Subgrouping in Social Networks (27 May 2011)

In this SAI item about "the end of the social network era," Jason Schwartz claims that people want to continue sharing as much as possible automatically, only they want to share it only with select friends:

When people talk about privacy concerns around check-ins, it's not that they don't want ANYONE to know where they are, they don't want EVERYONE to know where they are. The problem is the lack of tools to create the dynamic, intimate groups of people they would be comfortable sharing with. Once that problem is solved, this space will see a huge uptick from mainstream users.
Facebook has quite a few tools for managing groups of friends. These fail because they rely on the user to manually curate these groups. Users won’t do the manual work necessary to make a Social Circle work, just like they won't be selective with whom they friend on a check-in service.

It's no surprise that people don't seem to bother with Facebook's group controls very much. It runs counter to the initial attractiveness of social networking -- that everyone from your life ends up there -- to then turn and use it as an awkward means of negotiating the various levels of intimacy that social networks compress. The novelty of using social networks is in that flattening, perhaps. Using Facebook is a temporary escape from the negotiations and anxieties over who is in and out: The interface presents itself as a way to control it all and permit us to consume sociality on strictly individualistic terms. But once you start having to make decisions about who belongs where and who gets to see what, you get into trickier turf of reciprocity -- every update restricted to a certain audience then becomes an implied insult to those on the outside. Restricted messages to a private audience is no big deal in real life; it happens all the time and is an ephemeral moment of choice that isn't archived forever online as a proved potential sleight.

Schwartz then claims that technology must now solve the problem of people being too lazy to form smaller groups within the larger group of contacts they assemble in online networks: Some clever startup must figure out a way to balance our desire for as many tokens of attention as possible from the widest set of contacts with our somewhat vestigial privacy concerns. But it seems to me that certain properties of online space militate against forming "intimate groups," no matter how dynamically or automatically it can constitute them. (Incidentally, nothing bothers me more than when Gmail tells me who I should add to an email. Stop telling me who to talk to! Stop trying to get me to run my private email like I am a corporate middle manager negotiating different workgroups!) Social networks serve as archives and scoreboards more than private drawing rooms; the time-space of exclusivity runs against the medium's accumulative nature. That is to say, social media are by definition for broadcasting, not for the sort of communication that sustains intimacy.

I can't be alone in regarding virtually everything on social media as purely informational or promotional, akin to Christmas-card-letter copy that has no emotional valence whatsoever. Unless it is a direct and private message, communication through these networks assimilate me to an implied mass audience as I consume it. Evoking a feeling of belonging is not part of the circuit. I get the sense that all social media discourse merely serves to reinforce the significance of what is absent, what is deliberately held back. And that material must be kept offline to retain its aura, as everyone seems to know by now that anything mediated online is always already as good as broadcast. The "social circle" is going to be defined specifically by face-to-face encounters and the communication that takes place during them. If you are not getting facetime, you are not in the social circle, no matter how much of someone's social media you are privy to.

Quantification, self-exploitation, prostitution (25 Jan 2011)

I've written before about my suspicions regarding the quantified-self movement and the data-driven life. To want to turn one's life experience into data is obviously an expression of a deep-seated urge to become an object. It reflects a yearning to make one's life knowable in an "objective" way -- or rather, to be known in the way that our highly rationalized society regards as authentic. You know, numbers don't lie.

Some of that urge is pragmatic: since bureaucracies are already turning us into data, why not manage the process more directly? But the process of making fresh data by experimenting on oneself seems an especially sinister kind of alienation, reifying a mind-body split that threatens to rob one of ability to experience life as flow, installing instead a Taylorist manager in one's mind, a superego run amok. With all these "objective" numbers, the potential for self-flagellation becomes limitless, as the numbers vividly render the illusion of life as the ceaseless quest for measurable progress. But there is always another measurement to take. One never arrives. The data we generate becomes a miasma into which our soul eventually disappears; we become a set of numbers pre-formatted for the institutional data-processing and the recommendation engines that increasingly structure contemporary life. We become ghosts in the machine at best.

I called the obsession with measuring oneself and mimicking the way technology already translates us into data "robot envy," an idea that apparently finds some support in Sherry infoTurkle's new book Alone Together, which I need to read ASAP. This Chronicle Review piece about Turkle's recent work lays out her thesis about "sociable robots" and the possibility that we will prefer relationships of convenience with selfless machines to fraught and necessarily ambivalent relationships to other humans.

"What if we get used to relationships that are made to measure?" Turkle asks. "Is that teaching us that relationships can be just the way we want them?" After all, if a robotic partner were to become annoying, we could just switch it off.

The article doesn't mention it, but one obvious use for the sociable robots of the future would be as prostitutes. The prostitute-client relationship is already about supplanting awkward intimacy with convenience and efficiency and providing a "made to measure" relationship. It's also a realm in which social behavior has already been rigorously quantified: time is strictly metered and billed at a negotiated rate, which serves as a putative measure of the value of the prostitute's company. This essay in Salon by a prostitute writing under the name Charlotte Shane explains how prostitution can be regarded as the logical end point of the urge to quantify one's social impact. She argues that we "are living in a world where a woman's worth is constantly equated with her sex appeal. Is it any wonder that many women might find it compelling to take that equation to its logical end?" That a woman's "worth" is often regarded as entirely a matter of her sexual usefulness is depressing enough, and one could certainly blame patriarchy, but one shouldn't neglect the way patriarchy is served by the capitalist drive toward ever greater rationalization, efficiency, and quantification. These are all vectors for self-criticism and for insecurity in relation to numerical standard that has been abstracted from any particular context that can make it meaningful. The strictures of femininity in capitalist culture manifest themselves in lots of numbers: dress sizes, weight, caloric intake, breast measurement, etc. Shane writes, tellingly, "I was so highly self-critical as a young adult that by the time I was 12 I vowed I'd have breast surgery."

Prostitution supplies another of those numbers, one which seems to synthesize all the others into a master index. What unifies the numbers is the underlying notion that genuine, inarguable objectification is sexual objectification, rooted in nature and vested by the inescapable imperative to procreate, which makes the choice of sexual partner seem like the archetypal consumer choice. This logic fuels the crypto-evolutionary suspicion -- epitomized in, say, Michel Houellebecq novels -- that all consumerism is a matter of status competition, but status is merely a genteel way of expressing the competition for suitable mates. Sex sells everything. Once a market for a woman's sexual attention has been created (it is, after all, the "oldest profession"), the ideology that locates a woman's essential value in sexuality seems concrete, material, an inescapable truth -- after all, a specific figure can be quoted. Shane writes:

There's something almost merciful about finally having the clarity of a number, and once you're an escort, you've quite literally put a price on your sexual powers. That's an intimidating assignment for any young woman with a less than robust sense of self-esteem, but it can also be perversely satisfying: You've finally quantified your appeal.

This seems like an especially pernicious example of the alienation inherent in wages generally, but it captures the temptation of self-quantification. It's a weird, entirely temporary form of mercy, though, because that price we obtain is just one quote. Being priced only reminds you that your value is always being negotiated by others, and you are mostly at the mercy of that often arbitrary conversation. Once you get priced once, you have to keep being priced to procure a moment's respite of security in one's worth.

The eagerness to be quantified is one of those cures that worsen the disease. It promises to resolve insecurity and afford us more control over our lives and how we are perceived, but instead it radically destabilizes the self and gives over the arbitration of our self-worth to an impersonal market. It impels us to keep generating occasions to be measured -- the yardstick dictates our behavior, supplies the form that shapes our identity. We feel obliged to create information in order to know ourselves, but it doesn't constitute capital for us; it becomes a mode of autoexploitation -- we work hard to turn ourselves in a product for someone else ultimately to sell. The self-exploitation process culminates in the development of the personal brand, which codifies the illusion that we are building equity through compulsive sharing and self-measuring: The qualities of the self aren't seen as ineffable and transcendent; as processes rather than possessions; as indivisible clusters of skill, experience and intuition rather than market-assessed commodities. Instead we find social validation in being on the market and being sold -- an understandable conclusion, given the hegemonic idea that value is somehow conferred by markets. How can you know something is worth anything if you don't try to sell it? How can you know your full potential as a human unless you have leveraged your brand and maximized its value?

