Beauty and inflated value (15 July 2010)

I'm skeptical about transcendental beauty, if only because the nature of the beautiful seems to change with time. Of course, that itself may just be an illusion. That all I can see is unceasing change in beauty could be the unfortunate effect of my being socialized as a consumer, trained to recognize value primarily in novelty. Beauty descends to the level of fashion, and though timeless is a commonplace in fashion-industry marketing copy, fashion cycles themselves seem much more salient than the specifics of any given trend.

Fashion is no proxy for beauty; it aspires to supplant it. But fashion cycles make explicit the logic that has long underwritten the cultural power of what has gone under the name of beauty. The power to dictate fashion as a series of apparent discoveries is akin to the authority to credibly assign beauty and shape the contours of social perception, to define the aesthetic. The particular usefulness of beauty as a category is that it serves to posit an eternal, elemental value. It connotes a transcendence even when it's nonexistant, so its privileges seem unquestionable.

Ashley Mears, in this essay for 3 Quarks Daily, examines why certain fashion models become ubiquitous and iconic when, for all practical purposes, they are interchangeable. Using Canadian supermodel Coco Rocha as an example, Mears asks, "how, among the thousands of wannabe models worldwide, is any one 14-year-old able to rise from the pack? What makes Coco Rocha more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants?" Mears argues that "there is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens," suggesting that her beauty-value is instead "bequeathed" to her by nature of the "unstable market" in which that value is realized.

Does the process of her elevation to fashion-industry fame somehow link beauty and value, allowing each to define the other for the rest of us?

The experts responsible for choosing models "don’t know what makes one model a better choice than another," Mears notes, which means that the process is ruled by the inarticulate whims of fashion's managerial class:

Like dozens of fashion producers I spoke with, Russell doesn’t really know what it is about a kid like Coco Rocha that excites him. He “just knows” if a model is right for him, and further, he “knows it when he sees it.”

But what Russell "just knows" is not some ineffable movement of his own sensitive spirit but a collective understanding of what image his industry has legitimized, something that is not set down explicitly but communicated instead through reciprocal patterns of protective imitation. Mears points out the importance of the social network to this project: "producers talk. They hang out throughout the week at lunches, dinners, parties.... They talk constantly, facebooking, texting, and drinking; they even date each other. They share social and cultural space, and they pick up on the gossip, or 'the buzz,' this way." This particular social network produces a time-specific ideal of beauty, reconstituted as the height of fashion -- an ideal which in turn authenticates the exclusivity of the network, whose members conserve the power of naming the beautiful. [herding and information cascades and the problem of arbitrary value with real social impact]

Beauty seems more an ideological effect than an intrinsic quality of things, a residue of the process of power that decides who should reap beauty's associated benefits. It's an expression of cultural capital, albeit one that strikes us with immediacy, as though it were a natural intuition. Beauty allows to grasp power in a glance as pleasure -- the hard, protracted work that went into establishing a particular hegemonic ideal vanishes into the instant, leaving behind only a sense of compulsory approval and attraction. We feel as though we are glimpsing both what we want to have and want to be, or what we are supposed to, at any rate, but also something far more insidious. In that moment of perceiving beauty, being and having are inseparably blended so that identity can seem a matter of owning things and seeing becomes a mode of possession.

"A finance market, like a fashion market, consists of speculators chasing each other’s tails in disregard for what things are really worth." But there may be no "real worth" to be ascertained, only ideology.

Beauty is our heart volunteering us for the gentlest form of domination.

Terry Eagleton, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, argues that these cultural beauty myths serve the purpose of persuading us to recognize the premises of the prevailing social order as the spontaneous movement of our hearts

Of course there is a different way to commune with beauty --get metaphysical in conclusion.

Eva Illouz (5 June 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

Baroque Theory and Collective Action (1 June 2010)

In his review of Akerlof and Kranton's Identity Economics,Tom Slee argues that leftist critical theory uses ideology and false-consciousness-based approaches to explain what is better understood as a collective action problem.

Sometimes it has seemed to me as if all the avant-garde contortions of post-Marxist, post-modern political thought could have been avoided if sociologists had learned a little game theory. Instead, believing that it is in the interests of subjugated classes to throw off their shackles and yet seeing no shackles being thrown, they have resorted to more and more baroque explanations for this seeming contradiction.... Yet simple game theory would have cut this Gordian knot. Eagleton writes that “If it is rational to settle for an ambiguous mixture of misery and marginal pleasure when the political alternatives appear perilous and obscure, it is equally rational to rebel when the miseries clearly outweigh the gratifications.” But this ignores the collective action problem: just because it would be good for a group to rebel does not make it sensible for an individual to rebel. The contradiction is not a contradiction at all: was all this baroque theorizing really necessary?

