Box of books in the trash (27 April 2009)

Who says serendipity is dead? While I was jogging around my neighborhood yesterday, my run was interrupted by one of my favorite things to stumble upon -- a box of books being thrown out. This happenstance allows me to (1) acquire several more books of marginal relevance to me for the nearly always margin-defeating cost of free and (2) believe there is some sort of destiny in my reading and them and extracting what I can extract from them, all while (3) feeling like I'm performing a noble act of unconsumption, resuscitating something old and avoiding an unnecessary new purchase. If we need to be constantly rearranging our belongings to be continually reaffirming our ever-unstable self-concept, why not do it through acquisitive acts outside the economy?

Anyway, at this particular treasure trove (I guess if I used Twitter I would have immediately posted the address so all my non-existent friends in the neighborhood could go check it out?), my attention was arrested particularly by one spine, which read "QUANT by QUANT." What was this? Was it the anonymous confessions of a hedge fund manager? Not exactly. It turned out to be this:

Very mod. Inside are a bunch of pictures of Mary Quant cutting clothes and looking at her own handiwork through shop windows. I also got a copy of Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, a book about teen angst called Suburban Youth in Cultural Crisis, and this book, which I have read before but whose cover I find irresistible:

I read this book a few years ago mainly because I liked the title and found it almost impenetrably strange. If I remember right it is a Heavenly Creatures-like story of girls acting out against the patriarchy in their own misguided way. (I hope that is not too glib.) I've probably owned three copies of it in the apst, all of which I have given away -- this is my fourth. I will probably tear the front off and use it as a bookmark.

Anyway, as I left the box behind, I immediately began to do exactly what I frequently complain about in other posts -- draw conclusions about what sort of person could possibly have owned this strange concatenation of books. Is it someone who took a feminist literature course and is only now getting around to casting off the books? Does that mean the person's feminism has waned, or that the person has moved beyond the need to keep books like The Beauty Myth on the shelf as proof? Was this person a child of the suburbs who had resettled in the city (like me), or was this person just vaguely interested in a 1970s perspective on an evolving social concern? Most important, perhaps: Was this person a mod? A rocker? A mocker? Or were they someone like me who saw this book in a thrift store and thought it a kitschy artifact? What are people going to think of me when I throw it away?

It's easy to see how this mode of thinking reinforces itself and generates a low-grade cultural paranoia. It's easy to let oneself off the hook and say, Oh, it's human nature to perform such analyses and typecastings, as well as to use objects to define ourselves, but it seems ultimately more fruitful and hopeful to wonder what about our current society invites and provokes this sort of thing, which seems to trap our identities in things to a degree that seems unprecedented.

Freecycle and utility traps (12 January 2007)

In Rob Walker's article in last Sunday's NYT Magazine about Freecycle, a Craigslist or Meetup style Internet matching service designed to help you give away stuff you want to get rid of, founder Deron Beal suggests that his organization has been successful because the sacrifice-free generosity it enables makes people feel good.

Whatever attracts people to join, part of what keeps them involved, Beal says, is something they probably didn’t expect: the moment when someone thanks you backward and forward for giving him something you planned to throw away. “There’s a sort of paradigm shift in your brain: ‘Wow, that feels really good,’ ” Beal says. “That’s what I think is fueling this absurd amount of growth we’ve had.”

It seems to me the analysis of this could be pushed a little further. Sure, it's great to earn approbation for being charitable simply by redirecting your trash pickup. And it's pleasing to simplify and streamline your belongings, something that can be surprisingly hard to do because of the responsibility we may feel toward what we buy. Generally we think we are buying stuff with some use in mind, even though the actual motives have more to do with indulging some fantasy about who we want to become or who we might have been. That fantasy is enacted upon purchase, but the purchased object lingers on even after the fantasy fades, cluttering up our apartments -- and our consciousness, when that fantasy curdles into disillusionment and we are embarrassed or taunted by what we wished we were or what the object reminds us we are not. It sits waiting to be use in the way we promised ourselves would when we bought it. My Russian-English dictionary, for instance, always annoys me with how quickly I gave up on learning Russian. But I don't want to throw it away -- not only will that seem a waste in the abstract, but it's an admission of surrender. So I hang on to it, refusing to give up on the utility still entombed within it. That utility, which was the alibi for indulging the fantasy, becomes a trap until we can find some way of dissipating it.

One way is to find some other person to assume that burden, who by taking the object from you is making their own promise to use it in the way you couldn't. This salvages the whole project, allowing you to part with the good without admitting to yourself complete failure. You've just changed one fantasy about yourself (whatever dream was evoked by the object) for another (the pleasure of being a benevolent gift-giver, the pleasure of feeling useful), and it's no longer your fault if the thing is never really used for its ostensible purpose. Giving things away allows us to use them up without having to consume them in the way they are intended to be used. I use up the squash racket not by playing squash and wearing it out but by giving it to a stranger who now is making an implicit promise to play squash, taking me off the hook. So the gift is not as free as it may seem, it comes with the hidden burden of abandoned dreams and the duty to make good on those dreams for someone else as well as yourself. So the goods exchanged through Freecycle threaten to become freighted with serial failures, all the previous owner's as well as your incipient own. But this probably doesn't happen -- giving something away for free seems to remove that thing from the money-for-pleasure cycle that renders the abstract notion of utility seem so important. The gesture, the effort to find a home for something rather than merely trash it, springs you from the trap, and that, I think, explains the unexpected elation Freecyclers feel.

