Subgrouping in Social Networks (27 May 2011)

In this SAI item about "the end of the social network era," Jason Schwartz claims that people want to continue sharing as much as possible automatically, only they want to share it only with select friends:

When people talk about privacy concerns around check-ins, it's not that they don't want ANYONE to know where they are, they don't want EVERYONE to know where they are. The problem is the lack of tools to create the dynamic, intimate groups of people they would be comfortable sharing with. Once that problem is solved, this space will see a huge uptick from mainstream users.
Facebook has quite a few tools for managing groups of friends. These fail because they rely on the user to manually curate these groups. Users won’t do the manual work necessary to make a Social Circle work, just like they won't be selective with whom they friend on a check-in service.

It's no surprise that people don't seem to bother with Facebook's group controls very much. It runs counter to the initial attractiveness of social networking -- that everyone from your life ends up there -- to then turn and use it as an awkward means of negotiating the various levels of intimacy that social networks compress. The novelty of using social networks is in that flattening, perhaps. Using Facebook is a temporary escape from the negotiations and anxieties over who is in and out: The interface presents itself as a way to control it all and permit us to consume sociality on strictly individualistic terms. But once you start having to make decisions about who belongs where and who gets to see what, you get into trickier turf of reciprocity -- every update restricted to a certain audience then becomes an implied insult to those on the outside. Restricted messages to a private audience is no big deal in real life; it happens all the time and is an ephemeral moment of choice that isn't archived forever online as a proved potential sleight.

Schwartz then claims that technology must now solve the problem of people being too lazy to form smaller groups within the larger group of contacts they assemble in online networks: Some clever startup must figure out a way to balance our desire for as many tokens of attention as possible from the widest set of contacts with our somewhat vestigial privacy concerns. But it seems to me that certain properties of online space militate against forming "intimate groups," no matter how dynamically or automatically it can constitute them. (Incidentally, nothing bothers me more than when Gmail tells me who I should add to an email. Stop telling me who to talk to! Stop trying to get me to run my private email like I am a corporate middle manager negotiating different workgroups!) Social networks serve as archives and scoreboards more than private drawing rooms; the time-space of exclusivity runs against the medium's accumulative nature. That is to say, social media are by definition for broadcasting, not for the sort of communication that sustains intimacy.

I can't be alone in regarding virtually everything on social media as purely informational or promotional, akin to Christmas-card-letter copy that has no emotional valence whatsoever. Unless it is a direct and private message, communication through these networks assimilate me to an implied mass audience as I consume it. Evoking a feeling of belonging is not part of the circuit. I get the sense that all social media discourse merely serves to reinforce the significance of what is absent, what is deliberately held back. And that material must be kept offline to retain its aura, as everyone seems to know by now that anything mediated online is always already as good as broadcast. The "social circle" is going to be defined specifically by face-to-face encounters and the communication that takes place during them. If you are not getting facetime, you are not in the social circle, no matter how much of someone's social media you are privy to.

"This generation got no destination to hold" (4 April 2011)

I enjoyed the essay about the "iPod era" by Nikil Saval in the new n+1 (excerpt by Slate here), which considers the ramifications of solitary listening for political action. I thought it would cover the same ground as sociologist Michael Bull's book about the iPod, Sound Moves (which I wrote about here), but it turned out to be something quite different.

I don't accept Saval's claim that the music of the 1960s was "an incitement to social change" without a lot of qualifications that are not supplied in the essay; I think the music was shaped by political ferment that preceded it rather than vice versa, and most politicized pop was cashing in on the zeitgeist. The explicit merging of politics and youth music culture in the popular mind undermined political action, diverting it into self-neutralizing spectacles like Woodstock (funny how that more or less heralded the end of radicalism for many of its participants even as they claimed it was just the beginning; instead it was as if they knew they had achieved the goal of having participated in something "historical").

I'm more persuaded that the surge in politicized pop in the 1960s was a demographic phenomenon, a Baby Boomer thing. There is always music for youth expressing a rejection of certain aspects of the status quo; when there was more youth, there was more of it, and it was more prominent culturally, as that bulge of young consumers made what they consumed significant to the entire capitalist system. There was no golden age when music could be put to good political use. All music conjures a feeling of solidarity, I think; iPodization has just made the vicariousness of the process explicit.

What I liked best about Saval's essay was the survey of pop music sociology: Saval suggests Adorno and Bourdieu offer "the two most considered attempts to connect music and society" and contrasts them: Adorno held out for traditional aesthetics and the importance of high culture as a form of resistance; Bourdieu rejected musical taste's autonomy from the social order, arguing that it reflected status rather than an appreciation for something transcendent. I'm glad Saval takes some tentative steps to refute the idea that Adorno was "wrong" about popular music (I've written about that before for what it's worth), but still seems to want to emphasize the autonomy of the consumer in an administered consumer system. However, the essay makes this excellent point:

The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn't care what that song says. Other times he doesn't even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network.

Popular culture is already subsumed by capital; this is not different from the situation in the 1960s. RCA didn't care what kind of polemic Jefferson Airplane put on its albums, because the company just wanted to sell records. The radical sentiment was already commodified and neutralized; what it inflamed in listeners was to a degree already contained, already likely to express itself as radical chic, vicarious fantasy, and scenesterism rather than radicalism. And scenesterism is good for the culture industry; it enriches the value of products with new, valuable meanings for customers. It builds brand equity.

Saval suggests Bourdieu is a "philistine" who asserts the "falsehood" that "music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and it has nothing to say." I don't think that's false at all; I think it is a recognition that music, like any other form of art, is not an untarnished container for humanistic pieties about what constitutes "greatness." But music, like asbtract art, more easily masquerades as such because it seems "purifed" of interpretable content and presents audiences with the higher truth of form qua form.

Bourdieu, Saval claims, refuted Adorno, but I think that Adorno and Bourdieu have complementary perspectives; both see popular culture as manifesting the failure of popular culture to be autonomous from capitalism and the classes it structures to support itself.

Saval's essay concludes, probably ironically, by recommending silence as a mode of resistance, as a means of steering between the Scylla of Adornesque snobbery and the Charybdis of Bourdieuian identity self-consciousness:

One radical option remains: abnegation—some "Great Refusal" to obey the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening. Silence: The word suggests the torture of enforced isolation, or a particularly monkish kind of social death. But it was the tremendously congenial avant-garde gadabout John Cage who showed, just as the avalanche of recorded music was starting to bury us, how there was "no such thing as silence," that listening to an absence of listener-directed sounds represented a profounder and far more heroic submission than the regular attitude adopted in concert halls—a willingness to "let sounds be," as he put it ... Silence is the most endangered musical experience in our time. Turning it up, we might figure out what all our music listening is meant to drown out, the thing we can't bear to hear.

That seems like a Baudrillardian fatal strategy to me: "against the acceleration of networks and circuits, we will look also for slowness," he wrote in Fatal Strategies, in 1983. "Not the nostalgic slowness of the mind, but insoluble immobility, the slower than slow: inertia and silence, inertia insoluble by effort, silence insoluble by dialogue. There is a secret here too."

The dilemma Saval diagnoses is painfully familiar to me; I am always trying to find a way to "really" hear music, stop instrumentalizing it. But I probably won't ever choose silence or to "Enjoy the Silence" or even listen to Hymns to the Silence. My strategy recently has been repetition. (Insert obligatory citation of Derrida and/or Lacan here.) I tend to listen to the same handful of albums over and over again and hope that constitutes a nullification of the imperative to seek and enjoy novelty for its own sake through the medium of popular culture. Right now (god help me) one of those albums is Wings' Wild Life.

