I was sent down memory lane by this metafilter link to an archive of the work of the New Republic's comedic fabricator, Stephen Glass. I can understand why other journalists and pious publishing types vilify Glass, but he was an extremely engaging writer, and I can testify that his pieces single-handedly convinced to me to renew my TNR subscription back in 1998. I used to look forward to his pieces because they were funny, and -- thanks to the invented sources -- coherent and compelling. There was always a punch line quote from someone to punctuate any of Glass's rhetorical points. They were so effectively constructed that I used some of his pieces as models back when I was teaching composition at the University of Arizona. I may have done so even after he was exposed as a fraud. (I wished my students could make up stuff that good, and even better, know how to deploy it in an essay. Indeed. would have preferred that they make up suitable supporting evidence for their arguments, if only to see that they actually understood the concept of "evidence.")
Since I never regarded his pieces as much more than entertainment, nothing about what Glass did ever bothered me particularly. It wouldn't surprise me if the sorts of things he did still went on all the time in the press, perhaps in less elaborate ways and to slighter degrees (yielding less interesting stories, in the end). Now and then, journalists, most of whom are in good faith, I'm sure, record some heinous wrongdoing and document it for history, and perhaps these efforts will bear fruit at some point in time. But such achievements seem like by-products of professional newsgathering. Readers of any news publication are naive if they believe that they are getting some form of verified truth there. Even when it is fact-checked, it is still biased by the nature of the medium itself, and the commercial information gathering process. In the presentation of news, obviously, there are conventions writers and editors adhere to in order to whittle down events and shape incidents into a recognizable product. The boundaries that separate this institutionalized process from what Glass did as a maverick is somewhat arbitrary. Sure, Glass didn't do straight reporting; he pioneered a more fascinating reality-TV-style of reporting -- only he didn't have the luxury of doing a casting call to find the people that would fit into his prefab narrative frame.
Obviously there are exceptions, but some reporters are little more than diligent stenographers, following a ethical code is primary purpose is to garner them access to powerful sources who know they can trust the reporters to say what they want the public to hear. Few publishers have the resources to fund investigative reporting anymore, and most readers don't especially want it, when there is celebrity gossip going on 24/7. It's also hard to look past the fact that throughout the Bush years, investigative journalists were tirelessly exposing scandal after scandal, and in the end it didn't change a thing. In part, this may be because the surfeit of information and the panoply of outlets makes it all meaningless as anything but a distraction. It sometimes seems that there is next to no venue in which a story can run where it will have a transfiguring impact on how the world is perceived, that would galvanize some sort of resistance or overwhelming unified protest. Instead, any "important" story may be buried with a flood of new details and reactions and interpretations and repudiations, and ultimately all that comes through is the commercial purposes that all this dissemination of information -- all this brokering of audience attention -- serves. An "important" story is simply one that delivers a lucrative audience segment to an advertiser.
Glass seemed to grasp this superlatively cynical perspective intuitively, and he transformed it into gold -- even if it was fool's gold, no one had really mistaken its value. His editors knew that his stories would entertain readers like me, readers who didn't want to change the world or have their policy presumptions or political biases tested. I wanted my biases confirmed with implausibly perfect and uproariously funny examples of what I already thought was happening with DARE programs and young Republican groups and hackers and all the other juicy topics Glass confabulated about. By spinning engaging tales out of his near-pathological desire to be liked and to earn approval, Glass hijacked the organ of the press for his own piddling purposes; he brought TNR down to the level of a Facebook page, avant le lettre.
Showing posts with label cynical reason. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cynical reason. Show all posts
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Convenience and material culture (11 April 2007)
Via kottke.org comes a link to this Stay Free! interview with Giles Slade, author of Made to Break, a book about planned obsolescence. (I wrote about the book before here after reading about it here. The whole thing is worth reading, but these exchanges I found particularly interesting:
I thought this was an interesting connection -- rather than attribute rudeness and impoliteness to cultural mores and leave it at that, the move to ground our understanding of the mores in material culture seems an absolutely necessary next step. I wonder whether our fixation on efficiency leads us to build in the desire for convenience into our infrastructure, into our commonsense approach to the environments we find ourselves in and how we read them, making that pseudoefficiency hard to resist. And since convenience is so often understood as the elimination of human interaction, does the way our preference for it seems already built in to society then justify to us that ubiquitous rudeness Slade mentions? The expectation and privileging of convenience seems to make things road rage seem reasonable, normal. I rarely pause to doubt my righteous intolerance when someone in front me at the bakery where I get my morning roll takes a long time to count their change out. I get frustrated when everyone isn't in as much of a hurry as me, and I feel that's somewhat a product of living in New York, where haste is institutionalized.
