Pleasures of Scoreboard (9 Dec 2010)

This Wired article about "retail hackers" -- people who try to turn companies' price discrimination techniques against them -- offers this useful distinction:

According to Donald Lichtenstein, a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado at Boulder, super-couponers have learned to ignore “acquisition utility,” the pleasure and value one obtains from, say, a box of cereal. Instead, they peg their shopping decisions to “transaction utility,” the difference between what they’re getting the cereal for and what they think the cereal is supposed to cost. In other words, super-couponers don’t perceive a grocery item as food, at least not until they exit the store and serve it for breakfast. On the shelf and in the cart, the super-couponer evaluates products with the cold-eyed calculus of a trader.

This is another way of saying that these people are after exchange value rather than use value -- they are beyond use value, as Baudrillard liked to say. Or in other words, the utility they are after is what radio host Jim Rome and his devotees used to call scoreboard -- the sheer irrefutable fact of winning, of beating someone else. This old column of mine about "thrift-store gentry" discusses the idea in terms of obsessed thrift-store shopping -- I defined scoreboard there as "an ethical Occam's razor, a pitiless pragmatism that relentlessly transforms all situations into zero-sum clashes with clear winners and losers." My conclusion was that "beating the system" by scoring retail triumphs was not really beating the system but reinforcing it. You're still shopping and reckoning your identity in terms of acquiring stuff.

I think that we are encouraged to fall back onto such pleasures as scoreboard in shopping for a number of reasons. First, competitive consumption nicely mirrors the competitive aspects of production in capitalism, making that ideology holistic and naturalizing the idea of a zero-sum society -- that there should be winners and losers in the great game of making and distributing useful things. Of course, cooperation with others would be an illusion and off course there should naturally be vast inequality.

Also scoreboard is compensation for discovering that use value is a mirage, an alibi. Or to put that differently, the pleasures of zero-sum scoreboard are infinite, whereas our organic human needs are quite limited. Satisfaction is anathema to both our growth-oriented economy and our sense of limitless self-potential, of endlessly expanding identity, so fixating on exchanges for their own sake as the source of new pleasures makes sense. That is an inexhaustible well.

The problem with this -- the reason retail hackers seem more crazy than enviable -- is that focus on the pleasures of exchange blocks our access to the pleasures of the things acquired. We don't want to accept that use value isn't more real than exchange value. So we believe that the hackers don't really taste the cereal, in a way, if they ever even get around to eating it. It's akin to collecting mania, where managing the collection replaces enjoying the things collected -- you enjoy buying albums more than listening to them, if they ever get played. We become, if the article is to be believed, "cold-eyed" and dispassionate -- which, presumably, is inherently bad.

Baudrillard seems to argue that no one can ever really taste the cereal, that this is always already an ideological illusion necessitated by consumer capitalism. His position seems to be that you can't "really" experience anything within capitalist social relations (if ever) -- sensory experience is always mediated, and the mediation becomes the focal experiential point. To beat those conditions, you need to upend all of society, not aggressively clip coupons.

I wouldn't go that far, but I often find myself falling into the collector/scoreboard trap of fetishizing the triumph of winning the exchange, or completing the series, or whatever it is that makes me lose sight of the goods themselves in light of some other goal that seems like it should be subordinate. Then I generalize from my experience, wonder if there are structural aspects to consumer society that encourage us to fall into those traps. (Since obviously it can't simply be my credulity or weakness. Obviously.) The looming question is whether these derivative pleasures that come directly from capitalism's structure are actually less pleasing to us than the authentic pleasures of enjoying objects and non-exchange-oriented experiences.

Further complicating things, capitalism tends to makes us think that all experiences and goods can be understood as exchange-oriented, as trades in which a measurable status outcome is at stake. Scoreboard everywhere, all the time.

Metaprotesting and the Stewart/Colbert Event (27 Oct 2010)

It appears as though I will be in D.C. for the big comedy event being hosted by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. I don't know anything about it other than it's happening and that it is supposed to be in praise of moderation, which, as Scott McLemee points out, is a pretty useless aim for a protest: "the anti-ideological spirit of the event is a dead end. The attitude that it's better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor -- this is not civility. It’s timidity." Obviously this won't be anything like the protests in France or the head stomping in Kentucky. It seems like a naive protest against the very need for protests, against the necessary existence of politics. Basically a futile protest against human fraility.

I'm not sure why so many people are interested in attending this event -- perhaps the perception is that it will be a Woodstock-like event encapsulating a shared generational moment, an event whose sole function is to be something that later you can say you were at it. But maybe it will turn out to be an Event beyond ontology, the "gap between two heterogeneous multiplicities."

I'm only partially joking in invoking Badiou, who has written frequently (and cryptically) about political protest and goes so far as to declare that militant politics is one of the four (why only four?) "truth procedures" that yield subjectivity. He has advocated a "poltics without party" -- which is not far from what Stewbert claims to advocate. Badiou argues that a true political event forces "assigning a visible measure to the excessive power of the State," which under ordinary circumstances remains invisible and is why, for example, we put up with corruption and "politics as usual" despite constantly complaining about it, and why we vote for the least bad option instead of rioting in the streets for different options. Indifference, this pre-emptive sense of defeat many people have in the face of politics, is the effect of power.

Stewart and Colbert are arguably trying to use a paradox to short-circuit this indifference, reveal the State in its power and end the "errancy" of our perceptions of it, to use Badiou's terms. Once the power is revealed, however, the smooth functioning of its power is interrupted.

