind antecedent to self-love, that propensity could scarcely ever exert itself; because we should, in that case, have felt few and slender pains or pleasures, and have little misery or happiness to avoid or to pursue.

This is like proto-deconstruction: any self-interested motive needs to refer back to some previous source of enjoyment to have any meaning; there needs to be a self first to motivate self-interest, so self-interest can't be at the root of things. There needs to be inborn motives toward fame, reputation, pleasure, etc., that precede self-interest and motivate us to construct the rest of the preferences that build up our character and our motivations. Then Hume suggests benevolence is one of these human inclinations that precede the formation of a self. We have to be able to love before we can be consumed with self-love, and if HUme is right, than we love others first and thereby learn how to love ourselves.

UPDATE:
Brad DeLong links to this article by V.S. Ramachandran offering a neurological basis for our conceiving of others before developing a sense of self:

It is often tacitly assumed that the uniquely human ability to construct a "theory of other minds" or "TOM" (seeing the world from the others point of view; "mind reading", figuring out what someone is up to, etc.) must come after an already pre-existing sense of self. I am arguing that the exact opposite is true; the TOM evolved first in response to social needs and then later, as an unexpected bonus, came the ability to introspect on your own thoughts and intentions.

Ramachandran's explanation for this is, needless to say, complicated, involving analysis of different kinds of neurons and their functions, but it leads him to conclude "that two seemingly contradictory aspects of self — its the individuation and intense privacy vs. its social reciprocity — may complement each other and arise from the same neural mechanism, mirror neurons." Pushing this further, reciprocity enables self-interest, and then selfishness. We need others to teach us how to love ourselves too much.

The pop cognoscenti and the holiday spirit (19 December 2006)

It's extremely counterproductive to feel obligated to resist the zeitgeist; when the holidays come this means resenting everything commercial culture dredges up to remind you spend, spend, spend. It means yearning to plug one's ears with cement to blot out holiday music, and it means taking each Christmas card received as some kind of insult or provocation, rubbing your face in the fact that you haven't gotten it together to get your own in the mail. Then there's the contrived gift exchanges and fatuous sentimentality -- I'm predisposed to see the worst in all of it because I am prejudiced against whatever appears to be popular and whatever "ordinary" people seem to be doing. No one wants to be ordinary, but growing up I latched on to the "alternative" ruse that one can be distinctive by having esoteric tastes and by advertising one's contempt for whatever cultural artifacts and rituals have become things that relative strangers can share and bond over. Perversely, I tend to remove those things from my conversational repertoire and as a result spend an awful lot of time blogging to myself. With this strategy, loneliness and alienation become badges of true singularity. Congratulations, no one can relate to you. What an accomplishment.

Anyway, my instinct to sneer at this best-albums roundtable at Slate is what started me thinking about this. What put me off most was the writers' enthusiasm, which was awkward for me because theoretically that is what I'm afraid consumerism obliterates. I'm always worried we'll lose the public space in which to express enthusiasm authentically, since it's usually cynically simulated in ads, devaluing all expressions of it. Perhaps that is what sets me on edge here -- I subliminally suspect editorial fluffing, encouraging writers to be more effusive in their praise and hype when its deeply ingrained in me to think that the best things speak for themselves.

Of course that's not true -- there's too much stuff for anything to be noticed on merit alone; everything needs an advocate, needs to be known by someone important (one of the influential operatives Gladwell discusses in The Tipping Point) who will spread the word. So what gets recognized and cited in year-end lists like this are the things that have been adopted in chummy networks of the privileged, those who feel entitled to have opinions and blast them out at everyone and can expect to be paid attention to. So the best-of lists are coded maps to these networks of influence, the same ones that keep elite colleges elite and keep media jobs in the family and keep American opinion-mongering ultimately homogeneous and subject to observable, bankable trends. In some ways I think the "holiday spirit" can also be mapped to this network of the powerful congratulating themselves for how they have closed ranks -- right now that is just a paranoid notion of mine, I think, but something about the oppressiveness of polite conventions seems intended to conserve power. Holiday cheer, the universal zeitgeist, seems a deeply embedded way of endorsing the status quo without apprehending the specifics of what you are affirming. The social machinery that manufactures what should be, what we should feel, what we should value, lumbers into high gear in the holidays, purveying a utopia-lite in lieu of any progress toward true egalitarianism, a synthetic Candyland where everything in our culture is made to seem bountiful, commercial rituals (which stoke capitalism's creative destruction) reaffirm a specious continuity to social life, and we are invited to swap presents as though it can be achieved with none of the potlatch humiliation and overdogging that gift exchange is rooted in. Critics in the popular press effusing over all the year's great works constitute one set of gears in that machine.