And this:
If the values are built in to material culture, which is made up mostly of consumer products and embodies consumerist values, then it makes some sense that generations raised entirely within that culture, which has been proliferating steadily, would be protective of it and grow defensive if you imply that there's something damaged about it. It's as though you are saying they can't help but be impaired by the culture they grew up in. But that situation holds for everyone, no matter what generation; it takes a special effort of negativity and critical thinking to escape the biases built in to the society we learn to adapt ourselves to. It's made easy for us to seamlessly assume the prejudices of that society, and there's little benefit in resisting that process -- just a faith in principles, in the idea that there is some "real" beyond those prejudices worth aspiring to. It's easy, though, once you've adopted that negative attitude (hard to differentiate from cynicism), to assume that it's harder for the generations after our own to make the same effort, that things have become much worse.
STAY FREE!: How did book come about?
GILES SLADE: I came back to North America from teaching in the Arab Emirates after 9/11, and every interaction I had in public was very curt, very rude. I wondered where that shortness developed and ultimately became convinced that it has to do with our attitudes toward material culture.
I thought this was an interesting connection -- rather than attribute rudeness and impoliteness to cultural mores and leave it at that, the move to ground our understanding of the mores in material culture seems an absolutely necessary next step. I wonder whether our fixation on efficiency leads us to build in the desire for convenience into our infrastructure, into our commonsense approach to the environments we find ourselves in and how we read them, making that pseudoefficiency hard to resist. And since convenience is so often understood as the elimination of human interaction, does the way our preference for it seems already built in to society then justify to us that ubiquitous rudeness Slade mentions? The expectation and privileging of convenience seems to make things road rage seem reasonable, normal. I rarely pause to doubt my righteous intolerance when someone in front me at the bakery where I get my morning roll takes a long time to count their change out. I get frustrated when everyone isn't in as much of a hurry as me, and I feel that's somewhat a product of living in New York, where haste is institutionalized.
And this:
STAY FREE!: When you talk to people about your book, do you notice a generational divide in how older people and younger people feel about these issues?
GILES SLADE: Yes, younger people don't want to hear anything negative about the iPod. I might as well put a turban on and grow a long beard. It comes down to the social value of consumer goods as icons. If I'm saying something negative about your tribe's icon, it's as if I'm attacking you personally. Also, younger people have much less sense that things should last. I find that really disturbing.
STAY FREE!: It makes sense, though. If you're born into a world where things aren't made to last, naturally you won't expect them to.
GILES SLADE: Sure, but then things less than 20 years old become what we think of as antiques. So your sense of duration, of history, of culture has collapsed and evaporated. If your favorite toys are constantly updated and replaced, how is that going to effect your relationships with people? I think you're less likely to have lasting commitments to people, to family, to a country, even. There's a well-known book called Bowling Alone, and I think this is where it comes from. We've become so accustomed to things only lasting for a few years we don't invest in them anymore. We don't see beautiful things like paintings and rugs as lasting.
If the values are built in to material culture, which is made up mostly of consumer products and embodies consumerist values, then it makes some sense that generations raised entirely within that culture, which has been proliferating steadily, would be protective of it and grow defensive if you imply that there's something damaged about it. It's as though you are saying they can't help but be impaired by the culture they grew up in. But that situation holds for everyone, no matter what generation; it takes a special effort of negativity and critical thinking to escape the biases built in to the society we learn to adapt ourselves to. It's made easy for us to seamlessly assume the prejudices of that society, and there's little benefit in resisting that process -- just a faith in principles, in the idea that there is some "real" beyond those prejudices worth aspiring to. It's easy, though, once you've adopted that negative attitude (hard to differentiate from cynicism), to assume that it's harder for the generations after our own to make the same effort, that things have become much worse.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
The gift economy (18 Feb 2007)
It might be useful to contrast Bataille's vision of potlatch expenditure, of competitive destructive waste, with the "gift economy," production by technology-assisted volunteers rather than paid labor -- open-source projects, shared amateur entertainment, Wikipedia, etc. Justin Fox has an article in Time about this phenomenon, pondering what sort of alternative it presents to capitalism's assumptions of rational self-interest. We assume that people behave rationally by getting paid what they are worth -- by making every marginal unit of effort or expenditure yield the most additional utility, however we construe that. Bataille seemed to want to imagine an escape from the prison of rational calculation with behavior so destructive it could yield no such utility, but utility can ultimately be rehabilitated to capture that desire to escape from it.
