Infinite sustain (31 July 2007)

Chris O'Brien, who's written a book about beer and sustainability issues, told me about a trip he had taken to Chico, California, where he visited the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. It doesn't publicize its efforts very much, but Sierra Nevada, it turns out, is fairly committed to environmentally sustainable business practices, as this section of the brewery's website makes clear. It wasn't the easiest thing to find there; you have to peel a few layers back before you find the tab somewhat cryptically marked "Our Environment," which takes you to the page that details the brewer's efforts to supply its own energy and produce energy from its waste product and recycle and so on, all without compromising its product or its ambitions -- currently Sierra Nevada is one of the largest craft brewers in the U.S. and its product has become fairly ubiquitous.

As Chris was telling me about this, I wondered, Can Sierra Nevada continue to expand its market share without undermining its environmental commitments? The question that seems to me central to sustainability and business is whether the pursuit of economies of scale doesn't at some point require a business to sacrifice its commitment to sustainable practices, which seem to prescribe limits beyond which energy consumption and labor exploitation and various forms of resource arbitrage become inevitable. If consumers all decided they approved of Sierra's methods and wanted to show it by consuming its product, it would become threatened by its own success, or become so expensive that it would reinforce the idea that conservation is a luxury of conscience for the well-to-do.

One could argue that the limits on a business's ability to expand are organic ones, natural, constituting the natural size for human communities, but technology muddles the demarcation of these limits. Also, now that we are accustomed to globalized culture -- the availability of the world's output just about anywhere, the triumph of logistics and container-based shipping, etc. -- it would be hard to experience a truly local culture as natural, to see the return to localized idiosyncrasies (which have always been typified for me by local music scenes) as anything but a loss in the richness of the fabric of life. Of course, it is easy to posit arguments about how local culture is actually richer, thicker with community involvement, community specific customs and mores -- the lost folk culture I was lamenting in an earlier post. It also would make travel much more meaningful, because it would be much harder to replicate the consumption patterns one is familiar with elsewhere. A return to local culture might even displace the centrality of consumption to much of our leisure time experience.

But I know I would react badly to the loss of access to goods from abroad; I would feel deprived, even cheated. And it is hard to sell deprivation and lack of choice as a kind of liberation, though in trivial non-material cases, it sometimes can be; removing optional paralysis can sometimes lead to a lot more personal productivity, a lot less time wasted on choices that seem important but really route ones energy away from the activity the choice is supposed to facilitate and back toward a debilitating self-consciousness and endless procrastination: what will people think of me if I wear this shirt? What will they think if I read this book on the subway? You can use a prolonged decision making process to avoid doing anything while flattering yourself that you are wrapped up in important deliberations. I spent days agonizing over what kind of laptop to buy, dwelling on all the specifications and how they would impact my fantasy of using it to get all this work done out and about. If it weighs under 5 pounds, will I carry it with me more places to get things done? How much memory should it have, in order to run which applications simultaneously? Will I need it to be powerful enough to run audio editing and recording software, so I can use it as a portable studio? I thought a lot about these things, elaborating daydreams where the computer would enable me to complete all these aborted projects while spontaneously generating all these new and ever more absorbing ones. But now that I've bought one, all I do with it is connect it to my TV to watch downloaded shows.

The problem with taking away consumer choice in favor of local, sustainable business practices is that living with consumerism has instilled in us its values, which equate freedom of choice with freedom in general, so that an "arbitrary" limitation on our access to things -- for arbitrary will be how it would seem, now that we are familiar with what can be made possible, with the great diversity that can be brought to our store shelves -- seems like an encroachment on our rights as American citizens. We also prefer purchasing power as a proxy for a political power because it exempts us from coming up with a coherent ideology. It also reinforces another value pervasive in consumer societies, the primacy of individualism. Where consumerism reigns, individualism is less a matter of being able to do whatever you want without interference than it is synonymous with the ability to assemble a unique collection of goods that one owns personally and which seem to constitute one's unique social identity. It's easier to feel autonomous when your social role -- who you are in your community -- is determined not by what you are capable of doing or what you are permitted to contribute but by what the magic of the economy allows you to buy for yourself. This arrangement allows for the illusion of much greater independence from those around us; you can walk into a mall and experience the fantasy of being able to become whoever you want, immediately, through a series of well-considered purchases.

So in prioritizing sustainability and localized production over expanded consumer choice and identity construction, different values would have to be disseminated. Privileging local community and small-scale sustainable economies would have to seem like something other than vain utopianism (local communities, theoretically invested with richer and more-binding traditions, could possibly be more repressive than decentralized "open" societies) or nostalgia for a less complicated time. And people would have to reconceive the ways in which they understand their own potential and value -- not in terms of how many options they can supply themselves with but in terms of how satisfying the relationships in their lives can be made (or some such rot).

