Smooth-jazzed into submission (27 Oct 2009)

Having spent the weekend in a Hilton hotel in Hartford, Connecticut, this essay from Travel & Leisure by Peter Jon Lindberg, about "bad" music in corporate spaces open to the public, resonated with me (via NYT Ideas). The Hilton was particularly aggressive with the piped-in smooth jazz, which blared in the lobby and the coffee shop and the bar and the elevators and the indoor pool and the fitness center and possibly even the business center, which incidentally was basically an extortion scheme for those poor businesspeople who break their laptops during their stay. (The center offers you the opportunity to rent an old computer at the rate of 99 cents a minute. And don't think you get internet access included with that, or with anything having to do with your stay with Hilton. In fact, the Hilton was out to nickel-and-dime patrons at virtually every level of service. Parking for $18 a night? $15 for the internet? This is not at all how the resort is portrayed on Mad Men.)

Lindberg's essay is an intermittently amusing exercise in fussy snobbery:

Some people are irked by bad lighting, excessive AC, the reek of European men’s cologne. I’m hopelessly particular about music. Background sound tracks can make or break my impression of a place—and these days every place has one, from wine bars to Williams-Sonoma. Too often it’s employed with alarming incompetence.... I’ve walked out of otherwise appealing shops that elect to blare Maroon 5. I’ve hung up on reservations lines that put me on hold to “Groovy Kind of Love.” I bring earplugs on planes to block out not the roar of the engines but the insipid pabulum of the boarding music.

You get the idea. His taxonomy of Muzak is spot-on, though -- Bebel Gilberto, Gypsy Kings, Amadou & Mariam. The idea is to evoke thoughtless, non-intrusive cosmopolitanism, the fantasy that global homogeneity is just one slick programmed beat away. Lindberg reserves special opprobrium for Sade, whose 1984 release Diamond Life was one of the first non-rock cassettes I ever owned. Like Hiltons across America, I believed it would make me seem sophisticated.

Lindberg ends up focusing on Muzak as professionalized aural branding for corporations trying to negotiate the diverse tastes of their clientele, and he even celebrates it, as long as it is "hip" -- that is, suits his indie-rock tastes. That seems like a cop-out, but after all, the piece was published in Travel & Leisure, not Adbusters or something. But along the way, he cites an academic paper by business professors Alan Bradshaw and Morris B. Holbrook, “Must We Have Muzak Wherever We Go?: A critical consideration of the consumer culture,” which argues that the copious deployment of background music "support concerns that culture is degraded by marketers as a means of social control."

By methodically testing the effectiveness of certain types of music to elicit certain behaviors in commercial spaces, canned-music suppliers instrumentalize music, make it "deployable" instead of listenable. Simply schematizing our emotional responsiveness to music may ruin it -- giving credence to the frequent complaint that music criticism kills what it anatomizes. Music is "de-aestheticized": The songs remain the same, but the uses to which they are put (as "retail atmospherics," in the marketing jargon) irreparably alter how we can hear them. We can't pay attention to it with the goal of immersing ourselves in it. It becomes background music everywhere -- it gets iPodded, etc. Further, when music is deployed in this way, we no longer have the option of simply listening to it, of having an unmediated response to it. Music retains its emotional efficacy, but that efficacy is co-opted and used to achieve the ends of those deploying it. When we choose to hear something, we are giving our consent to be moved by it, but when it's foisted on us, we are vulnerable to those properties in music that slip by our conscious defenses. We are moved against our will, to purposes that aren't our own. These include efforts to make us buy more and buy specific things, but more surprising is the suggestion that "less pleasant music" affects our perception of time and theoretically makes waiting in line seem to pass more quickly. Bradshaw and Holbrook, pictures of academic neutrality, put it this way:

Apparently, more distasteful music will make the queue appear to move more quickly. Really loathsome stuff should make the wait breeze by in a jiffy. So can it be that the onslaught of diabolically annoying sounds that typically assaults the unwilling victim on such occasions – the most offensive canned drivel imaginable, epitomized by garden-variety vanilla-flavored squeaky-clean middle-of-the-road bland-as-blazes Muzak – actually makes the time seem to fly?

This speaks to Bradshaw and Holbrook's more general point: Background music is meant to manage us, not entertain us. Whether people "like" it doesn't figure in to the decision to pipe it in. They cite Adorno's lament over our loss of the right not to hear music. (This puts a different spin on Keats's verse: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.")

