Pret à mourir (12 Aug 2011)

I borrowed the title for this post from my friend Anton of Generation Bubble, who forwarded me a link to this NYT article by Stephanie Clifford about Pret à Manger, sort of the Target of sandwich shops, assuming Subway is the Wal-Mart. If you want to see a horrific application of all the principles of immaterial and affective labor, Virnoesque virtuosity, lateral surveillance, obligatory reflexivity, emotional management, gamification and so on, you need look no further.

How does any company encourage teamwork? At Pret a Manger, executives say, the answer is to hire, pay and promote based on — believe it or not — qualities like cheerfulness.

There is a certain “Survivor” element to all of this. New hires are sent to a Pret a Manger shop for a six-hour day, and then the employees there vote whether to keep them or not. Ninety percent of prospects get a thumbs-up. Those who are voted out are sent home with £35 ($57), no hard feelings.

The crucial factor is gaining support from existing employees. Those workers have skin in the game: bonuses are awarded based on the performance of an entire team, not individuals. Pret workers know that a bad hire could cost them money.

All the joys of tournament labor markets like those that exist in academia, with none of the "life of the mind" rationalizations. And instead of solidarity against management, each worker becomes the face of management, another Stasi spy for the happy police.

But that is not nearly enough surveillance to allow Pret's management to discriminate among workers:

Pret also sends “mystery shoppers” to every shop each week. Those shoppers give employee-specific critiques. (”Bill didn’t smile at the till,” for instance.) If a mystery shopper scores a shop as “outstanding” — 86 percent of stores usually qualify — all of the employees get a £1-per-hour bonus, based on a week’s pay, so full-timers get around $73. “There’s a lot of peer pressure,” said Andrea Wareham, the human resources director at Pret.

DARE sessions in school taught me that peer pressure was bad, but I suppose peer pressure, in this context, is good. It is the vaunted power of worker collaboration and cooperation turned inside out and made into a coercive management tool. One's very ability to get along with others is alienated and quantified,amde into somethign you would only do for money rather than from basic human solidarity. Pret rejects the sort of human sociality that might thrive outside of capital, that is possible in environments where making a profit by selling commodified service experiences isn't the overriding goal. Instead Pret chooses to incentivize human feeling and turn the point of exchange into an explicit, quantified moment of affective labor while turning worker cooperation into a reified shadow of itself. That policy is carried out all down the line, apparently, with no sociality left unincentivized and thus unexploited:

Pret reinforces the teamwork concept in other ways. When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a “shooting star.” But instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must give the money to colleagues, people who have helped them along the way.

There are other rewards. Every quarter, the top 10 percent of stores, as ranked by mystery-shopper scores, receive about £30 per employee for a party. The top executives at Pret get 60 “Wow” cards, with scratch-off rewards like £10 or an iPod, to hand out each year to employees who strike them as particularly good. Pret has all-staff parties twice a year, and managers get a monthly budget of £100 or so to spend on drinks or outings for their workers.

“Rewards, through bonuses or ‘outstanding’ cards, affect behavior,” Ms. Wareham says.

Wow cards, I suppose, are the Scooby snacks of the service industry. It's always nice to be recognized, but there seems to be something backhanded about making even that a lottery scenario. And in the end, it's just Pavlovian manipulation, not genuine recognition of the worker as a human. The incentivizing of feeling leaves no space for the employees to be recognized in and of themselves. Everything about them as feeling creatures has been subsumed by the wage relation. That's what is so creepy about going into a Pret -- you know they are being forced to be nice to you and are being carefully watched by other fake-nice bosses and informers. It feels like those moments in movies about people in a mental asylum, where the patients try to maintain a facade of controlled politeness in hopes of demonstrating their newfound sanity. This sounds sort of insane to me, anyway:

Every new employee gets a thick binder of instructions. It states, for example, that employees should be “bustling around and being active” on the floor, not “standing around looking bored.” It encourages them to occasionally hand out free coffee or cakes to regulars, and not “hide your true character” with customers.

Can a boss really force you to display your "true character" without driving you into an insane spiral of endlessly recursive reflexivity? And is one's "true character" nothing more than picking random lottery-winner customers to hand a cake to? Are human interactions so conditioned by the imperative of exchange that giving and getting something for nothing is the best way to simulate genuineness, or sincere benevolence? Perhaps the looting in London was just a big expression of love.

