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.

Foucault's Facebook (18 March 2009)

This Gawker item about the Facebook redesign offers a useful phrase for thinking about Twitterification generally: We are expected to be, or become, "omnivorous consumers of momentary trivia." Not only that, but we are expected to produce that trivia ceaselessly and eagerly. This calls to mind Foucault's ideas about power exercising itself not as repression -- that is, as forbidding us to speak or to act in certain ways -- but as permission, as a kind of broad encouragement to speak (albeit through discourses that constitute our identities along certain prescribed lines). Our participation lets power work through us, which we can experience as being exciting -- as being part of the action; we are all under surveillance, but we understand that emotionally as "Hey, we're all celebrities!" Foucault calls it "control by stimulation." This is why people seem to feel compelled to use Twitter. We want to participate, want to be counted, want to count.

I assume someone out there is working on a dissertation (or has at least posted a really incisive blog entry -- maybe among these) that does a Foucaldian analysis of social media (which I would be eager to read actually) -- it fits so well with his predictions of a panoptic society. We are spying on each other (that's certainly how it feels when someone tags me in a high school photo), and confessing ourselves to everybody else (in hourly 140-character broadcasts), and mistaking it all for entertainment consumption, ordinary leisure activities.

Social media tends to be understood as a kind of freedom to express ourselves in a new way; interactivity liberates us from one-way communication and affords us the opportunity to speak and participate. But this "freedom" can function as a kind of compulsion, as part of what Baudrillard et al. called the "fun morality." Foucault insisted that power is both decentralized (not a matter of some authority telling you what you must do) and productive (it allows more things to have a kind of social being, not fewer; creates more data, not less). In an interview in Power/Knowledge, he says, "What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse." Various modern technologies have brought about what he calls "a new economy of power" that allows "the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted, and 'individualized' throughout the entire social body." In other words, there is no way to sneak around power because we are basically bathing in it, breathing it in and out at all times. Twitter-style discourse is the latest instance of a social discourse that functions this way, reinforcing the compulsion to confess. The "effects of power" Foucault is talking about, I think, is a matter of our being available -- power makes us available to various social institutions so that are efforts can be harvested and our behavior channeled accordingly without our even conceiving of resistance.

The sadness of Michael's (17 Jan 2009)

This may be a pointless either/or question since it can be trumped with the response of "both and" (which is a useful trick, by the way, kind of like switching causes and effects to derive theoretical "insight"). But it interested me anyway as a sort of thought experiment. Which is preferable: (1) discussing a professionally produced song or a film or whatever with a friend or (2) sharing with one another songs or films or mashups or whatever that you've made yourselves. I think I prefer the former but often preach the latter. Sharing stuff you've made too often closes off the possibility of critical discussion or interpretational analysis, devolving instead into what my high-school friends used to call ballwashing. "Oh that's so cool! It's so great that you're doing that..." Often artistic professionalism is the cue to audiences that they are allowed to engage seriously with a work, to have an opinion regarding what it was about, to devote the resources to analyzing it, or even to allow themselves to enter into it vicariously. Often with homemade productions, I feel myself holding back, because I have this dread that I won't be able to share the (frequently critical) insights that I would thereby derive. Often, I have the suspicion that the desired and appropriate response is "That's great that you are doing that. Yay, you!" (Maybe I'm just a jerk.)

This question occurred to me because I was in Michael's, the chain craft store, earlier today, and it struck me as a great big repository of sadness. I'm sure scrapbooking and collecting rubber stamps brings great joy to many people, but all I could imagine was failure of creativity inherent in purchasing a decorate-your-own-mug kit or any of those kits where the manufacturers try to package the creativity inside, an effort to assuage purchasers of the fear that they won't be able to rise to the occasion and think of their own mug slogans. "We've thought of the project for you, all you have to do is follow directions." These kits are basically the home-consumer version of deskilling. Rather than sell the raw materials of soapmaking, Michael's sells you a soapmaking kit which pre-empts your learning how to make soap for real. The same is true for dumbed-down computer applications: Most of the people who have GarageBand on their iMacs will never record a song, let alone become musicians (though it presence does allow for some pleasing flights of fantasy about what you could do.) All that tends to happen when an artistic process is simplified to make it accessible to casual, semi-invested would-be creators is the production of substandard products that no one can possibly take seriously. No one who was serious about making something would stock up at Michael's for supplies, right? The chain stands as testimony to the collective crippling of our imagination.