If background music can be so effectively instrumentalized, is its ultimate purpose not any particular local effect but a general conditioning of consumer-citizens? Is it subliminal orientation to our role in the totally administered society, or some such? "As we have demonstrated, music plays a complicit role in creating this conveyor-belt style of organized consumption, coaxing customers to travel at suitable speeds through a retail setting dependent on the manager’s manipulation," Bradshaw and Holbrook write. They critique "consumer-culture theory" -- that version of cultural studies that regards consumerism as a form of expression and rejects ideas that social control could be implemented top-down through cultural products. Consumers, to that view, are "more than capable of defending themselves against the onslaughts of commercially-entrenched brain washing." But the efficacy and ubiquity of background music suggests otherwise. Consumers don't transform it; they tolerate or ignore it while it works semi-subliminally. Music helps regulate our internal rhythms and synch them with the necessary flow demanded by capital. Often, we ignore background music, which suggests it's working as it should and we are in that flow. When we notice it, when it galls us, we have become sand in the gears of postindustrial society.

I used to think this meant we should complain loudly and often about piped-in music, to prove that we are still alive. The melodrama helped me regard a gesture that cost me very little effort as something truly revolutionary -- that is where I would take my last stand, against Natalie Imbruglia in the supermarket. But is this a matter of my performing my discontent, which gives me a stake in the persistence of background music, to give me my rebel identity? Bradshaw and Holbrook note how resistance is typically co-opted, and perhaps only registers when it is available for co-optation:

despite the tendency toward market resistance, the ultimate performed resistance is ironically market-mediated (Kozinets 2002) so that resisting one market discourse of power merely generates another (Thompson 2004). The phenomenon of a countercultural brand community entails a basic paradox.

The problem with resisting Muzak is that it plays immediately into self-presentation, how we use our tastes to market ourselves. The critique of background music is always already defused by the fact that the credibility and motives of the complainers can always be questioned. Many things in consumer society seem to work this way. The idea that we are all "brands" engaged in our ongoing identity projects, just like the corporations, levels the moral playing field and preempts resistance.

Desire dependency (7 April 2009)

I wonder if I am alone in this, but I am always surprised at hard it is to want things, how much effort it takes to manufacture desire. Of course, in our ordinary lives, it seems easy because the marketing infrastructure is there to serve us, to prompt us to impulsiveness. But I am in Madrid right now, and I don't understand the language or the culture at all really, and I have this nagging sense that I should want to go shopping or something but it all seems pointless and tiring. I don't know what I am supposed to want in part because I can't decode what is even in the stores half the time. I find myself trying to interpret the fonts, find some temptation in them. But combined with the language barrier, the absence of marketing that targets me specifically has left me feeling oddly and disturbingly bereft. Who knew that advertising was so critical to my knowing who I am? Maybe Judith Williamson was right about the interpellating force of advertising discourse -- they call out "Hey, you" to me, and when I respond, I know just who I am.

Without my being aware, I think that consumer culture has persuaded me that shopping is a natural way to conceive and express not only desire but creativity -- the ability to know what to want, how to want it, and how to daydream and fantasize through it, and ultimately how to put it to use. Whenever I travel, I realize that I rely on marketing for those sorts of ideas to a degree that makes me ashamed. I'm discovering that without comprehending ads, without understanding why certain things are being sold and who they are supposed to be for, I'm without desire, and without desire, I don't seem to exist. Suddenly it seems as though there is no place for me; suddenly I must make an enormous effort to make places my own. I suppose experienced travelers are adroit at that; they know what sort of experiences they wish to have because they emanate from within them, from the well of their prior experiences.

But I'm not used to making that sort of effort and have been deprived (or have deprived myself) of such experiences by the sensorium of marketing that I typically exist within. So as I wander the streets here, I float around with no particular drive to accomplish anything. I look at things without understanding at first, seeing them as though for the first time. Since I'm used to seeing the commercial world through the lens of my own desire, it is odd to see it from a different perspective, to have to place its meaning on a different register. "Wow, so that's a children's shoe store," I'll think to myself, and wonder why it is there, in that particular location, and who might go to it, and who might own it, and what sort of childhood it implies, and so on -- all questions I think I know the answers to intuitively and instantly when I am in the U.S. (But what do I really know? The ideology embedded in common sense.)

And since I am less distracted by the meaning of objects, the temptations of desire for things and their meanings, I notice people more, which is good I suppose, but it intensifies the feeling of loneliness. I don't know how my set of signifiers registers to anyone, so I feel invisible.

I suspect I could get used to it, this blank naivete, and even embrace this particular and peculiar form of alienation as a traveler's euphoria, or even more, as a return to some authentic self, but I would have to learn how to generate impulses for myself again. Maybe these would seem more real and true to me, even though there would most likely be far fewer of them, and I would still probably interpret that void as a lack of creativity. Would I be able to relearn how to desire before I began to understand the foreign marketing materials better? Probably not.

