Celebritization and Resistance (26 May 2011)

As I inevitably tend to view social media through the lens of my personal experience, I tend to degender it and talk about it in the asexual terms of corporate branding, with adults pursuing their attentional accumulation and personal affirmations like canny entrepreneurs, deploying a kind of abstracted informational commodity in tweets and updates and links and so on. But clearly the imperative of self-exploitation strikes us all unevenly, and it's conditioned by gender and race and class and social capital and innumerable other things that would be impossible to totalize. Because they quantify attention, social media can make it seem as though it is an abstract commodity, like money, uniform and commensurate, but that masks the the fact the different forms of attention available have different consequences for subjectivity. It's one thing to have, say, your blog post on Spinoza tweeted; quite another to have your picture reblogged on Fuck Yeah Self-Shooters. And it is not as though the sort of attention we can seek is some entirely autonomous choice. What is available, or what we know is possible or attainable, is highly conditioned by where we are already situated.

If there is any commonality among the various snares of the attention economy, it may be in an underlying reflexivity, an awareness of identity as an alienated thing rather than a lived-in spontaneity. Reflexivity introduces absence into any sense of presence, an awareness of audiences not directly accounted for which nonetheless must be played to. Still, the different ways in which we are enticed to seek attention, the different audiences we are brought to suspect are in our reach, require different forms of resistance, different precommitments perhaps. So while I feel myself being sucked into a personal-branding spiral; women face a temptation to sexualized modes of attention-seeking that I don't experience.

So the online objectification and fetishization of young women, the generalized idea of their availability, drives a disproportionate slice of the online attention economy, authenticating a certain kind of attention's value and rooting vicariousness in a subject position that's simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. I imagine it as an alluring opportunity to become money, as fungible and fecund and purposeful as money can be, though it is hard to anticipate what it must be like to be spent. Here's how danah boyd put it in an essay that looks at the attention economy, "celebritization" and its consequences mainly for teenage girls.

Celebrity becomes a correlate to a perfect life -- money, designer clothes, and adulthood. What being a ‘celebrity’ means is discarded; fame is an end to itself with the assumption that fame equals all things awesome despite all the copious examples to the contrary. So teens only hold on to the positive aspects, hoping for the benefits of becoming famous and ignoring the consequences.

boyd is writing in response to this Rolling Stone profile by Sabrina Rubin Erdely of a teenager, Kiki Kannibal, who used MySpace to achieve notoriety but as boyd puts it, "lacked the resources to handle the onslaught and never made it big enough to recoup the ground she lost to weather the fame." Because Kiki uses her sexuality for attention but is not sanctioned through a big-media-supported alibi, she is "under attack."

Rubin Erdley explains why Kiki Kannibal doesn't simply go offline:

She can't go offline. One reason is practical: Kiki has a business to run. But the other reason is more existential: If she were to go offline, her link to the world would disappear. This is a girl with 12,000 Twitter followers whose actual life is empty of real relationships. She's trapped in suburban isolation; outside the bubble of her family, her most meaningful interactions are electronic. In real life, she's lost.

The implication seems to be that her pursuit of celebrity has precluded her ability to generate local ties of affection. Learning how to market oneself online is a different skill from learning how to maintain friendships. boyd suggests that girls get trapped in such dynamics because "fame is a toxic substance," noting that "when the attention is good, it’s really good and it feels really good. And when the attention fades, people can feel lonely and anxious, desperate for more, even if it’s negative attention." I wonder if that isn't pathologizing the desire for celebrity too much, pinning it on personal psychology rather than the structure of the new media form that amplifies these tendencies into potentially destructive compulsions. Social media seem to systematically efface the possibility that the desire for fame might not be universal; they do a poor job of allowing people to calibrate their exposure, which is always theoretically infinite despite whatever temporary barrier privacy settings erect. (Anyone within the network can liberate the private information, which in any event belongs to the social media company, not the user.) In other words, I agree with boyd when she writes, "it’s high time that we start reflecting on the societal values that are getting magnified by them."

Maybe this is a bit hyperbolic, but this Vanity Fair story by Amy Fine Collins about prostitution and human trafficking seems the grim logical extension of what the Rolling Stone story describes. The self-coercion boyd mentions with regard to celebritization is arguably on a continuum (albeit a very, very long one) with the horrors described in the Vanity Fair piece, which would make certain Internet users into the equivalent of johns. A lawyer Fine Collins interviewed for the VF story says, “Johns don’t understand what they’re contributing to. It never occurs to them that the woman who is smiling is being abused. They really don’t know what’s going on—and they don’t care." Internet use sometimes seems to invite that kind of indifference, if the manifold examples of trolling, bullying, voyerurism and generalized deinhibition are any testimony. (The Rolling Stone article is about these tendencies as much as it is about the drive for microcelebrity.) The governing ideology seems to be that all the information online has been voluntarily provided and is thus ultimately fair game, as if there are no gray areas or no shifts in context or no possible regrets on the part of the volunteer that should check a consumer's impulse to enjoy it on whatever level one chooses. Social media's immediacy can make it seem as though this sort of heedless entertainment is an entitlement; the underlying implication is that women are naive if they think otherwise. The consumption of microcelebrity is not governed by the norms of friendship, despite social media's liberal usage of its terminology.