Seeing a dialogue unfold amongst this cognoscenti network regarding the most democratic of art forms, pop music, about which one can form meaningful aesthetic opinions without any prior training or education, is just extra depressing because you can sense the strain of the writers, who are obvious smart and sincere music lovers, trying not to posture while at the same time laboring to justify their coronation as "working critics". They try to display their versatility and populism by referencing music from a spectrum of genres, kowtowing to contemporary country like Democrats angling for the NASCAR dad vote. They try to vindicate what is popular, avoiding accusations of elitism or irrelevance, but they slip in enough references to obscure musicians to demonstrate how they are slumming. They need to manufacture authority for their criticism in a field with no traditions for certification other than a lively, compelling voice, and consequently pop-music writing tends to be palpably narcissistic, preoccupied with methodology and metacritique of other critics, always reflecting back on the writer's own right to speak. Perhaps all writing is this way, at the root of things. Perhaps this is just what it means to have a conversation.

I'm trying to think what I would prefer instead of this critical conversation. As much as I remain unconvinced by anything a music journalist gets paid to write, I actually find year-end lists useful -- for though my instinct is to recoil from the popular, my way to overcome this juvenile behavior and try to combat the tendency of getting stuck in the music I listened to at 20, is to download whatever records the cognoscenti have elevated. I don't like very much of it, but I feel I've done my cultural duty and forestalled nostalgia, for a few weeks anyway. If I could come up with a similar strategy for making peace with the holiday spirit, I'd feel even better.

Robotic love (15 December 2006)

Even Sherry Turkle, a scientist who has long put forward the notion that "technology is not just tools," that technology changes the way we feel as well as the way we do things, is creeped out by this, about elderly patients in a nursing home bonding with robot babies.

How creeped out? Just look at this picture:

She says in the article that her research into objects designed to encourage us to form nurturing emotional bonds with them -- Tamogochis, dolls, etc. -- "gave me the chills." She also admits, "I have finally met technology that upsets and concerns me."

Here's why, from the MIT news office release:

One of Turkle's concerns was triggered by the effect of a sophisticated interactive doll, Hasbro's "My Real Baby," and of the Paro seals on the elderly. She left a few "My Real Baby" dolls (which were not a big retail hit with children) in a local nursing home, and when she returned later, she found that the staff had bought 25 of them because of the soothing effect on the residents.
"The only one who's not happy here is the sociologist," said Turkle, raising her hand.
That soothing response was based on a sham, she believes. "What can something that does not have a life cycle know about your death, or about your pain?"
She cited the case of a 72-year-old woman who, because she is sad, says she sees that her robotic toy is also sad. "What are we to make of this relationship when it happened between a depressed woman and a robot?" Turkle asked.

There are a lot of disturbing implications here: Human empathy is easy to simulate because it's mainly an illusion created by looking at someone with a thoughtful expression. Not only that, when we seek empathy from others, we're content with the illusion because we wouldn't be able to distinguish it from the other actually understanding us anyway. Psychics seem to work this way, bouncing back things you tell them in a way that allows you to feel as though something magical has happened, some secret insight has been revealed. Horoscopes, too -- they seem insightful because almost any generality can apply to our lives, but because we are so fixated on our singularity, the advice seems shockingly particular and oracular to us. We don't want new understanding, we want the understanding we already have made strange and confirmed simultaneously. We want to be able to project and then recognize ourselves, thereby extending our scope, universalizing how we feel.

Also, it suggests the process of nurturing is less a matter of communication then it is a technical operation, a set of objective conditions that can be met by any means, human or nonhuman. And it's not unusual to nurture something incapable of feelings. When we nurture, the object of our nurturing can be an infant, a houseplant, or book collection (which I invest with loving care by occasionally attempting to alphabetize them or group them by subject) -- anything that can elicit the appropriate forms of behavior and gestures. In other words, nurturing is a reflexive gesture rather than an altruistic one. It seems plausible that the effort our culture spends investing material goods with emotional qualities abets this process, reinforcing the idea that other people need not be present to complete circuits of emotional experience. Other people's feelings, after all are inconvenient and inefficient to deal with.

