The birth of the wrongness (18 August 2008)

I'm still thinking about wrongness, purposeful attempts to alienate an audience through a kind of puerile repetition or offensiveness that on its face contains no politically subversive content. Pop music has been a fertile ground for breeding wrongness, as PopMatters' recent list of Detours, unlikely albums by established artists, makes plain. Wrongness may be defined as the attempt to reject aesthetically or repudiate the constraints of popularity after the compromises to achieve it have already been made. (Think Metal Machine Music or Jim Morrison's Miami performance on March 1, 1969.) Since it is so self-referential, it tends to be politically and artistically sterile. The appeal of such wrongness is limited mainly to connoisseurs of disillusionment and cynicism, and more important, to those "true fans" of the contemptuous artists. By sticking with performers no matter how much hatred they direct at their audiences, these fans prove they are not dilettantes.

But the 1990s may have been the heyday for wrongness, as college rock became indie rock, which became alternative, which became profitably embedded in the established mainstream of pop genres. Efforts to preserve indie credibility and maintain integrity in the face of commercial success were played out at the aesthetic level at the very moment when what had first been seized upon as the sign of integrity -- grunge -- became a highly marketable and easily duplicated commodity. Elaborate simulacrums of lo-fi ineptitude became a calling card in alternative rock and graphic design. Grunge could connote integrity and/or authenticity without its purveyors needing to have any. But, of course, that has been true of many up-and-coming commercial forms emerging from various subcultures. What was interesting about the 1990s was that authenticity for the first time became the main appeal of the new style, its basic substance and message, the organizing principle for all its hallmarks. Hip-hop moved in the same direction, fetishizing authenticity as an end in itself rather than serving as an ex post facto description of a style that was ultimately "about" something else.

When grunginess became a mainstream cliche, something more heinous was necessary to demonstrate how alternative you meant to be. Hence, wrongness, or being "brown" as '90s alternative rock band Ween called it. Around the time the band made the quintessentially "wrong" move of putting out a straight contemporary-country record replete with the genre's cliches and lyrics full of derogatory stereotypes -- all the while insisting they were fully in earnest -- it would play shows featuring limit-testing 20-minute versions of b-side "Vallejo" and "Poop Ship Destroyer," an epic tribute to brownness. These were the antithesis of hippie jams (though Ween ironically would later become embraced by the jam-band scene), meant not to be expansive and pleasing to drug-altered minds, but to be abrasively tedious and mind-numbing, forcing observers to question when, if ever, it will end, and cleasing the mind of all remembered pleasures in the show, perhaps so the band could start fresh afterwards, trying to re-earn the audience's trust and approval. In this was an analogue to all indie bands' predicaments, having full knowledge of their own selling out and wondering if it were possible to regain integrity somehow, through some purifying ritual of awfulness.

Anyway, with the Family Guy's success, it may be that wrongness of this sort is in the process of going the way of grunge. What will the new oppositional aesthetic be now that wrongness and purposeful annoyance is losing its ability to repel?

Thick and thin (15 June 2007)

A recent Economist post reports on Will Wilkinson's rebuttal to the familiar thesis put forward by Benjamin Barber in a new book, Consumed. Barber, following Galbraith's general idea in The Affluent Society, argues that consumer society requires the manufacture of false needs and a populace desperately fixated on trivialities and frivolity and the immediate satisfaction of shallow desires -- convenience for its own sake. In his response, Wilkinson, the post notes,

theorised that on the veldt, we developed strong collective preferences in order to enforce the solidarity necessary for survival. Those preferences were "thick" -- binding, and enforceable by those around you. The farther we get from those small communities, both demographically and economically, the more we are free to develop our own preferences. Those preferences are "thin"--less strongly reinforced--but they are in some sense authentically ours in the way that "thick" preferences never can be.