Generally, information has never been easier to come by, yet it's never been harder to turn information into knowledge. Instead the volume of information is an incentive to dabble in things rather than delve into them in pursuit of some sort of mastery, no matter how slight. Is it better to know how to make really good pesto from scratch but nothing else, or to have ready access to many different kinds of passable microwavable meals but know how to make nothing well. (Or is that a particularly nefarious both-and situation?)

I feel a little guilty in bashing Michael's, because my intent isn't to dump on the people who shop there, reject them in favor of some superior set or artistic professionals. But some sort of process of professionalization seems necessary to bringing about a meaningful exchange between maker and user -- a social relation must be brought into being in which the exchange itself matters more than the personal relation. Of course, in capitalist society, professionalization is a matter of getting paid. Making money is the mark of professionalism -- transforming a production into a commodity for sale and finding success in vending it. Get to that point and you show that you're not just dabbling; you are trying to make customers of others and live up to their expectations. That discipline elevates the product beyond hobby and craft -- you're not just dilettanting around.

But professionalism needn't automatically be defined by money -- by selling out to the Man. It could instead be seen as a matter of creating something that isn't merely an extension of one's ego, a matter of wanting to give a social life to some idea or thing that will can then circulate independently from us. Amateur culture often fails to achieve that separation, doesn't rise to level where it can be seriously criticized because it seems that its primary purpose is to secure recognition for the maker. A noncapitalist understanding of professionalization might resemble flow, losing oneself in a process, wherein the end product is secondary to the creative experience itself but not a matter of total indifference. Instead it could have a ready path to manifesting its social usefulness, to finding an appreciative audience without having to be explicitly marketed -- and having its meaning permanently altered by that discourse.

Utopian internet folk probably have this in mind, that the internet becomes a low-barrier-of-entry distribution channel that permits our work to become socially useful without having to be channeled through capitalist means of production first. Unfortunately, capitalist media companies and various internet startups (often under the guise of enhancing the read-write web and so on) have by this time managed to embed themselves online between most home producers and would-be consumers, and in much in the same way as Michael's kits, the use of these intermediaries' services tend to taint our productions automatically with amateurism. Thanks to the corporate-owned easy-to-use services, the space that had been opened on the internet for a different kind of professionalism is now being flooded with look-at-me productions. If we are all narcissists, we'll all remain amateurs, which offers an interesting, albeit functionalist, way to look at the modern efflorescence of narcissism -- it seems as though there is an incentive to try to make us that way, insecure in who we are and preoccupied with gaining recognition. But sadly, a MySpace page will never make us web designers any more than a paint-by-numbers kit will make us artists.

Teen angst continuing to pay off well (22 Dec 2008)

When I cast about for a possible silver lining to the recession, I continually return to the idea that it could at least destroy ephemeral trendy fashion outlets as consumers retrench, hold on to things longer, and focus on spending for necessary goods. The NYT article suggests I can't even hope for that.

In one of the darkest holiday shopping seasons in decades, perhaps it is fitting that a retailer has been given new life by vampires.
While sales at most stores plummeted last month, the teenage retailer Hot Topic enjoyed a 6.5 percent gain, thanks mostly to brisk sales of gear inspired by “Twilight,” the teenage vampire movie.
As the nation’s retailing landscape has deteriorated, Hot Topic is one of a handful of chains that seem to be coming out ahead. The most obvious winners are discounters like Wal-Mart Stores and BJ’s Wholesale Club, which are helping American families trade down to cheaper merchandise. But another, more surprising group of beneficiaries has emerged: niche chains that cater to teenagers and young adults.

