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.

Preppy paradox (20 July 2007)

Ordinarily I would have ignored this, but it seemed relevant to points I was trying to get at in the post about sprezzatura. A dubious trend piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day charted the return of the preppy look. This sort of story has a boilerplate feel to it, and you probably know without even having to click through how it reads -- a list of consumer goods that have been marketed heavily recently are rattled off to establish the appearance of a trend, and then some fashion industry flacks are quoted to produce the illusion of substantiation. Let me tell you, if a retailer or an industry analyst confirms an "important" trend , then it must really be happening. This article cites John Murray, co-owner of Murray's Toggery Shop, veteran rap-video director Julien "Little X" Lutz (who proclaims ""Hip-hop is rapping about money and power and women, which is perfect for preps"), and Susanna Salk, the author of A Privileged Life: Celebrating WASP Style.

Anyway, what caught my attention was this paradoxical statement by Salk: "Preppy fashion is so iconic now. There's a nostalgia element to it. It's certainly a privilege to live in a manner that doesn't evolve, doesn't change." Put aside for a moment the fact that this makes no sense on the face of it -- how can something that doesn't change come in and out of fashion? And it's very easy to adopt a wardrobe that doesn't change; wear a uniform -- put on a gray-flannel suit. This requires no particular privilege, except that which supplies the strength of mind to transcend trends, the allure of belonging to the zeitgeist -- the bonuses of being alive in this particular time. Perhaps we fantasize of such transcendence while realizing we don't really want it -- we want to buy a consumer good that just evokes it for us, gives a chance to daydream about long summer months, year after year in Nantucket, without having to live out the tedium and the coruscating snobbery.

But in the sense that preppy fashion offers the opportunity to purchase the illusion of permanence without the rigor that comes with upholding a standard, it makes sense. The statement is true not merely of preppy fashion but of all fashion which often attempts to sell timelessness as a transient, thrilling experience -- the exciting thrill of participation in the present moment and the fleeting sense that this moment is the most important moment and will last forever. Through nostalgia fashion, you get the thrill of participating in something with an ersatz tradition without actually having to do something as boring as adhere to a rigid code. Via well-marketed products -- iconic nostalgia for the now -- you can dupe yourself into believing you can get style without propriety -- you can be like Castiglione's courtiers without actually having talent or ethics.

Sprezzatura and style (16 July 2007)

Seemingly apropos of nothing, the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal had an appreciation of Castiglione's Renaissance era conduct manual The Book of the Courtier. The article has a smattering of biographical detail and some by and large unsubstantiated praise for the man; in short it's the typical warm-bath-of-genius article in which you are supposed to take away cocktail-party-level familiarity with an alleged great mind. (Sample insight: "Castiglione's life, from beginning to end, was in pursuit of the ideal, and peopled with leading names of the time. His portrait, which hangs in the Louvre, was painted by Raphael (a native of Urbino); his tomb was designed by the architect-painter, Guilio Romano, with epitaph composed by the literary light, and future cardinal, Pietro Bembo.") I take some umbrage at this because Castiglione has been a touchstone reference point for me for a while now, and it's sad to see an opportunity to promote his ideas squandered. I find myself evoking him in order to make use of his notion of sprezzatura, the paradoxical ideal of planned nonchalance. It's an pernicious sort of goal to set for yourself and it anticipated the great achievements of contemporary advertisers and their marketing of ersatz authenticity, of selling the idea that you can find yourself by using consumer products.

It's hard to imagine a fashion industry without a version of sprezzatura in operation -- usually it takes the form of "style," the indescribable and ineffable quality that is intended to mystify the periodic changes in fashion that the industry requires. By pointing to models with "timeless style," the awkward question of why what was timeless last season has become suddenly all too dated is avoided, particularly for those who want to play along with the game, who want to believe that now is the only possible time it could be meaningful to be alive. (Hell, for us it is, right?) The humdrum commercial mechanics of the fashion business disappear, and instead we enjoy a parade of consumer society's values in their most attractive packaging -- beautiful people seeming to live the possibility of effortless spontaneity, with looking the part merging with the pleasure presumed from living it, only the pleasure seems accessible much more conveniently when all it seems to require, as we indulge the fashion fantasy, is donning a costume. The problem with this is that if you believe in these ideals despite the evident contradictions in them, and you stake you sense of self on them, you can end up losing your moorings, beguiled by your own pretenses and left with no stable, operational identity. Since spontaneity is artfully feigned, it's no longer of use as a way to confirm sincerity, and every emotional state can seem contrived, including one's own. And one begins to labor to turn one's own spontaneous reactions into managed signals, expressions of "natural style" and inborn refinement.

