Thick and thin (15 June 2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Motivational research and the death drive (16 Feb 2007)

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

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

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

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

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

Entertainment as attention (16 November 2006)

In No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart, Tom Slee's book about the foibles of individual choice, he cites this passage from Grant and Wood's Blockbusters about the risk involved in putting up cultural goods for sale:

The risk factor in launching new works of popular culture is impossible to overestimate. Simply put, the great majority of cultural products do not succeed: few people by the CD or watch the movie, and the investment in the creation of the intellectual property is not recouped. Adding to the risk is the blunt fact that research and pre-testing are notoriously ineffective in the realm of popular culture. Until audiences actually experience a creative product, it simply cannot be evaluated. In advance of the actual release of the title, nobody knows.

This point is often raised when someone wants to debunk the power mainstream-media conglomerates have in shaping taste or to validate the sovereign, spontaneous role of the consumer in creating culture, which, if this is true, is exactly what we want and deserve. But Slee is citing it to make an almost opposite point -- the market for cultural product is so polluted with failure that audiences are always becoming that much more risk-averse themselves. The more product that floods the market, the more difficult it is for an audience to choose something, and the more the audience will rely on safe herd choices.

According to Slee, it's an asymmetric-information problem -- no one knows what makes anything any good (i.e. successful, profitable -- the meaningful criterion) so the slightest fortunate accident that creates a focal point (or the concerted ad campaign, or the presence of a known star, or any other aspect that brings a modicum of familiarity and comfort) can drive a herd to something specific, which then becomes something everybody needs to know about in order to have something to talk about with one another (which is the main function of most popular culture) -- you need to see Borat because everyone else has and is reliving it in conversation. Economists calls this increasing returns to scale -- the bigger something becomes, the bigger it will continue to become, because the incentives for choosing something else diminish. This is why the longer the long tail gets, the bigger the blockbusters become. Adrift in the deep, vast ocean of mediocrity, we need brighter beacons to bring us home.

But what makes the ocean so deep is the ease with which anyone can distribute their creations. This may allow more people to conceive of themselves as creators making culture rather than consumers digesting it, just as cultural-studies Pollyannas were fond of saying all along -- consumption is a form of making, of production. Now, consumers have the opportunity to really prove that by distributing their various repurposed versions of the culture they consume -- the remixes, the mash-ups, blog posts, etc. With that distribution capability available, it may become incumbent to distribute one's creative work. One no longer has the excuse of being shut out from the technology as a reason for not attempting to share one's innovations with an audience larger than the person in the mirror. If one takes the possibility of an audience for the innovative ways in which you consume culture seriously, this shift changes the pursuit of entertainment into the pursuit of attention. So perhaps the future of the "superstars" economy is this: a handful of successes in the sense that Grant and Wood mean, and then a legion of reimagined versions of those successes, at varying degrees of separation and revamping.

MarketThink and moderateness (13 November 2006)

Mark Thoma and Ezra Klein both link to this article by Christopher Hayes about what one learns in University of Chicago introductory economics class. Chicago, of course, is the spawning ground for anti-Keynesian ultra-free-market "neoclassical" perspectives, epitomized by Milton Friedman, that gained political currency in America in the 1980s.

The article basically delineates what Tom Slee, in his book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart (a misleading title, as the attitude it expresses is what it critiques; Chris Dillow reviews it here), calls MarketThink: the belief that the free market aggregates individual choices to reveal what society prefers while affording a medium within which an individual can make choices that reveal her preferences. In other words, the belief that individual choice is always sovereign in the marketplace and yields desired outcomes, and thus the world we currently live with is the people's choice, and to go against it is an elitist or totalitarian impulse. The competitive market is presumed to solve all social problems meritoriously, and if problems persist, it's because competition remainds regrettably imperfect. Slee's book uses staples from political science and game theory -- the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, the free-rider problem, the collective action problem -- to expose the oversimplification of this worldview without tossing it out altogether. He turns its precepts against itself.

Hayes is up to something different; he is concerned that intro economics courses normalize MarketThink and present it as objective truth, as apolitical rather than the inherently conservative tool it often is (it typically rationalizes arrangements that see public goods falter while private wealth accumulates in the hands of a few who increasingly monopolize power). He exposes how the seemingly commonsense models of basic economics have vast explanatory power and how they allow one to marvel at the seeming obfuscations partisan commentators make to muddle the picture. And he gives a sense of the economist's knee-jerk contrarianism (what ALbert Hirschman dubs the "perversity argument" in The Rhetoric of Reaction). Hayes seems especially inspired by the way the class rises up against the professor when the professor's free-trade enthusiasm carries him into more overt propagandizing but laments that students are perhaps skeptical only in cases where professors seem to excited -- that they are knee-jerk cynics. Hayes suggests that if you can present your partisan spin with centrist equanimity, no one will bother to question it; that tone rather than substance is all-important. They don't see "moderateness" as a position but as some average that equals the truth. The students' skepticism of unmitigated enthusiasm for a position marked it as a weak position to them; hence the ironic presentation of information in the Daily Show era -- the sideways presentation of political ideas marks them with a cool that doubles as credibility; it too dissudes questions that dissolve in the all-encompassing presentation of attitude.