Reverse Schadenfreude and Facebook (27 Jan 2011)

At Slate, Libby Copeland writes about recent psychlogical research that suggests we underestimate other people's misery and overestimate the uniqueness of our own loneliness. The lead researcher, Copeland reports, "got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. 'They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life,' he told me."

That certainly captures my typical experience with Facebook -- a vague panic at how much fun everyone is having without me. In my colossal narcissism, I find it particularly troubling to have the concrete evidence in front of me that I am not at the center of everyone else's life and my company is not a prerequisite for their joy. Without Facebook (and other social media) it was much easier for me to put that dismal truth out of my mind. Before social media, what I would know about my friends lives was what they decided to tell me, and that decision alone was enough to make me feel included in the events they described. Finding out about their fun in a status update makes me feel as though I had been deliberately excluded.

The structure of Facebook exacerbates the problem of assessing the true extent of others' happiness by nudging users toward only expressing enthusiasm and optimism -- there is no "I hate" button, no thumbs down. Copeland writes:

By showcasing the most witty, joyful, bullet-pointed versions of people's lives, and inviting constant comparisons in which we tend to see ourselves as the losers, Facebook appears to exploit an Achilles' heel of human nature.

It's hard to see what she means by "exploit" in this context, because you wouldn't think Facebook wants to make its users miserable. It wants us to be friends, not losers. But exploit may be the perfect word choice, if the best way we can come up with to stifle that feeling of misery is to craft witty and sparkling updates of our own. When we share more, Facebook wins. If it has to count on us vainly trying to sublimate our misery in serial acts of sharing, then so be it.

The ongoing need to counteract each other's apparent joys with expressions of our own would not only produce a negative feedback loop, it would also prompt us to experience a different kind of insecurity about our identity. Copeland points to what Sherry Turkle calls "presentation anxiety" in Alone Together: increasing self-alienation as one self-consciously produces a self online. This is a more acute ramification of the intense reflexivity that sociologist Anthony Giddens, for one, claims is an inescapable condition of modernity. (I wrote about Giddens here.) It's a familiar idea -- identity is destabilized by the waning of tradition and the rise of fashion, and what results is "ontological instability," an ongoing need to posit and refresh oneself. Facebook obviously caters to that condition, and perhaps worsens it in the process, giving it an inescapable concrete foundation. There we can always see in an indelible way how frail and mutable our identities really are, even as our friends' come to seem like demoralizing monoliths of optimism.

Desire as craftsmanship (23 Jan 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faking yourself as resistance (7 Jan 2011)

Fibreculture journal posted 10 theses about Web 2.0 by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter. I think the term Web 2.0 is starting to seem dated and inadequate to describe what they are talking about with these; something like network culture or social media might be more apropos. It was probably forced on them by the journal's theme, which illustrates the disconnect between how fast the internet changes and how fast scholars can organize to discuss the change.

The authors are primarily concerned with how social media diffuses social conflict: "Where is the enemy? Not on Facebook, where you can only have ‘friends’. " And: "The virus is the closest thing to conflict online." Instead of dispute and critique, there is sheer surfeit as a mode of dissent

They ask rhetorically, "How does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation?" and suggest that time spent with such media anesthetizes us; they haven't proved useful in organizing social movements. They have allowed the mere fact of participation masquerade as collective social action in the tallied wisdom of crowds. Lovink and Rossiter argue: "«Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence." In other words, simply participating in social media doesn't mean that one's voice is helping direct the "general intellect" that Marx writes about in the Grundrisse and has since become a key concept in theories (like Hardt and Negri's) about the revolutionary potential of the Multitude. Some see the rise of social media as confirmation of what Hardt and Negri prophesized, that the new sorts of subjects fostered by globalized capitalism inherently participate in some new kind of democratic association simply by virtue of their being, by instinct. This spontaneous collectivity is destined to overthrow capitalist Empire in favor of the expanded commons and peer-to-peer sharing and the end of profit and alienated work and all that sort of thing. Lovink and Rossiter are skeptical.

The authors also make the point that social media are simultaneously a form of consumption and a form of labor, so it makes no sense to talk about them as "free." We pay for them by consuming/using them -- that's their essential nature, their defining quality.

These days ‘free’ is just another word for service economies. The linux fiefdom know that all too well. We need to question naïve campaigns that merely promote ‘free culture’ without questioning the underlying parasitic economy and the ‘deprofessionalization’ of cultural work. Pervasive profiling is the cost of this opening to ‘free market values’. As users and prosumers we are limited by our capacity as data producers. Our tastes and preferences, our opinions and movements are the market price to pay.

The internet makes us feel entitled to voice our opinion about anything, as Paul Ford argues in this essay. Ford writes as though this is an innate human tendency, but arguably, the Web instills it in us, encouraging an irrepressible irritation to speak because of how frequently our opinion is solicited. What's important to remember is that inciting this irritation and giving it an impotent forum is a mode of control. The Web serves to vent off dissent, preoccupy our critical faculties on trifles when we are not caught up in the positivity of social networking. ("Hi friends! Let's share! Rainbows! Puppies!") Lovink and Rossiter's advice: "We need to promote peer-education that shifts the default culture of auto-formation to the nihilist pleasure of hacking the system... If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona."

Existential hoarding (6 Jan 2011)

This CNN item about decluttering has sensible advice that few people, I suspect, would disagree with, as it fits the zeitgeist by seeming vaguely eco-conscious and consevationist. The author, Tsh Oxenreider, invites us to live as if we are always just about to move overseas:

Ask yourself, Is this thing worth hauling 6,000 miles across an ocean and in to a new home? Is it providing that much meaning and value to my life? If not, why bother having it now?

She argues that more is less, in that you have less to take care of or worry about. If you purge yourself of unnecessary things, each remaining object becomes more meaningful, glowing with the value of its being intentionally chosen. The gambit is to create an artificial scarcity for oneself, set limits to manufacture aura.

Living this way isn't about having nothing. It's about everything in your life having value. It's looking at all your belongings and knowing that you've given that thing permission to be there, that the item is truly adding value and beauty to your life. When you get rid of the things that don't matter, the things you do keep become that much more valuable, and you'll have more time and money to invest in quality over quantity.

It's an appealing fantasy. I imagine having that one bookshelf on which every book is one of the best and most powerful books I've ever read; I think of those apocryphal families of yore who only had a bible but knew it backwards and forwards and derived true spiritual nourishment from it as a result. I think of being able to imagine at some point eating every single thing in the refrigerator, or better yet, emptying it totally and eating only what I've bought fresh from the green grocer's on the way home from work each night. (Like I ever do that.) I think of empty closets, save for my all-purpose utilitarian uniform that I can wear at all times in any weather and always avoid the appearance of "trying to look cool." I'll be so free of objects that I will spend all my time in unfettered activity, really doing things -- though with only a few objects at hand it is likely to be the same sorts of things over and over, or it will involve me consuming disposable things or spending lavishly to access meaningful experiences. Or maybe not. Maybe I can convince myself that all I need is a guitar, a laptop, and a dream.

I want very much for Oxenreider's fantasy to be true. I want shedding belongings to generate a lasting and satisfying sense of having purified my life. I want to prove myself the sort of fortified and transcendent soul who can overcome the hegemony of advertising and conspicuous consumption and capitalist reification to see the true value of things, the value that stems from my ability to invest them with part of my own spirit. I can dispense with the vulgar lies of commerce and live a spare, Spartan minimalist life of meditation in a tastefully empty room like the one we see pictured in the article.