Not surprisingly, the Economist writer draws the conservative lesson from this that the allure of the "thick preference" world needs to be acknowledged in order to make the defense of consumerism stronger --

it concedes that something has been lost in moving away from tight communities with binding norms. There was something unique and joyful about that kind of community. My grandfather died surrounded by friends and family, bathed in a network of social relations impossible to replicate in this day of economic, social, and geographic mobility.

A defense of consumerist dynamism must start with a gesture of respect toward the lost world of stable social roles and conformity and the palpable ability of a community to keep its members in line in part through the rigorous control of the availability of material culture. Then one can argue that consumerism takes the repression away and allows people to explore their true individuality.

Those small communities were brutal to many of their members. The outliers in taste, intelligence, or almost any other metric except beauty and charm, could be brutally punished for their deviance. People worked harder at their friendships, because ties gone wrong in a small town are hard to bear; but they had to work harder at their friendships, because they were less likely to be compatible.

But I would take away a different lesson, that the critique of consumerism can't look backward to a lost totality, a lost community, a golden age that precedes the vulgarities of MTV and the 24-hour news cycle. This is the conservative solution to the trap that postmodernity springs on us in a consumer society: the erosion of the ability to experience authenticity and the injunction to discover who we "really" are through various shopping-oriented quests for a comfortable lifestyle. A progressive critique would have to look forward, away from the lost conformist community and the dispersed conformity of lifestyle seeking in varied but formally identical niches. Hence the viability of a critique of consumerism that centers on the sheer ecological destruction boundless consumption wreaks (i.e.a new solidarity necessary for survival) , but this needs to be complemented with a critique of the postmodern subject, of the supposed problem of identity that prevents self-realization from becoming beside the point.

The Postmodern Condition (28 March 2007)

Baudrillard's death made it clear how far postmodernist theory has sunk in the estimation of those paid to write about such things for a general audience, with most writers dismissing him as a charlatan, and his ideas as performative, self-aggrandizing sophistry. This, naturally, seems to reinforce one of his great themes, how the ability to convincingly reproduce the real (i.e., the conditions of "truth") has become increasingly difficult, or rather increasingly easy to simulate. A superfluity of information, kept in motion by proliferating media and accelerating technological developments, makes us simultaneously overinformed and helplessly confused. We can't assimilate information, so we come to treasure novelty for its own sake, as a sensation rather than a building block for the edifice of our understanding of the world.

Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition seems to have been a fairly prescient book -- published in 1979, it accurately predicted much of the change brought by the internet, which he anticipates as a massive interactive database, brings to society, making information ubiquitous and those who can best manage that information into a new strata of movers and shakers. Technology has made information's usefulness more accessible, and this usefulness has been commercialized, making what information can produce its most important quality over whether its true in some idealized sense. Easily accessible information allows for the manufacture of what Lyotard calls "proof" for use in "language games" that reproduce legitimacy -- what gives society's basic institutions their authority and enables them to renew it. He paraphrases systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, claiming that "in postindustrial societies the normativity of laws is replaced by the performativity of procedures." Efficiency produces its own truth and colors the truths we find elsewhere; efficiency (which is the profit motive in operation) suddenly becomes indistingishable from common sense -- we do things the fast way, not the way our elders did, etc. Lyotard goes further to suggest we see that which is efficient as what is truly real, what remains when the layers of mediated illusions are stripped away (and not itself an effect of media saturation).

So possibly as information becomes easier to obtain and process and turn into productivity, we begin to translate our sensations and desires into similar information to be processed, to be made useful and productive -- we assess our own feelings for their efficiency, though we think of this not in managerial terms, as a way to get more out of our natural states, but in terms of personal ease, convenience. As society makes ubiquitous instrumentalized information the basis for its institutions, a similar process takes place at the personal level, as we make convenience an overriding value, an end in its own sake, as it seems to bring us closer to what's real (what's most efficient). And the sensations we can't figure out what to do with, the ones we don't know how to make use of, become unreal to us, nightmares, surreal delusions. A substantial portion of our consciousness becomes incomprehensible to us, even as we are processing more external information than at any other time in the history of the human race.