The Problem with Reflexive Authenticity (1 June 2010)

Joshua Glenn's 1999 essay on fake authenticity, reprised at Hilobrow, has lost none of its acuity in the decade since it was written. And that's more or less his point: there can be no end to the quest for authenticity. It can't be realized reflexively. Once you recognize it as an independent quality of things, it has become ersatz. Identifying it in something speaks only to its actual absence, or worse, to a gap in our own ability to know and experience authenticity without alienating it and mediating it back to ourselves first. A similar phenomenon is at work when photograph ourselves somewhere to prove that we were really there; the "really being there" doesn't sink in when we are actually there, but when we contemplate the photo much later. Identity is also similar, in that reflexivity about it diminishes it, calls it into question, invalidates it. We can't assess the "truth" of our "real self"; we can only live it. The degree to which "the real self" becomes a problem for us measures the external pressure being placed on us to be other than we are. (Is that tautological? I mean that the effort we put into becoming who we really are merely measures the gap opened by outside pressures; it doesn't help to close it.) It traces "consumer dissatisfaction" and "perpetual obsolescence," as Glenn puts it.

Spontaneity is subject to the same critique. Glenn notes that "decades before the slogan Just Do It was burned into our brains, Adorno noted that 'Authentic Ones' like Heidegger were given to making gestures of autonomy without content, serving only to help advertising celebrate the empty meaningfulness of immediate experience." Marketing is the destruction of meaning (always contingent and personal) in favor of meaningfulness, a seemingly transcendent quality that masks the pressures of persuasion. At best, meaningfulness is our understanding of meanings that could be ascribed to certain things without our having intuited or experienced them ourselves. It is the sense that others might ascribe those meaningful experiences to us.

Implicit in Glenn's differentiation of the fake and the fake-authentic ("the 'fake' is simply kitsch, which can be transformed by the lovingly ironic person into camp; the 'fake-authentic' is nothing but cheese") is a reassessment of what makes experience valuable, away from reified authenticity (the mode of value important to collectors) and toward engaged enthusiasm -- not necessarily earnestness, but rather a courage to appropriate, to suppress self-consciousness in favor of performativity, to be boldly unoriginal. The tyranny of authenticity as an ideal rests with its stifling that enthusiasm -- it is a conceptual cousin to intellectual-property laws meant to prevent sampling, cultural remixing, the free and rapid circulation of ideas. As Glenn, citing Baudrillard, notes, there is no authenticity as such. It is a contrived, wholly ideological category designed to alienate others from the significance (or meaningfulness) of their own lived experience. Authenticity is a matter of controlling the flow of cultural trends to allow for established interests to secure the profits they had planned for, or to protect their authority. Glenn writes, "when that sphere of society whose role it is to enforce inherited forms and norms gets into the action, the result is always an example of fake authenticity."

A corollary theory: The experience of inauthenticity, then, is when we internalize those external forces, negate the legitimacy of our own experiences in order to validate those imposed norms. When we recognize the inauthenticity of something else, the pleasure we experience stems from our having internalized those norms as our own aesthetic judgment. Paradoxically, judging experiences in terms of their authenticity is precisely the best means for refusing to accept them on their own terms. Experiences don't have to try to be what they are; judging the authenticity of something, though, posits that effort, introduces a gap between what something is and what the person passing judgment would demand of it, attributing that gap to flawed execution. Then, alas, we start making that effort with regard to what we do (or with regard to projecting our identity), alienating ourselves from our experiences at the outset.

Abstract Thoughts on Identity (7 May 2010)

This Eurozine article by Amy Allen about subjectivity and autonomy got me thinking about identity as site for capitalist development. The frontiers are gone; the new colonies are within the networked territory of the self.

I tend to take it as a given that our sense of individuality - our reflexive identity -- is an effect of the sort of society we live in. It requires a certain sort of society to prompt us to discover our individuality, to make self-absorption a seemingly more valuable activity than losing oneself in engagement with the world. Identity is an effect of power (as Foucaldian theory puts it) that has singled us out for some particular form of scrutiny or flattering attention -- the point is to control us by telling us who we are and having us believe it. For an identity of that sort to develop, we have to be recognized by a force outside of us (marketers, the police, doctors, teachers, bosses, peers) in order to see our own uniqueness, otherwise we would simply be lost in the sensations of our own experience. The outside force becomes the organizing principle for our inchoate sensations, structuring our ideas about which of those sensations and responses are "us" and which are incidental, contingent, irrelevant. The attention we get teaches us which responses and feelings we should regard as authentic, integral to the self, and which we should regard as roles, pretenses, strategies.

The attention we are paid is always motivated by some purpose beyond our self-development; our self-awareness is an effect, a by-product of whatever it is that has led to our being noticed. Retailers want to sell us goods; as a by-product we come to recognize ourselves in the lifestyle that they have ferreted out in us and people like us. Our identity seems to precede the purchase of the lifestyle goods, but it is actually an ex post facto explanation or rationalization. The purchases are organizing our impulses into an identity; a coherent, innate identity isn't prompting the impulses. Allen cites Habermas's claim that individuation develops as a response to our socialization:

Habermas views individuals as produced through but not determined by socialization. As he puts it, "identity is produced through socialization, that is, through the fact that the growing child first of all integrates into a specific social system by appropriating symbolic generalities; it is later secured and developed through individuation, that is, precisely through a growing independence in relation to social systems." This is because linguistic and moral development generates capacities for autonomy and reflexivity that enable socialized individuals to take up a critically reflexive stance on their own socialization processes.

The presumption is that language (or institutional discourses, etc.) constitutes a self who then learns to master language and reshape the self to suit his own ends. Self-awareness ultimately takes the form of rejecting serially the sort of person our upbringing and social situation has made us.

But what this suggests also is that self-awareness is at one further remove of alienation from our ordinary consciousness. Self-awareness is not our becoming aware of some intrinsic being we were destined at birth to become -- it is not the discovery of authenticity within. We become individuals only within a social context; it is not some inborn proclivity. We have impulses, social institutions shape them into an identity, and then we react to that alienated identity and call it ourselves. That is to say, it only makes sense to be self-aware of our individuality in relation to what others think of us, which suggests that self-awareness is an internalized form of what we suspect or intuit others are thinking of us, and is distinct from mere consciousness, or our internal monologue that is preoccupied primarily with everything but the self.

Self-awareness is a process that attenuates identity and furthers its development, its "growth" (though its size can't really be measured, even though the data-obsessed wish it could be) or its momentum. I see the whole idea of "growing" an identity and tracking its growth as a ramification of networked consumer capitalism. Instead of an identity that derives from integrating experiences, we are encouraged to conceive of a process of accumulation akin to that of capitalist firms. This takes our critical self-appreciation and turns it into an engine for self-extension, manifesting itself as a craving for novelty, a penchant for growing bored, a general dissatisfaction with oneself. Rather than achieve a "steady-state" self, that sort of identity is roundly derided as abrogation of personal potential; instead we must experience and consume as much as possible to prove that we are continuing to "grow as individuals" -- prove we are "really alive".

Autonomy is not freedom from power relations making us who we are -- instead power enables us to recognize ourselves and thus gives us a way to see what we do as autonomous. Autonomy is a gift from power, not an escape from it. Consumerism permits us to express our autonomy, experience our own autonomy reflected back to us, through a series of purchasing decisions, elevated to the level of ontological referendums. Can you make yourself sufficiently free to dare to buy that new car and take on all the responsibility for the messages it will send? Will you seize control of the discourse constituting you by sending as many symbolic messages by way of consumer choices as possible? The networked society magnifies the import of these decisions and expands their ability to function as symbolic communication -- a mode of communication more authentic than mere language because it carries a material weight, a cost. Identity is not what we say but what we do -- which in a consumer society is buy things. In this recent FT piece Habermas puts that point across in his own inimitable style: "liberal confidence in the idea of an autonomous life is now confined to the individual freedom of choice of consumers who are living off the drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures."

