Deeper Into Commodification (29 March 2011)

Reihan Salam has some criticism of the ideas in a few of my recent posts here, in which he points out that as insecure and isolating conditions may be under new capitalism, they were worse before, in the Fordist era. He highlights particularly the "dramatic advances made by women in educational attainment and market production" under the neoliberal order. He suspects that I might be nostalgic for the old order of things (odd that a post at the National Review would seem to imply that I am too conservative!) and argues that Fordist conditions were a historical anomaly rather than a useful point of comparison.

I think I definitely mislaid my emphasis if I come across as though I am advocating a return to 1950s social conditions. Obviously I have reservations about how social relations are being shaped by conditions today, but I don't think we can or should try to turn back the clock. I think Salam is right that in many ways what is happening with the "proliferation of small-units, e.g., small firms and cultural niches" is a re-emergence of some of capitalism's early dynamism, providing opportunities that many experience as wholly beneficial. But whereas Salam writes that he would argue "that the collectivity and security we’ve lost is being replaced by new forms of collectivity and security that are preferable in many important respects," I think those new forms are destabilizing and subtly coercive. I don't think the old forms are preferable; I guess I keep writing about these ideas because I believe that there are new forms that aren't being realized, that may be interdicted by the necessities of a capitalist organization of the economy. That is, the new forms of social relations offer certain freedoms at the cost of having to commodify oneself at a deeper level than wage slavery required, with more of everyday life subsumed into capitalism, made business like, subject to its procedures of rational calculation. Some of what stems from that is good: At times work is more harmonious with one's overall life, at times it feels good to have the market assess the quality and extent of one's sociality, at times the flexibility increasingly expected of us prompts us to be and feel more creative, at times our self-consciousness leads to a rewarding consideration of what other people are thinking, and not just what they are thinking of us.

But the negative aspects are inseparable from those positive aspects. Richard Sennett outlines some of those negative aspects in The Culture of New Capitalism, which I wrote about here. I think social media exacerbates both the positive and negative aspects, which is a pretty nebulous position, I know, but I try to disguise it by writing mainly about the negative things. I think that social media seems to promise to be a respite from the pressures of life under neoliberalism, but it ends up serving mainly as a vector for those same pressures. That suggests a missed opportunity to have structured an emerging phenomenon differently.

Salam suggests that I am someone whom he "disagree[s] with as completely and comprehensively as one can disagree with another human," but it seems we probably agree that economist Albert Hirschman is very much worth reading. Salam links to his paper "Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?" (sadly a gated link) which I also highly recommend and which amply illustrates that there's nothing new in disagreeing about the predominant social and psychological effects of markets, whether they are civilizing, integrative, alienating, etc. Hirschman writes,

For capitalism to be both self-reinforcing and self-undermining is not any more "contradictory" than for a business firm to have income and outgo at the same time! Insofar as social cohesion is concerned, for example, the constant practice of commercial transactions generates feelings of trust, empathy for others, and similar doux feelings; but on the other hand, as Montesquieu already knew, such practice permeates all spheres of life with the element of calculation and of instrumental reason. Once this view is adopted, the moral basis of capitalist society will be seen as being constantly depleted and replenished at the same time.

That seems right to me. Social media represents new threats to and possibilities for the perceived moral basis of capitalism. I emphasize the threats because I tend to think that undermining the moral basis for capitalism might lead to a better economic system (as I think the downside of omnipresent instrumental reason outweighs the gains from doux commerce), though I am wary too about lapsing into a sort of "heighten the contradictions" approach. I think social media and personal branding and so on reveal what has been true of capitalism all along but in muted, and possibly more tolerable forms. If capitalist ideology assimilates social media, another opportunity for fundamental change will be lost and capitalistic subjectivity will have been retrenched at an even more intimate level and with our social lives more thoroughly organized along capitalistic lines, there will be fewer places from within everyday life where it is possible to imagine an alternative.

Optimistic ways to be negative (26 Jan 2010)

Going through the archive of this blog, I came across this post, about negativity. There I confess to having a knee-jerk skepticism about things billed as optimistic or positive, particularly when those terms are being used as synonyms for "feel-good" in the midst of a recommendation. I haven't changed much: My first instinct is still to read "optimistic" as actually meaning "short-sighted" or "blinkered," and to see positive spin as ideologically motivated hoodwinking. The role that blithe confidence and animal spirits played in the economic crisis has probably only made me more skeptical -- it's no good if too many people are persuaded to ignore their natural human tendency toward risk aversion. And the incentives are all in place for the financial sector and the media to collude in puffing up confidence, which I am taking to be broader than a mere willingness to spend or invest. This is obviously speculation, but complacency with one's culture would seem to reinforce a blind confidence in the general economic situation, and vice versa. And a habit of resistance and skepticism about culture seems good practice for a similar skepticism towards salespeople, investment schemes, and peddlers of financial products. After the events of the past few years, could one possibly err on the side of being too cynical? Haven't the bailouts and the events leading up to them proven once and for all that most of us lack the imagination to be cynical enough?