That's a good question. Another way of putting this is that we have a variety of group identities as well as individual identities and each of these comes with different rationales for behavior, different hierarchies of motives. I think baroque theorizing can help explain the means by which these various identities are constituted and delimited, and what prompts us to switch between them. The salience of our various identities can be manipulated externally, and identities can be made to seem more or less relevant or unchangable -- just look at Facebook's efforts to persuade us that we need a one online identity to have "integrity." What we believe is important to believe about ourselves is subject to environmental conditions: class habitus; the sorts of marketing we are exposed to; the sociopolitical environment; group religiosity; etc. So the structures that lead to the cognitive dissonance that shapes our choices of whether to act in situations, or continue to act, are always in play -- at every moment the nature, salience, and apparent consequences of our identity (or rather our identities) are being negotiated.

Theory speculates on what the fulcrums might be for that exogenous manipulation of identity, rather than accepting predefined identities from empirical observation or self-reports. Is that methodologically dubious? Possibly, but it may help open avenues of exploration for more empirically oriented social science.

Slee points out that "what game theory brings is an explanation of why certain patterns persist, and the introduction of identity extends these explanations to many important patterns." One can see the power of this approach in Slee's book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart and in the work of economist Thomas Schelling, to give a few examples. They reveal how well-intentioned people can help perpetuate macro-level injustices or conditions they long to reject and change. It shows how self-interest is not all that socially benevolent in many situations. What we believe is good for society (or our group identity as a member of a community, etc.) turns out not to be something we can act upon directly; what we can directly affect as individuals has unintended, contrary consequences at that social.community level.

But ideally baroque theory can investigate whether power in society turns us against collective identity and traps us in self-interested behavior that reinforces existing power relations. It can explore why game theory holds for human behavior, rather than accept its structure and logic as given. This is part of what makes it so frequently baroque; it sometimes attempts to explore human behavior without recourse to formal logic or a stable definition of rationality or a simple, measurable balance of pros and cons. (I tried to make a similar point in my post on Identity Economics.)

Identity, ideology, and micromotives are concatenated in a complex cluster. Slee makes a crucial point that illuminates how ideology tends to work: "To articulate beliefs carries with it a cost." That cost is socially negotiated -- a matter of not just education and diligence but of courage. When beliefs are "expensive" to express (to bring it back within economics-style analysis), we avoid clarifying them even to ourselves and find ourselves conforming to beliefs that are already circulating and are attached to generic identities that are also circulating. Power adheres there, in that circulation. In other words, that is how ideologies become hegemonic; that is how identity's building blocks, which dictate the limits of our identity, are determined. Who circulates them, and how, and what drives up the cost of expressing beliefs? These are the questions of baroque theory, perhaps of sociology in general.

Fashionable apathy and the power elite (3 August 2008)

Wright Mills's The Power Elite is pretty dated now, especially the first 200 pages of so, which elucidate the specifics of the nascent 1950s military-industrial complex in mind-numbing detail. But it's worth plodding through all that to get to the thundering denunciations of American complacency that follows, which have lost none of their sting over the years. He laments the loss of a Habermasian public sphere (though the degree to which this ever existed is debatable) and blames a media-sponsored celebrity cult for keeping the public, disintegrated into a mass of alienated individuals capable of thinking only of their own limited self-referential interests, stupified and distracted from the workings of the true "power elite" -- the Ivy League-educated managerial class who come from the established rich families. The media fosters a "psychological illiteracy" that encourages stereotyping over thinking, making it harder for us to perceive the totality of society in its functioning (as Lukacs laments about in History and Class Consciousness). "The man in the mass does not gain a transcending view from these media; instead he gets his experience stereotyped, and then he gets sunk further by that experience." This in turn makes us more vulnerable to media manipulation, since we lack the basis to critique its representations.

The media provide much information and news about what is happening in the world, but they do not often enable the listener or the viewer truly to connect his daily life with these larger realities. They do not connect the information they provide on public issues with the troubles felt by the individual. They do not increase rational insight into tensions, either those in the individual or those of the society which are reflected in the individual. On the contrary, they distract him and obscure his chance to understand himself or his world, by fastening his attention upon artificial frenzies that are resolved within the program framework, usually by violent action or by what is called humor. In short, for the viewer they are not really resolved at all.... There is almost always the general tone of animated distraction, of suspended agitation, but it is going nowhere and it has nowhere to go.