Another example of contingent opportunity structures are social networks, which capture the self but allow that process of capture to feel like liberation, because it gives the self a concrete mode of expression across a broader field. The way our identity can be used instrumentally on the networks seems an elaboration, an enhancement of autonomy even though it is a constriction of what we can do to forms dictated by the platform. (Subjectivity -- there's an app for that.)

Robot envy and self-tracking (28 April 2010)

I'm not much for biofeedback. In fact, I regard it with suspicion. Obviously not stuff like blood pressure and blood-sugar monitoring, but mental self-preoccupation. I often think that the more we know about ourselves, the more unhappy we are likely to become, and not merely because it takes out of flow (the liberating freedom from self-consiousness) and not because this sort of awareness must inevitably make us all too conscious of our own death (h/t My Dinner With Andre). Self-monitoring tends to limit our sense of ourselves to the limits of our measuring equipment. So when we use devices to record data about ourselves -- the subject of this forthcoming NYT magazine piece by Gary Wolf -- it seems like we are adding to our self-knowledge, but actually we are subtracting from it, limiting ourselves to what we have been. Maybe I'm hubristic, but I like to think I am bigger than that.

Wolf's piece is full of anecdotes about mega-narcissists tenaciously collecting data on their personal lives, with the idea of using the data to discover some truth about themselves that is hidden from their own consciousness but will be revealed in the numbers, as though the numbers are more themselves than their own thoughts.

For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.

This strikes me as the saddest and most profound form of alienation humankind has ever known. It seems fueled by the data-driven information economy in which we live; people feel obliged to become more like robots in their effort to better assimilate themselves to the highly tracked, digitized environs. They seem to want to be handled logistically by the "network society," like a set of bolts necessary for a Toyota assembly line or a just-in-time shipment of product destined for a Wal-Mart somewhere. Wolf poses this question, and I think he is in earnest: "We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?"

There are many answers to that question. The most obvious comes by way of Iron Maiden (by way of The Prisoner): "I am not a number. I am a free man!" Another answer: because the knowledge produced in not self-knowledge but self-circumscription, self-digitization. It's like ripping yourself to your hard drive. (That probably sounds appealing to some techno-utopians.)

It seems obvious that quantification serves the ends of consumer capitalism; we produce data that finds itself in the hands of statistical analysts and marketers, who happily sell back to us the truth about ourselves we seek in the form of commercial products and services. 'Personal data are ideally suited to a social life of sharing," Wolf writes, because who wants to share ideas? What he means is that data is perfect for the pseudosharing enabled by social-networking apps that feeds raw intel into the number-crunching maw of online data rustlers. It is actually the antithesis of sharing. When we want to automate what we are doiung and broadcast it to the indifferent world, we are building a wall of data to keep real intimacy away. (H/t Pink Floyd The Wall). Wolf adds, "You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report." Here's a thought: if you have nothing to say, keep quiet until you think of something. Only the machine is interested in having you "report" your cyber-cognitive datastream.

Having the habit of self-quantification -- seeing ourselves as Facebook sees us -- predisposes us to trust what automated suggestion systems will tell us about what we want, what we need, what we should dream, etc. As Wolf notes, "Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square." When we consent to quantify ourselves, we are packaging ourselves for those institutional machines, and the gains we receive by this process are essentially the gains to be had from cooperation and collaboration with these institutions' disciplinary functions. In other words, we are rewarded by government and business by making ourselves "tractable." Our qualitative self is the "problem" the institutions are looking to solve and dispatch.

Numbers can provide only one sort of "truth" about ourselves, and to pursue it we must surrender or compromise other kinds of truth -- for example, the intuitive faith we have in our qualitative assessments of our dasein. (There is a methodological problem, too, with recording ourselves recording ourselves recording ourselves.... The self-observance becomes more recursive the more thorough it becomes.) In other words, we give up our soul for a spreadsheet.

I have a post up at Generation Bubble about "reflexively defiant consumerism" -- a concept coined by two marketing professors that they saw as a fusion of postmodern critical theory and consumer protection initiatives. It's basically the "prosumer" idea of subverting the marketers who want to tell you what to do. It's obviously an outdated notion; few would argue today that marketers are forcing specific identities on us anymore. Advertisers are probably content to know that we are playing on the consumerist field, and just hope will play with their ball. (Who can resist an unnecessary football metaphor as the Super Bowl approaches?)

My hunch in general is that self-consciousness about how we consume means they have us right where they want us, thinking about how to articulate our identity through consumerism and not through other modes. Douglas Holt's excellent 2002 paper "Why Do Brands Cause Trouble" (wish I could link it, but my searches haven't turned up an ungated one) bears that out. He posits a dialectical model of identity and oppositional consumerism that seems to suggest resistance to certain brands tends to produce more credibility for other ones, and that production is now built into the consumerist system of "post-postmodernism." Reflexively defiant consumers are just the avant-garde producers of new consumerist meanings within the code. The sovereignty they convince themselves that they have earned by pseudoresistance is actually more bound up than ever with consumerism. "Authenticity" becomes nothing but a marketing concept; it can no longer serve an an orienting ideal. It is, as Holt argues, "becoming extinct."

Worse, we confront sovereignty inflation:

To feel sovereign, postmodern consumers must adopt a never-ending project to create an individuated identity through consumption. This project requires absorbing an ever-expanding supply of fashions, cultural texts, tourist experiences, cuisines, mass cultural icons, and the like. As a result, we are in the midst of a widespread inflation in the symbolic work required to achieve what is perceived as real sovereignty.

In other words, as a character in the 1968 film Psych-Out declares, "It's all one big plastic hassle."

I would add that Web 2.0 has become the technological expression of that system, the means of production that allows consumers to make meanings on a sort of industrial scale, thanks to the increasingly hegemonic notion that identity (or individuality) must be mediated online to secure the requisite social recognition and the sense of sovereignty.

Holt thinks that eventually brands will exhaust all possible tropes of authenticity and will have to turn to genuine community action and resource provision to secure customer loyalty and make their brands stand for something admirable. I am skeptical of this; I think the contrivance of pseudo-authenticity is limitless, and the absorption of millions of new mini-brand managers on social networks and the like serves to manufacture new ruses at an inexhaustible rate. We have become the brainstorming consultants for corporations, only they don't have to pay us for the labor.

Thoughts on the game (25 Jan 2010)

Yes, this game. Yes, we've lost. (Thanks, BoingBoing.) This probably doesn't need explicating, but the Game is a perfect metaphor for the sprezzatura of postmodern identity. We all succeed at playing the role of ourselves as long as we simultaneously fail to become self-conscious, and repress or disavow all our efforts to appear effortless. That is, we win as long as we forget to acknowledge the way we use consumerism for self-fashioning, the way we buy into the way trends work and perpetuate and/or modify the meanings of objects, and so on. As long as that is the case, we can transcend it all. Once we get wind of what we are doing behind our own backs, we fall back into the muck of alienation and desire; we "lose."

I think Lacan invented the game.

Creative writing and crippling self-consciousness (4 June 2009)

In the New Yorker, Louis Menand reviews The Program Era, a book by Mark McGurl about the institutionalization of creative-writing programs. Creative writing classes are an easy target for cynics (including me) who don't believe that "creativity" can be taught or should even be isolated and reified as a concept, yet are also skeptical of the idea of transcendent genius separating the true Wordsworthian artists from the rest of the plebes and philistines. Neither McGurl or Menand seem to be as cynical as that -- McGurl argues (and Menand agrees) that creative-writing programs as an institution are the most important development in the history of American literature since World War II, and in many ways is more significant than any particular author produced by the programs. Menand writes:

As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature. McGurl’s claim is simple: given that most of the fiction that Americans write and read is processed through the higher-education system, we ought to pay some attention to the way the system affects the outcome.