Outsourced motivation (20 March 2009)

At the Atlantic's website, Reihan Salam files a report on the tech companies debuting projects at South by Southwest, which has apparently transformed itself into a milieu for venture capitalists rather than A&R men. (Related question: In our iSociety, has music become subsumed under technology?) Salam highlights the proliferation of services that attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. He describes Loudcrowd, which serves up social games to isolated people, commercializing our reluctance to be out in the world where we can't control everything. Channeling Allen Bloom, Salam writes that Loudcrowd suggests to him "anomic dystopia" -- I guess I'd define it as a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can "unite" us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services like Loudcrowd seem to meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. Increasingly, simply hanging out seems like wasted time unless someone is keeping score or is broadcasting it to others who are not there.

We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. As Salam notes, It's easy to imagine this evolving into a social engineering system in which we are told what we should enjoy by virtue of how many points some commercially interested party has assigned it. But where he points out that "this concept of layering games over real life is an extension of something we all do: apply our own standards and expectations to the social world," he fails to note that these services are endeavoring to perform that function for us, pre-empt our own standards while substituting their own.

Meeting with your friends too boring? Social life too uncompetitive for you? Enter Foursquare, "an ingenious service that turns finding your friends into a Zelda-like quest," according to Salam. He quotes this description of the service from the NYT:

Foursquare players "check in" via iPhone application, text message or the Web. That alerts their network of friends to their current location, in case they feel like dropping by to say hello or have a drink. (If you're flying solo, or on a date, Foursquare allows you to check in without posting your location.) Players rack up points for checking in at unusual places, early hours of the morning or in the same location as other users in their network.

It seems strange that we would need to incentivize ourselves to have a social life, but that seems the inevitable outcome of technology-assisted convenience. Convenience tends to be a matter of avoiding interpersonal hassles in favor of a solipsistic world in which we have individual control over as much details of our experience as possible. The ideal, from the perspective of technology, would be a situation in which we don't have negotiate any aspects of shared space or time with anyone. "Sharing" itself would become passe. (Where's the incentive?) Instead, we broadcast at one another from our hermetic worlds. Why trouble yourself with reciprocity when you have the tools to broadcast yourself to those who happen to be interested, and filter out what bores you among everyone else's broadcasts.

Drawing on Will Wilkinson's argument about the proliferation of coexisting status hierarchies making us all feel like achievers (as if these are not themseleves ordered into a hierarchy), Salam suggests that these virtual games mapped on real life are useful because they "introduce new hierarchies designed to make life more fulfilling and fun at a faster rate than we've seen in the past." Generally, that seems like a grim take on human nature, that it requires hierarchies for their to be fulfillment and fun -- that winning is the only joy we know. But stranger, especially for a conservative like Salam, is how he posits acceleration as basically beneficial. This seems to me another of technology's detrimental effects, given our consumer society -- tech is tailored for increasing our cultural consumption throughput. Making social life into a game, quantifying it even more precisely, seems very likely to exacerbate that tendency, nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value. ("I wanted to see that painting show at the Met, but I saw that the Guggenheim was worth more so I went there instead." "Would have went to see your band, but seeing the band playing at Mercury Lounge was worth more points. Sorry.")

Sex and travel (13 Feb 2009)

I went to see Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her last night and left fairly perplexed. His films are frustratingly discursive that they seem haphazard (and half-assed) to me while I'm watching, but then afterward, I usually find that there was something to it after all if I can force myself to think it through.

In 2 or 3 Things, as in many other of his 1960s films, Godard starts with the idea that being an attractive woman in the city is a very mysterious proposition. He can't bring himself to then demystify femininity; instead he intensifies the mystery, revels in it, seems to honor it, which makes his films seem sexist. A specific type of young Parisian woman becomes the generalized Other that is longed for but impossible to apprehend. If I were a woman, this would probably irritate the hell out of me. But Godard, to his credit, seems interested in further questions the derive from this ideal he can't quite relinquish: What if you are that Other? What is the other for the Other? Are women their own other, doomed to spiral into narcissism? Or do they withdraw into some deeply inaccessible inner space within urban modernity that can only be caught in oblique, accidental glimpses, in the interstices of everyday life.