Yet when I try to live with that sort of rigor, I experience little lasting joy. When I've purged things in the past, the feeling of lightness that follows tends to be fleeting. Instead, entering into purging mode can sometimes open a yawning void in my life, not because I am ridding myself of things and worry I will feel their loss but because I start to see how little anything "really" means. What's the point in having anything? I'm just going to die anyway. Having a hoard of stuff to sort through and manage and muffle my existence also stifles my sense of mortality, for better or worse.

And perhaps because of how I've been conditioned to experience things, the thrill of getting rid of stuff -- unconsumption, as Rob Walker would have it -- ends up feeling much like the joys of acquiring it. That is, the pleasure is detached from the nature of the object itself, from the intentionality that is supposed to be so obvious within it. Instead the objects prompt multifarious fantasies, depending on where we are coming from, what we have been exposed to, what are particular situation is that moment. So it is not as simple as it might seem to get rid of the "unnecessary" things in our lives, because necessity is a moving target, much like our own sense of self, our own priorities. Sometimes it seems very useful to me to have every album by Grand Funk Railroad loaded and ready on my computer just in case; sometimes it seems like insane clutter preventing me from noticing the really great music I could be listening to.

Sometimes the meaning of things elapses -- revealing another scary truth about mortality. It doesn't mater how few things you have; your memory is going slip away. The things that seemed important will merely haunt us then, or we will remember things we didn't save but not remember why, or we'll cherish that lost moment of purging more than what we've kept. Maybe at the point when you can no longer remember why something was important to you, you just throw it away -- but then why was it ever saved in the first place? You save it because you are afraid to forget its meaning, and when you do start to forget, the item may seem more dear than ever in its obscure mystery. Hoarding can be a matter of luxuriating in that surfeit of mystery as much as it is a matter of suffocating on material goods.

I don't think my life is a matter of memories stored in goods, but I am afraid of it seeming as empty as that room in the photo. In my eagerness to purge, the danger is I'll shut everything out. I don't know if I can access a way of organizing my life that doesn't lump people and things together -- a way of living in which I don't need otherwise useless things to remind me of the people I want to keep in touch with. Theoretically, I should be able to have a purity of intention that doesn't require objects in this inefficient way, and I shouldn't think about collecting experiences as if they were things or objectifying the time I want to spend with others. But to live according to that theory, with little social support for it, is to risk the empty room becoming not tasteful and light but a void.

Oxenreider writes as though our intentions are constant, so close to the surface, so readily accessible, but she also writes as though only our individual tastes are at stake in those things. But usefulness and meaning are slippery, social concepts, and we end up implicating one another in our needs for things, multiplying those needs without being able to account for where they are coming from within us. It seems like this weird burden to have things, this inexplicable hoard we end up with through no will of our own. But in fact that is just the burden of being with others, refracted into miscellaneous odds and ends.

Social-media psychodrama (25 Dec 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leftover thoughts about authenticity (23 Sept 2010)

I found the bookmark I was using when I was reading The Authenticity Hoax, on which I had made a bunch of near illegible notes. I think I covered most of it, but I missed this: Potter at one point dismisses the problem of alienated labor and more or less endorses what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, "a pervasive atmosphere conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action." Or to put it another way, the attitude of "work sucks, get over it" is an ideological position, not a statement of fact -- it's an example of the way capitalist ideology shapes what appears to be realistic and what registers as slacker daydreaming, establishing the range of expectations for working life and normalizing the idea that work should be personally nonproductive -- it's effort made to forward somebody else's ideas in return for cash, or it's not "real" work.

Authenticity, as a result of that prevailing ideology about work, takes on a compensatory function in the sphere of consumption -- once the private sphere, but no longer. It becomes a code word for the process of self-making within the "empty work/frantic consumerism" dialectic. We suspend our real self while we work, but are then empowered through cash to elaborate that self in leisure time. That typically means buying products and experiences from the cultural-industrial complex and immersing oneself in consumerism's code rather than diving into some interior possibilities latent or dormant in one's own intrinsic make-up. I sometimes subscribe to the idea that engaging in meaningful work within a clearly delimited community as an ongoing practice is the only way to tap into something that could be called the "real self" or "species being." But that only defers the question of what defines "meaningful" and "community" and so on. Anyway, consumerism thrives on atomized individuals who neglect collective identity and chase an unbounded authenticity through serial purchases and collecting as opposed to letting go of the authenticity ideal in favor of something more like flow, self-confidence through collaborative doing.

I don't know. I'm troubled by the thought that the insecurity about identity seems to be addressed in our society through building a durable personal brand, with the strategies adopted from ubiquitous marketing and self-broadcasting tools. Seeking authenticity now means, more than anything else, developing a strong personal brand. But what is the product we are branding? Bare life? What market are we after a share of? My problem with that isn't that the personal brand is inauthentic -- it just seems subject to kinds of evaluation and tracking and manipulation that corrodes human dignity, which rests in the myth that there is something ineffable and inexpressible about all of us that only comes out when we are in the process of doing something for people.

Authenticity Crisis and the Dream of Escaping Irony (23 Sept 2010)

A section of Andrew Potter's mostly compelling new book The Authenticity Hoax deals with Soviet kitsch and mentions a park in Hungary that's now home to Soviet-era monuments and statues. Hungarian authorities, anxious that the park would be misinterpreted as a cynical move to cater to what Potter calls oppression tourists, have given it this motto: "no irony, memento."

That strikes me as a good motto for everyone laboring under the burden of authenticity, which seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid striking an ironic attitude about oneself. It's clear in the peculiar note of 2000s hipsterism, that mawkish nostalgia for juvenilia that passes for a "new earnestness," the evocation of the comforts of familiar things from the developmental period that predates cool -- the stuff people are into before puberty, before tastes matter to our sense of self. We want to build a self in the present that honors and remembers that pure self, before we had to try to be cool.

Potter, who previously co-authored The Rebel Sell, about anti-conformity marketing, argues that authenticity has supplanted cool as the au courant advertising strategy -- which, because he sees advertisers as following the proclivities of the consumer public rather than shaping them, means that authenticity is an idiotic fetish that middle class people have somehow managed to get stuck on in their quest for status. "Cool fizzled out when it was exposed as just another consumerist status hierarchy.... The trick now is to subtly demonstrate that while you may have a job, a family, and a house full of stuff, you are not spiritually connected to any of it. What matters now is not just buying things, it is taking time for you, to create a life that is focused on your unique needs and that reflects your particular taste and sensibility."

I agree with that analysis, but I think it's not quite fair to blame consumers for falling into authenticity traps, as Potter does when he declares "we should not blame those who are selling the authentic, but rather those who are buying." At that point the business journalist in him seems to get the better of him, as he ignores his own arguments about capitalism's role in trigger an authenticity crisis. Potter, a philosophy Ph.D who writes for Maclean's, a sort of Canadian Time magazine, does a good job tracing the history of the idea of authenticity, through Hobbes and Rousseau and Hegel and Benjamin (though it was a tease to use the phrase "jargon of authenticity" without citing Adorno), but that metaphysical spadework is dispensed with once we reach contemporary times, and individuals are expected to be able to transcend the social conditions into which they were born and reject myths of authenticity out of a common sense appraisal of the benefits of capitalism and liberal democracy. One of Potter's primary concerns is with the ways the fascination with authenticity is currently taking an aggressively atavistic form, with people yearning to roll back the Enlightenment and market capitalism and get in touch with pure nature. I don't think authenticity automatically implies a look back to a phony lost golden age (though it often does). Sometimes it is constructed as agreat leap forward; sometimes it is infused with technophilia, as when Mark Zuckerberg claims that people with integrity (i.e. authentic modern persons) share everything on Facebook to prove they have nothing to hide.