Because the crisis has mainly impoverished those with tangible assets and the former ability to rack up debt, it has left teenagers largely unaffected for the time being. With the deflation currently coursing through the economy, they may even felt relatively enriched.

Youth-lifestyle marketer extraordinaire American Apparel, for example has continued to thrive:

Marsha Brady, creative director for American Apparel — which in November had a 6 percent increase in sales at stores open at least a year — said the key to its continued success in this economy is its demographic: young, single, urban creative-types accustomed to living on a shoestring.
“They hear about the stock market but stocks are something their parents worry about,” Ms. Brady said. “They don’t own anything. They rent. They’re not really facing foreclosure or falling property values. If anything they’ll just get another roommate or move into a cheaper rental. It’s not utter devastation to their cores.”

In other words, teenagers and "kidults" are too stupid to see how the economic trouble affects them and are most likely to continue wasting their money as they always have. It's only when the kids' allowances or trust funds are affected that American Apparel might see some red ink.

But it's not as though it's irrational for youth-culture consumers to behave this way.The largest worry in the lives of these "creative types" is not retirement savings or anything so banal; it's being cool in the eyes of one another. Often. coolness is actually their only asset, which is sad, since that is one of the few things that remains more volatile than the current stock market. For companies like Hot Topic, which trade on that volatility and thrive on it, that paucity of assets is the essence of their business model. They can harness the inevitability of aging, or the uncertainty of nascent friendships in a dog-eat-dog social environment, to forge an engine of profitable insecurity that leads consumers to overvalue the significance of coolness. Such companies have every incentive to undermine the possibilities of consumers escaping from the youth ghetto and developing other kinds of value, more productive forms of human capital.

Blaming the weather (4 Nov 2008)

It's hard to write about anything serious while waiting for the election to be over. My hope is that Obama wins convincingly, the Republican party becomes even more reactionary and Palinesque, and the sensible conservatives form their own third party, so that there can be grownup debate in this country again about issues. It seems like U.S. politics in general, perversely enough, would be well-served by a real far-right party (just like they have in such countries as Austria and Germany and France) where wackos can gather, lodge their petulant protest against reality, and stay out of the arena of meaningful politics. As it is, they are muddling the picture when there is a great deal to do. America needs serious policy debates about the economic intervention and foreign policy, and we can't afford to waste time with nitwit nationalism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, and race hatred.

Anyway, more of that later, I'm sure. In the meantime, I thought this post from the PsyBlog, about the way weather doesn't actually affect mood, interesting. The post cites two studies that suggest the correlation between mood and the weather is almost negligible, which raises the far more interesting question of why we believe the weather is so significant.

Denissen et al. (2008) suggest that we may be responding to a culturally transmitted idea that weather affects mood. Effectively we think the weather has significant effects on our mood because everyone else thinks and says it does.
We may also pay a disproportionate amount of attention to a very small number of people who really do have what has become known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). These people report that their moods are very strongly associated with the weather. While it might be assumed that this connection is the same for everyone: winter = sad, summer = happy, the data collected by Denissen et al. (2008) doesn't support this. Instead it suggests there are just as many people with SAD who become sadder in the summer and cheer up in the winter. But for the vast majority of us there is no effect.

This pattern of mutual social reinforcement probably has something to do with it -- a consequence of people ceaselessly and needlessly talking about the weather -- though it certainly doesn't feel this way when we are in a good mood, and we want to ascribe it to something. We want the weather to be for us alone, to reflect our tremendous significance to the world. We never feel so important, perhaps then when our mood and our milieu seem to magically coincide, as if the climate has been specially contrived just for us.

As someone who dislikes sunny days and enjoys a good mist, these findings are reassuring, though perhaps I should be upset that something special and contrarian in me has had its basis in fact threatened. There's nothing special in being inured to the sun.

It's probably more convenient to blame the weather rather than what is really causing a down mood, since you can't expect to do anything about the weather, so you can remain passive, thereby reinforcing one of the primary traits of down moods. Possibly, weather-mood connections are established not in response to actual behavioral changes but ahead of time as a kind of moral imperative -- it's sunny so you should want to go outside and enjoy it. You should feel glad you have this opportunity to get more done in the world. My aversion to sunshine actually has more to do with weather bullies than the sun itself, though the UV rays are no good for me either.