As Jameson notes in Postmodernism, the idea of the market ("Leviathan in sheep's clothing") exerts a totalizing force, with economists such as Gary Becker explaining how any possible desire, conscious or unconscious, can be configured to conform to production functions -- mathematical models of inputs and outcomes -- and thus be rendered rational. Jameson sees this as a desperate attempt to salvage the promises of freedom and equality capitalism rests on but never can deliver. In his view, spontaneous order is an expression of despair at how individuals are never really free in the sense of being able to intervene in their destiny, which remains governed by motives dispersed throughout the system and directed by no one. Instead "cynical reason" (Peter Sloterdijk's term for "enlightened false consciousness") in the form of semi-ironic consumerism reigns as the only freedom we know, and we accept it as compensatory.
But does the gift economy, productive volunteerism, do anything to disturb that analysis? Is there an alternative form of freedom from market rationality in working hours for free on a Linux patch or in distributing your fan fiction online? Or has the compensation changed from money to attention or recognition. (if this is true, what does it say about the devaluation of money, which can no longer secure a fundamental human need such as community recognition?) Fox talks to Yoachi Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who posits a sweet spot between exploitation and cooperation whereby corporations can capitalize on this outpouring of volunteer labor: "The key, Benkler says, is 'managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.' " His view is opposed by Nicholas Carr, who argues the market will eventually co-opt volunteer labor by learning how to value it and price it. It seems like work being done for free is either being subsidized elsewhere (as perhaps with Benkler's book; he's a Yale professor and may have been paid by the university to research and write the book) or is pleasurable in its own right, the way most work is markedly not -- we do it on our own time, with our own goals in mind and via methods we've improvised that make us feel most engaged.
But does the gift economy recuperate Bataille's notion of expenditure -- does it serve as a refutation that any act can truly be nonproductive? Also, does it refute the strange notion that true freedom is incompatible with production, that it must consist in some free play that yields only abjection? It seems more likely that people enjoy being useful but have that natural impulse perverted by a market system that insists that gratifying that impulse alone is not enough. The market encourages to suspend that impulse and pursue profitable but personally meaningless activities. Then we rescue the impulse in our private hobbies. The wealth of networks lies in bringing to account all that energy expended in hobbies without corrupting it with the taint of market-driven thinking that makes the work seem inadequate in itself.
As Jameson notes in Postmodernism, the idea of the market ("Leviathan in sheep's clothing") exerts a totalizing force, with economists such as Gary Becker explaining how any possible desire, conscious or unconscious, can be configured to conform to production functions -- mathematical models of inputs and outcomes -- and thus be rendered rational. Jameson sees this as a desperate attempt to salvage the promises of freedom and equality capitalism rests on but never can deliver. In his view, spontaneous order is an expression of despair at how individuals are never really free in the sense of being able to intervene in their destiny, which remains governed by motives dispersed throughout the system and directed by no one. Instead "cynical reason" (Peter Sloterdijk's term for "enlightened false consciousness") in the form of semi-ironic consumerism reigns as the only freedom we know, and we accept it as compensatory.
But does the gift economy, productive volunteerism, do anything to disturb that analysis? Is there an alternative form of freedom from market rationality in working hours for free on a Linux patch or in distributing your fan fiction online? Or has the compensation changed from money to attention or recognition. (if this is true, what does it say about the devaluation of money, which can no longer secure a fundamental human need such as community recognition?) Fox talks to Yoachi Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who posits a sweet spot between exploitation and cooperation whereby corporations can capitalize on this outpouring of volunteer labor: "The key, Benkler says, is 'managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.' " His view is opposed by Nicholas Carr, who argues the market will eventually co-opt volunteer labor by learning how to value it and price it. It seems like work being done for free is either being subsidized elsewhere (as perhaps with Benkler's book; he's a Yale professor and may have been paid by the university to research and write the book) or is pleasurable in its own right, the way most work is markedly not -- we do it on our own time, with our own goals in mind and via methods we've improvised that make us feel most engaged.
But does the gift economy recuperate Bataille's notion of expenditure -- does it serve as a refutation that any act can truly be nonproductive? Also, does it refute the strange notion that true freedom is incompatible with production, that it must consist in some free play that yields only abjection? It seems more likely that people enjoy being useful but have that natural impulse perverted by a market system that insists that gratifying that impulse alone is not enough. The market encourages to suspend that impulse and pursue profitable but personally meaningless activities. Then we rescue the impulse in our private hobbies. The wealth of networks lies in bringing to account all that energy expended in hobbies without corrupting it with the taint of market-driven thinking that makes the work seem inadequate in itself.
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