There's more on robotic love (via Mind Hacks) here, in this interview from the Boston Globe with Marvin Minsky, an AI researcher whose most recent book argues that emotions are just another way of thinking through a problem and thus can probably be emulated by machines. This also suggests that humans themselves are machines as well:

We don't like to think of ourselves as machines because this evokes an outdated image of a clunky, mechanical, lifeless thing. We prefer the idea that inside ourselves is some sort of spirit, essence, or soul that wants and feels and thinks for us. However, your laptop computer has billions of parts, and it would be ridiculous to attribute all its abilities to some spirit inside its battery. And a human brain is far more complex than is any computer today.

A fairly radical materialist viewpoint that dispenses with the mind/body problem -- mind is the product of the brain's processing power. (This, by the way, is how I think Battlestar Galactica ultimately ends; we find out eventually that the humans on the show never did reach Earth, but the Cylons did and we are their descendants.)

Minsky also suggests that love occurs through subtraction rather than addition:

There's short-term infatuation, where someone gets strongly attracted to someone else, and that's probably very often a turning-off of certain things rather than something extra: It's a mental state where you remove your criticism. So to say someone is beautiful is not necessarily positive, it may be something happening so you can't see anything wrong with this person.

So if you put that together with the elderly people and their robot babies, it seems that products could be designed (or are designed, or are advertised as such when they are made to be lovable) to induce this kind of forgetting, to propel this kind of screening, or turning-off, which makes the shortcomings of others (or things) and the outside world in general less recognizable, less present, and at the same time keeps the focus more securely on ourselves, the true object of our affections.

Vanity activism (14 December 2006)

The Economist takes on the notion of socially responsible food shopping, attempting to debunk notions that buying organic or fair trade or locally grown foods in any way helps accomplish anything other than making yourself feel better. I'm actually extremely sympathetic to this position -- shopping activism seems a bogus proxy for actually political power (as the editorial writer also points out) and it seems mainly a product of vicariously projecting oneself into some helpless other (a peasant farmer, a migrant worker, an animal bred for slaughter, an indigenous tribesman, etc.) in alien, complex situations created and driven by many different factors and then acting as though one's emotional response yields all the relevant facts. One is led through moral vanity to believe that one's own personal emotions are superior to and more significant than historical reality and the social systems that reproduce it and the conscious decision making of all those people whose lives we have no wherewithal to be making assumptions about. And our consequent actions are ultimately only about making ourselves feel good, and more powerful and influential perhaps than any individual can be, absent the tools of political power. Our own deeply felt good intentions don't make out individual piecemeal actions free of perverse, unintended consequences (Albert O. Hirschman's warning about reactionary rhetoric notwithstanding).

Neverthess I'll try to temper my gullibility for this species of right-wing argument in the following summary. (Brad Plumer has a nice corrective here as well.) The editorial argues that organic food, because it is produced less efficiently, consumes more land and has the perverse consequence of destroying more of the natural environment via deforestation. (I liked this bald statement: "Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale."

I don't think, however, The Economist is advocating a return to hunting and gathering.) Fair-trade arrangements distort the price system and encourage farmers to produce goods for which there is insufficient demand, rather than diversify into viable crops. (Whether that option exists for many of these third-world farmers is not addressed -- but if they must be wrung out in the market's creative destruction processes as agribusiness consolidates, so be it.) And locally-grown food can't help change the finding that most of the miles food travels (in England, anyway) from farm to plate occur in our cars as we drive it home from the grocery store. The editorial also points out the futility of working against comparative advantages available in food being raised the locale where it can be achieved with greater efficiency -- we waste resources if we insist on ignoring those possible gains.

So in lieu of these solutions, the editorial proposes carbon taxes to address energy waste (Harvard economist and Pigovian tax crusader Greg Mankiw surely agrees) and the eradication of agricultural subsidies of all kinds (i.e. ensure real free trade in agriculture, which would be fairer -- though perhaps not for some individual farmers who would be driven out of business and have nothing else to do -- than matching subsidies with more subsidies in protectionist tariff wars).

Mark Thoma at Economist's View links to an essay from the journal Democracy that asks a related question: "Can progressives really change Wal-Mart–or any other company, for that matter?" Authors Aaron Chatterji and Siona Listokin argue that working to make corporations behave in a socially responsible way independent of binding, state-backed law is a futile endeavor. Corporations, due to their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, will always do what is most profitable. If that course also happens to also socially responsible, then so much the better. But they won't surrender big profits for lesser ones simply because they want to be considerate, even if they wanted to -- the hierarchical organization and the spontaneous order in the economic system that distributes decision making militates against it. That's where government can step in and let us all off the hook by reigning in the profit motive in certain instances when, unfettered, it demonstrably harms the public good. Thus we must engage with the political process to push government to achieve these goals, and dismantle governments that put forward corporate interests at the expense of the public good.