Ironic tourism (7 Nov 2007)

The Economist had a brief piece about tourism in North Korea that wanted to do the classic journalistic move of mocking the thing its reporting on and those who would care about it while validating at the same time the inherent interest of the thing being dismissed by bothering to publish a story about it at all.

Global capitalism has worked many wonders, but where in the free world can one see 10,000 children dancing in synchronisation, dressed as eggs? Such weirdness makes North Korea, a basket-case state, a must for a certain sort of backpacker.

This image helps give a sense of what they're talking about:

Now, I'll admit to being that sort of backpacker in my imagination, and I know I shouldn't be; it doesn't do to be snickering at totalitarian regimes as if these egg dances are the worst indignities the people who suffer under them have to endure. It's easy to laugh and forget about the starvation, surveillance, deprivation, fear of random imprisonment and ceaseless propaganda that makes life a cynical grind. It's easy to want to commodify that experience and consume it from a far:

It seems that the tourist board realises the ironic appeal of such things: painted replicas of some of the most over-the-top bits of propaganda are for sale, and a post office does a roaring trade in stamps depicting mighty fists crushing Western imperialist aggressors.

Those are some grim souvenirs when you think about it; what makes them kitschy for their target market is the fact that they are imposed on the miserable people who are not free to laugh at them. Owning such propaganda items as an American is a way of consuming our own freedom as a gloating entitlement, a way of celebrating it to the degree that it comes at the expense of others. Look at us, we're free to laugh at the emblems you must fear. Ha-ha.

Still, I enjoy reading this kind of article, imaging myself as the correspondent staring out the window of the "Alcatraz of fun" where Western tourists are consigned during the Mass Games and idly contemplating with great detachment the economic misery of others. I imagine this would make me feel more alive, like I was less living in a bubble of prosperity, preoccupied by small-scale personal issues. Maybe the sight of such misery would blot out awareness of any such personal problems; this might be the appeal of this kind of magazine article, for that matter.

People take pictures of each other (12 July 2007)

A sentence in one of Walker Percy's essays from The Message in the Bottle has had me thinking of this Kinks song: "People take pictures of each other, just to prove that they really existed." It's one of my favorite Kinks songs, partially for the perfect timing of the first snare drum hit in it but mostly for the lyrics, which would be cynical if not for the overriding sadness. (This is how I sometimes see myself.) The verses end with this: "Pictures of things as they used to be, don't show me no more, please." For a song on an album album often accused of reveling in nostalgia, it's a pretty stark sentiment. "The nostalgia is sickening," these lines seem to say, "I've wasted my life being a spectator of myself."

The sentence from the Percy essay comes after a discussion of the dilemma humans are confronted with in the modern era. Because science makes a general case out of all individual cases, and scientific discourse is regarded as the only authentic discourse, people find themselves to be inauthentic, recognized only insofar as they resemble other people. "This is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible." This struck me as another way of understanding the overwhelming urge people have to mediate their lives through communication technology -- recording themselves and their impressions in an endless stream of digital photos and blog posts and text messages and so on. The cell phone seems above all a portable self-mediation device, capable of recording anything and reliably putting people at a remove from whatever situation they find themselves in. In that way it works most of all like a security blanket, making sure one is never abandoned to naked reality, forced to really experience what is there and nothing more, with no ability to preserve it or project it in to the future, to put oneself in a position to consume it rather than experience it.

Percy makes a similar argument about tourism, that people surrender their sovereignty over interpreting what they experience in order to be able to consumer their own experience as something packaged, something storeable and fungible -- we may secretly prefer experience as currency rather than something ineffable and irreplaceable. Or as Percy claims, we are made vaguely uneasy by the fact that we are deprived of our own ineffable life experience, but we are powerless (due to our habit of language) from preventing ourselves from commodifying everything. "The consumer is content to receive an experience just as it has been presented to him by theorists and planners," Percy suggests. We consume representations and we remained estranged from things in themselves, and we judge experience in terms of how well its been translated into information -- by what kind of story it would make, by whether others will be jealous, etc. I wonder if there are any alternatives, though.