Frederic Jameson's gloss on Marcuse, which prompted my earlier post, seems worth quoting again: "Thus it is that the happier we are, the more surely we are given over, without even being aware of it, into the power of the socio-economic system itself." But "happiness" must be understood in a particular way, as a specific kind of narcissism endemic to consumer culture. The kind of happiness Marcuse and Jameson are talking about -- in my interpretation, anyway -- is the special satisfaction of self-fashioning with the tools afforded us by consumerism. It is a matter of experiencing a moment of cool because one is doing the approved things, or doing new things in the approved way, or is generally adding new flourishes and wrinkles to the carnival of public consumption. It is the happiness of online "sharing," of participation in pseudoevents, of what Marcuse called repressive desublimation -- the removal of moral and intellectual engagement from pleasure, and its transformation into a kind of compulsion or addiction. Jameson: "It is only when individual happiness, subjective contentment, is not positive (in the sense of ultimate satiation by the consumer society), but rather negative, as a symbolic refusal of everything which that society has to offer, that happiness can recover its right to be thought of as a measure and an enlargement of human possibilities."

Back in 2005, I endorsed the idea of resistance for its own sake.

What matters are acts of resistance, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant—not laughing when the laugh track cues you, not saying “have a nice day” when you don’t mean it, adopting a stubborn literalism in the face of “witty” ads trying to win you to their snarky side, etc. One can help but be implicated in the consumerist system—one can’t simply stop shopping unless one has survival resources that extend beyond what the typical American habitus equips one for. But one can begin to seek out the sorts of tactics Michel de Certeau writes about in The Practice of Everyday Life, the subversive moves wherein the producer’s intentions are subverted by the consumers in an effort to manifest a sense of life outside of the market hegemony. Debord advocated cultural detournement, taking cultural artifacts and parodying them, using them in ways opposite to how they are intended. Sontag called it camp, approaching culture with an incisive irony that turned the consumer society’s soporifics and stupefiers against it. All of these are semi-idealistic, optimistic ways to be negative.

I'm less salient about those approaches now; cultural resistance seems to have been absorbed into what it attempts to resist. The problem with consumer culture is not its content but its form; when we express our resistance with the tools supplied to us to publicize it, our acts of local refusal become general endorsements of the larger system of cultural mediation. (Whatever we complain about on Twitter may be bad; Twitter itself is okay.) It is imperative to resist when we can, but what we end up having to resist the most is the petty vanities of celebrating our own resistance.

Lonely in traffic (8 Dec 2008)

This is something to consider as the U.S. prepares to bailout its hapless auto industry. Jon Garvie reviews Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic for the TLS and highlights some of the problems with car culture that Vanderbilt elucidates. Driving allows us to travel faster than the speed of human thought while expecting us to interpret the intentions of the other people we must interact with while traveling. Unable to communicate and process what is happening fast enough, we outsource our conscientiousness to the system of signs, a textbook case of moral hazard. Our trust in the system belies the real dangers. And the signs seem to supplant our need to recognize the humanity and frailty of other drivers -- it's as though the signs do it for us and take them into account. "A line of vehicles crawling along congested roads at 20 miles per hour imitates nature. That speed is the maximum at which even Olympians can run. It is also the limit beyond which humans cannot maintain eye contact and other, vital, non-verbal forms of communication." At higher speeds, we can no longer comprehend one another. The faster we go, the more isolated we become.

Though we experience driving as freedom (when there is no traffic, that is, to remind us of other people's wills), driving nonetheless requires great amounts of coordination and cooperation; it's probably one of the last things we should go into expecting to be liberated from the hassles of other people. In our car-fostered feelings of isolation, interpersonal mores no longer seem to apply and we regard it as alone time -- "me time." Meanwhile, we should feel terrified:

In order to absorb the gulf between the risk of death and the reward of a trip to the supermarket, we require elaborate coping strategies. Economists have suggested that a dagger attached to the steering wheel and pointed at the driver’s chest would represent an automobile’s “negative externalities” accurately. Instead, we have tended to buy SUVs (more likely to crash than smaller cars), with airbags and computerized gizmos which provide illusions of control. Often, while driving, we eat, text, talk, or drink as if to quell the panic which similarly dangerous situations produce.