The article should put to rest any ideas that the implementation of such concepts as gamification and the general intellect are inherently benevolent or subversive. Instead, they can be deployed by management to create a kind of affective Taylorism, where emotional experiences are assembled under hurry-up conditions and energetically concealed duress. Unless you believe that it's more fun to be forced to pretend to be having fun while working a deli counter -- maybe the findings that people who are forced to smile report being happier apply here also. Clifford notes that Pret's "annual work force turnover rate is about 60 percent — low for the fast-food industry, where the rate is normally 300 to 400 percent." Stockholm Syndrome is a powerful management tool.

The emotional labor being extracted from Pret employees exemplifies the way tight labor markets give employers the chance to cement expectations of a more pliant disposition from workers. The new normal is a grotesque sycophancy sugarcoated as a fun, cheerful workplace where "teamwork" rules. In an email, Anton says Pret's approach elicits an "unprecedented self-relation -- instrumentalization of mood and affect as a way of producing surplus value. It can only end in a psychotic break." I'm inclined to agree.

The carefree society (14 Dec 2010)

I attended this lecture at the New School yesterday given by economist Nancy Folbre about how capitalism has transformed patriarchy and how this has helped bring on the employment crisis. It wasn't a discussion so much of the much-reported mancession of 2008-09 as it was a broader look at how the domestic and affective work long performed by women for nothing has increasingly become waged work, and also how such work continues to be performed by women who are also working other jobs. Women have gained "self-ownership" thanks in some part to the logic of capitalist individualism -- they have been granted the opportunity to sell their labor power and hold property. This increased agency threatens the way capitalist societies have relied on women to do the work of social reproduction outside of the markets that are assumed to be natural to and rule all other forms of production and exchange. As women gain self-ownership, their view of the domestic work they perform becomes more capitalistic -- they want to be paid for it, or rather pay other women to do it. The wages for such work is low, because the work itself is easily commodifiable and requires no formal education and can be performed by members of the underclasses.

In neoliberal ideology, it's regarded as better to privatize welfare than use the state to pool risks associated with social reproduction. American society in particular has fostered an every-family-for-itself environment that intensified risks for everyone -- if your parents lose the Alzheimer's lottery, and you have to put them in a home, well, tough break for you. Don't expect your neighbor's tax dollars to help you out. If your company pulls out of the U.S. and lays everyone off, don't expect anyone else to help put food in your kids' mouths until you can't find new work. Instead, you are presumably supposed to think about what gave you the right to have kids in the first place, if you couldn't guarantee you could afford them.

As capitalism internalizes or subsumes more and more of everyday experience -- as more and more of the traditionally unpaid work of social reproduction becomes reconceived as commodified, exploitable wage work -- there's less reason to want to do any of that for other ideological reasons (because it is fulfilling in one's social role; because it's morally satisfying; because it is pleases God; etc.). But someone's got to do it, or else the system as we know it will inevitably end. The key question is who does this work, and for what reasons, for what sort of recognition. Capitalism -- flying in the face of patriarchy, to some extent -- tells us that money is the only form of recognition that matters.

In the neoliberal world, where the costs of social reproduction are not defrayed by the state but instead show up as costs carried unequally by every family (unless they can outsource it to cheap workers), affective labor -- caring for children, the elderly, spouses, etc.; anyone other than yourself -- becomes a sucker's game unless you get some sort of payment for it. It represents an opportunity cost, especially since connectivity makes it so that we always can be working: domestic work is performed at the expense of the more lucrative work that is available to women with more-marketable skills. So the logic implies that the more mothering you do -- the more time you spend parenting instead of something else -- the poorer you will be. And birth rates drop. It's easy to extrapolate these trends to a global capitalist world in which no one wants to be a mother and we all become inadvertent Shakers.

Of course, we may also try to get by with as little of this caring work as possible -- to have a society where "caring" is automated in social networks as sharing self-broadcasts and pseudo-connection, but we spend as little time as possible actually caring for others in person. The friction of everyday life, ordinarily smoothed over by care work, could just ramp up and up, particularly if the online mediation of our productive lives sufficiently isolates us so that the friction doesn't impede productivity. That is to say, there is no absolute amount of caring required to make capitalist society; it can always be squeezed, reduced, rationed with the price mechanism. As more care work becomes paid work and becomes priced, the more incentive we all have to economize on it. If caring is work -- as capitalism's logic encourages us to see it -- then we have too much incentive to end it, and bring about a society in which no one cares about anything except themselves.