And Potter sometimes seems to border on adopting the right-wing narrative that regards eco-minded consumers and lifestyle connoisseurs as some sort of liberal fascists. But by and large his tone is shaped by an apparent desire to be accessible to general readers, which makes it reasonable and conversational. He gets into some issues in metaphysics without ever becoming obtuse or recondite (i.e., he wisely leaves Heidegger outside his bailiwick here).

Potter is quick to say alienated labor is simply "the way it is" -- you know, work sucks, get over it -- which strikes me as hasty. I don't quite understand his claim that alienation "does not mean that there is a problem and that something ought to be done about it," though I suspect it has something to do with his implicit rejection the idea of human species being (i.e. he implies that having meaningful work to do is not necessarily the goal/purpose of human life) and his advocation of tolerating a rigid separation of the private and public self -- which I am totally on board with. More on that below.

Anyway, blaming consumers for allowing authenticity to become a marketing tool holds them unfairly responsible for the ontological insecurity brought on by modernity (to put it in Anthony Giddens's terms). That insecurity, in my view, brings on the crisis of authenticity, which consumerism has attempted to ameliorate ever since. Marketing cool is one of many strategies, one that was especially suitable to a fragmenting media market that allowed each of us to regard ourselves as our own niche. Marketing environmental concern -- a point Potter is especially strong on -- seems to be the ascendant strategy currently.

But the goal of selling a claim to lost authenticity is as old as the forces that first broke up traditional ways of life and melted everything solid into air, to borrow Marx's phrase (from a passage Potter also cites). The first anti-irony wave was perhaps the cult of sensibility in the late-18th century, which was a response to the rising tide of commercialism and "interestedness" in English culture as capitalism began to reshape subjectivity and inculcate rational calculation as a socially tolerated morality. Hence all the literary fad novels full of weeping men and feeling heroines -- A Sentimental Journey, The Man of Feeling, the works of Fanny Burney and Frances Sheridan and countless other forgotten late 18th century writers. The characters are obsessed, just like we are, with displaying sincere emotions without letting the fact of the display and the self-consciousness of it invalidate the gesture -- and with outdoing the displays of others on the scale of "conspicuous authenticity" that Potter derides.

In other words, the need to prove authenticity and the capacity to "really" feel things is not a new status hierarchy, but one that emerges with capitalism and consumerism (which was born in the late-18th century). It undergirds the class distinctions that come into play as aristocratic titles and such get washed away. It always serves along side of the conspicuous consumption that Veblen famously described to establish class boundaries. It's been there all the time, helping differentiate those who consume vulgarly from those who consume tastefully -- or genuinely, authentically, organically, etc. And since authenticity has no metaphysical basis -- there's no intrinsic "real self" to display; it's defined negatively, as Potter notes; it's always contingent, as Rorty argued among many, many others -- the grounds of authenticity can always be shifting in order to freshly reinscribe the hierarchy. Fashions can change as class markers get appropriated without posing an existential threat. The problem is that privilege gets laundered as authenticity and gets to pass without being questioned. It becomes authentic to be inegalitarian.

The "authenticity hoax" is precisely the Romantic idea that we have a true self to which we must display our faithfulness. We think our integrity is at stake in consumerism when really what we are doing is attenuating the status system, replenishing the "code". We think we are recalling something -- a memento of the real self -- that isn't there at all; we blind ourselves to the truth of irony, an inescapable and paradoxical self-awareness that our self is a construct, a work in progress, an open-ended (and mortal) set of possibilities rather than a timeless essence. As Potter puts in in his introduction, "we need ... an individualism that makes its peace with the modern world while allowing for a meaningful life free of nostalgia, reactionary politics, or status seeking."

That sounds pretty utopian, but it's also what Rorty seems to be after in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. He argues that, since there is no true self, we are burdened with a crushing anxiety of influence -- a sense that we are creating ourselves out of someone else's language and merely establishing our non-existence as a unique being. Each person has a "need to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own." That is to say, we need to create "authenticity" out of rhetoric, a unique personal vocabulary and point of view, through creative restatements of what has already be said, of what already simply exists. We can't be free of contingency, but must seek freedom through it. And we cannot mistake our own definition of authenticity as being the true, universal one -- we must keep it private while adhering to an ideal of cosmopolitanism in the public sphere. One needs to be an ironist, in Rorty's terms -- one must accept that our descriptive language is open to influence and is not permanent or true. So basically, when we are setting up our Hungarian statue park of the self, we should flip the motto, and make it "Irony, no mementos."

You can't ever complete the quest for the authentic self, but you can't really ever get it wrong either. You don't have to borrow someone else's notion of the authentic itself. But the idea of authenticity as it's deployed by persuasion professionals (who strive to amplify the feelings of ontological insecurity, since our feeling insecure gets us to buy goods), tends to militate against that idea obviously, positing instead the notion that we have an inner truth that we are in danger of betraying. The sustaining consumerist myth is that authenticity is a matter of manifesting individual novelty and nonconformity rather than a private mode of assimilating inevitable influences. Consumerism perverts romanticism by adopting its critique of modernity and using it to co-opt the quest for authenticity, generating a cultural environment in which most efforts at self-fashioning intensify the feeling of insecurity and phoniness. Potter notes that "selling authenticity is another way of making it self-conscious, which is again, self-defeating."

Creativity, even as it pertains to self-creation, appears as a strict matter of consumption -- not as something attached to a broader sense of practice. So all our efforts can tend to feel like poses, stabs at fashionability, attempts to crack the consumerist code and reap the social benefits. That's in part because the search for self can't take place in private anymore, as Rorty seems to hope. It is now situated in social media, wherein the various gestures and experiments we make searching for ourselves get redeployed automatically as marketing, as signifiers of what is trending.

So I think the specific way to resist the evils of commodified authenticity is to police the public-private boundary more carefully. Rorty writes that we have to "overcome authority without claiming authority" -- to slightly shift that, I think that means we have to find ways to validate our self-making project that don't rely ultimately on commercialized modes of validation, which appear to have transpersonal authority. And we can't broadcast our identity, mediatize it, because that amounts to the same thing.

Permission to Consume (23 July 2010)

In this interview of Andrew Potter (whose book, The Authenticity Hoax, I still really need to read), he makes an interesting point about what sort of rhetoric supplies us with the permission to consume. To put that it in a more jargony way, what sort of ideological climate is necessary to naturalize a consumerist orientation -- make us see shopping quests and the accumulation of stuff as normal, inevitable personal goals?

Behavioral economics and marketing research explores some practical aspects of generating permission to consume. First of all, they acknowledge such reluctance exists, and that wants are not simply inherently infinite, as neoclassical economics assumes. That is, they accept that creating demand is an actual problem (sort of obvious, otherwise marketing as a discipline wouldn't exist, but don't tell that to a Say's Law zealot). And then there are nitty-gritty behavior studies of the reluctance people have in pulling the trigger on purchases and how to overcome it, the sort of research Paco Underhill and other marketing gurus proselytize about -- how to create the appropriate buying environment with music and positioning of goods and so on; how to counteract optional paralysis; how to weaken our psychological defenses to persuasion.