Stumbling on Bibles (14 June 2007)

On a recent flight I traveled beside a 13-year old boy who spent most of the flight not munching complementary pretzels and sucking down Cokes or watching the Ryan Phillipe movie most of the other passengers "enjoyed" but reading passages from the Bible he carried with him. Why I found this reassuring, I can't immediately say; perhaps it was as Zizek theorizes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, and I was comforted by the material presence of an object that resonates belief -- it believes so that I don't have to. Its very existence, and the boy reading it, establishes beyond doubt the reality of a whole substratum of faith without my having to make any spiritual effort. Zizek cites a Stalinist expression: "Whatever I may be thinking, objectively I am believing" thanks to the presence of an object that connotes the material reality of belief. I don't have to believe myself to be in an objective state of belief -- this is why cultures have often developed designated mourners that can do the formally required grieving, freeing up the bereaved to take care of more pressing matters. So in this case it may be that I have convinced myself that the passenger beside me has freed me to write blog entries and play computer chess (about which more later) by carrying the visible signs of his belief with him, participating in that great religious stratum in American society in which I grumblingly subsist but in theory I'd be lost without. I need the forms of spirituality enacted around me to not be troubled excessively by spiritual questions myself. I need there to be religious folk so I don't have to be religious myself. I have faith by proxy.

I'm not entirely convinced by this reasoning, though Zizek's use of it to explicate laugh tracks is pretty interesting -- the shows laugh so we don't have to, and we can experience enjoyment without making the effort necessary to understand, make the movements in our thought to produce genuine amusement, laughter. We can rest assured that we participated without effort, which is its own reassuring satisfaction, the pleasures of passivity. As Zizek puts it, "Even if, tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterward that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time." In other words, a really good time can be had merely by mimicking the form, perhaps more so by mimicking the form rather than genuinely experiencing pleasure. Purer pleasure is always already secondhand, mediated, predigested, since this preempts the difficult questions of purpose, why am I bothering with pleasure? What is this pleasure supposed to accomplish?

Which brings me back to Bibles. One of the comforting things I find about the Bible is that it is a book whose meaning is almost entirely exogenous; it makes little effort to justify itself by present a thesis, by mounting a coherent and unifying argument, by rationalizing its heterogeneity. This means that despite the laborious efforts of concordance, the work to organize the text and being it all to account, it still promises the leisure of unstructured reading; it invites being picked up and flipped through at random -- hence the divination procedure of opening it at random and trying to deduce the horoscopic relevance of the passage chosen. Approaching the text with that spirit feels as though it frees us from the hassles of belief as well; we can demystify the words by reading them without preconception, without needing to understand them, and this becomes a practice of faith as well -- we can take care to not make any interpretations to assure our faith's perfection. We validate the religious without partaking of it; haphazard Bible reading thus becomes a kind of homeopathic remedy for becoming overwhelmed with theological complexities and conundrums and puzzles, which after all may lead one to question faith, to question the spiritual altogether. Thus the path to spiritual sublimity may be a principled ignorance, taking for granted what you are searching for without necessarily suspending your quest or conceiving its ultimate end.

March madness (19 March 2007)

The NCAA men's tournament is now almost universally known in America as March Madness, presumably because the insane amount of college basketball excitement drives fans absolutely delirious. And the lunacy is supposed to build until a champion is crowned a few weeks from now. But that's not exactly how it plays out. The phenomenon has now far outgrown people who actually care about college basketball or know the slightest thing about it, so that part of the madness has to be that rubes who know nothing about the sport (me) are willing to wager in bracket pools where they try to predict the winner of every single game in the 63-game tournament. This plays out like a prolonged lottery, with buzzer-beater jump shots taking the place of ping-pong balls being suctioned out of a vat. And excitement doesn't build as the weeks go on, it tends to fizzle out, even though the games become generally more competitive. Unless one is affiliated with one of the schools, one probably doesn't especially care who's going to win once it no longer can help the bracket.