Indisposability (28 December 2006)

I've been reading Giles Slade's Made to Break, which explores the evolution of the concept of planned obsolescence in American industry. Slade goes into way too much detail for my taste about the nascent radio and nylon industries, but his overall account of the unstoppable rise of disposability is interesting. The story goes like this: the expansion of industry in the nineteenth century brought with it the specter of overproduction, which seemed to many to be responsible for the Depression. (Obviously these folks took no comfort in Say's law.) In order to get consumers to repeatedly purchase the same item, and thus keep workers employed in making these items, they needed to be convinced that what they already owned had become obsolete by offering a "new and improved" version. Of course, touted technological improvements were often specious, and most improvements are entirely stylistic -- as a quintessential example, Slade traces how GM pioneered styling in autos to steal market share from Ford, which stubbornly built durable cars. Slade cites Christine Fredrick, one of the pioneers of gender-targeted advertisement, as devising a list of three "telltale habits of mind" that we should be induced to cultivate, which he paraphrases as this:

(1) A state of mind which is highly suggestible and open; eager and willing to take hold of anything new either in the shape of a new invention or new designs or styles or ways of living.
(2) A readiness to 'scrap' or lay aside an article before its natural life of usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing.
(3) A willingness to apply a very large share of one's income, even if it pinches savings, to the acquisition of the new goods or services or way of living.

I don't think it's too cynical to say that this defines the meaning of life for those in a consumer society -- do whatever you can to remake yourself in a new and improved way with the aid of products that one can readily fantasize about and through. The degree to which you are "countercultural" is the degree to which you consciously resist these tenets. (And the degree to which we think we disobey these tenets but reveal nonetheless how deeply we have internalized them makes us faux countercultural -- makes us hipsters.)

Industrial design as an industry in its own right begins here, and the advertising industry, generally, takes off with this new mission in mind, to persuade the general public that fashion cycles must be obeyed in regard to all their material possessions, and the up-to-dateness of the stuff you have is the surest way of identifying status, rather bloodline or comportment -- this message has a democratic appeal to it, in that it seems to do away with inherited privilege in favor of what money can buy, but the relentless, ceaseless striving to be current if not novel is merely a different kind of tyranny, and one that is tremendously harmful to the environment -- Slade is especially good at illustrating the enormous amount of waste a consumer society generates by relying on unnecessary packaging (individually wrapped just for you!) and unnecessary replacement buying to connote one's personal progress. Inevitably we come to expect to throw away everything we acquire eventually; we don't saddle ourselves with the looming burden of ownership -- imagine if you were continually confronted with the possibilty of having to keep everything you got forever; think then what a borderline insult it would be to have gifty gifts foisted on you for no other reason that to make the giver feel thoughtful.

This burden of ownership, and our deeply ingrained commitment to disposability, may be why it feels so good to purge ourselves of unnecessary things. It's always a rewarding feeling when I drop off Trader Joe's bags full of junk at the Goodwill. (Though I usually end up buying more junk on the same visit.) At times I feel as though nothing is as satisfying as the experience of using things up, of finally extracting the potential of some object I've acquired and then getting rid of it. Consumer society orients us to think in these terms, of not merely using things but of using them up, of extinguishing them, of sucking them dry. The idea that something could be useful without being used up begins to seem like a dream, a scam, a lie akin to a perpetual motion machine. When I'm conscious of this, I try to resist; I begin to romanticize getting pleasure from the same thing, listening to John, Wolf King of L.A. over and over again, or glorying in playing Freecell repeatedly. I think about rereading books I love, sometimes I'll even thumb through them, suffused with warm wistfulness -- ah, that first time I read For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign....

So we glorify inexhaustible resources, but we don't trust them; they are fairy tales, mirages of nostalgia. Eventually we begin to think of other people as resources to be used up, that this is the honest and fair way of appraising them, and we attempt to extract whatever use we can out of them and then discard them, whether they are in the labor force or are our intimates -- though the "purity" of the latter may sometimes be constructed as an escape from the former, the way we feel obliged to use people in production, to manage them as disposable things. In essence we start to plan for obsolescence with regard to the people in our lives, though we regard this as something inevitable that we must "be realistic" about. (We need to expect the cheese to be moved, that sort of thing.) This leads perhaps to our wanting to compensate by prioritizing trying to be indisposable, feeling irreplaceable for some unique quality we have to offer the people who are closest to us. We love those who make us feel this way, regardless of whether the way we have become indispensable is also a way we can be any good to this world.