But there is a larger sense in which we are reluctant to consume that goes behind jittery resistance at the point of sale. Potter maintains that "we have a deep cultural aversion to buying things on the open market. We think we live in a consumer society, but we don’t. We live in an anti-consumer society, which is why we feel the need to “launder” our consumption through a moral filter." That cultural aversion stems from the way market interactions depersonalize us. In the "open market" we are all interchangeable consumers, measured in terms of the greenness of our money. We are nobody special. Still, we want the process of exchange to respect and reflect our unique personal worth. Consumerism must compensate for that loss of dignity inherent in market transactions. One of the ways it achieves this is the ideological cant of customer service -- the customer is important, always right, etc. Another, more far-reaching way consumerism compensates for capitalism is through its promise to constitute our identity anew, allowing us to establish an illusory ontological security by tapping into a pattern of shared meaning through goods.

So I think Potter goes too far in saying ours is an anti-consumer society; consumerism is certainly the governing, hegemonic ideology for most of us in our everyday life. Consumerism supplies the solution to most ordinary problems -- problems which it helps give coherent shape to in the form of concrete needs for products: have a "need" (in quotes in deference to Baudrillard)? Buy something! Need purpose? Collect and curate! And to adopt Potter's point, ethical purchasing and crypto-authenticity is a new solution consumerism supplies for the problem of anomie. Feel unreal? Buy something green! Buy something cool!

Like most consumerist needs, the need for authenticity is generated internally within the system of consumerism, which then endeavors to sate it. It doesn't refer to an actual ontological need for some sort of real self-knowledge. Consumerism, as part of the modern social order, makes us conscious of our identity as something contingent and contrived, and it suggests that this fact should make us anxious. Then a series of solutions are offered, themselves contingent on changing fashions and the matriculation of trends through status hierarchies.

Some critics of authenticity blame the rise of Freudian depth psychology -- the idea of real selves hidden behind the veil of the unconscious -- as the root ideology that fuels the consumerist drive (to use psychoanalysis's term) and spawns the concept of the packaged lifestyle. (See Adam Curtis's disturbing BBC series, The Century of the Self, for example.) We are persuaded that finding the real self entails ongoing experiments with a variety of experiences, which ultimately become reified commodities. Other sociologists and anthropologists see it as a reflection of the decay of stable traditional markers of identity under the pressure of changing technologies. As we become more mobile, both geographically and in terms of class, personal identity is no longer ascribed but becomes open-ended, something we make for ourselves but which is never final or fully accepted but most be tested and approved socially, over and over again. The arena of consumerist display becomes one such place for this identity proving.

But to return to Potter's point about a "moral filter": how it became morally permissible to consume over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is a subject that sociologist Colin Campbell (not the New York Rangers' ex-coach) explores in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. The gist is that consumerism doesn't come naturally to us; it's an attitude that must be inculcated, reproduced. That remains true; consumerism must be perpetually reenchanted in the face of its obvious shortcomings and dangers.

Campbell argues that romanticism and the 18th century cult of sensibility (which saw virtue as the ability to demonstrate deep emotional responsiveness) bequeathed us a general, Walter Mitty-esque ethos of daydreaming for personal fulfillment, which allows for us to take pleasure in fantasies about ourselves prompted by consumer goods imbued with emotional overtones. Campbell writes, "The central insight required is the realization that individuals do not so much seek satisfaction from products as pleasure from the self-illusory experiences which they construct from their associated meanings." But as a result, we take less pleasure in the actual consumption. So for example, we delight more in thinking of ourselves as the kind of person who will eat unpasteurized artisinal cheese than we do in tasting it. Or more radically, our anticipatory delight steals the pleasure from the sensual experience. Consumerist pleasure cannibalizes the pleasure inherent in things, preempts it. This leads to the chronic dissatisfaction with the stuff we have and the perpetual urge to want more -- conveniently enough for an economy structured around ever-growing consumer demand.

But the moral permission to consume, he suggests (if I am remembering right), derives from the quasi-religious idea that a rich inner life is proof of having a strong intuitive moral faculty (which in turn reinforces one's sense of being one of the elect, in the Calvinist sense). The cult of sensibility disseminated the idea that emotional responsiveness indicated a noble soul over and against aristocratic tradition that located nobility in bloodlines. Consumerism became a means of eliciting that responsiveness and supplying a medium through which it could be displayed. Making such displays then becomes mandatory, normative, the basis by which we show our willingness to belong to society and play by its rules. It becomes the modality of empathy; we show we understand one another by consuming the same sorts of things and reading one another's consumption choices to a certain degree of fluency.

Self-consciousness begins to exponentially expand in the hall of mirrors we represent to one another: "I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see if I was looking back at you." We feel compelled to share every consumer gesture and practice (and technology develops to encourage and sate that impulse) because it all has "relevance" to who we are, but we become alienated from ourselves to an additional degree, watching ourselves mediate the watching ourselves consume, and on and on. And this amplification seems to builds up an unmanageable pressure, a sense that one can't catch up with oneself, with everything we can potentially be that's promised by all the things and ideas and information there is to consume and record ourselves consuming and reacting to.

What's needed now is permission not to consume in this sense -- permission to ignore what Baudrillard calls "the code" and proceed in the world in a state of self-forgetting.

Backlash to the M.I.A. Backlash (10 June 2010)

A few weeks ago the NYT Magazine published a piece by Lynn Hirschberg about M.I.A. that made M.I.A. (aka Maya) seem like a hypocritical phony. (New York magazine helpfully listed the 10 harshest parts here.) Maya likes to portray herself as a sort of musical terrorist for the globally oppressed and the Tamils of Sri Lanka in particular, but this sits uncomfortably with her engagement to corporate scion Ben Bronfman, heir to the Seagram's heir, and her life of luxury in the wealthy apartheid of Southern California. These apparent hypocrisies are amplified by the apparent inauthenticity of her Western fans, who are open to the accusation of dabbling in orientalist exoticism and radical chic. M.I.A. sells a certain brand of cosmopolitan clamor, a would-be righteous antagonism, which is by some conceptions an ideal that should not be commodified and trivialized. Her music seems to want to put its "dangerousness" into quotation marks.

That's not such a bad thing. I don't think Maya is really a revolutionary anymore than I think Jay-Z was really a big-time drug dealer -- it doesn't matter for my purposes as a listener. It seems plausible enough while the songs are playing to hold my attention in a particular escapist way. For what it's worth, I like listening to M.I.A. but feel a little embarrassed about it, like I am trying to prove something. I wish there was more pop music like hers so that listening to M.I.A. wouldn't stick out and seem like a statement of some kind. I sort of think of her as Fela lite. I don't pay much attention to her politics or her lyrics, largely because I can't decipher them and also because I don't care about the meaning of lyrics generally. I just want them to sound right in context. In the grand scheme of things, there's probably not much difference between the lyrics of "Paper Planes" and those of "In Da Club."