In spite of all the danger, we cling to our cars in America and insist upon their overriding convenience, and the independence they allegedly supply. We transform them into overriding status signifiers, emblems of our autonomy. Garvie cites Margaret Thatcher's statement that “Any man who rides a bus to work after the age of 30 can count himself a failure in life,” which I certainly experienced as truth when I lived in Arizona. If I told someone I rode the bus, they would assume I was either joking or was on some sociological do-gooder mission to see how losers live. This kind of attitude becomes a near-insuperable barrier to change. Grown-up people I knew in Tucson truly believed that it was "impossible" for them to ride the bus. Not only did they not know how it could be done, where the stops were or how to get a schedule, but it struck them as a physical impossibility -- they would just as soon jump off the roof and start to fly to their destination. And I basically felt the same way. I had a car, because that is what you did as a middle-class adult. Anything else would be making a statement, and I just didn't have the energy or the investment to be constantly making that statement as I went about my life, let alone the hours to waste on the inferior mode of transit. I wasn't going to burn a few hours getting to and from the grocery store.

But the independence implied by the car way of life, the class privilege it seems to codify and attribute to our own pluck or inborn entitlement, is illusory, since in reality, of course, it requires a massive infrastructure to allow us to get our motors running and head out on the highway. Politics must direct public funding in that direction, presumably at the expense of more social and collective modes of transit. And this infrastructure makes possible further isolating modes of signifying class -- suburbans detached homes, yards, exurbs, etc.

Perhaps that movement to protect ourselves from the terror of everyday life by embracing a faux convenience happens more generally -- that we try desperately to relabel alienation, anomie, angst (the three A's of late-stage capitalism) as something more amenable, or even something we regard as positively beneficial. "It's so awesome that I have so little human connection in my life -- fewer interruptions while I am watching TV!" Convenience (generally the avoidance of hassling with others) is often the recompense for social isolation. Every moment we experience as convenient, then, is a disguised moment of terror.

Trollope's The Way We Live Now (4 Dec 2008)

Trollope's The Way We Live Now, seems a novel well suited to our times. It's about what happens to a society in which speculative motives have supplanted the traditional moral codes governing economic and social behavior -- how bubble psychology plays out at the various levels of society and affects the various relations between different classes of people. Trollope unobtrusively works the theme into his different plot strands: we see speculators in the marriage market, speculators in aristocratic titles, speculators in a fictitious railroad scheme; cheats at cards, cheats at establishing literary reputation, cheats in the game of love, cheats in self-representation, and so on. Aristocrat card players issue their own illiquid commercial paper and reputational bubbles swell and burst.

In his workman-like way, Trollope take us through the thought processes of his characters, who, unlike those of so many other Victorian novelists, at least succeed in coming across as adults. In The Way We Live Now, characters are generally rationalizing their own selfishness by referring to the apparent selfishness of others -- the overriding mode of moral reasoning during a bubble. Presuming that everyone is in the midst of calculating how to press their advantage leads to an overwhelming cynicism that one adopts by default. It becomes to hard to conceive of the possibility of authenticity, of a disingenuous self-presentation. (Hetta Carbury, maybe the least tainted figure in the novel, captures this well when she says to her mother of a suitor, "He has to me that air of selfishness which is so very common with people in London -- as though what he said were all said out of surface politeness.") Genuine emotions are so routinely turn out to be vulnerable weaknesses that the characters instinctively resist them and ultimately succeed in banishing the notion of having them from their minds for the most part.

This gives the novel moments of genuine tragedy, when we recognize that the characters can't acknowledge their own natural sympathies, and the opportunity for real love and mutual understanding with others passes them by. Over and over, Trollope illustrates the alienation that stems from calculating rationality. If they sense them, they dismiss the possibility of acting on them, mainly because they are skeptical that such feelings aren't a social trap, but also because they are so habituated to scheming. They are self-centered without taking much pleasure in it, which suggest the demeanor is imposed on them by the times -- the way they had to live then. Speculation had become an end in itself -- it becomes gambling addiction, where winning is beside the point of always finding action, always having a live bet. All the characters are subsumed by variations of this compulsion.