I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "serious fiction" -- I assume that means the fiction that most people don't bother to read because it doesn't conform to the expectations generated by popular genres. Though McGurl rejects this idea, creative-writing programs, perhaps, can best be understood as the attempt to standardize that heterogeneous mass of non-genre fiction, codifying it into an identifiable (if still not all that marketable) product known as "literary fiction." They also fortify the walls that separate genre fiction from the precincts of capital-L Literature. This helps protect literature from the sort of economically grounded analysis that best explains the popularity and specific features of mass-market fiction, which is clearly crafted as an entertainment product to appeal to well-delineated audiences. Literature, according to the professors sworn to defend its reputation, is above such craven pandering; it is a matter of geniuses serving the muse, of aesthetic struggle in the name of art, not commerce. But creative-writing programs, though they help stabilize the definition of literature and carry it forward into contemporaneity, seem to be primarily about commerce -- about networking and forming the connections that will allow as-yet-unknown writers to possibly make a living by writing (or teaching others how to write). This, and not a cosmically serendipitous concentration of talent, is what allowed so many renowned writers to all inhabit the same university classrooms, as Menand details.

Lots of fields are essentially networking cliques. What makes the creative-writing programs so suspect is not the networking aspect but the intense egocentricity they seemed geared toward generating. Menand highlights this aspect of McGurl's anlalysis and renders it in telling metaphors of machines and carpenter ants:

Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system. They are thinking products of a system. After all, few activities make people more self-conscious than participating in a writing workshop. Reflecting on yourself—your experience, your “voice,” your background, your talent or lack of it—is what writing workshops make people do.
McGurl thinks that this habit of self-observation is not restricted to writing programs. He thinks that we’re all highly self-conscious ants, because that’s what it means to be a modern person. Constant self-assessment and self-reflection are part of our program.... So the fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs may appeal to readers because it rehearses topics—“Who am I?” issues—that are already part of their inner lives.

Again, fiction that comes out of creative-writing programs has an extremely limited appeal -- to those hardy few who routinely read The New Yorker, for instance. As Menand notes, "university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit—the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace." So when McGurl talks about self-conscious ants, he's really talking about a small slice of well-educated middlebrows who tend toward a certain status anxiety and are also probably prone to the peculiar kind of identity crisis that afflicts those self-selected members of the "creative class." Like the Calvinist elect, the people of the creative class are fairly certain they are destined to be creative, but can never be certain about just how creative they are. So they must seek outward signs of their blessed inner superiority, must seek or contrive recognition for their creativity whenever possible. This is that class's essential self-consciousness, and when it is acute, it becomes hipsterism.

Part of this crusade for recognition involves writing and reading and commenting on literary fiction, which is perhaps the purest materialization of that personal creativity, the ore of hipster selfhood. In literary fiction, plot is often replaced with meticulous observation, a kind of careful surveillance of surfaces that are then subject to a hermeneutics of authenticity or cool. The same spirit that animates identity creation in the various online forums, mediums, and social networks is what has long animated creative writing programs, so it may be that the programs don't reflect identity-obsessed audiences so much as they have fostered them. Self-proclaimed creative writers are an elite group that teaches the rest of us and the generations that follow how to be minutely worried about the status of the self, the micromechanisms for conveying identity or computing that of the people we encounter. Creative-writing programs institute trickle-down narcissism.

The "habit of self-observation" seems to me a most unfortunate curse, an inability to escape from oneself or see past oneself and become immersed in experiences, in dialogues, conversations. Instead there is only workshops, which are rudimentary rough drafts for the sort of reciprocal "sharing" that now takes place in rolling fashion online. We are all creative writers now. Maybe those who come after us will have the lucky chance to be something else.

Attention grabber (4 May 2009)

At Salon, Laura Miller reviews Winifred Gallagher's Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, a book about why we find it difficult to concentrate. Miller points out how technology has made it easy for us to distract ourselves with a continual flow of mini-activities, which constantly rewards the novelty-craving part of our brain at the expense of the part of our consciousness that likes to be absorbed in things, achieve flow. We find ourselves becoming the functional equivalent of that guy who is always scanning the room looking for someone more important to talk to and who never has a real conversation or listens to anything anyone is saying. We are always made aware of the alternatives that are slipping away, of the imperative to consume as much as possible within the limits of the time we have to devote to entertaining ourselves. The pressure of what we are passing up becomes intolerable, clouding over the activities we would like to wholeheartedly choose. Miller laments, "In many cases, the thing we wish we would do is not only more interesting but ultimately more fun than the things we do instead, and yet it seems to require a Herculean effort to make ourselves do it."

Rather than make this effort, it seems we try to compensate by indulging alternative ideals: convenience for its own sake; quantity of experience over nebulous qualitative experience; competitive consumption and early adopterhood -- various measurable efficiencies that allow us to belief we are prospering in the attention economy, regardless of harried we may feel by the pace. Or, as Miller notes, we can attempt to use technology against itself, as a filter to block out options, to restrict our freedom, to limit the range of our responsiveness. This is one way to understand the success of Twitter, which synthesizes both approaches -- it's a binge-purge technology whose arbitrary restrictions seem to be simplifying the media onslaught while actually authorizing it accelerating our gluttonous information intake.

Gallagher's book endorses the idea that we are what we pay attention to, so it offers methods for us to seize control over our attention span. But the implication that something other than our own will directs our attention, that it is some wayward entity with prerogatives of its own, is a bit troubling metaphysically. It leaves us subject to "the machinations of late capitalism," as Miller puts it (and I probably would have put it that way if she hadn't), the firms that know how to exploit weakness in how our brain works to grab our attention and fix it on things we would have been perfectly happy ignoring. It also negates for us the possibility of what Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" calls "unremembered pleasures":

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

Those lines are open to all sorts of interpretations, but I've always understood them to suggest that we are more than the sum of our sensory impressions, of the stuff we have paid attention to and collected in the treasure house of our memory. Instead it's what we do, and the unself-conscious grace with which we do it that fills our contemplative moments -- the moments we are systematically banishing from our lives now -- with the spirit of self-satisfaction. The anxiety of identity gets suspended, and there isn't room for the feeling of missing out on something. Rather there is a sense of completeness that comes with giving up on keeping score -- a recognition that our souls are too immeasurable for that.

A hipster lost generation (17 April 2009)

An interesting point from a commenter at the American Scene blog, called out in this post by Dara Lind, about whether hipsters are important:

It boils down to a question of where a generation of educated, privileged, creative class sorts of people are ending up. As a group, those who wind up being hipsters tend to have a good deal of opportunity, so if hipsterism is a kind of psychological/cultural zombie state (suggested by the Time Out New York article, and the Adbusters article from a couple years ago “Hipsters: The Dead End of Western Civilization”) then there is a vast amount of potential being wasted.

I think that's partly right: People are aware of this negative possibility of becoming a hipster, and it's important to figure out what cultural forces conjure that possibility and make it such a powerful and pervasive archetype. I don't think hipsters constitute a lost generation of young people who were distracted from some important cultural work by skinny jeans and Animal Collective, though. Instead, I think there may be something more pernicious in how the category is feared, how the threat of the label may be brandished to stifle creativity. (Which I suppose makes some want to seize the mantle in a radical act of reappropriation, the way the term queer was salvaged by academics and activists.)

"Hipsterism," as I tried to argue in this post, is more a fear of irrelevance or phoniness than it is an aesthetic one would purposely adopt. It is the shadow that passes over us when we begin to tentatively plan to do something unconventional, the chill that tells us that maybe it would be safer to do nothing rather than become one of them, trying for cool but failing. That is to say, "hipsterism" is the term for that sinking feeling that cool is at stake in any endeavor, and that nothing can be pursued for its own sake anymore. Of course that is not true, but it often feels like it is, and the image of a stereotype arriviste hipster is there to personify that feeling. And the final twist is that once we begin to fear becoming hipsters, begin thinking primarily about the way what we are doing will be perceived by others who somehow can see through us to the roots of our motivations, we become at that very moment hipsters ourselves.