So for many, the madness seems confined to the first Thursday and Friday of the tournament, when 64 teams are wittled down to 32. Not only can one still be optimistic about one's bracket picks, which are still fresh in mind, but one can get swept up in the thrill of underdog victories, for this is the round where the true underdogs compete, and inevitably a few of them pull off unlikely victories against the established athletic powerhouses. This affords commentators a chance to bring out all the bromides about teams working hard and being disciplined and having faith and believing in their coach, their dear leader and so on, or perhaps the other team was complacent and ill-prepared, lazy, unmotivated, not working together as a unit, taking their success for granted. All these ideological notions become more salient the greater an upset the outcome is, and it's easy for the novice to figure that out. The teams are conveniently seeded with numbers, so you know exactly how shocked you should be at an outcome.

But what's most "mad" about these first few days is that they constitute a pseudo-surreptitious holiday for those working at offices, as office betting pools are typically condoned, along with tracking the games' results from one's desk. It can seem a mini office Mardi Gras, in which ordinary rules are suspended or turned upside down, and you are watching TV at your desk. But March Madness still permits office workers to have the sense they are getting away with something. Last year, CBS made live video streams of the games available for the first time over the Internet, and introduced the "boss button" innovation, which allows you to hide the mini-screen on your computer with one click. This institutionalized promise (and this should tip everyone off that it is not in any way subversive) that the network is on your side in being sneaky and fooling management creates the illusion that for these few days, the worker is winning. This is the real Madness. Hence the slew of newspaper pieces calculating the lost productivity that is alleged to stem from people paying attention to the tournament -- this is not so much to chastise American workers as to give them a sense of the scope of their pseudo-triumph against the bosses (who often organize the betting pools themselves). But nothing is being wasted; instead the pressure that has built up in the social system of production has an opportunity to be let off in a controlled and entirely expected fashion. After the first two days of the tourney, few enough teams are left that all the games can be scheduled during evenings and weekends. This ends the madness and returns office life to business as usual.

Computerized scheduling and on-demand consumerism (4 January 2007)

Wal-Mart dominates the retail sector because it perfected just-in-time logistics (only as much inventory as will be sold), minimizing overhead costs and allowing the company to charge lower prices. This in turn attracted more customers, which eventually gave Wal-Mart the enormous scale of operations that allows it to bully suppliers and dictate its own terms to them in order to hone its supply-chain logistics even further -- a tidy little feedback loop. Now Wal-Mart hopes to improve its bottom line by treating workers, whom it has vigorized preventing from unionizing, in the same way it treats inventory, employing them on a just-in-time, as-needed basis. This WSJ article by Kris Maher, which is surprisingly sympathetic to the worker's point of view, has the details:

Staffing is the latest arena in which companies are trying to wring costs and attain new efficiencies. The latest so-called scheduling-optimization systems can integrate data ranging from the number of in-store customers at certain hours to the average time it takes to sell a television or unload a truck, and help predict how many workers will be needed at any given hour....
But while the new systems are expected to benefit both retailers and customers, some experts say they can saddle workers with unpredictable schedules. In some cases, they may be asked to be "on call" to meet customer surges, or sent home because of a lull, resulting in less pay. The new systems also alert managers when a worker is approaching full-time status or overtime, which would require higher wages and benefits, so they can scale back that person's schedule. That means workers may not know when or if they will need a babysitter or whether they will work enough hours to pay that month's bills. Rather than work three eight-hour days, someone might now be plugged into six four-hour days, mornings one week and evenings the next.

In this post, Brad Plumer elaborates on the employee hardships Maher mentions: "Another problem, of course, is that 40 percent of Wal-Mart's employees will soon be part-time workers. Many of them—and many of the full-time workers, too—need to find second or even third jobs to make ends meet. Of course, it becomes near-impossible to find another job when you have to sit around 'on call' and can't predict your schedule from week to week. Ah, but at least the Bureau of Labor Statistics can record an uptick in 'productivity,' and economists can then sit around and wonder why median wages aren't going up too. So it's all good..."