In a world where cynicism is virtually universal, belief becomes a valuable commodity. In this regard, the interpersonal intersects with the economic, as a capitalist economy runs on trust, or at least on trust transformed by capital into its economic aspect, credit. But credit, in Trollope's novel, is a means to pervert the human relation of trust into something exploitable, into something that may easily be misrepresented since it is not a lived relation but a contracted simulacrum of a relation. Lady Carbury, the hack writer who hopes to ingratiate herself with the dubious financier Melmotte, poses this question -- the question of the age, it seems -- to one of her editors: "If a thing can be made great and beneficial, a boon to humanity, simply by creating a belief in it, does not a man become a benefactor to his race by creating that belief?" One can imagine many advertising professionals asking themselves this, as well. Nothing is real, anyway, right, so should we give people the opportunity to dream big? But the question also suits the Ponzi scheme high-finance has become in our time. As we have discovered, it is easy for the untrustworthy to secure vast amounts of credit; there are no moral tests to pass before one can pile on leverage.

So it's not surprising that this piece of analysis from financial consultant Greg Curtis (posted at Barry Ritholtz's site) seems a summation of the themes of Trollope's novel:

In our view, poor risk controls, massive leverage, and the blind eye were really symptoms of a much worse disease: the root cause of the crisis was the gradual but ultimately complete collapse of ethical behavior across the financial industry. Once the financial industry came unmoored from its ethical base, financial firms were free to behave in ways that were in their – and especially their top executives’ – short-term interest without any concern about the longer term impact on the industry’s customers, on the broader American economy, or even on the firms’ own employees.

Anticipated terrorism of everyday life (7 July 2007)

The Buttonwood column in the most recent Economist takes up the topic of terrorism in the wake of the recent foiled plots in the U.K. Despite the "frightening prospect that terror tactics perfected in Baghdad might be brought to the streets of Britain on a regular basis," financial markets barely reacted, and investors seem "completely unconcerned." This leads the columnist to virtually speculate that terrorism is accepted as a given aspect of society, that it's already built into the structure of things and factored in to the decisions made on capital's behalf.

Perhaps this points to an admirable sang froid on the part of investors. Terrorist attacks kill far fewer people than car accidents, so why should they have a long-term impact? After all, mainland Britain survived 20 years of bombing by the IRA and Spain's economic growth has not been thrown off course by the activities of ETA, the Basque separatist group. Provided the violence is sporadic, people have to carry on with their daily lives.

The radical place to go from this sort of thinking is to conclude that of course terrorism is presumed as given; capitalist society itself, with its gale-force winds of creative destruction, can be viewed as inherently terroristic. The random disruptions of terrorists plots, successful or not, are possibly analogues for the instability necessary for continued innovation, for the insecurity that finds redress in the stable certainties supplied by consumerism ("We never close").

This is close to the ideas sociologist Henri Lefebvre advances in Everyday Life in the Modern World, where he conceptualizes the terroristic society in terms of compulsion carried out at the level of the quotidian. He seems to have in mind the pervasive ideology of competitiveness and individualism and materialistic hedonism that makes it a draining struggle to resist the currents pulling people toward passive consumption, convincing people to be satisfied with material comfort as opposed to fulfilling, meaningful activity. Terroristic society, Lefebvre argues, presents limited human potential (being realistic) as a precondition for what one experiences as freedom (accumulation of goods). But in such a society, terror is so omnipresent it becomes invisible:

In a terrorist society, terror is diffuse, violence is always latent, pressure is exerted from all sides on its members, who can only avoid it and shift its weight by a superhuman effort; each member is a terrorist because he wants to be in power (if only briefly); thus there is no need for a dictator; each member betrays and chastizes himself; terror cannot be located, for it comes from everywhere and from every specific thing; the 'system' (in so far as it can be called a 'system') has a hold on every member separately and submits every member to the whole, that is, to a strategy, a hidden end, objectives unknown to all but those in power, and that no one questions

What Lefebvre conjures here is a panoptic sort of society, where individuals in perpetual competition police each other and themselves in accordance to a ideology that champions atomization, etc. Everything that bears mainstream ideology (other-directed success on society's prevailing terms) becomes terroristic -- he singles out fashion and the ideal of youthfulness as exemplary of the operations of a terrorist society.

Obviously this is not the kind of terrorism that involves randomly blowing up buildings in the name of a religious creed. The question is whether such bomb-exploding events disrupt the fabric of the "terroristic society" -- the panoptic prison where we presumably live lives of quiet desperation -- or are an integral, structural part of it. Do they succeed in opening a rift in the seamless operation of the "system" or are they merely part of that system, flying a false flag?