That idea warrants Godard's strategy of just sort of following women around town rather than fashioning a plot. Of course, he's adopting Brechtian techniques, eschewing tried-and-true methods for drawing viewers in (making us like characters and care about a suspenseful story) and instead making efforts to heighten our discomfort and our awareness of conventions. So 2 or 3 Things begins with the actress Marina Vlady introducing herself to the camera as herself, quoting Brecht on how to read dialogue as if it were being quoted, and then introducing herself again as the character she is supposed to be in the film. But she is never wholly one or the other; she is both playing herself and a role at all times, both the subject specified in the script (assuming there was one) and her objective self. So it is for women in cities generally. They are intensely objectified by the attention they attract in quotidian urban life and serve as fantasy objects, occasions for dreams of escape, akin ultimately to consumer goods, with which Godard juxtaposes them, especially in 2 or 3 Things. (The film closes with lights dimming on an array of branded products laid out in a kind of graveyard.) Living with that burden, women must at the same time fashion their own means of escape, in part to preserve their own subjectivity. So in the film, Vlady is often speaking out existential riddles and philosophical speculations in the midst of pursuing stereotypical female activities -- washing dishes, shopping for a dress, putting on cosmetics, getting a haircut at the hairdresser's, taking care of children, and so on. Frequently these question the role of language in framing desire and limiting our ability to know ourselves, as Godard cuts to advertisements, and other signs with words printed on them, cropped to be meaningless and without context. The language through which we know ourselves is being denatured, afflicted with unsettling meanings by its commercial use. And women, the implication seems to be, are acutely aware of being both signifier and signified, of being the subject and object of discourse, with their essential being strewn between these dichotomies, impossible to resolve.

Godard ups the ante considerably on this female subject/object problem by making the women in the film prostitutes (more sexism), seeming to suggest that all women are confronted with the issue of whether to exploit their objectified femininity. Through their scrutinizing gaze, men have turned women they see in the city, on the street or in the cafes (where someone is inevitably playing pinball), into consumer goods. To make the connections explicit Godard has the women sell sex, which seems to stand in for feminine mystery, and escape generally, for the men who purchase it. Godard memorably illustrates this in a ham-fisted (yet awesome) scene in 2 or 3 Things when a john (wearing an American flag T-shirt) has the women he's hired wear airline-issued carry-on bags on their heads. In an earlier scene, the rooms of a brothel hotel all have cheery travel posters on the walls. Sex and travel are brought together in the commercial exchange for a woman's time and attention, and thereby made into manifestations of the same male desire for novelty and mystery. (In one telling non sequitur, a man in a cafe -- named Bouvard, one of the clownish autodidacts in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet -- calls out an order for mystery-flavored ice cream.)

If sex is the degree zero of desire in Godard films -- the essence or representation of all the other forms desire takes -- then prostitution is emblematic of the general corruption and exploitation of desire in general by social institutions, by capitalism as a system. It's a somewhat hackneyed metaphor for what consumerism does to desire, how consumerism "solves" the problem of desire. It sells us inadequate substitutes for that fulfillment while convincing us we don't want the entanglements that go along with pursuing true desire. Desire requires our full vitality and presence; consumerism tells us we can't live up to that standard and it's easier and just as well to have prostitutes, tourism, brand-name goods, etc., instead. It's fun to visit jouissance, but you wouldn't want to live there.

So the real subject of the film is how to preserve true desire and find it within the quotidian in modern city life. Women, he seems to suggest, have an inside track on this. But alongside that theme is some inchoate material about Vietnam and something about suburbanization -- the film charts Vlady's journey from the banlieu on the outskirts to Paris and back, and frequently the camera lingers on highway construction sites and brutalist apartment towers. The city as a technology for facilitating social exchange, a whispered voice-over tells us, is being replaced by new media -- television, telephones. We would now add, the internet. But in these films, is the city the last hope for nurturing real desire -- a place where spontaneous social interaction can be fruitful; where we are not stuck permanently in predetermined ruts that make desire beside the point -- or is it one of the earliest first technologies for replacing desire with alienation and convenience, one that is now being supplanted and perfected in new media? Maybe I need to watch Weekend to get to the bottom of that.

Motivational research and the death drive (16 Feb 2007)