Loving things (10 Dec 2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pejorative "gay" (16 Oct 2008)

Growing up, I was often guilty of using the word gay as a synonym for lame, a bad habit for which there is no excuse. So I'm glad to learn, via AdFreak, that the Ad Council is making public-service spots that point out the unacceptability of the pejorative gay. I don't think that the word can really function as a compliment either; ideally it works as a neutral, descriptive word, typically applied to people. But can it be used also to suggest certain qualities in certain species of pop culture? I've said that Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs is gay, and in a non-pejorative sense (though I could understand why my interlocutors would be confused, in that I also think it's annoying), but I can't quite articulate what I even mean by that -- not that it is made for and by gay people; not that it's conforming to certain gay stereotypes, as in being campy or flamboyant; not that it addresses gay themes in the way that say, the unequivocably gay Bronski Beat did. Coldplay seems "gay" to me in the same way, and John Mayer too. The TV show Three and a Half Men. I'm probably not making any sense. Do these things share some ineffable quality that can be called "gay" or am I merely transferring the negative valence of homophobia to pop culture that is lousy? (Also, the uncertain status of the word suck needs to be reconsidered in this context as well.)

Feeling sorry for sex (13 March 2008)

This essay by Lauren Berlant at The Nation, about how we denigrate sex in the public sphere, is a good example of something I sort of agree with but the way it's expressed makes me want to repudiate it and come up with a counterargument.

If her point were that sex scandals reveal how social attitudes about sex are used to control what sorts of relationships people think to create for themselves, I would be on board completely. But she is claiming that sex scandals are at root about erotophobia, the fear of sexuality because of its alleged ickiness. And that just seems flat-out wrong. First of all, prostitution may not even be a primarily a sexual matter, anymore than pornography is about sexuality -- they are both expressions of power and control through sexual means, with the sexual overtones serving only to make the thrills of power seem more salient.

And people are not scandalized by Spitzer's having sex. If anything, they are excited and titillated by the sex in the story. Sex scandals make good press because people love having an excuse to talk about sex in a public forum. If the public is offended by anything, it may be by his breaking the law in a highly hypocritical fashion and spectacularly violating the social contract he entered into by getting married. In the coverage of scandals such as these, sex itself is not made to seem morbid and unnatural, as Berlant argues, but instead it's the rejection of approved forms for intimate relationships -- that one would dare to ignore the strictures of the nuclear family -- that is pathologized. That is where the shame is, not in sexual activity itself. Berlant makes it seem as though the problem is that people aren't having enough sex; but it's the use of sex as a social tool to control the sorts of relations people can have or even consider having.

This is the graf that annoys me particularly:

Nonetheless, I'm just saying, I really like sex. We have no idea what sex would be like in a world that saw it basically as a good. A weird good. A good that can tip you over and make you want to do strange things. A good that can reveal your incoherence, your love of a little disorder, your love of a little control (adjust the dial as you like). A good that can make you happy, for a minute, before the cat starts scratching the corner of the bed, or the phone rings, or the kids mew, or you're hungry and sleepy, or you need another drink or the taxi comes.

That last line could describe a beer or a cigarette or Wii. What about the sexuality that's not conceptualized as a reified product to be maximized quantitatively? What of sex that's not a part of the experience economy -- which is what prostitution is simply the ultimate expression of -- but is instead a lived-in process that has no rigid boundaries, that expresses the curiosity that fuels an active attitude toward life's constructive possibilities, that isn't just something you do to distract yourself from work or everyday hassles?

Anyway, society approves certain modes of sexual expression precisely because the power of sex is so respected. In fact, that power is cultivated -- that's what Foucault seems to be arguing in The History of Sexuality. The power of the sex drive allows it to be an extremely useful tool in structuring social institutions and systems of control. Sexual morality is not an expression of a "fear" of sex; it's a honing of sex's power to dictate the shape of people's lives. And many welcome this -- they are following these scandals carefully not out of horror but out of the satisfaction of seeing sex's cultural power reiterated. To oversimplify a bit, prohibitions make sex more intense and exciting. It reaffirms that we are right to be thinking of sex so much and that it's appropriate that sex appeal is used ubiquitously to sell products.