To prompt us to that moment of self-consciousness are those people who intently make a business of cool -- whether they are hunting for it or selling it to others or trying to associate it with products or whatever. These people, less hipsters than youth-culture entrepreneurs, see the insecurity that cool generates as a profit opportunity, and they try to persuade us (and perhaps themselves) that the preoccupation with cool is actually a healthy interest in style and novelty, enriching our lives with creative possibility. This group, a subset of the so-called creative class, is not itself made up of a bunch of hipsters, but the hipster is their invention, I think. If we need a cultural enemy, these are the people. These are the collaborators, the infiltrators, the saboteurs that complete the circuit between subcultures and corporations, subverting the original aims and intentions of a group and orienting it toward straightforward financial opportunities.

But Lind is probably right that in time (sooner than we think, I expect), hipster will be just like hippie or beatnik, a word that conjures a stereotype of an era, a moribund caricature pickled in history and no longer threatening. Meanwhile, the shadowy quality of infiltration and appropriation the hipster once represented will have moved on to be embodied by some new au courant imago.

Perhaps because I'm reading Daniel Bell right now, but I wonder whether the revulsion at the idea of hipsters is an important component of the dialectic that pushes people who begin in the cultural left in a conservative direction. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell fulminates about the self-centered relativists, hedonists, and "antinomians" of the 1960s who took over capitalist culture and destroyed the work ethic and religious piety. Bell wants to see limits set on "cultural experiences which go beyond moral norms," wants society to "recognize the demonic in the delusion that all experience is 'creative.' " The fixation on preventing hipsters from destroying authenticity would seem to recur to Bell's idea of fixing a more or less arbitrary limit on culture. In capitalist society, a hipster figure will always be generated by the way commercialization is necessary for cultural legitimization (commercial viability has replaced religious sanction in this respect). The received idea of the hipster proves that a given cultural phenomenon has become integrated in commercial society, is reliably exploitable, has no actual subversive potential, is just an insubstantial matter of style.

Technological determinism and convenience bias (15 April 2009)

Yesterday I was trying to make a point about information search costs, and I don't think I ever succeeded in making it clear. I'm hoping the ideas in this Boston Review article by Evgeny Morozov will help. Morozov argues that cyber-optimists who think of the internet as a medium inherently spreads freedom because it creates a public sphere that's harder to control and because it lowers the costs of disseminating information are being somewhat myopic. "Cyber-utopians’ biggest conceptual mistake is treating cyberspace as some kind of anarchist zone, which the authorities dare not enter except to shut things down. Media reports encourage this view of authoritarian governments as technophobic Internet censors." But as he points out, authoritarian regimes (and the media interests that collude with them, perhaps) don't maintain power and oppress people merely through censorship, through the stifling of the information flow. Rather than also maintain control by (1) flooding the public sphere with disinformation or trivia, drowning out or diluting subversive communication and (2) by encouraging egocentric apathy in the population so that they don't develop an interest in political protest or collective action.

The internet, for all the possibilities for semi-spontaneous group formation and communication it offers -- making it, as Morozov writes, "cheaper, faster, leaner" -- is ultimately neutral as a medium; it can facilitate those authoritarian big-brother communication strategies outlined above just as easily as it can be used to circulate samizdat and allow resistance efforts to coalesce in the interstices. The main problem for resistance efforts is that samizdat becomes harder and harder to differentiate from among the cornucopia of information proliferating exponentially online as each hour passes. "While the new digital public spheres may be getting more democratic (at least quantitatively), they are also heavily polluted by government operators, making them indistinguishable from the old, tightly controlled analogue public spheres," Morozov writes. Repressive governments may have reason to encourage us to produce reams of inane personal information online, as this contributes a great deal to the data smog that then shrouds state malfeasance. Blogging is not necessarily disinfecting sunlight; it is just as often provides a smokescreen or a sideshow.

Morozov cites this telling fact, that "East Germans who could not tune in to West German broadcasting had higher rates of opposition to their government than those who did." This implies that access to Western style lifestyle accoutrements -- the apolitical modes of identity cultivation -- quells dissent. The point: "digital natives are as likely to be digital captives as digital renegades" -- captive to a happy and prosperous marriage of the culture industry with an authoritarian regime. Habituating ourselves to consuming trivia about celebrities and one another assures that developing a political consciousness will remain an unnecessary bother for most of us. That social networks produce reams of self-confessed information highly useful to a state-security apparatus is gravy.

The idea of information pollution is also a matter of information costs. The internet makes it seem as though it is easy to collect information on most subjects -- just type it into a search engine, and there you have it. But this seemingly straightforward process is anything but, because there is no guarantee that what a simple search yields is unbiased or undistorted. It may in fact be deliberately misleading -- the product of information management efforts or shrewd marketing. Search results, in short, are subject to the same possibilities of manipulation as any other information source, only the ease with which the information comes to us conditions us to trust it. A sort of convenience bias, combined with the apparent surfeit of data that a search yields, makes what we discover seem self-directed and therefore credible -- inflected with our interests rather than someone else's, since we picked any particular needle out of the haystack. We grow accustomed to information on demand, guaranteed and certified by our own instant gratification and apparent freedom of choice among readily available options. But this easily harvested information is the most easy for authoritarian forces, or alternatively, oligarchical forces, to manipulate. Thus an ideal synthesis can be achieved by the powers that be: Internet users end up consuming the information that the Man wants them to consume while believing the Man has been circumvented. We think the information has been set free by the apparent limitlessness of the medium by which it is conveyed, and is therefore more likely to be "true" for our intents and purposes. But instead the ease with which information is available is just as likely to make us lazy and complacent about its veracity and about the complicated amalgam of ends it in fact serves.

As information costs plummet, our investment (in terms of mental energy) in challenging that information also drops. Information, as a commodity, becomes too cheap. It no longer pays to worry about our standards while making more of it or in sorting through it. In fact, we have an incentive to consume as much information as possible and sort out at some later date what the utility of it should have been. Convenience goes hand in hand with consumption acceleration.

In short: Thanks to the internet it has become simple for us to produce and disseminate information -- creating information pollution. It has become simple for us to gather information -- creating convenience bias. These offset the gains for freedom that the internet affords.

Microaudiences (25 Feb 2009)

I wasn't entirely satisfied with the point I was trying to make at the end of the previous post. My dissatisfaction ties in with my thinking about Ryan Avent's point in this post responding to criticism of Richard Florida's recent Atlantic article about the future of the "creative class." Avent is puzzled by the objection to fashion-oriented innovation, regarding them as cultural goods, and concludes that "Cultural goods aren’t just a nice by-product of a modern economy. They’re the very justification for it." In other words, the reason we care at all about economic growth is to expand the quality of life, which is expressed through the ability for we in the ordinary classes to afford the ever more innovative and creative commodities made by the creative class. Avent writes, "Efficient technologies are nice, in no small part, because they allow us to cheaply or sustainably use electronics, either to work more productively (in order to spend on those frou-frout consumption goods) or to directly consume entertainment (like television or video games, which contain disturbingly high levels of frou-frou design, music, and narrative)."

I don't agree with this assessment of the effects of technology. In my view, technology seems to accelerate the rate at which we consume (while affecting the personality changes to facilitate this acceleration) so that the cycle of exchange can spin more rapidly, allowing producers to realize profit at a faster rate. Technology is like financial leverage, only on the variable of time. Without any malice, with nothing but the best intentions of bringing something new and captivating into the world, the "creative class" aids this acceleration by fueling the fashion cycle and shortening it to accommodate more trends, more memes, more retro recoveries, more design accoutrements, more obsolescence. The creative class are by definition artists who have bent their talents to commercial purposes; thus, the cultural goods they produce tend not to satisfy "real" wants in those who consume them; instead the consumption of these goods may be a defensive measure to preserve one's place on the cool continuum, to signal one's ability to keep up or keep ahead. Even if real pleasure is derived from these cultural goods, it often comes compromised -- the pleasure is imbued with positionality; it is often the pleasure of knowing more than others, of social superiority, which can mask itself in aesthetics. The relation between the creative-class cultural good producer and the consumer is not analogous to the relation between artist and audience. The latter is gratuitous; the former serves an ineluctable socioeconomic purpose.