Momentum has been building in the blogosphere in support of the argument that Hirschberg's hit piece was not merely unfair but antifeminist. Women's behavior is so culturally prescribed that a readymade list of criticisms is always at hand for commentators to tear down any woman's particular accomplishments, as Amanda Marcotte points out here. At Tiger Beatdown, this essay by Sady makes the case that M.I.A. is more vulnerable to charges of being a phony because as a woman, her choices are inauthenticated in advance.

there are a few common-sense things to be pointed out here: That it’s not unusual for women to work throughout their pregnancies, that lots of women go to work on the day that they’re scheduled to go into labor, that labor itself is a long process (the profile even notes that M.I.A.’s son wasn’t born until three days after the performance) and so many women often continue to work throughout the early stages of labor, especially if they’re doing something important or time-sensitive that can’t be re-scheduled — like, say, performing at the Grammys. Or, for that matter, the fact that implying that a woman ought to neglect her job because she’s knocked up is the flip-side of the rationale that says it’s okay to not hire or promote women because they will have to neglect their jobs once they get knocked up. But never mind all that: I mean, the wheelchair was right there, but instead M.I.A. was up on stage, almost naked, singing her violent lyrics about murdering people, because she cares more about performing and being famous than she does about her poor little helpless baby boy. What a monster.

M.I.A., Sady also suggests, is a living embodiment of how capitalist co-optation works: "I read M.I.A. as a person in a difficult and contradictory position: Someone who’s come into a huge amount of privilege, after growing up without it, someone who’s benefiting from the very system she condemns, and is attempting to use her position of power to bring attention to the problem." The problem with Hirschberg's article is that she sides at a deeper level with capitalism, marginalizing and dismissing Maya's efforts to embody the contradictions, as it were, as simple hypocrisy. M.I.A. struggles obviously with being a sell-out; Hirschberg has been a sell-out all along and now enforces for capitalism and the Establishment against those in the gray area. The same old story: character assassination and ad hominem attacks on the messenger so that the message will be ignored or invalidated.

That's why complaints about authenticity tend to be a ruse, and why authenticity is a dubious criterion whenever it is invoked. Marcotte notes that:

The craving for this impossible standard of authenticity causes neurotic behavior, depression, and withdrawal. To make it worse, “authenticity” is not just a lie, but it’s also a black hole. It eats up everything around it, including those things that are real, like quality and effectiveness.

Also on the M.I.A. defense team is Andrew Potter, author of The Authenticity Hoax (which I am eager to read) and its associated blog; he mounts a similar defense of Maya on this basis. "In this age of authenticity, where an artist is only entitled to those forms of personal, artistic, and political expression that are properly underwritten by their background. If you don’t live it, you can’t say it, and a hypocrite is the absolute worst thing you can be." This is the "authenticity hoax" and Hirschberg falls for it and is thus out of touch. (Also for what it's worth, I've written my share of posts about authenticity; here's the most recent, about why reflexive authenticity is a trap.)

At one point it was important to claim that the personal is the political to secure recognition for certain forms and modes of struggle. Where one is coming from matters in terms of what one ends up claiming to be objective. But the personal-is-political approach got subverted itself by the dubious but persuasive argument that one can't be self-consciously calculating about living one's politics without invalidating them.The collapse of the separation of public and private has turned out to be disastrous for the public sphere, for the existence of a form of privileged discourse about ideas as opposed to grievances. Now ideas are grievances.

UPDATE: Potter has an updated piece about the M.I.A. article here.

The Problem with Reflexive Authenticity (1 June 2010)

Joshua Glenn's 1999 essay on fake authenticity, reprised at Hilobrow, has lost none of its acuity in the decade since it was written. And that's more or less his point: there can be no end to the quest for authenticity. It can't be realized reflexively. Once you recognize it as an independent quality of things, it has become ersatz. Identifying it in something speaks only to its actual absence, or worse, to a gap in our own ability to know and experience authenticity without alienating it and mediating it back to ourselves first. A similar phenomenon is at work when photograph ourselves somewhere to prove that we were really there; the "really being there" doesn't sink in when we are actually there, but when we contemplate the photo much later. Identity is also similar, in that reflexivity about it diminishes it, calls it into question, invalidates it. We can't assess the "truth" of our "real self"; we can only live it. The degree to which "the real self" becomes a problem for us measures the external pressure being placed on us to be other than we are. (Is that tautological? I mean that the effort we put into becoming who we really are merely measures the gap opened by outside pressures; it doesn't help to close it.) It traces "consumer dissatisfaction" and "perpetual obsolescence," as Glenn puts it.

Spontaneity is subject to the same critique. Glenn notes that "decades before the slogan Just Do It was burned into our brains, Adorno noted that 'Authentic Ones' like Heidegger were given to making gestures of autonomy without content, serving only to help advertising celebrate the empty meaningfulness of immediate experience." Marketing is the destruction of meaning (always contingent and personal) in favor of meaningfulness, a seemingly transcendent quality that masks the pressures of persuasion. At best, meaningfulness is our understanding of meanings that could be ascribed to certain things without our having intuited or experienced them ourselves. It is the sense that others might ascribe those meaningful experiences to us.

Implicit in Glenn's differentiation of the fake and the fake-authentic ("the 'fake' is simply kitsch, which can be transformed by the lovingly ironic person into camp; the 'fake-authentic' is nothing but cheese") is a reassessment of what makes experience valuable, away from reified authenticity (the mode of value important to collectors) and toward engaged enthusiasm -- not necessarily earnestness, but rather a courage to appropriate, to suppress self-consciousness in favor of performativity, to be boldly unoriginal. The tyranny of authenticity as an ideal rests with its stifling that enthusiasm -- it is a conceptual cousin to intellectual-property laws meant to prevent sampling, cultural remixing, the free and rapid circulation of ideas. As Glenn, citing Baudrillard, notes, there is no authenticity as such. It is a contrived, wholly ideological category designed to alienate others from the significance (or meaningfulness) of their own lived experience. Authenticity is a matter of controlling the flow of cultural trends to allow for established interests to secure the profits they had planned for, or to protect their authority. Glenn writes, "when that sphere of society whose role it is to enforce inherited forms and norms gets into the action, the result is always an example of fake authenticity."

A corollary theory: The experience of inauthenticity, then, is when we internalize those external forces, negate the legitimacy of our own experiences in order to validate those imposed norms. When we recognize the inauthenticity of something else, the pleasure we experience stems from our having internalized those norms as our own aesthetic judgment. Paradoxically, judging experiences in terms of their authenticity is precisely the best means for refusing to accept them on their own terms. Experiences don't have to try to be what they are; judging the authenticity of something, though, posits that effort, introduces a gap between what something is and what the person passing judgment would demand of it, attributing that gap to flawed execution. Then, alas, we start making that effort with regard to what we do (or with regard to projecting our identity), alienating ourselves from our experiences at the outset.

The Authenticity Fetish (8 Dec 2009)

A study by MIT professor Renee Richardson Gosline (via BoingBoing and others) shows that people who buy "fake" handbags -- those branded without authorization -- sometimes go on to later buy "authentic" ones.

Gosline interviewed hundreds of consumers who knowingly bought fake luxury apparel, many at “purse parties” where such goods are sold. Gosline found that within two years, 46 percent of these buyers subsequently purchased the authentic version of the same product — even though other people could not necessarily tell the difference. Such behavior is another twist on Veblen’s thesis: For some status-seeking people, at least, the social power of luxury goods means that consumption must not just be conspicuous, but real.

That seems somewhat incredible (Felix Salmon calls it "astonishing"), but it fits well with NYT Magazine Consumed columnist Rob Walker's contention that we are own primary audience for our consumption displays. We can't fool ourselves with a fake.