That's where Chris, if I understand him correctly, believes companies like Sierra Nevada can play a part. He found it odd that Sierra Nevada wouldn't make more of an effort to link its product with the environmentally conscious manner in which its made. This might serve to take the taint of wishful thinking away from such sustainability projects as the one Sierra Nevada is engaged in and make it clear that it could be a feasible and natural part of the economy with which we are familiar. But the minute the brewery begins promoting itself as a green business, it instrumentalizes environmentalism and makes it serve as marketing tool, a reputation builder, rather than an end in itself. This could have the effect of alienating the very audience who remains skeptical of environmentalism by making it seem the province of the privileged, the latte liberals, the coastal elite, etc. They won;t buy into sustainability once it seems like its something people want to congratulate themselves for, once it seems a means to an individualist end -- this seems to take the narcissism of consumerism and larders some hypocrisy on top. To put it in terms Jon Elster uses in Sour Grapes, a reputation for environmentalism is a necessarily a by-product and not something that can rightly be the aim of a set of practices. Publicity would undermine the perceived purity of Sierra Nevada's motives. Instead, it must rely on people like Chris to spread the word of its greenness for it, protecting it from seeming to exploit environmentalism, reducing it to a trend. But then, any advocates must also be careful not to become too strident as well. Elster cites Stanley Benn, who argues that "political activity may be a form of moral expression," but this must be tempered with care that it not become merely moral self-expression, "middle-class radicalism" as most forms of commodified rebellion expressed in shopping endorsements or lifestyle choices turn out to be. As Elster points out, "there is no such activity or kinesis as 'acquiring self-respect,' in the sense in which one may speak of the activity of 'learning French.' "

The point here is that one must be a true believer to make proselytizing a worthwhile action; the minute one begins to consider how what one is doing makes one come across as the sort of person who does such things, then all is lost. One becomes a vanguard hipster who's trying to pass for a fellow traveler -- the social relations at stake are reduced to ego politics, and one's praxis is a dim reflection of the system one pretends to want to change; one become a second-rate entrepreneur marketing a self-image. When the sincerity of your motives are in question, even if it is it seems as though it is through no fault of your own, you risk doing active harm to the cause you espouse -- like Janeane Garafolo on the campaign trail in 2004. And once you become overly self-conscious about the effects you are trying to achieve, and how it reflects on you personally, your motives are suspect. What sets someone like me apart from someone like Chris is that I am riddled with these kinds of thoughts constantly, cursed with perpetual self-consciousness, while he strikes me as someone who never questions his causes or puts him own interests out in front of them. Were I to consciously try to emulate his m.o. though, I'd be compounding my problem, still trying to achieve through direct action a state of mind that is essentially a by-product of thinking entirely of something else.

Inorganic democracy (10 July 2007)

One more post about Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Retreat From Class. Wood spends a chapter casting doubt on the idea that socialism might evolve naturally out of bourgeois democracy without the need for a revolution. She sees this as arguing that there can be socialism without having to redefine the economic organization of society, which wouldn't amount to socialism at all. Instead, she argues that the claim that politics and economics are independent of each other is one of capitalism's main lines of defense -- this separation allows the exploitative prerogatives of private property to coexist with a discourse of rights in the political sphere. The point at which political rights are used to question exploitation, the political system becomes a battlefield, and the privileged classes will use their concealed leverage, and the barriers inherent to limited representation, to protect their interests.

Wood then raises the point that it's dangerous to become enamored of democracy as an abstract end unto itself. It is a good, as far as socialists are concerned, to the extent that it allows for collective social action, but is there an inherent, organic human desire for democracy, that human nature demands democracy as an expression of its essence? Doesn't seem like it when you look at history. Here's what Wood writes about such advocates of democracy for its own sake:

We are given little guidance as to who in particular might want or need democracy, whether some people might want or need more -- or different aspects -- than others, how a social force capable of bringing it about might come into being -- or indeed why there should be any difficulty or conflict about it at all. If, on the other hand, the democratic drive is not universal, or not immediately so, and yet at the same time is not constituted by material conditions and class relations but is constructed by ideology and politics more or less "autonomously," then are we not again thrown back upon the old utopian elitism which Marx himself denounced? Must we not look to some privileged producers of "discourse" to implant the democratic impulse from without, giving a collective identity to an otherwise shapeless mass, creating the "people" and then imparting to them a socialist or democratic spirit which they cannot bring forth out of their own resources?

This not only sheds light on the hubris of the American project of exporting democracy to the Middle East as if the shapeless masses there were just waiting to be shaped into pseudo-Americans, but it's a reminder of the problem of classes requiring "organic intellectuals" to harness a group's potential power and direct it toward a goal that will continue to motivate and unify them. Because of this, the temptation is always there for those shut out from participating in the revolution to revise that requirement, and come up with ways in which the working class can be told what is in their best interests by those who don't necessary share them, or to argue (a la Laclau and Mouffe) that the working class is not necessarily pertinent to socialism. But there's no way of knowing where the class struggle is headed once the fellow travelers take the wheel.