Another problem with the creative class is that they are making cultural goods that are designed to in part supplant the creativity of the people who consume them; they abet the idea that sheer ownership of tastefully curated goods is an expression of creativity, taking us off the hook for actually doing anything more, for actually realizing our own creativity through more elaborate activity, through meaningful work undertaken seriously and ultimately geared toward adding to society's aesthetic wealth. But currently, the creative class monopolizes that process, and the ideology of cool, urban living being central to its productivity helps preserve that monopoly.

Now, to the point I was trying to make yesterday. The internet, originally, was heralded as a medium that could threaten the creative class's monopoly, undermine the networks they thrive in and open up creative and rewarding social production to a much broader swathe of society. If you buy into a Marxian utopian vision, this is ultimately what socialism is about -- overcoming the division of labor so that each person can realize their full potentialities in socially necessary and recognized work. The distinction between creative work and drudgery would be effaced. We all would have the opportunity for meaningful work and for society, in some way, to recognize our creative efforts -- wages would in essence be replaced by this creative fulfillment and recognition. This is utopian, of course, but if a "progressive" movement means anything, the end of alienation is what it would be progressing toward.

Paradoxically, we all need a sympathetic community within which to realize our individuality. Isolated, we are ciphers, even to ourselves; only as a social being do we know ourselves and become aware of how we are fulfilling our capabilities. Consumerism functions primarily by isolating us, offering us products for our self-realization in lieu of that community. These ultimately fail, leaving us with a sense that our identities are unstable, tenuous. Our connection to the community that buoys us is obscured.

If we are all to be creative and be recognized for it, we need an audience attuned to our own idiosyncratic creative production, which would thrive in a more or less pure form since it wouldn't need to be commercially viable or compete economically with other creations. The internet seems to be the technological development that could facilitate these microaudiences, and the proselytizers of the various forms of social media seem to have this in mind in their encomiums. Our social networks can potentially become the infrastructure for these the appreciative microaudiences, who will celebrate our pure expressions of our creative self (presuming these expressions can be transmitted digitally). We could be famous to fifteen people instead of for fifteen minutes. (Someone else must have used that line before.)

But therein lies the problem -- the very notion of fame. If we pursue fame as it is currently constituted in any way, our practice devolves into the familiar forms of reification, alienation, profit maximization. We replace the pleasure of the activity of work in itself with fantasies about the outcome, the rewards we imagine we'll reap in measurable notoriety. Hence, social networks don't make for microaudiences then; they seem to function like any other consumer product that caters to our fantasy life -- in this case, the fantasy serviced is that of our being celebrities like the stars in whose lives we participate vicariously through gossip and well-attenuated entertainment product. Now we can emulate them in a subtler way, by trying to maximize our social reach by amassing friends or followers and imagining they are hanging on our every update.

Of course we disavow such fantasy overtly, but it's there, fueling the drive to inform on ourselves in Twitter posts. The internet hasn't only fostered microaudiences; alongside that possibility has sprung up its neutralizing antithesis, the impossible dream of a mass audience for everyone, for ourselves. Pursuing that dream nullifies the benefits that might come from a nurturing microaudience; it is a return to isolation, a retreat into vicarious fantasy rather than a shoring up of our presence in a community. To chase that mass audience, one must adopt the commercial and entrepreneurial strategies of honing in on the common denominator. With that we are back in the realm of the creative class, and its commercial yardsticks and its competitive prerogative, its defense of its fiefdom of cool, defined as the latest novelty others can be seen chasing. To dissolve the creative class into a universal creativity, the tyranny of "cool" -- fashion as a mass-market business; trendspotting as an entrepreneurial vocation; friendship as a quantitative measure; influence as and end in itself -- must be abolished.

In praise of Stephen Glass (18 Feb 2009)

I was sent down memory lane by this metafilter link to an archive of the work of the New Republic's comedic fabricator, Stephen Glass. I can understand why other journalists and pious publishing types vilify Glass, but he was an extremely engaging writer, and I can testify that his pieces single-handedly convinced to me to renew my TNR subscription back in 1998. I used to look forward to his pieces because they were funny, and -- thanks to the invented sources -- coherent and compelling. There was always a punch line quote from someone to punctuate any of Glass's rhetorical points. They were so effectively constructed that I used some of his pieces as models back when I was teaching composition at the University of Arizona. I may have done so even after he was exposed as a fraud. (I wished my students could make up stuff that good, and even better, know how to deploy it in an essay. Indeed. would have preferred that they make up suitable supporting evidence for their arguments, if only to see that they actually understood the concept of "evidence.")

Since I never regarded his pieces as much more than entertainment, nothing about what Glass did ever bothered me particularly. It wouldn't surprise me if the sorts of things he did still went on all the time in the press, perhaps in less elaborate ways and to slighter degrees (yielding less interesting stories, in the end). Now and then, journalists, most of whom are in good faith, I'm sure, record some heinous wrongdoing and document it for history, and perhaps these efforts will bear fruit at some point in time. But such achievements seem like by-products of professional newsgathering. Readers of any news publication are naive if they believe that they are getting some form of verified truth there. Even when it is fact-checked, it is still biased by the nature of the medium itself, and the commercial information gathering process. In the presentation of news, obviously, there are conventions writers and editors adhere to in order to whittle down events and shape incidents into a recognizable product. The boundaries that separate this institutionalized process from what Glass did as a maverick is somewhat arbitrary. Sure, Glass didn't do straight reporting; he pioneered a more fascinating reality-TV-style of reporting -- only he didn't have the luxury of doing a casting call to find the people that would fit into his prefab narrative frame.

Obviously there are exceptions, but some reporters are little more than diligent stenographers, following a ethical code is primary purpose is to garner them access to powerful sources who know they can trust the reporters to say what they want the public to hear. Few publishers have the resources to fund investigative reporting anymore, and most readers don't especially want it, when there is celebrity gossip going on 24/7. It's also hard to look past the fact that throughout the Bush years, investigative journalists were tirelessly exposing scandal after scandal, and in the end it didn't change a thing. In part, this may be because the surfeit of information and the panoply of outlets makes it all meaningless as anything but a distraction. It sometimes seems that there is next to no venue in which a story can run where it will have a transfiguring impact on how the world is perceived, that would galvanize some sort of resistance or overwhelming unified protest. Instead, any "important" story may be buried with a flood of new details and reactions and interpretations and repudiations, and ultimately all that comes through is the commercial purposes that all this dissemination of information -- all this brokering of audience attention -- serves. An "important" story is simply one that delivers a lucrative audience segment to an advertiser.

Glass seemed to grasp this superlatively cynical perspective intuitively, and he transformed it into gold -- even if it was fool's gold, no one had really mistaken its value. His editors knew that his stories would entertain readers like me, readers who didn't want to change the world or have their policy presumptions or political biases tested. I wanted my biases confirmed with implausibly perfect and uproariously funny examples of what I already thought was happening with DARE programs and young Republican groups and hackers and all the other juicy topics Glass confabulated about. By spinning engaging tales out of his near-pathological desire to be liked and to earn approval, Glass hijacked the organ of the press for his own piddling purposes; he brought TNR down to the level of a Facebook page, avant le lettre.

Thoughts on Papa John (25 Nov 2008)

I've been reading Papa John, the autobiography of Mamas and the Papas founder John Phillips. I never thought much of him growing up, and would have thought reading his memoir would be tantamount to reading one by a guy from Three Dog Night or something. Now, with the benefit of having his solo albums readily available, I realize how grossly misinformed I was. For one thing, I stopped taking well-arranged harmonies for granted and came to see what a rare thing the Mamas and Papas were. And not only are their records unexpectedly deep, but even the hits have a surprising emotional ambivalence (not to mention a Sticky Fingers-like level of drug references). And Phillips's first solo record, John, Wolf King of L.A., has become one of my favorite rock albums; on the surface it's saturated in narcissism with lyrics confronting unnecessary failure in the midst of decadent excess, but beyond that it's about a very recognizable kind of depression, of being able to recognize high expectations and even the means with oneself to meet them but balking at the effort and instead withdrawing into various fantasies and feints. I think I identify with that to an altogether unwholesome degree.