Rented friends (6 Oct 2010)

The BBC has an item by Claire Prentice about the emergence of friend-renting services. In the past, these services were often known as escort services and often implied prostitution, or they are known as travel guides. You might be friendly with such people, but friends? With the reification of friendship through online social networks, however, the meaning of the word friend has been denatured and made into an all-purpose synonym for someone with whom you are having any sort of social relation at all, as Prentice notes:

'Friend' has become a word we use unthinkingly and it's almost ruined as a result. It started before we had 'friends' on Facebook whom we've never met.

This has put the concept of friendship as a noncommercial relation motivated entirely by affection under some stress, making such relations seem almost naive or suspect. Friends, in the new dispensation, are, as Prentice points out, "service providers."

Prentice's piece turns on the distinction between rented friends and "regular" friends. One rental friend is quoted as saying, "I'd definitely be open to transitioning from being a rented friend to a regular friend, but I haven't met anyone I like enough to do that yet." I just can't conceive of a situation where such a transition is possible. You proclaim yourself outside the boundaries of friendship once you take money to consent to be in another person's presence, once you pretend to like them for profit. A regular friend is someone who has earned your trust and attention and affection through reciprocal acts. Renting a friend removes reciprocation for both parties and ushers them into the realm of commercial exchange, where the contract is governed by the principles of getting the best bargain. The rented friend expects someone else to pay her for an option on friendship that she holds the right to exercise.

Are people that desperate and deluded? Do they think, "If only I get my foot in the door with a stranger, she will recognize what a good person I am and want to get to know me for free"? The cash payment then serves as a way to circumvent the awkwardness of initiating contact, of risking oneself (that precious commodity, that carefully tended brand) in reaching out to a guarded stranger. But that awkwardness can't be priced in cash; it's nonfungibility is what gives it value as a marker of true vulnerability, the prerequisite to "regular" friendship. The riskless alternative is something resembling friendship, perhaps, and maybe it beats being alone, but you have to risk something intrinsic to secure a true friend. But in the era of hyper-conscious self-construction and externalized identity building, the question, though, is rapidly becoming whether we have anything intrinsic left. Does anything about our "self" seem essential remain, something we couldn't possibly lose or remake, that we can offer in a gesture of pure friendship? I think that when we reify our identity in various ways online, it makes such intrinsic character harder to recognize in ourselves.

Tipping and Servility (18 Aug 2010)

A few days ago Matt Yglesias linked to a blog post by Rachel Ryan about restaurant-tipping customs in the U.S. Ryan notes that her European visitor thinks tipping is ridiculous and essentially anti-capitalistic, saying, "They chose to be waiters. They chose to work for minimum wage. If they want more money, get a higher paying job -- don’t expect me to tip you because you were nice and speedy. That’s your job.” Ryan admits she has no rebuttal for this, since her argument that tipping is a reward for good service is somewhat negated by the fact that we don't tip everybody for doing anything in the service sector (yet -- I've been encouraged to tip just about every type of retail worker I've encountered in New York City).

I think this misses the point about tipping, a paternalistic practice that serves to strip dignity from service-sector jobs, deprofessionalizing them, while giving employers justification for paying employees low wages. You can classify my argument here as part of my jihad against customer service. (Is it okay to use "jihad" that way? I need to ask my local Tea Party apparatchik.) I'll indecently quote myself: "Generally I’m against customer service, which is typically a bogus way of making shoppers feel more important than they really are for an activity that should in no way be thought to dignify them."

The tip shakedown is a variant on the idea that customers have a right to demand special service -- that they are able to buying the illusion that they are treated better than the other customers and are somehow better people. (How often is big tipping not a sign of customer insecurity?) Instead of getting the privileged service automatically, customers must hold out their dollars like treats to get service workers to perform tricks for them. Tipping always and everywhere demoralizes the people who are forced to beg for their pay in addition to doing their work. It's a barbaric backward practice that functions as a kind of institutionalized corruption, as it assumes that workers are all de facto extortionists who will only do something for you for a little extra. Tips are supposed to promote "friendly" service, and admittedly, you don't have to eat too many meals in Eastern Europe to notice a difference in the way customers are regarded. But I don't want waiters to act as though they are my friend, and I don't want them pushing more food and drink on me to inflate the bill and thereby inflate their tip (as one of the commenters on Ryan's post notes). I don't want "good service"; I just want appropriate service, and also not to feel like a phony pasha lording over the lower castes for the duration of my meal.