This leaves people in a state of semi-helplessness, incapable of complex thought. "Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, he is accompanied through his life experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue. He has no projects of his own: he fulfills the routines that exist. He does not transcend whatever he is at any moment, because he does not, he cannot, transcend his daily milieux. He is not truly aware of his own daily experience and of its actual standards: he drifts, he fulfills habits, his behavior a result of a planless mixture of the confused standards and the uncriticized expectations that he has taken over from others whom he no longer really knows or trusts, if indeed he ever really did." And since the media is controlled by the elite, its effectiveness enriches them further.

As a consequence of the degraded citizenship, democracy is a hollow illusion, an ideological alibi for the status quo. Voting is a mere expression of nationalism as opposed to a true political choice. And a "conservative mood" overtakes intellectuals who are disillusioned by the failure of liberalism to preserve a thinking public. At the heart of this mood "there is a knowledge of powerlessness without poignancy, and a feeling of pseudo-power based on mere smugness. By its softening of political will, this mood enables men to accept public depravity without any private sense of outrage, and to give up the central goal of western humanism -- the presumptuous control by reason of man's fate." The word smugness serves as a trigger for me, and it makes me want to link this conservative mood with today's hipsters, as per the previous post. The problem with hipsters is not their fashion-following phoniness; it's their smug abdication of responsibility in favor of an egocentric apathy. Hipsters are conservatives posturing as progressives, often professing to be liberals while their practice refutes the claim. Mills's description of the 1950s conservative mood suits hipsterism to a tee:

it is not a snobbery linked with nostalgia, but on the contrary, with what is just one-step-ahead-of-the-very-latest-thing, which is to say that it is a snobbery based not on tradition but on fashion and fad. Those involved are not thinking for a nation, or even about a nation; they are thinking of and for themselves. In self-selected coteries, they confirm one another's mood, which thus becomes snobbishly closed -- and quite out of the main stream of the practice of decision and the reality of power.

(This reminds me of my own indifference to the business world when I was a graduate student, and thought I was well informed on everything important -- you know, semiotic theories of gender and decentered subjectivities in 18th century novels and that sort of thing. My arguments about these subjects with my peers were so vital. Mills saw the conservative mood as facilitating "historical development without benefit of idea." This is the sense, perhaps, in which hipsterism is the dead end of Western civilization. Mills's book is useful for linking hipsters to the larger problem of the meaningless political sphere, which seems to have spawned them. But it doesn't shed much light on how to reinvigorate political involvement, how to make the basic acts of citizenship in a democracy not seem trivial or merely self-referential. Could "youth" culture -- in reality the culture of grown adults who can affect the structures of society in a meaningful way -- form for itself a politically literate, unified, and efficacious sphere of action? Is there anything else to do but resist what is currently dominant, or does any positive action stand only to be co-opted and reassimilated by the forces of conservative "smugness"?

The relation between hipsterism and conservatism-in-effect apathy makes it almost ironic that McCain's campaign is trying to paint Obama as a kind of king of the hipsters. Andrew Sullivan makes the obvious point that this is no substitute for actually crafting policy positions (the Republicans are the dead end of Western Civilization). But this of course makes them the natural allies of hipsters, who also stand for nothing. These attacks are just another feat of projection, as when McCain plays the race card by accusing Obama of playing it.

Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?

Prolific Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has written several books over the past decade about consumerism -- which he for some reason prefers to call "the world of consumers" -- hence the verbose title of his most recent book, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? -- in what he has dubbed the "liquid modern era." (He also dislikes the term postmodern, and this is his way of avoiding semantic arguments about what it precisely means.) There's not much suspense about the question the title poses: The answer, as you'd probably guess, is basically no.

It's a not a question you'd ask if you were actually optimistic about it. Bauman, while not as thoroughgoingly pessimistic as such past consumer-society critics as Jean Baudrillard, is still left dispiritedly positing utopian scenarios after laying out his grim analyses of our social situation -- he calls it a "battlefield" in the introduction -- which, in his view, technology is rapidly worsening. The characterological changes brought on by consumerism are accelerating, he argues, turning the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood into the diminished qualities of security, parity and networking.