Anyway, I expected his autobiography would shed more light on that aspect of Phillips' complex character, but instead it mostly reads like just another symptom of his peculiar malady, an at times appallingly unreflective memory dump that seems a dodge, a cop out. His music clearly reflects how acutely he is aware of the limitations of hedonism, but in recounting his decisions to indulge in it with no regard for his companions or his own health, he is generally powerless to do anything but register his own selfishness as if it were an inevitable fact. He habitually flees responsibility and rather than figure out what makes causes his flight, he instead evinces a pathological expectation of total forgiveness for all his transgressions. The only excuse he can muster is a kind of cretinous hippie hedonism, typified by such passages as this: "The France was as elegant as you could get. We had our own wine stewards and did our best to consume as much of the dope as possible. We Swam, read, sunbathed, drank, and I stayed high the whole time." Sometimes there's a dash of philosophy: "The dope was out on the tables, in vases and bowls, and money never seemed to change hands. That's how I wanted it in my house. We were there to share and party. And the partying never let up." Probably an interest in making the book commercial led to to an emphasis on such scenes, and Phillips offers all sorts of sensationalistic details -- he claims to have had a threesome of some sort with Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, and he says he turned down an invitation to go party at 10050 Cielo Drive the night the Manson family showed up and murdered everyone on the premises.

In running through the inventory of outrageous parties and famous fucked-up friends and sexual partners, it's weird how Phillips seems like a spectator to his own memories; he sounds like he's trying to convince himself of what a great righteous time it was even though he seems to have been somewhat passive in the face of everything that overwhelmed him. Unexpected success on an unfathomable scale seems to have permanently disoriented him, made all his choices seem arbitrary or choreographed by some mysterious outside force. Throughout the book, it's clear that he had no special aspiration to express the ideals of the 1960s, yet he ends up claiming them even as the zeitgeist co-opted his songwriting skills. After all, one of his signal achievements was to turn the youth movement into a jingle by writing "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)". And lost in the hype he generates for his past, Phillips seems to forget that the money had to come from somewhere. The square record-buying public's funds were ultimately fueling this drug-consumption spree, and they didn't really get to share in the piles of pills at the Bel Air party. The best we get is the vicarious appreciation of his lifestyle as it filters out in gossip magazines, self-referential songs and biographies like the one I'm reading.

This brings me to something I often wonder about, which is the degree to which people like Phillips are aware of the vicarious potential of their own decadence -- if they feel driven to it as a kind of marketing program, particularly since selling pop music is as much about lifestyles as it is hooks and choruses. His memoir offers few clues. That's probably inevitable since any sign of self-consciousness on this front would render the whole edifice inauthentic. But I suspect that the fantasy demands of a mass audience impose themselves on celebrities without their knowing quite what they are facing. They end up violating all these bourgeois norms (fidelity, prudence, thriftiness, hard work, punctuality, etc.) out of compulsion more than pleasure. (A lyric from Phillips's "Someone's Sleeping" captures this: "From a second-story window I caught a glimpse of someone's life and it was mine, and my face was dark and dirty and I cried.")

Stars' boundless notoriety makes the illusion of their absolute autonomy all the more intoxicating, while in truth they have no more control than the rest of us. They merely confront a different set of limits. They seem forced to adopt decadence or peculiarity as a kind of defense, an escape from the mania that inadvertently fuels it further. The more remote they become from ordinary life, the more intriguing they become and the force that pushes them further out into inexplicableness becomes more and more powerful. If they give in to it, they achieve a kind of pure celebrity that has no pretense of a connection to any sort of achievement. Just look at what happened to Michael Jackson and Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, et. al. This happened to John Phillips as well, though as he faded to obscurity, he was left with the far more conventional fate of being a straight-up dope fiend.

Reflexivity and bubble trouble (11 Nov 2008)

In the New York Review of Books, George Soros pushes his "reflexivity" thesis, which as far as I can understand -- I haven't read any of his several books on the topic -- is simply a refutation of the idea that we can't argue with the equilibrium points markets move toward.

As a way of explaining financial markets, I propose an alternative paradigm that differs from the current one in two respects. First, financial markets do not reflect prevailing conditions accurately; they provide a picture that is always biased or distorted in one way or another. Second, the distorted views held by market participants and expressed in market prices can, under certain circumstances, affect the so-called fundamentals that market prices are supposed to reflect. This two-way circular connection between market prices and the underlying reality I call reflexivity.

Whenever someone proposes an "alternative paradigm," you have to wonder if that person is a crank, and certainly Soros has been accused of that, despite the fortune he made in the 1990s in currency trading. And the nebulousness of the new paradigm here doesn't help. It's hedged and abstracted to the point where it doesn't seem to argue for anything that anyone would disagree with. Yes, there are market failures; yes, bubbles form when investors misread the economic tea leaves. Yes, markets work dialectically -- they are always in the process of aggregating the decisions of investors and so are never in a static state from which absolutely reliable conclusions can be drawn. Information is always in the process of being priced in, but there are lags, asymmetries, criminal manipulations all affecting what prices can signal, not to mention the fact that prices must be considered in relation to other prices, each with its own host of distortions. Investors are obviously forced to make decisions with imperfect information, because no one can adequately process all the information that is now accessible, let alone take into account the known unknowns. And markets may move toward equilibria, but they never quite achieve it, because inputs into the system are always in the process of changing. (Mark Thoma links to this paper, which deals with the same problem and champions Imperfect Knowledge Economics -- perhaps a successor to behavioral economics in garnering future buzz? -- as a way of accommodating policy to asset-price swings.)

Soros seems to be arguing for an inherent momentum in false perceptions, a feedback loop that compounds erroneous assumptions. His ponderous way of putting this: "occasionally there is a misconception or misinterpretation that finds a way to reinforce a trend that is already present in reality and by doing so it also reinforces itself. Such self-reinforcing processes may carry markets into far-from-equilibrium territory." This continues until some unspecified magic moment when everybody all of a sudden recognizes that everything is out of whack (Soros: "it may persist until the misconception becomes so glaring that it has to be recognized as such"). But the imprecision about what prompts this sudden recognition is frustratingly vague. Why doesn't it happen sooner? Do certain parties actively prevent such recognition? Is it a tipping-point phenomenon? Aren't there already a plethora of opinions that the market is already aggregating? Are there investor opinions that don't get factored into market-moving decisions until some later consensus is achieved? What is the mechanism here? Soros blames reflexivity on the "distorted view of reality" of market participants, but that seems to misrepresent the nature of financial reality. Not to go all postmodern here, but how can anyone presume to know what the underlying reality is to ascertain that it has been misperceived? Financial reality is not some given thing; it's constructed by the market's participants and is always in the process of being shaped. It's not just there, waiting to be misunderstood by certain foolish investors. The difficulty in pinning down what "reality" is makes it hard to identify and prick bubbles, because for every benchmark one can cite to show that asset prices are misbehaving, one can also bring up some reason why this time it's different.

Also, in trying to grasp the nature of economic reality, we confront the quantum problem: we affect what we are trying to observe. This is especially true of, say, Fed governors, whose comments profoundly affect markets.

Often in financial commentary, a dichotomy is set up between investing based on "fundamentals" and rampant speculation -- trading on noise. Soros's theory would seem to fit in to this: the reality is dictated by fundamentals -- the raw data about capital flows -- but the market moves according to the distorted interpretations of those fundamentals. But you don't need to be in a post-structuralism seminar to be wary of this particular dyad. One can't act on the fundamentals without interpreting them in some way, and once in the realm of interpretations, the nature of the fundamentals themselves becomes superfluous. In other words, fundamentals alone don't dictate market activity. The interpretations are all that there is. Trying to present your own investment decisions as being based on fundamentals is just an appeal to the ineffable authority those fundamentals are supposed to give, but fundamentals are like the "master signifier," unknowable in and of itself and without any essential meaning, though its theoretical existence supplies the rationale for all the meanings encrusted around it. We can collect all the data we want, but we can't "know" the fundamentals. To paraphrase Lebowski, we just have, like, our opinion, man. Everyone is ultimately trading on noise. Often, as a result, amateurs are urged to "buy and hold" because we collectively have faith that we will produce more and not less going forward, so the sum total GDP in the future will be bigger. That's about as fundamental as it gets.