Being good at waiting tables requires skill and practice, and those who learn to do it well are consummate professionals. But the custom of tipping reduces their labor to a kind of implied prostitution. It builds in the assumption of their incompetence, as though it's only natural they they should again and again prove they are worthy enough to be paid what they should "really" be making.

Digital Addiction (unfinished) (12 Aug 2010)

It's easy to amass anecdotal evidence of rising internet addiction. The marathon Asian gamers who prefer to starve rather than leave their terminal; the couples at restaurants, ignoring each other as they engage with their iPhones; the compulsive sharers on social networks who leave no private experience unmediated and recapitulated online; the restless oscillation between email accounts and Twitter and RSS readers looking for a personalized jolt of novelty; the sheer volume of content on YouTube -- where did it come from and who is watching it? -- these all suggest the dissolution of boundaries that many would have thought impervious even five years ago. The lines that once separated, say, public from indiscreet, consumers from connoisseurs, sharing from stealing, and enthusiasm from compulsion, have been progressively blurred. TK here.

The relentless encroachment of the internet into our everyday lives can feel out of our control. Suddenly, we palpably risk social exclusion if we can't keep up, if we lack online presence. The vaunted network effects that the Web harnesses begin to come at the expense of our autonomy. We have to maintain a Facebook page. We have to shop through Amazon.com. We have to Google ourselves to check up on our reputation. We must have a smart phone. We yearn for unlimited data plans.

But does that TKTKTK constitute addiction? Recently Paul Graham, an early Web pioneer, argued that technological innovation inherently focuses on enhancing the addictive properties of any given good. Because of this, "increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much."

Built into this is the assumption that quantity is the only quality.

Says we'll need social antibodies, but digital natives already seem immune to the internet issue--

The things we do for Google (25 Feb 2010)

Google, as we know, makes a lot of money by providing "relevant" ads alongside its search results. As this cheerleading Wired article by Steven Levy details, Google can provide relevance to users because it has devised ways to harvest the data users provide in their various searches and in what they subsequently click on. This makes the search operation a quid pro quo exchange, even though it seems as if we are getting something for free when we use Google.

Singhal notes that the engineers in Building 43 are exploiting another democracy — the hundreds of millions who search on Google. The data people generate when they search — what results they click on, what words they replace in the query when they’re unsatisfied, how their queries match with their physical locations — turns out to be an invaluable resource in discovering new signals and improving the relevance of results. The most direct example of this process is what Google calls personalized search — an opt-in feature that uses someone’s search history and location as signals to determine what kind of results they’ll find useful. (This applies only to those who sign into Google before they search.) But more generally, Google has used its huge mass of collected data to bolster its algorithm with an amazingly deep knowledge base that helps interpret the complex intent of cryptic queries.

The egregious use of the word democracy in this passage gives a hint of how corporations would like people to view this immaterial or affective labor (the production of meanings or emotion) that its consumers perform. When you do work for Google, it's not work per se, but an expression of your significance as a digital citizen in the great internet super-regime. Your privacy isn't being invaded; no, instead you are getting to vote your desires automatically and have your voice registered in the way Google molds our common shared reality online. The "amazingly deep" company then can sort out the "cryptic" nonsense that its users type in and tell them what they really wanted to know, as if they weren't so ignorant and could ask for it intelligibly.

Michael Hardt argues that affective labor, the way we collectively "make" emotions in society, used to occur by and large outside of capitalist production, but the shift to an information and services economy brought it inside. "Just as through the process of modernization all production became industrialized, so too through the process of postmodernization all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalized.... production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and 'elevated' to the level of human relations -- but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital." In other words, the effort we put into making emotional bonds with one another have been co-opted in part by capitalist production, which exploits our human desire to cooperate and like each other and get more done and share things with each other and so on. My sense is that internet platforms have completed that project of cooptation.

The point is that Google and companies like it will increasingly use both promises of convenience and efficiency and celebrations of the democratic joys of open participation to justify privacy invasion and the annexation of the information work users do for their own private purposes. Web 2.0 is an ideological phenomenon more so than a technological one. It's a matter of persuading us to live publicly so that our lives can become the by-product of the data processing we do in the course of living.