In Bauman's account -- and it is a familiar, comfortable story to anyone schooled in leftist, Adornoesque social theory -- the liquid modern world's problems start when aspects that traditionally limited our possibilities in the world (religion, geography, class, occupation, family, ethnicity) gradually became less restrictive, thanks mostly to capitalism's modus operandi of creative destruction. Things once regarded as more or less permanent or unmarketable were subsumed by the market, reified, branded, and made subject to neoclassical economic truths about privatization, rational choices, and marginal utility. No longer assigned a specific role in the community from birth, we are alienated, atomized, cut free as an individual, forced to make our place. This has tangible benefits, obviously, in expanding our freedom to act. But it also brought with it the scourges of insecurity and boundless responsibility. (This is Frankfurt school orthodoxy -- not unlike Erich Fromm's and Herbert Marcuse's ideas about freedom, in Escape From Freedom and One-Dimensional Man respectively.) "As Alain Ehrenberg convincingly argues," writes Bauman, who frequently selects choice quotes from other thinkers (one of the nice things about Bauman's book is that it serves as a kind of index to recent theoretical trends), "most common human sufferings tend to grow from the surfeit of possibilities, rather than from the profusion of prohibitions as they used to in the past" -- an insight he may have attributed to any number of behavioral economists as well. Overt coercion in the pre-consumerist world was replaced by the regime of flattering persuasion, which is just as coercive, only we feel like we are in control, volunteering to participate in it (we shop because we want to), making the meaningful choices (between the things supplied by the market to satisfy the needs it has trained us to adopt). "As Pierre Bourdieu had already signaled two decades ago, coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires."

At this point, I'm nodding in agreement, but none of this is new -- this is more or less the case that all left-leaning thinkers have made about consumerism. It seduces us to control us, replaces the ideal freedom of citizens in the public sphere determining a future for society collectively with that of a a bunch of individuals free only to choose among doodads after having their brains filled with bafflegab.

But Bauman turns an interesting corner. He cites philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's notion of society as not a limit on our selfishness, as Freud, for instance, claimed in Civilization and Its Discontents, but as a limit on our boundless ethical responsibility to our fellow humans. "Using the vocabulary of Levinas, we may say that the principal function of society, 'with its institutions, universal forms, and laws,' is to make the essentially unconditional and unlimited responsibility for the Other both conditional (in selected, duly enumerated, and clearly defined circumstances) and limited (to a select group of 'others,' considerably smaller than the totality of humanity and, most important, narrower and thus more easily manageable)." Society may be not the force that stops the Hobbesan war of all against all, but "an outcome of tempering their endemic and boundless altruism with the 'order of egotism.' " (It's like bizarro Ayn Rand.) That altruism -- that feeling of ethical responsibility to others -- is an impossible, crippling burden. Only by curtailing it can we accomplish anything. But in doing that, we also curtail the spontaneous impulse Levinas believes that we have to trust and help others. And possibly we curtail the source of life's meaning.

The way consumer society allows us to escape from that responsibility -- its innovative method, perhaps -- is to train us to fix it on ourselves. "Responsibility now means, first and last, responsibility to oneself ('You owe this to yourself,' as the outspoken traders in relief from responsibility indefatigably repeat), while 'responsible choices' are, first and last, such moves as serve well the interests and satisfy the desires of the actor and stave off the need to compromise." The celebration in consumer society of individualism and our "right" to convenience mean that we have a duty to free ourselves from having to consider other people's needs -- and the market works to supply us the tools to avoid impinging human contact. It sells us ways to avoid having to deal with other people and the hassle they represent. "The privatized utopias of the cowboys and cowgirls of the consumerist era show vastly expanded 'free space' (free for myself, of course)," Bauman explains, "a kind of empty space of which the liquid-modern consumer, bent on solo performances and solo performances only, never has enough. The space consumers need and are advised on all sides to fight for can be conquered only by evicting other humans -- and particularly the kind of humans who care for others or may need care themselves." (This ties in another subject Bauman has written about frequently: the systematic exclusion from society of the victims of the Holocaust.)

Along with that championing of individuality and training of responsibility on ourselves instead of others comes a newfangled responsibility for shaping and projecting our own identity, which used to be dictated entirely by our circumstances but is now subject (seemingly) to our control. As a consequence, we are now all required to continually fashion our identity and project it in social symbols, which are supplied by the language of consumer goods and brands. In order to keep the consumer economy dynamic, the meaning of these symbols are constantly in the process of redefinition, and we adapt our identities to follow suit, let our identities function as brands for ourselves. What Bauman doesn't mention, but is sort of implied, is that in making identity formation a never-ending process, consumer society sells that process as pleasurable. Actually, it probably is in fact pleasurable -- it makes real life into a kind of daydream in which we can impersonate anyone and fantasize freely and openly, playing pretend games in public. And when you embrace novelty as an end in itself, it becomes a need easily (albeit temporarily) gratified. If you're a dog who likes chasing your tail, you'll never want for entertainment. The point is that pleasure comes not in some final achievement of the right identity, but in the multiplicity of identities always available to us, and the freedom we feel in swapping them out. If we were easily satisfied, it would take a lot to motivate us as workers (we could just sit in the park and watch butterflies rather than work overtime to buy a flat-screen). Not accidentally, our consumerist refusal to be easily pleased, to demand more, is routinely portrayed as a positive trait, a testament to our superior discrimination.