Wal-Mart defends this by reminding everyone how great this will be for customers.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark says the system isn't intended to schedule fewer workers, and hasn't where it has been implemented so far. The company says that in one test last year in 39 stores, 70% of customers said the checkout experience had improved. "The advantages are simple: We will benefit by improving the shopping experience by having the right number of associates to meet our customers' needs when they shop our stores," Ms. Clark said.

But what about workers, whose lives will be made much more insecure? "Some analysts say the new systems will result in more irregular part-time work. 'The whole point is workers were a fixed cost, now they're a variable cost. Is it good for workers? Probably not,' says Kenneth Dalto, a management consultant in Farmington Hills, Mich.

Probably not? Of course it's not good for workers. It only amplifies the chaos in the already often chaotic lives of the poor. As Jonathan Cobb argues in his afterword to The Hidden Injuries of Class, class is a matter of being reminded that your time is not valuable, not nearly as significant as other people's time, other people who presumably do something much more useful with it. If you are poor, lower class, you can always be made to wait. If you are important, you can have things "on demand." Wal-Mart is telling its employees that the time of every single person who comes into a Wal-Mart store is more valuable than that of those it entrusts to serve those customers. Of course, any of us can become one of those customers and suddenly feel important, but that is the deeper charade at work -- that we will ever be able to buy dignity and self-respect by being a consumer rather than earn it by doing meaningful social work. This development makes it plain how improvements in serving the customer are typically translations of ways of screwing the worker (who is essentially the same person). On-demand consumerism, then, is compensation for how our time is routinely demanded of us; the more on-demand consumerism we expect, the more we accept unreasonable demands on our time from our employers.

other Desert Cities

Part of my trip to Southern California was spent in Palm Desert, one of the "other Desert Cities" referred to on the I-10 exit sign for Highway 111, which runs from Palm Springs out to Indio, before it heads to that environmental disaster area known as the Salton Sea. ON the way there from L.A., you first pass through the wind farms in the mountain pass and the creepy rows of wind turbines that render the landscape alien and forboding. Harvesting wind energy seems a good idea, but still, the hills seems to have been colonized by some relentlessly churning alien life-form -- I felt like I understood the concept of visual pollution at a visceral level. The whirring blades are mesmerizing, in a bad way. They create a delirium of planes and angles shifting and changing in a lulling rhythm, making it impossible to see anything else. It's a wonder there aren't more accidents on that winding downhill stretch of the freeway, where it seems like the average traveling speed is around 85 miles per hour. Beyond the turbines, you enter Palm Springs, the desert city that is not "other" and is the oldest of the group. It's an unremarkable town that sits in the shadow of a stupendous mountain. The sublimity of the landscape makes the human doings there seem a bit insignificant, piddling, so it's suitable that most of what goes on there is golf and tchotchke shopping From there, on 111, you enter Cathedral City, then Rancho Mirage (home to the Betty Ford Clinic, a rehab center), then Palm Desert, where we stayed. From the highway these towns are indistinguishable -- just one shopping strip after another, with some hotels interspersed here and there. Streets are named for moribund performers: Dinah Shore, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Fred Waring. I could think of no good reason to be there, and that was what made it perfect.

Unlike most touristy places, which garishly try to cajole you into doing and spending, thrusting temptations your way and working to intensify your restlessness, Palm Desert was an oasis of sobriety. No wonder the rehab centers are there. No wonder people talk of going to the desert to dry out. At night -- we were there on a Saturday night, and it was quiet as the moon -- even the lights were subdued; so much so that most of the stores and restaurants seemed to be closed, seemed indifferent to our business. There were activities imploring us to attend -- no bands playing, no limited-run reperatory cinema, no places to see or meet people, no night life of any kind. It seemed like we were so alone. It was beautiful.