Compulsive self-revelation (5 March 2007)

In a recent New York magazine story, Emily Nussbaum argued that a generation gap now exists between an older cohort, sensitive to privacy concerns, and a younger group who are comfortable with surveillance and perhaps transliterate this in their minds into "attention." The gist of her case is that the new generation grew up with the internet and reality TV as a given, so they are comfortable with the potential for an audience for everything we do and the pressure to achieve such an audience. Nussbaum doesn't think their indifference to privacy is a matter of ignorance (the usual take on the question, with which I happen to agree) but rather, it may be a matter of the older cohort's jealousy and fear of the opportunities for self-publicity and exhibitionism they never had in their own youth.

More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”

I suppose it could be seen as narcissistic to imagine anyone cares enough about your specific personal information that you need to make it private -- this is my attitude, actually, when I don't shred my mail or take care to send email over secure WiFi networks, and that sort of thing. I have this naive blind faith in my own irrelevance. It would be great if I could bring myself to believe that the nitwits on The Real World were on the show because they didn't take themselves too seriously, but I can't make that leap of faith (or logic). The sheer performativity of living your life as if it were stocking a public archive seems to me of a different order of self-obsession than being punctilious about what one reveals to people who really don't care. When you watch a show like The Real World, you have the palpable sense that surveillance is the breath of life to them -- they seem afraid that they'll cease to exist the minute people stop watching them.

I've generally argued that compulsive self-revelation is search for recognition in a society that trains us to pay attention to products and brands -- using the technological tools available, we commodify ourselves and allow others to notice us by, in essence, shopping for us -- programming our number into their phone, adding us as a friend on whatever social networking site is considered important at the time to your chosen demographic, hooking up an RSS feed for our blog or Flickr stream, evaluating one of our personal profiles on which we've calculated our most flattering preferences and interests, and so on.

Nussbaum spins this kind of recognition as "community" and perhaps it's all that is left of the vaunted Habermasian public sphere -- actually it's probably an improvement over what was left of it before the internet took off. One can promulgate various identities and investigate all sorts of subcultures and so on but at the expense of objectifying something of one's spirit to make it susceptible to digital dissemination. Is this true of social interaction generally, that it objectifies us as its price? Then the difference is the material recording technology generates of this process, confronting us with our compiling multiplicity. I shudder to consider the many poor identity-related choices I've made in the past (e.g., 1980s haircuts); presumably the new generation is not concerned with this, or any accusations of hypocrisy that might ensue. This I cannot understand, and I'm not convinced that youth are simply more "thick-skinned" than the rest of us. They just have not yet realized all the ways in which this technology can weaponized.

Introversion as sensitivity (1 March 2007)

WSJ's new digest feature, "The Informed Reader", has an item today from Psychology Today about introverts: "Loners don't necessarily fear the company of others. They appear to require solitude to process thoughts and events because those stimuli register more strongly with them than in outgoing people." This definitely corresponds with my experience of introversion, which always has felt like oversensitivity to me, putting too much stock in momentary cues that probably don't signify that much to the person giving them off. Relative to the oversensitivity, it seems like no one else is really paying any attention to you at all, which can feel like a slight. Thus introversion's a kind of paranoia where minute things -- a look, a gesture, a verbal slip-up -- become subject to intense interpretation and I end up with a constant awareness of how precarious my integration is into what's going on socially, along with a building narcissism stemming from the enduring feeling that everyone's being indifferent toward me. It's pretty exhausting and makes me want to withdraw pre-emptively. So this sounds right too: "Situations rife with emotional triggers, such as parties, can be wearying for such people, while solitude serves as a refreshing balm." I tend to leave parties without telling anyone and go walking around aimlessly, or I'll try to find an empty room and hole up with a book. I've even taken naps at parties before. All of this, I'm afraid, makes me seem a little weird, and I usually end up wondering why I go to parties at all.

A few years ago (and I probably blogged about this before), Jonathan Rauch published a sort of introvert manifesto in The Atlantic that develop some of these same ideas, and pleaded with people to understand that introversion can be a preference rather than a pathology.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

In a follow-up interview with Rauch about his article's surprising popularity, the interview connects it to Reisman's analysis in The Lonely Crowd that the consumer economy requires extroversion, and its form of public identity building, as the norm. If we're continually being encouraged to advertise our personality to secure status, then introversion would simultaneously come to be seen as a kind of threat to the whole social order founded on that status as well as a form of self-sabotage. Thus the inner plenitude that lets introverts enjoy a quiet room alone becomes translated into a lack, a sadness, a disease: social anxiety.