Bauman argues that we all are forced to become pseudo-artists, with our identity as our chief work, a kind of temporary installation in our own bodies. At the same time, any continuity between identities is discarded, leaving us living through a series of discrete moments in which it is possible for us to be anything. Bauman argues,

What follows is that the sole skill I really need to acquire and exercise if flexibility -- the skill of promptly getting rid of useless skills, the ability to quickly forget and to dispose of the past assets that have turned into liabilities, the skill of changing tacks and tracks at short notice and without regret, and of avoiding oaths of life-long loyalty to anything and anybody.

As individuals, we need to embrace capitalism's creative destruction at the personal level, seizing upon a moment's given opportunities with no recourse to past or future inclinations or sentimentalities. The most important aspect of that flexibility is the ability to forget -- to believe that we have always been at war with Eurasia. Skirts have always been knee-length. Crocs have always been stylish.

The institutionalized contempt for continuity encourages us to replace friendships with the network: "relations set by and sustained by network-type connectedness come close to the ideal of a 'pure relationship,' one based on easily dissolvable one-factor ties, with no determined duration, no strings attached, and unburdened by long-term commitments." What this gives individuals is "the comforting (even if ultimately counterfactual) feeling of total and unthreatened control over his or her obligations and loyalties." Of course, if you control obligations, they aren't exactly obligatory -- they are voluntary. That is what conceals from us the larger dimensions of our cultural obligations.

Bauman implicitly likens this situation to the notion of "groups of belonging" and the conditions of exclusion that set up the parameters of the Holocaust. The illusion of control may mask our obligations to play the game. The coercion to be a consumer is experienced generally as freedom (our ideology's accomplishment), but if you resist it, you run the risk of social exclusion -- not on a stateless-person-headed-to-concentration-camp level, but moving in that direction. "All of this may be intuited," Bauman writes, "from the dark premonitions that haunt them at night after a busy shopping day -- or from the warning that goes off when their bank account falls into the red and their unused credit reaches zero." To be without credit takes on multiple meanings -- you become worthless as a human being.

This is a roundabout way of point out that in a society where purchasing power is how we experience freedom, being poor means being very unfree. In other words, poverty really sucks, moreso than it did when society was less open. (Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation explores this simple truth at length.) The poor, and those who are sympathetic to them, or nostalgic for old roles, or repulsed by the identity shuffling were expeced to relish, perhaps "do not view this life as a kind of life that they themselves, given genuine liberty of choice, would wish to practice." But these people obviously need reeducation. "Those who go solely by what they believe they need, and are activated only by the urge to satisfy those needs, are flawed consumers and so also social outcasts." If you aren't worried about keeping in tune with the zeitgeist, you are seen to be expressing some kind of contempt for the socially-agreed-upon way of being happy.

It is often said of such people that they are indifferent if not downright hostile to freedom, or that they have not yet grown up and matured enough to enjoy it. Which implies that their nonparticipation in the style of life dominant ... tends to be explained by either ideologically aroused resentment of freedom or the inability to practice it.

If they only loved freedom a little more, they wouldn't be concerned with how the system is basically rigged to assure that they will never be regarded with dignity in the public sphere, that they will always seem helplessly out of touch. Their fashion backwardness seems to justify their social exclusion, as we are invited to see how they manifest their identity as an expression of their own poor opinion of themselves. "If 'to be free' means to be able to act on one's wishes and pursue the chosen objectives," Bauman notes, "the liquid-modern, consumerist version of the art of life may promise to all, but it delivers it sparingly and selectively."

So what do you do if you don't want to include yourself in the consumerist economy, you want to preserve an ethical code, but you don't want to risk living as a semi-persecuted outcast. Do you "go live in a jelly jar"? Bauman's text doesn't offer much in the way of answers. He urges that we become better educated in the sorts of things I was taught in civics class -- fundamentals about the how politics works and so on -- and that we become citizens instead of consumers. But it seems that in order for that to happen, citizenship will have to assume some of the technique of consumerism -- it will have to be able to generate the personal, individualistic pleasures we have come to expect from consumerism and which we now regard as the guiding purpose of our lives. We need to make the pursuit of happiness an explicitly political matter once again.