Gift woes (12 December 2006)

I've always been more than a little uncomfortable with prescribed gift giving -- my lame excuse is that unscheduled gifts are more authentic; only how often can you get away with giving an unprovoked gift without seeming a little creepy? It takes more conversational deftness and security in your shopping skills than I possess. I tend to give away stuff that I got for free or stumbled upon randomly, so I have an excuse if the gifting goes badly -- "Well, I just saw this at Value Village for 99 cents and thought you might get a kick out of it." "This was in the free pile at work." For some strange reason I seem to think that sending the message that I didn't really spend any money or time trying to find something for a person somehow comforts them.

My guiding principle, I guess, is to never demonstrate through a lame gift that I have totally misjudged someone and somehow failed to really know them. How I envy the people who never give a second thought to a lame gift -- they must make up for it by giving so many gifts that their successful-gift average ends up being pretty high. Or rather, viewed from a strict quantity-over-quality perspective, they distribute a sum total of more happiness through sheer volume. I instead have eaten a lot of gifts I ended up lacking the courage to give. And so that copy of Practical Chess Endings remains on my shelf with my unsent packages of Joe Weber jokes.

Anyway, during the holiday season I tend to come across as extra curmudgeonly, I think; today I was approached to participate in a secret Santa at my work and I replied, "I can't do that." Naturally I was asked why not, and I was on the verge of presenting a semi-bogus religious reason when the office do-gooder walked off without my needing to reply. I was thinking to myself that I already had too many gifts to get for people in my family, but it turns out that if I wanted to reduce my stress, I should have leaped at the opportunity to give to strangers in lieu of people I ostensibly know more intimately. Via BoingBoing and then the Consumerist comes links to this report from the Journal of Consumer Research. It turns out our gift-giving acumen is more likely to fail us when we think we know the person we're giving to. Apparently the more familiar we are with a person, the more we take for granted that we know the, the more likely it is we will misperceive what they actually want. This is from the journal's teaser for the article:

Past research has argued that lack of diagnostic information causes this sort of misperception, but Davy Lerouge (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) and Luk Warlop (Katholieke University, Belgium) found that we buy unwanted gifts even when we have plenty of knowledge. In fact, we frequently have the most trouble understanding the tastes of those we know a lot about. Not only do we feel overconfident that we’ll pick something they like, but our tendency to assume that we are extremely similar to the ones we love also motivates us to ignore cues that don’t support preconceived notions.

We tend to put faith in our ideas of what we want our friends and family to be rather than seeing them for what they are or giving them a neutral, all-purpose gift that falls below the connotations of particularity. That's why it's not so lame and unimaginative to give things like socks or AAA batteries. Hey, maybe someone in my family might appreciate Practical Chess Endings.

I used to expedite this whole phenomenon by simply buying stuff I wanted and then giving it to people. If it didn't end up being something they wanted, at least they got the gift of knowing me and what I might want a little better. (Very generous of me, I know.) I have often had hard time imagining that people don't want what I want, and I can't bring myself to shop with other people in mind -- they begin to fuzz out as I begin to imagine myself owning the stuff I am contemplating buying. I succumb to the narcotic fantasies of consumer pleasure that sociologist Colin Campbell describes in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. I've never gone so far as Homer Simpson's trick of buying Marge a bowling ball with his own initials inscribed in it, however. Thus the holiday season tends to unleash my inner selfishness -- the more times gift shopping takes me to stores, the more covetous I begin to feel.

As far as I'm concerned, when giving gifts, cash is king. I used to get my niece and nephew gift cards, but then I started reading the business press, which is full of stories of how gift cards favor retailers and how they have methods to push down redemption rates, whether through expiration dates or arbitrary restrictions on paying out the balance after purchases. And besides, why would I want to limit them to whatever store I chose? I guess a gift card prevents the cash from dwindling away on quotidian things like gas, junk food, beer, the phone bill. And it can give a shopper focus, an excuse, a reason to go buy something that they may have been waiting for. A gift card is the only reason I end up in Barnes and Noble (that is, ever since I stopped returning free-pile books there), but when I'm there I enjoy the pleasant buzz of browsing, empowered by "free" money. But this seems like a retailer's trap I should spare my loved ones from. I always have wanted to write "merry X-mas" in magic marker on a $50 bill and just stick it in an envelope, but the sad truth is that this wouldn't be appreciated like I'd hope it would be; this would be still a gift I'd want, delivered how I would want to receive it, completely colored by my dumb notions of what I think is cool.