Everyone an outsider artist (8 Feb 2007)

At academic blog the Valve, Joseph Kugelmass has a post that seems relevant to what I was trying to get at yesterday -- the problem of having to seem unaware of your calculating signaling in order to for these signals to seem authentic and succeed. For this, Kugelmass cites master semiotician Björk (emphasis below is mine):

"I don’t really know why I’m obsessed with swans but, as I said, everything about my new album is about winter and they’re a white, sort of winter, bird. And obviously very romantic, being monogamous. It’s one of those things that maybe I’m too much in the middle of to describe. When you’re obsessed with something, you can explain it five years later, but in the moment, you don’t know exactly why. Right now, swans seem to sort of stand for a lot of things. I see a picture of a swan now and I go [takes a deep gasping breath], but two years ago it didn’t do that to me." —from an interview with Bjork by Donna Karan, Interview, Sept. 2001
Bjork contradicts herself remarkably here. She begins by giving a series of revealing, thoughtful interpretations of her own decision to wear an ungainly swan dress to the Oscars, after decorating her album Vespertine with images of swans. She then immediately disowns these interpretations by claiming that she’s “too much in the middle of” the phenomenon to describe it. In other words, she does what she can to preserve the aura of the symbol of the swan, by protecting it against the corrosive process of becoming conscious of its meanings. However, by doing this, she is actually giving in to us. As everybody knows, the dress Bjork wore to the Oscars was criticized far and wide for being incredibly ugly. It did not look like a dress—it looked like a ridiculous swan costume.

If I interpret this right, Kugelmass argues that we demand a dog-and-pony show from artists in which they disavow their own awareness of what they are doing so that we can all believe they are doing it for reasons both we and the artists would like to assume are real. We want them all to fit the stereotype of outsider artists, working from an untutored and ambition-free impetus. This keeps the artist's ego and career investments from spoiling our aesthetic experience.

Kugelmass cites this in response to a debate amid academic blogs about the invocation of theory in blogging, and his post nicely performs the method it simultaneously intends to scrutinize. (He invokes some pop culture references -- Björk and Daniel Johnston -- to elucidate some high-theory-like insights about praxis.) I like it when the form an argument takes reinforces its content, even though it can sometimes seem like a flashy trick -- which brings us back to the question of how calculation and spontaneity play into the perception of sincerity. Should academics work like Daniel Johnston, whose mental instability frees him from the accusation that he is being too calculating in his choice of motifs and topics, and allows us to appreciate them without fretting about how clever Johnston must think he is for coming up with them? (Kugelmass seems to argue that just as we don't discredit Johnston for logical inconsistency, heterodox use of tropes or choosing ideas that don't entirely cohere, so we should not dismiss theory for similar sins but seize such criticism as opportunity for clarification. That he can imagine a comparison between what he does and the art Johnston makes implies an equation of criticism with art itself, another can of worms.)

I found Kugelmass's conclusion a bit unhelpful: "As somebody who does theory, I’m obliged to respond that the success of the performance is the truth of the author’s faith." But what about when the success is being measured in terms of how truthful it seems? The nature of the problem is that we have a hard time separating success from the good or bad faith of the performer -- this has been true since moral virtue became a spectator sport in the 18th century. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Something other than the ideas themselves always seem to be at stake in discussions of capital-T theory, namely what it is that humanities study is supposed to accomplish. Upon coming across an lit-crit article that foregrounds "trendy" social or literary theory, some reactionaries (me included, at times) assume that it has been forced in to show what a smarty-pants the author thinks he is, that it is not organic to the argument, and thus the writer is making a "bad-faith" argument and is engaged in an intellectual exercise rather than a sincere, impassioned argument. But trying to assess how organic the rhetorical elements of an argument are seems impossible to determine, if not beside the point -- it's applying a piece of critical dogma (literary works should be unified and "organic"; evaluating organic beauty is what we should do in English class) to something it's not equipped to process. If that line of attack seems too facile, a skeptic will perhaps provoke a definitional skirmish (e.g. what "real" feminism is, what counts as a novel, when the consumer revolution really occurred, etc.) that is less about the subject of the paper than it is about policing academic turf and perpetuating the professional viability of a particular interpretive approach. Perhaps the scariest thing that every graduate student in literature must confront is that, given how subjective the parameters and goals of the field are, every disagreement can be seen as a kind of ego-bruising, academic turf war -- how one continues to fight the good fight after having stared into that abyss is the mystery that separates PhDs from ABDs.