Having nothing to do and feeling no pressure to do anything exciting are two very different things. It seem like anything we turned to was going to be fulfilling. We went to the outdoor pool in the warmth of the evening and sat in the hot tub and when we got too hot, we went swimming. We met a few recent graduates of the "program," which seemed to be a Betty Ford euphemism. We went to eat at an anonymous chain restaurant and received pleasant, generic service. We felt like nobodies in nowhere land. I wished we would have booked a longer stay.

I'm always troubled by forced leisure, so much so that vacations rarely feel warranted or comfortable to me; they often seem like an alternate form of work. I feel like I'm trapped in what Baudrillard calls the fun morality, the obligation to treat leisure productively, to use it to manufacture distinction if nothing else. It's very hard to just waste time, to let yourself destroy it. The pressure can become intense to find something useful to do with the vacation time, made artificially precious by the meaningless work it's framed with. It can lead to moments of self-consciousness within the vacation -- which remove one from the present moment and place in time and sends one to the purgatory of hypotheticals and second guesses: Am I really living up to the time I've been allotted? Has this all been worth it? Worth what? What is the point of comparison?

Living in New York, I'm constantly aware of ambitious people, and the pressure they put on themselves and the people around them. It's in the pace of everything that happens, and I become infected with it -- it shows in the way I am ready to run people over on the sidewalks when they aren't going fast or in the impatience I freely exhibit when the person in front of me dodders around for exact change while I'm anxious for my coffee. Los Angeles has similarly ambitious people, though it seems to exhibit itself there as a kind of desperation to be paid attention to rather than a heedless haste. But when you reach the other Desert cities, ambition seems a million miles away. Urgency is unthinkable there. It dawned on us that this could be the point of the place, to evaporate ambition in the dry heat and leave you adrift in endless expanse of undifferentiated time. The ultimate vacation is from ambition, from the need to score distinctive accomplishments -- to remove yourself from the ongoing competitive status game that haunts our every action. In the desert cities, places that don't especially want tourists so much as retirees, who are beyond ambition and anxious only to fill out the rest of their days with pleasant distraction, that vacation, possibly a permanent one, is always waiting.

Leisure counselors (12 August 2006)

The two-day weekend is something we tend to take for granted in America, as natural and normal as breathing oxygen or driving thirty miles in stop-and-go traffic to get to work. Of course it is of relatively late provenance in the history of labor, and I'm sure at the time, capitalists resisted shorter work weeks with all their collective might as if it would mean the end of all productivity gains. But now is no time to elaborate the lump of labor fallacy.

Anyway it's interesting to read about how it can feel just as unnatural to those not acclimated to it. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal had a story about yeoga kwallisa, or leisure counselors, that the Korean government has begun to use to convince Koreans that it is okay to relax on Saturdays. Though, as the article reports, most Koreans resist the idea and worry about the economic burden leisure will allegedly impose, in truth leisure is business; leisure allows workers to work as consumers and prop up the segments of the economy that rely on free time and boredom to thrive: entertainment, services, luxury consumer goods, lifestyle accoutrements.

Though the article highlights Korea, leisure counselors are by no means limited to nations new to shorter work weeks. In America we have an entire elaborate industry that tries to tell us how to relax and entertain ourselves; because the free time is not especially organic -- it's not a product of needing to take it easy after great exertion, it's no wonder we don't know what to do with ourselves and look for guidance.

And it's no wonder that we feel under pressure to enjoy ourselves, constrained and compelled by the fun morality Baudrillard writes about -- the imperative to manufacture distinctive signs of being leisured. Leisure, relaxation, basically don't come naturally; I'd like to think optimistically that this means we are inherently predisposed to be productive, which is why an economy's chief measure of success ought to be how well it provides people meaningful work, not solely how much growth it is capable of generating. This is basically a nostalgic attitude, I know, conjuring up some non-existent golden age where people worked until they were tired on things that made them happy and then enjoyed themselves with authentic folk culture, lost communal rituals. It certainly was never quite so simple, and who knows if we'd be able to experience that simple, limited life as pleasurable. The modern pleasures may have something to do with building new communities and new rituals from scratch, again and again.