But then, when we do buy fakes? Are we hoping that our own assessment of ourselves can matter less than that of those around us? Is it an attempt to silence the internal critic? Is a ploy to be postauthentic? Obviously it's similar to the dynamic behind pirating MP3s instead of buying them -- what does it matter if the source of the file is authentic if it is a copy that is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable for an authenticated one? In a world where it is so easy to copy things, authenticity becomes a kind of fetish, a value for its own sake that doesn't speak to any actual physical quality in the objects themselves. The power of the fetish derives from our simultaneous awareness that we should be skeptical of everything, that everything can be faked, including personal identity, which is more provisional than ever, being reinscribed on a moment by moment basis online in some instances. The more I keep telling myself who I am, how I want to see myself, the more I need to manifest that materially through gestures. If I want to believe I am authentic, I need to gesture authenticity. Voila: We seek objects with the aura of authenticity (expensive, distinctive, rare things mainly) so that we can try to feel more authentic ourselves.

Baudrillard literally wrote the book on this sort of thing back in the early 1970s -- For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, which compiles several of his essays about how use value is mistaken for an authentic transcendental truth. He argues that we tend to refer to our needs, and to an object's "real" usefulness as the basis for what should be true, particularly in critiquing consumerism. If we could only stop consuming objects as symbols of other things and just use them in a natural, unmediated way, we would escape the ways in which consumerism constricts and constructs us. (I fall prey to that line of thinking a lot -- I just want to wear a shirt, not signify I am the sort of person who wants to wear this sort of shirt.) But there is no such escape, as concepts like use and need are socially constructed along with identity as part of the same totalizing cultural system. "Just as exchange value is not a substantial aspect of the product, but a form that expresses a social relation, so use value can no longer be viewed as an innate function of the object but as a social determination." One can't pursue authenticity through that route -- by using only generic objects that we "need" -- anymore than one can by acquiring authentic luxury items. What is "real" about a given object's provenance is open to constant reevaluation; the emphasis can be shifted to suit the needs of those questioning reality at various junctures.

Luxury items are expensive not because they are intrinsically valuable (what is gold "really" worth, anyway? Seems pretty useless as a metal) but because of the social capital embodied in them. In fact, as other research of Gosline's suggests, people authenticate goods in terms of who is using them:

Consumers, Gosline observes, struggle to distinguish the intrinsic qualities of real luxury goods from fakes; instead, they rely heavily on social cues to make those judgments. Indeed, when some consumers are shown pictures of people wearing luxury apparel, they are twice as confident in their ability to judge those products, and willing to pay twice as much for the apparel, as when those consumers are shown pictures of the goods alone.

Social capital is a gestalt, then, an assemblage of goods, gestures, behaviors, etc., that convey a rank in the class hierarchy. If the goal is to climb in that hierarchy, goods -- fake or real -- are not enough. (Incidentally, Gosline's work also offers support for the immaterial labor idea I have been going on and on about lately: "Gosline has quantified Veblen’s famous observation: Consumers are willing to pay twice as much for luxury apparel when they can use those products to send or receive social signals." There is a relation between what goods can mean -- product of our using them -- and what they can be sold for.)

But why not use fake luxury goods for other reasons? They function as a kind of social sabotage, a direct attack on distinction that forces those invested in positional goods to become uncomfortable and shift their ground. In the world of simulacrums of simulacrums, authenticity is a constructed pose, a disguised power play. When the owner of a fake buys the real thing, it is a small triumph for luxury goods makers and the powers that be generally -- their definition of authentic is still holding enough sway to shape behavior. I guess I prefer the possibility that authenticity is worthless.

Pandora and authentic taste (19 Oct 2009)

Rob Walker's NYT Magazine article about Pandora, the online music-recommendation service, sets up an opposition between musical taste that is grounded in our social context (what our friends like and the siganling aspects of publicly liking certain genres and so forth) and taste that is presumed to be intrinsic to a particular piece's qualities. Pandora's business model relies on its ability to analyze and assign numbers to those taxonomized categories and use that to play music that will keep consumers listening.

Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

But as Walker asks, "Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?" One possibility is that these two ways of conceiving musical taste are incommensurable, irreconcilable, what Žižek calls a parallax. It's not that one explanation is an ideological cover-up for the other, real reason -- these are two separate explanations that are perhaps operating simultaneously, and we oscillate between them in comprehending ourselves, forming our consciousness of what we want to appeal to us. In The Parallax View Žižek is very concerned about the gap between them, which he thinks captures the Lacanian "real" that can't be articulated directly. Parallax structures, if I'm getting what he is saying, allow a socially constructed self co-exist within us with a uniquely particular, individual, biological self. It allows us to believe our taste is unique and personal while at the same time developing it consciously to achieve social goals. So we can persuade ourselves that we like Lightning Bolt and not Black-Eyed Peas and find this to be an absolutely authentic expression of who we "really are."

Pandora's founder, in Walker's depiction, is stubbornly determined to reject the authenticity of socially mediated taste.

Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice.

I can relate to this attitude. It's hard not to be cynical about musical taste and snobbery and hype if you have spent any extended period of time taking what the music press has to say seriously. It seems like the inevitable social concerns that spring up out of pop music aren't inherent in it but are instead a barrier to our simply being in touch with our pleasures. I would think that if I could simply detach from the conversation about music, I would be able to enjoy it in a more sincere way. This took me toward older music (big-band music, 60s sunshine pop), into deliberately square music (Doris Day, the Fifth Dimension). But I was just involving myself in different conversations, even if they were only theoretical. I was still contriving a narrative about my tastes, even if I didn't necessarily share it with anyone. Still it is a very seductive idea, that our taste is like a fingerprint, a snowflake, and that when we find out fully what it really is, we see at last, concretely, how ineffable our soul is. We listen to Pandora, click the thumbs up or down to approve songs, let the formulas work their magic, and continue to attenuate our authentic self in pure isolation.

That seems like ideological fiction; it fits too well with the romanticizing of individuality that is endemic in consumerism. (What seems parallax about taste may be ideological -- there is no intrinsic taste, just the useful pretense of it.) It's more plausible that our musical-taste acquisition is like language acquisition -- inherently social from the get-go. Walker cites Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist who has written extensively about music.

Just as we’re hard-wired to learn a language, but not to speak English or French, our specific musical understanding, and thus taste, depends on context. If a piece of music sounds dissonant to you, it probably has to do with what sort of music you were exposed to growing up, because you were probably an “expert listener” in your culture’s music by about age 6, Levitin writes.

Walker ends by pointing out that Pandora is ultimately curated. Only certain songs are added, and this process is a bit arbitrary.

Westergren maintains that catalog size receded as a problem at around the 300,000-song mark. Since passing that, he says, the number of “missed” searches has declined markedly, so the great majority of people who come to the site and type in an artist or song name get a proper introduction to the Pandora system. But the more surprising part of Westergren’s response is his claim that he isn’t worried about compiling the biggest possible catalog. “This may seem counterintuitive,” he told me, “but we struggle more with making sure we’re adding really good stuff.” That sounds like a rather subjective, cultural judgment — shouldn’t the listener decide what’s good, based purely on the genome’s intrinsics-of-music guidance? Well, there’s no question that Westergren is a champion of the unheard music that gets marginalized by sociocultural judgments. But even he has standards.

So Pandora is revealed as an elaborate apparatus for masking with technology and mathematical mumbo jumbo the way tastes can be shaped from above and without. Pandora presents a limited set and invites us to see it as infinite. WHat we make of it is wholly are own and true.That's not so different from the way our opportunities are in practice curtailed by social context while we are raised to believe that anything is possible if we tap into our innate ability.