I picked up a copy of Vance Packard's classic ad-scare polemic, The Hidden Persuaders, in a thrift store recently -- a Pocket Book edition that originally cost 35 cents. It's not even a pocket-size paperback, and the dried, no-longer-adhesive glue cracks every time I open it. I love the cover, which has no illustration, just alarmist announcements of all of marketing's mind-control-like secrets -- whose salaciousness is barely concealed, if at all: "WHY men think of a mistress when they see a convertible in a show window. WHY women in supermarkets are attracted to items wrapped in red. WHY automobiles get longer and longer." What makes Packard's book such an effective piece of propaganda about psychologically oriented marketing is that it always suggests that the stupid shopping decisions we make aren't our doing really but the result of evil advertisers' manipulation. This twist lets readers pretend they can have the pleasures of shopping without the responsibilities; it puts their consumerism in the passive voice. Reading Packard's sensationalized accounts of Pierre Martineau (whose Motivation in Advertising is a kind of companion volume to Packard's book, well-worth reading, if only for its genial cynicism) and Ernest Dichter (a perfectly villainous sounding name for the founder of Motivational Research), we can become incensed at all the ways we have been tricked or gloat to ourselves over all the times we resisted and outsmarted Dichter's overlords, the devious ad men (always men in this 1950s text). Packard's outrage that science would ever be employed to exploit people -- that scientists might love money more than an abstract notion of humankind and posterity -- has a refreshing naiveté to it, and I'm pre-sold on the argument that consumer society needs to invent a new kind of consumer who wants to buy, buy, buy constantly, as if against his own will.

In Packard's account, depth psychology is deployed to "invade the privacy of our minds" and sell personality to people who hadn't even realized they needed more of one. And consumers must be made to feel constantly discontented and led to think it common sense that buying something more could fix that feeling. (This is sometimes celebrated as a ambitious faith in innovation, a force that keeps the economy growing.) At times he hints at the considerably more interesting thesis that depth psychology may actually invent the notion of personality, the desires that adhere to a lifestyle concocted on some paste-up board on Madison Avenue -- that motivational research posits and inculcates the motivation that it originally sought to merely describe. Packard works to make the line between description and inculcation hard to draw, so that once a shared human preference is noted by psychology researchers, it is immediately instrumentalized into something to manipulate people to behave in ways counter to their best interests. Common advertising tropes -- the promise of transformation, say -- yield irresistible symbols (never mind how these change over time -- long cars become big trucks, I guess) that can operate on us against our will; suddenly we become helpless at the subliminal sight of ice cream, we are duped into becoming brand loyalists by the clever way our subconscious desires are toyed with. One chapter describes women being literally hypnotized by products in the supermarket.

It's easy to mock the alarmist histrionics and complain about the paternalism this analysis seems to invite -- the restriction of ads to protect people from things they only seem to want. (The libertarian would be prompted to argue, If individuals can't be trusted to know what they'd prefer, why should we then trust a government agency to decide it? From this perspective any desire we might feel is valid by definition, and it's absurd to argue that we are duped into wanting cosmetics or big, dumb cars or cigarettes or whatever.) Ads become like drugs -- people seem to derive pleasure from them, but it is a pleasure that works on a reward system that is out of the individual's rational control and is therefore dangerous. This interpretation intrigues me because it is sometimes overlooked that ads are not merely reeducation campaigns but do provide pleasure -- we enjoy resisting them, enjoy submitting to them, enjoy the way they stock our imagination with fantasies and give us a shape for our aspirations. But they also make us angry at all the other forms of experience they crowd out or cannibalize. Our ambivalence ultimately provides enough of a wedge for ads to slip through and colonize everything; they become an ambient presence, inevitable, about as worthwhile to complain about as smog or litter. The power to do anything about ads is obviously beyond any individual's control, so we make our own private deals with them, getting what we can.

Packard went on to write about planned obsolescence in The Waste Makers, which pushed the notion that society is trained to celebrate wastefulness, usually in the form of fashion, which champions change for its own sake, or for the sake of establishing hierarchy. In the margin of that book I had written a note about comparing planned obsolescence to Veblen and Bataille's "The Notion of Expenditure," which ridicules the common sense notion of utility. Seeing all utility as confining and disciplinary in its rationality (usefulness implies production, which implies work), Bataille argues for a kind of anti-utility in destructive play, "expenditure," a pointless waste that society nonetheless relies upon: "luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, art, perverse sexual activity." Veblen rationalized waste as "conspicuous consumption" -- showy displays that attempt to establish one's wealth incontrovertibly. No one feels richer than the guy lighting $100 bills on fire. Waste, for Veblen, is not waste but a status purchase.

But Bataille follows anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who in Essai sur le don links wasteful displays to potlatch rituals, competitive gift exchange which often verges into sacrificial waste. The greatest glory (which Bataille defines as the most absurd and rapacious waste) comes with losing the most; it's a short leap from there to the masochistic impulse of surrendering all of your will in a perfect potlatch gesture that can't be topped. This ties back to the manipulative ads that can dictate our will; these ads fulfill this fantasy of surrendering our will but within a safe context, where the repercussions are small and contained -- the ads are socially tolerated safe zone for this kind of submissiveness. Ads can make us feel rich in will, so rich that we can give it up rather than exercise it.