That's why it's hopelessly utopian and likely counterproductive to wish for a "world that saw [sex] basically as a good. A weird good." It's too powerful an impulse to be ignored in the formation of social institutions. It will always be structured, and therefore regarded instrumentally, not as some end-in-itself, some independent good. For it to be "playful" in the way Berlant yearns for, it must exist within a game with rules. "Who knows what sex could be if people were encouraged to enjoy it as play rather than as a drama," -- but isn't drama a form of play? -- "a genuine test of recognition or tool of unwanted control over selves and others." I don't know, but I'd venture this guess: To wish for a world that left sexuality unstructured socially would be to yearn to see sex stripped of its power and made into a mundane, natural and inevitable, strictly personal process, akin to going to the bathroom. And then it truly would be icky.

Costumes are creepy (31 Oct 2007)

I'm not much of a fan of Halloween, although I am a big fan of the candy -- I like artificially flavored, pure-sugar, teeth-rotting candies that come in little plastic coffins, and the peanut butter cups in the shape of pumpkins, and all that. What I have trouble with is not trick-or-treating, but the wearing of costumes.

I realize I'm in the minority in this: NPR reported this morning that about 2 million people were expected at the annual Halloween Parade in Manhattan. But I find seeing people in costumes a bit embarrassing, a bit like peeping through a window into their inner psychic weirdness. Many people probably enjoy it for just that reason; it offers a chance to be exhibitionistic without guilt, and carries with it the illicit allure of the carnivalesque, the loosening of strictures, the subversion of social norms, and all that other Bakhtinian goodness. But the fantasies being unleashed in costume form somehow seem so paltry: people dressed as characters from TV shows, or attempting some other "clever" appropriation from pop culture.

The clever costumes, however, are less embarrassing than the vaguely sexual ones: Spend any time at the parade and you may conclude that most women want to dress like hookers and most men want to dress like women. With an opportunity to dress up and tap into the collective unconsciousness, it seems as though people gravitate to the image that our culture projects as being the most powerful, from an attention and marketing standpoint -- that of the beautiful, objectified women who is sexually available. So adults in costumes becomes a depressing reiteration of the way sexuality is so thoroughly bound up with commercialization. I guess in other cultures, where the harvest celebration still has religious overtones, there's a greater emphasis on the spiritual world -- ghouls and demons. Now, it's become a strictly carnal affair.

Anyway, that makes me one of those lame people who goes to costume parties without one. Why can't they be more like 18th century masquerades, where many wore the same costume, the eerie domino suit, and the emphasis was on concealing your identity altogether -- and generalized licentiousness -- rather than trying to come across as cool, a heightened form of one's true self?

Collecting people (29 August 2006)

I found this passage from Steven Metcalf's Slate review of the new Rohmer DVD boxed set interesting:

The most pleasant surprise of the set is La Collectionneuse, which Rohmer filmed on the cheap in the Côte d'Azure while waiting for Jean-Louis Trintignant to free up his schedule. The film is Rohmer's sun-kissed flip-off to all the Roger Vadim clichés: a young unattainable goddess pursued by a tormented man, and all the Which is worse, capturing her or not capturing her? blah blah that accompanies the genre. Instead, Rohmer gives us Haydée, a terrifically sexy gamine who is rather too easily had. What irritates her would-be pursuers, two art-world poseurs, to the point of outright contempt is that she hasn't cultivated herself as a mysterious object of enchantment. Having deprived them of this story line, they turn on her and call her a "collector"—that is, they project onto her their own worst qualities as dandies.

The passage suggests something of the difference between a woman whose sexuality is active, for itself, and a woman for whom the project of becoming sexy is a means to another end, a useful distinction to remember when considering controversies about pro-sex feminism and the nature of sex work. The power to be had in exploiting one's own sexuality is different than the power that comes from becoming a sexual subject (from desire enriching one's subjectivity and impelling one to act rather than wait).

Also, it hints at a pervasive anomaly of male sexuality: I think many men have a collecting attitude toward women, which is one of the reasons they appreciate their overt objectification -- why they will collect and save every issue of Playboy, for instance, which pins down a carefully selected specimen like a butterfly each month for the reader's bemused inspection. I wonder about the direction of causation though -- whether the collecting fever comes from being accustomed to a culture in which women are objectified, or whether women are objectified to suit an inherent male passion for mastery over objects. Is it even a fair assumption to make that women are less likely to be collectors? Is the woman in Rohmer's film actually a collectionneuse or is that merely a male misunderstanding of female jouissance? (Where are my Lacan books when I need them?)

Perhaps it is this: Collecting allows men to exempt themselves from the objectification that sex seems automatically to enact -- the regression into the anonymity of physical pleasure. Integral to the passion for collecting women, I would argue, is the man's certainty of a monetary exchange mediating the collecting. If the women in the magazine were volunteers -- if they were freely pursuing their own sexual aims -- the attraction of collecting them would diminish, possession of them (or their image, a proxy) would lose its value. By transforming sex from an activity into an acquisitive hobby, from a matter of doing to a matter of owning, men protect themselves from dissolving their identity in passion and instead ground it more concretely in an array of women-turned-positional goods.