Authentic Listening: Are We Selling Out Our Tastes? (10 Oct 2009)

A few days ago I confirmed for myself how out of touch I am with indie music when I took a look at Pitchfork's albums of the decade list. Of the 200 albums listed, I'd probably heard maybe half of them, and of that half I probably actually liked about 10. I tried again to listen to the albums they are really big on (e.g., Kid A, Supreme Clientele) and was left convinced I should probably regard a high Pitchfork rating as a personal negative indicator. If Pitchfork is associated with a band when I first hear about them, I'm probably best off not bothering.

I bring this up only because I am also reading Greg Kot's Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, a journalistic look at the music business over the past decade (it reads like a series of Fortune stories -- not an insult, just an impression) in which Pitchfork features prominently. Even though I am writing at this moment for what some might consider a "music webzine," I was pretty surprised at how influential Pitchfork is reputed to be. Some of the industry people Kot interviews makes Pitchfork sound like the financial rating agencies: "I feel the next step for Pitchfork is literally dictating to bands what to do next," a guy in an indie band tells him. " 'Okay, can you just paint a little more green on that album before you release it?' " That would mirror the way ratings agencies told banks what to adjust in securities in order to secure AAA ratings to keep the bubble going. These were oftentimes the securities destined to become "toxic," becoming the assets no one could value properly and no one wanted on their books.

Of course, music has always been impossible to value properly with a rating. Associating an album with a number may drive its sales -- Kot has several anecdotes of Pitchfork's rating pushing units to distributors and on -- but it pushes casual consumers into consuming the rating rather than engaging with the music. The number promises the idea that a bunch of others are out there listening and approving, so it is okay for you to get into it as well. That's not a terrible thing, but it contradicts the prized notion that we have unique and personality-defining tastes.

What is striking about Ripped is the longing most of the people Kot talks to have to see the music industry destroyed. They have a fantasy, it seems, that pop music will at last cease to be a commodity and become authentic art again. That's a nice dream, but it may set people up for unnecessary disappointment. Music seems more a matter of hype now then ever before, and the fact that amateur hypers are the driving force is even more depressing than when it was professional PR people. If I make a mix CD and give it to a friend, that's a way of building a bond, enhancing the friendship. If I put a bunch of tracks on an MP3 blog, that's something entirely different. Now I've crossed the line into being a freelance marketer, a wannabe A&R person. I want strangers to applaud my taste under the auspices of "sharing."

It's no better if I talk about my musical tastes on a social network -- the context changes the relevance of what I am saying and my opinions can be aggregated and sold as demographic data, or could lead to my friends being hit with certain sorts of targeted ads. By the terms of service, my opinions become part of a commercial public record.

So while the intentions of musicians probably haven't changed much over the past decade and may have a chance of becoming purer in the absence of a consolidated music industry, the intentions of listeners are much more likely to be altered for the worse, with music becoming, more than it ever has been, a counter in an endless game of self-promotion and self-definition. Our intentions in listening will be harder and harder to keep pure; the temptations to sell our tastes out by blogging/tweeting/social network posting about them will continue to increase. It may be too late for me (see first graf above) but the rest of you may be able to save yourselves. Tell no one online what you've heard.

Class consumers (21 Aug 2009)

Yves Smith noted a WSJ article reporting diminishing retail sales and heralding the new austerity in American consumers. This tidbit didn't quite fit the frame: "A cashier at Target in Los Angeles checks the authenticity of $100 bills." Counterfeiting is not exactly the act of an austere, frugal consumer, though it may be the act of debt-starved one.

Zero Hedge unleashed a long analysis of "the stratified American consumer" last weekend, making the useful point that the way the designation "American consumer" is thrown around tends to conceal the fact that it is not a homogeneous group. Statements like "Major retailers reported that American consumers are continuing to hunker down" from the WSJ article are not especially useful, because it is extrapolating a universal mental framework from aggregate macro data. (The same problem arises when a negative savings rate is extrapolated into "all Americans are spendthrifts," a rhetorically tempting logical leap I've certainly been guilty of.) Zero Hedge:

A drill down of disposable net income (after tax) and net worth, demonstrates why any discussion of "generic" consumers should be much more properly phrased as an observation of the "Wealthy" and "Everyone else". The disposable income difference between the richest 10% and even the next richest decile is staggering: a 3x order of magnitude....
While 10% of the population collects 40% of disposable income, it represents 57% of net worth! This is an impressive conclusion: on a lowest common denominator, the Net Worth variance between the 10% of the population that make up the wealthy and the 50% that comprise the middle class is over 8x! No wonder the aspirational consumer was the most vibrant retail category at the peak of the bubble: if the middle class can not accumulate 8x the net worth it needs to migrate into the top decile, it can at least dress like it. Unfortunately, it did these purchases on credit and is now paying for it (or not).

The upshot of this analysis is not surprising, but worth reiterating: that the data trends tracked regarding consumption reveal consumerism as a middle-class phenomenon driven probably by status envy of the upper-middle class for the upper-upper class. That the gap is widening means that the consumers now discovering austerity aren't liking it very much and that there is no paradigm shift to a culture of maximum utility extraction. Also worth noting: The lower classes (the bottom 40% who consume 12% of what's consumed in America) are statistically and economically irrelevant. I wonder if there is a social corollary to that -- beneath a certain income point, one's subsistence-style consumption becomes anonymous. The thought inspires in me a classic middle-class fantasy of the escape into squalor, a la the George Orwell of Down and Out in London and Paris: the dream that subsistence living is automatically authentic, and this authenticity compensates for the misery of relative deprivation.

The conclusions drawn in the Zero Hedge post seem ominous: The recession has hurt the lower and middle classes more than the wealthy, and has merely increased the wealthy's advantage. Calls for a consumer-led recovery will draw on their increased spending power, and when that spending shows up in the data it will mask the fact that more people in America are making do with less -- suffering the new frugality at the conspicuous spenders' expense.

Is it safe to say that the wealthy have managed to game the system yet again and avoided a significant loss of wealth, while maintaining sufficient access to credit? If in fact that is the case, a case could be made for a consumer lead-recovery, granted one that is massively skewed to the 10% of the population which consumes 42% in the US.

At that point, all the talk of the era of frugality will be over, even though more of us will be living it. What the Zero Hedge scenario means, as some others have remarked (now I can't find the links, grr), the U.S. will become more like Brazil -- a wealthy elite, with a monopoly on the social power that comes from the power to spend in a consumer society, living in gated communities with elaborate collections of luxury goods, with bodyguards for their children and so on, while the rest of the population is increasingly impoverished.

It reminds me of Baudelaire's The Eyes of the Poor, the poor family staring in at the lovers in their leisure at a "dazzling" cafe, whose decorations depicted "all history and all mythology pandering to gluttony." Increasingly, we are becoming that poor family, spectators of the heroic consumption of the upper classes. Thanks to the inexpensiveness of media entertainment, we consume the cheap images of their class status and derive what gratification we can.

The eyes of the father said: "How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! All the gold of the poor world must have found its way onto those walls." The eyes of the little boy: "How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! But it is a house where only people who are not like us can go." As for the baby, he was much too fascinated to express anything but joy -- utterly stupid and profound.

Meanwhile economic forces cement the boundary between us and those in the cafe enjoying the splendor, continue the redistribution upward, making sure we can do nothing but marvel at wealth.