One useful thing about Soros's article is how he frames the events of September not as a catastrophe narrowly averted, as if often done in recounting the Fed and the Treasury Department's heroic efforts to save the banking system, but as the catastrophe itself.

the inconceivable occurred: the financial system actually melted down. A large money market fund that had invested in commercial paper issued by Lehman Brothers "broke the buck," i.e., its asset value fell below the dollar amount deposited, breaking an implicit promise that deposits in such funds are totally safe and liquid. This started a run on money market funds and the funds stopped buying commercial paper. Since they were the largest buyers, the commercial paper market ceased to function. The issuers of commercial paper were forced to draw down their credit lines, bringing interbank lending to a standstill. Credit spreads—i.e., the risk premium over and above the riskless rate of interest—widened to unprecedented levels and eventually the stock market was also overwhelmed by panic. All this happened in the space of a week.

It reminds us that we don't have to wonder what disaster would have looked like; we saw it. And when we think of potential disasters to come, we can remember what that week in September felt like as a gauge of what happens in the midst of a panic, and how there is always some larger crisis that we are rushing heroically to prevent. When the house is on fire, politicians will tell us how effective they've been in saving the city from burning down.

Identity as byproduct (24 July 2007)

Jon Elster's Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality brings together a number of my favorite topics, all of which I tend to see as connected to consumerism: the importance of the public sphere, the problem of trying to will authenticity or naturalness (the sprezzatura conundrum), the ways in which collective and individual rationality are at odds, limitations of Pareto efficiency -- i.e. the argument that optimal rational equilibrium is achieved only when no one can be made better off without making any other individual worse off -- and the possibility of altruism.

Consumerism sets forth a set of values that hinge on a blindness to these issues; it thrives on a ideological belief -- easily disproved -- that there is no society, only individuals and their preferences, that can be sated in the market through goods, independent of the actions of others. After all, even our consumerist desires are dependent to a degree on what other people want, or have wanted, or will want. What's available depends on what others want and are willing to produce and sell. The value of things to us often depends on how others view them, and how scarce they are due to how much others covet them. And then there are status goods and positional goods, which can only be valued in terms of excluding others from having or using them -- things like beach-front property and limited-edition luxury goods and artworks.

We are not in total control of what we want and whether we can have it, and this undermines any simplistic assessment of what our rational behavior should be in such terms. Rather, our desires are always affected by the sort of decisionmaking processes studied by game theory -- if they want that, then I should want this, unless they know I know they want that in which case I should want this and not that. And so on. And such strategizing makes us hopelessly self-conscious, and by some standards, inauthentic, at one remove from what we are brought to regard as our "natural" desires.

Consumerism exploits this problem -- offering to return us to our naturalness through a fantasy evoked by heavily-advertised goods while exacerbating the inauthenticity that comes with a feeling that we are calculating our identity. Consumer products seem to provide us a signalling language to express real selves, but our real selves don't speak that language, and are actually byproducts of other activities -- perhaps of being lost in what productivity gurus like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi call flow.

In other words, consumerism chooses us to consciously, rationally, plan out what we desire as a means to achieving a better sense of who we are and how we want to live. This very act of willing makes the goal -- selfhood -- impossible. Elster cites Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit on this point: "Desire and the self-certainty obtained in its gratification are conditioned by the object, for self-certainty comes from superseding this other: in order that this supersession can take place, there must be this other." The process of desiring is central to the self, not what is desired -- consumerism tends to make us confused on that point and we wonder why the objects alone continue to disappoint us, or satisfy us only temporarily, or leave us fundamentally unfulfilled. Once we set out to pin our nature down, it eludes us, becomes contrived, feels wanting. At this point, the machinery of the consumer society intervenes to remedy that lack, reinforcing the faulty premise that conditioned it.

Authenticity traps (23 April 2007)

Via Julian Sanchez, a link to a New Statesman review of Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. The book apparently chronicles the long history of the music industry turning authenticity into a product, and various folk musicians into mediums for authenticity's distribution. As reviewer Jeff Sharlit explains, this reification of authenticity promotes "what Barker and Taylor call an authenticity 'trap' -- the harder you try to 'keep it real', the more artificial you become."

The thing about authenticity is that, much like spontaneity, it can't be self-aware. It's only something that others can recognize in you, and the more you are aware of your reputation for it, the more likely it is you will lose that reputation. Pop music, like pop culture generally, packages ready-made lifestyles with nothing authentic about them. Some people, however, like "authenticity" (the product) in their lifestyle mix, hence the efforts to sell certain musicians -- blues men and Appalachians in past decades, gangsta rappers more recently -- as epitomizing realness.

I tend to fall into a corollary trap where, after recognizing that contrived authenticity is worthless, I revel in gleefully inauthentic music, like bubblegum, thinking in part that this proves my piercing insight. But this is obviously no better. The real desideratum is to enjoy pop culture without deriving part of your enjoyment from the self-image you it helps you project.

Ideally, when you start down this road of critical thinking, you want to consume the music, not some version of yourself, not some vicarious fantasy. You long for a route to the thing itself, an experience in which the thing ceases to function as a sign and just is. But this too would merely cater to a vicarious fantasy: by apprehending the music, in itself, we would see through to how we too can exist for ourselves, without needing to worry about grooming our identity and how we come across. I listen to, say, Tony Burrows, and for a minute I can fool myself into thinking that I don't care what anybody else thinks, I'm just enjoying this song for what it is and nothing more. But at best I've bought myself a moment of self-forgetting. If there's a distinction to be made between pop culture and "high culture", it may rest in the way pop culture encourages you to consume yourself consuming -- to revel in the image of yourself it foments -- while high culture demands you apply some knowledge you'd acquired previously in order to try to understand a thing, and in so doing to forget yourself in the use of cultural capital, lose yourself in the effort.

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.

Induced alexithymia (5 Feb 2007)

The BPS Research Digest reports on a study about boredom whose findings make a kind of intuitive sense to me. Researchers issued questionnaires to students and found that those "who said they suffered from more boredom also tended to report difficulty identifying their emotions and being externally focused." The researchers somewhat poetically explain the problems of looking to external stimuli to cure boredom: “Like the trap of quicksand, such thrashing only serves to strengthen the grip of boredom by further alienating us from our desire and passion, which provide compass points for satisfying engagement with life.” Looking for distractions only yields further distraction, more boredom. The psychology of this strikes me as correct, and I have argued before that consumer societies have to manufacture this state in its populace. Boredom has to be built in to consumer society's products, and its discourse needs to continually reinforce the notion that we owe it to ourselves to be bored, lest we recognize the resources we have within ourselves. Boredom is a learned habit, not an accident of circumstances. Here's what I wrote about it then:

Since we're trained from childhood not to value the luxury of free thought, and since all initiative to think for ourselves and all cultural validation for autodidacticism has been effaced from the working world, we experience this erstwhile freedom to think undirected thoughts as boredom, as sullen blankness. Given this dire scenario, the culture industry's primary function becomes one of habituating workers to their fate: to routinely expect boredom and to see the oscillation in and out of states of boredom as the only kind of joy. So accordingly, mass entertainments, with their interchangeable stories and their quick-cut edits and their rejection of complexity, carefully cultivate the short-attention span, continuing the cultural work initiated at the multiplex during the children's movie. Concentration is counterproductive in a consumer, whereas boredom suits the consumer economy: incapable of forming deep attachments to cultural commodities and spurred by sublimated class envy, shoppers become perpetually restless for novelty, making serial purchases with spiraling frequency until the ever more tenacious habit of boredom renders them instantaneously empty upon possession. At that point, the act of acquisition is the only moment of pleasure, and one's life becomes a perpetual buying spree.

How then do we get in touch with our emotions if consumer society conspires against us to induce alexithymia? Having recently seen David Lynch field questions about his TM practices and lulled by his repeated allusions to the ocean of bliss within, I wonder if meditation could form a bulwark against the hedonistic materialism's snares, keeping us in a state of pristine emotional biofeedback. I don't know. Meditation seems kind of boring.