This dilemma is evident in The Book of the Courtier, and the strange depiction of ideal love that it develops. Since words are suspect in expressing love, a courtier is instructed to use reason to comprehend the "message written in his heart" in order to entrust his eyes to articulate that message without words to a beloved. Through this message, the lover knows that he is, in fact, in love. But still, his eyes must be "carefully governed," so that message is not expressed "to others than the one whom it concerns". He must be able to say to himself what he is forbidden to say to his beloved, and embrace the falsity assured by this situation as preferable to the falsity that might be assumed if he spoke. Exhibiting a "certain shyness," as the Magnifico, one of the book's interlocutors, suggests, becomes a self-consciously contrived gesture, as conscientiously offered as the "gesture of respect" that should accompany it. So the shyness, which first informs a lover of his own feelings of love, becomes, like the lady's timely blush, a pretense. What makes a lover sure of his own sincerity becomes dubious testimony of his sincerity when displayed. Both the ideal lover and the ideal lady then are in this precarious position: they must be able to govern the representation of feelings which if sincere, would be beyond governance, and they must recognize sincerity in acts they know can be contrived.

Perhaps this would not be a problem for that courtier who can "practice in all things a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry". But underlying the whole notion of sprezzatura is the idea that the value of an action is in how it is received rather than any essential quality of the action itself. A courtier's action becomes arbitrary, which leads in The Book of the Courtier to the ludicrous equivalence of disparate practices: from Castiglione's point of view, how one appears on the battlefield and how one appears at a masked ball are subject to the same criteria, criteria which have nothing to do with why one fights, or why one dances. How the courtier appears when in love, too, is evaluated according to criteria that abrogates any actual emotions involved. What emerges is a picture of how the ideal courtier would appear when in love (e.g. "the man who loves a lot, says only a little") that makes the actual feelings of love superfluous. (As another noted belle-lettrist, Howard Jones, once asked, What is love, anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway?) Those actual feelings are precisely those awkward sort which the doctrine of sprezzatura intends to suppress, urging instead a grammar of representation whose rules are divorced from those feelings that presumably necessitate the display. The representation of a feeling replaces the feeling itself.

But if the appearance of love is to be managed, and is, at the same time, the means of determining the sincerity of that love; then how is one to ascertain the sincerity of one's own feelings? Because those feelings are arbitrary within the sprezzatura system, the question is apparently moot. It is as insignificant as the reasons why one goes to the masked ball; one goes, perhaps, simply because one's presence is required. One loves simply because one is expected to. In that ideal world where sprezzatura is realized -- in the world pictured in fashion ads and Abercrombie and Fitch catalogs -- men and women interact with each other without needing an understanding of why.

However, when this is compared with what Castiglione seems to expect of love, a great disparity arises. One speaker remarks, "No other satisfaction" equals that of knowing his lady "returned [his] love from her heart and had given . . . her soul". A female salonista argues that a person in love should have his soul "transformed" into his beloved's, "for this is the way of those truly in love". Another count agrees that "the greatest happiness" is to share "a single will" with his beloved's soul -- "the feeling that one is loved himself" is that which most "stirs" the heart. All these dreams of love depend on certainty: one is assured of the other's will, and that assurance provides satisfaction. These hopes are all characterized by the freedom from deceit; in fact, having one's soul "transformed" into another's makes deceit impossible. Such hopes would seem to betray a deep-seated uneasiness with the deception that sprezzatura requires, revealing a wish for a relationship that would be a haven from perpetual contrivances.

But, as Castiglione has one of courtiers explain, the ability to love properly is "one of the most useful and important of the endowments yet attributed to the courtier". The court lady, too, "needs most of all to be knowledgeable about what belongs to discussions on love". Love is considered a learned skill, not a natural predilection of the heart. With no reference point to judge another's sincerity except a code that dictates the propriety of certain appearances, it is mutual love, rather than mutual suspicion, that becomes impossible.