Slackers, hipsters (1 March 2007)

Last week Marisa Meltzer had an essay at Slate about the recent slacker-film renaissance in which she points out the suspicious gender politics:

Slackers are always childlike men, and the objects of their affection always women with their acts together, as if slacking is a uniquely male vocation. Women in these movies are never equals; they may be able to parse the finer points of Josie and the Pussycats, but the issues that really occupy them aren't pop culture ephemera, but marriage, money, and babies. If male slackers are stuck in a permanent state of adolescence, all deep thoughts and long talks and sleeping in, then women are agents of growing up and getting a grip, two things that could harsh any slacker's mellow.

This seems indisputable, and it's not limited to movies about slackers; it applies to most romantic comedies as well. Men need to stop being adult children and assume the mantle of family guy; women are emblems of adult responsiblity and objective correlatives of established success, sort of McMansions with boobs (to adapt Laura Sessions Stapp's metaphor).

Whatever interests a man before he falls in love is shown as having are redefined as provisional surrogates for what he really wants, which is to be a dad and a provider. His passions -- the slacker tropes Meltzer lists (conspiracy theories, used bookstores, amateur musicianship) -- are revealed to be juvenile hobbies, only compelling enough to seem like a meaningful sacrifice on the altar of wedded bliss. And many men probably enjoy this theme; it celebrates a decision that men actually make -- they can see marriage as a sweet surrender, a good-bye to ambitious striving and personal betterment. They want an excuse to give up on the challenges presented by their youthful dreams, and a devoted woman is there to be the scapegoat. Because the man is sacrificing his former pleasures, the woman must compensate by doing all the emotional work in the relationship. He's done his part just for consenting to be in the relationship at all. Here's how Meltzer sums up the message of these films: "The new slate of slacker movies is retro not just because they imply that women can't properly hang with the guys; it's something far more nefarious and old-fashioned than that. Essentially, they're saying that women have to be there to care for and motivate a man—and in that responsibility, there's no room to slack off." If she does enough of that relationship labor, he might still be able to pursue some of his hobbies and remain an adult child.

Reading this piece reminded me also of how the slacker manqué figure was essentially for the evolution of the hipster as a cultural type -- the hipster takes the slacker's idiosyncratic hobbies, their "different standard of achievement," Meltzer refers to, empties them of their specificity and transforms them all into signaling mechanisms, into the currency of cool, and a pseudoachivement of self-importance. Slacker indifference to what the outside world thinks becomes a kind of desperate quest for recognition of how important one is by the measure of the "alternative" value system of youth culture. The slacker ideal of a kind of authentic solipsism and overinvestment in the useless becomes in hipsterdom all too useful as a means of establishing your personal brand, of self-marketing. Thus slacker movies had devoured themselves.

Bonus hipster-hating: Here's what I wrote before about adult children and the etiology of hipsterdom:

The instinctive revulsion kids feel towards suburbia--its materialism, its intellectual poverty, its cabin-fever cloisteredness, its reactionary politics, its complacency and xenophobia--is inevitably co-opted by the same capitalist value system that produced these dreary phenomena to produce hipsterism, a homogenized and codified form of superficial reaction to a stultifying life of empty entitlement. This entitlement derives not merely from economic privilege but from the insistent right to be entertained that suburban kids instinctively feel, a product of having watched too much flattering media that announce constantly that it is made just for them and sycophantically pleads for their approval. They will usually develop apolitical aesthetics (politics is "beneath them" because it will ultimately come around to the source of their entitlement, and their ultimate guilt) preoccupied with surface charms and "universal" themes of self-realization, as though that can occur in a socio-political vacuum. When it does, the hipster is what is produced.

Hipsterism is a quaint, neutered form of rebellion that allows post-teens to fret endlessly about how they come across, worry constantly about their individuality quotient, preparing them for a successful life as a middle manager or a functionary in one of the glamor industries, where such self-involvement is de rigeur. Hipsters are a plague of locusts on any scene in which young people are trying to figure out new approaches to life; they swarm in when word gets out and obliterate those new approaches, turning neighborhood sidewalks into catwalks for preening contests, ushering in trendy bars and restaurants, encouraging the sense that one is perpetually a tourist within the hallowed aura of one's own lifestyle. They imagine themselves fellow travelers but they are more like a bomb squad, defusing revolutionary potential and reestablishing the status quo motives of the pursuit of fashionable positional goods, status in the form of cultural knowledge, and a vaunted sense of one's uniqueness that always needs bolstering from serially acquired identity goods, the T-shirts and DVDs and such that remind you who you are. Hipsters, though frequently sneered at as ironic, are never actually ironic. Ironic is not synonymous with hyper self-awareness. Irony requires a detachment, a negative capability, a lofty perspective. The Wall Street Journal exhibits far more irony than does The Village Voice.

Hipsters are typically nostalgic for childhood, which is the idyllic time when total self-involvement is not marred by the more pernicious aspects of intense self-consciousness, when no critical consciousness yet exists to question or resist the way the media flatters and seduces. So they pursue the tchotchkes and retro junk of their youth, from the time when they were already consumers against their will but not savvy enough to have an opinion about it. The trauma of discovering you're already a consumer, that your consciousness was limned by consumerism, is such that it must be obsessively repeated, and the hipsters bray for those same things they cried for when they were six.

Connoisseurs of emotion (27 October 2006)

Via BPS Digest (and Marginal Revolution) comes this report that claims reading novels will make a person more empathetic. In the test the researchers conducted, "The more authors of fiction that a participant recognised, the higher they tended to score on measures of social awareness and tests of empathy – for example being able to recognise a person’s emotions from a picture showing their eyes only, or being able to take another person’s perspective. Recognising more non-fiction authors showed the opposite association."

The BPS Digest also notes of the study: "However, a weakness of the study is that the direction of causation has not been established – it might simply be that more-empathic people prefer reading novels." Having recently turned away from fiction to read nonfiction almost exclusively, I wonder if this means I've become more callous, and my disgruntlement with fiction is indicative of empathy fatigue or something -- novels are a means to try to experience empathy on an artificial, preplanned basis. Or perhaps my turn to nonfiction, if I really thought about it, is a potentially pathological means to blunt emotional connection I'm subconsciously trying to ward off. Maybe I'm using the arid world of facts -- the dry, detached prose of The Economist, for instance -- as a buffer from the warmth of human contact, which, frankly, can often seem like a hassle and a threat and a call to action when I'm much more comfortable planted on my couch reading.

That's not a good thing. So as a therapeutic measure, I've stayed planted on the couch, and started to read The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells. Something Walter Benn Michaels wrote about it in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism stuck with me -- something about how Howells is trying to figure a return to a precapitalist mode of relationships and how the novel delineates zero-sum social status games. (Even when I'm picking novels, I need some hyperpragmatic reason to read them.) I'm about halfway through it, and I can't say I feel any more empathic, but I'm trying to pay special attention to how the novelist wants to keep my attention focused on minute shiftings of his characters' attitude, and the means he uses to describe them. What novels do obviously -- the raison d'etre, probably for the study -- is teach readers ways to think the emotion of others, put it into words that can serve as a comprehensible substitute for something we can never access directly. Our own emotion is often inarticulate, too immediate, and we often don't bother to analyze it and think it rather than experience it. One of the reasons novels of past centuries continue to be read is that they provide tools for verbalizing emotion and for modeling its recognition.

This line of thinking would seem to run counter to the evolutionary psychologists' beliefs that apprehension of emotion is inborn and immediate (a la Darwin's study of facial expressions, for instance). From this point of view emotional comprehension is hard-wired and verges on instinct -- one psychologist even argues that changing your expression can change your mood to suit it. But what novels want to do is slow down the instantaneous instinctual process of reaction to others' emotional expressions and make it a subject for gratifying intellectual mastery. We derive a grammar of emotion and learn to experience tracing its fine movements as a species of pleasure. We are encouraged to become connoisseurs in emotion -- the way Sterne's narrator is in A Sentimental Journey.

Does this then objectify emotion, trivialize it, or commodify it? Is it wrong to perceive the feelings of others as a kind of delicacy, like a rare cheese or bottle of port? Is being overly concerned with the emotions others are experiencing simply a way of consuming other people? Novels serve to commercialize otherwise intangible emotional experiences; in the process they likely make empathy into something more akin to a shopper's discernment.

The question of whether altruism exists comes into play in this as well -- what motives are ultimately served in our efforts to feel another's pain? It seems a pertinent question to ask, because perhaps a deeper empathy can be achieved once the more self-serving level is interrogated a bit. Ultimately, I guess I would need to know more about how the study measure empathy to know whether there might be differences between that kind of empathy and some other preferable kind that isn't instrumentalized through entertainment product. Until then I'll keep reading Howells and hope things work out for "sly" Penelope.