The apathy of non-political time is maintained by the State's not being at a distance, because the measure of its power is errant. We are captives of its unassignable errancy. The political is the interruption of this errancy, it is the demonstration of a measure of State power. It is in this sense that the political is "liberty." The State is in effect a bondage without measure of the parts of the situation, a bondage of which the secret is precisely the errancy of the excess power, its absence of measure. Liberty is here to set a distance from the State, through the collective fixation of a measure of excess. And if the excess is measured, it is because the collective can measure it.

Bringing a large group of like-minded people together is bound to be good for sending a "message" of some sort, and there will be no shortage of Rorschach readings after the fact. But regardless of the announced intent, it seems like the purpose of getting aloof fans of a TV show to make the highly inconvenient gesture of showing up somewhere is to habituate them to the effort of protest, to radicalize them to some degree, to make them feel the intoxicating, potentially disinhibiting energy of massification. It calls forth a collective identity and reveals the subjectivity possible beyond the limits of individual identity. Whether that is a good thing, or even registers as something different from the awareness of being part of a large TV audience, remains to be seen.

Addendum: Here's some bonus material from the Paxton essay about fascism I mentioned yesterday. "Programs are so easily sacrificed to expediency in fascist practice that, at one point, I was tempted to reduce the role of ideology in fascism to a simple functionalism: fascists propose anything that serves to attract a crowd, solidify a mass following, or reassure their elite accomplices." Interesting to consider in relation to a nonideological event touted by the so-called cognitive elite. On the other hand, "Fascism can appear wherever democracy is sufficiently implanted to have aroused disillusion." Are Colbert and Stewart exacerbating disillusionment, as so much media coverage tends to, or are they trying to genuinely moderate it and get us to appreciate democratic institutions, including peaceable assembly?

Income Inequality Actually Sucks (25 Oct 2010)

Thanks to expiring airline miles, I am once again a subscriber of BusinessWeek, or rather, as it is known now, BloombergBusinessWeek. I like the new design, I like that it feels much more stuffed with content, Economist style, and I even don't mind the way they reprise the deckline at the end of stories as "the bottom line" for the morons in their audience who they assume can't be bothered to read what they've bothered to print. But I didn't at all care for this leader (to use the Economist terminology) about "the inequality delusion" by Drake Bennett, whose byline is ordinarily found on the Boston Globe Ideas page and not in the charnel house where right-wing ideology is made. Bennett is writing about recent polls that revealed that most Americans are fairly muddled about the full extent of income inequality in America, though the continue to espouse a desire for a more egalitarian society. Citing libertarian-leaning GMU economist Bryan Caplan, Bennett seems to suggest that Americans' ignorance about the growing levels of inequality is probably good, since they are likely to be too stupid to appreciate all the good things inequality does for society -- that is, motivate the genius class who might otherwise go Galt to build things to improve the lives of proles. That's not the kind of thing I want polluting my mailbox. If BusinessWeek was on Facebook and put that junk in a status update, I would de-friend it.

I was happy to see that Chris Lehmann was also irritated enough by the piece to write an intemperate take-down. He responds to this choice piece of anti-tax dogma from Bennett -- "Any attempt to reimpose that sort of tax rate today would lead to a flight of wealth and talent from the U.S. And with apologies to the social scientists, other ideas for dramatically reducing the income gap are in short supply" -- with some justifiably righteous indignation.

Hmm, where have we heard that “talent flight” mantra before? That’s right—from the defenders of the outlandish executive bonuses doled out under the misbegotten early days of the TARP bailouts. It would indeed be a shame to have to send the Fabrice Tourres of the world packing for greener pastures. And with apologies to Bloomberg savants, there are plenty of ideas for reducing our objectively perilous levels of wealth inequality, from single-payer health care to nationalized universities to unionized workplaces. Most industrialized western democracies have all these things, and as a result, the pain of massive economic contractions like the one we’ve been enduring is actually less lethal in exotic far-off lands like Canada and France.

Lehmann then explains how income inequality actually makes life worse for most people:

So there you have it: the great inequality debate waved away with the assurances of a sloganeering libertarian. So much for the abundant evidence that high levels of inequality help to precipitate, and certainly to prolong, depressions. So much as well for the striking range of positive social goods associated with more equal societies, from higher life expectancy to diminished crime rates to greater literacy rates and lower infant mortality.

Unequal societies are ones that have fragmented into separate classes who experience life from perspectives so different that they lose the ability to compromise with one another and perceive a common good. The logic of income inequality leads to the gated city and the ghetto.

Authenticity Crisis and the Dream of Escaping Irony (23 Sept 2010)

A section of Andrew Potter's mostly compelling new book The Authenticity Hoax deals with Soviet kitsch and mentions a park in Hungary that's now home to Soviet-era monuments and statues. Hungarian authorities, anxious that the park would be misinterpreted as a cynical move to cater to what Potter calls oppression tourists, have given it this motto: "no irony, memento."

That strikes me as a good motto for everyone laboring under the burden of authenticity, which seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid striking an ironic attitude about oneself. It's clear in the peculiar note of 2000s hipsterism, that mawkish nostalgia for juvenilia that passes for a "new earnestness," the evocation of the comforts of familiar things from the developmental period that predates cool -- the stuff people are into before puberty, before tastes matter to our sense of self. We want to build a self in the present that honors and remembers that pure self, before we had to try to be cool.

Potter, who previously co-authored The Rebel Sell, about anti-conformity marketing, argues that authenticity has supplanted cool as the au courant advertising strategy -- which, because he sees advertisers as following the proclivities of the consumer public rather than shaping them, means that authenticity is an idiotic fetish that middle class people have somehow managed to get stuck on in their quest for status. "Cool fizzled out when it was exposed as just another consumerist status hierarchy.... The trick now is to subtly demonstrate that while you may have a job, a family, and a house full of stuff, you are not spiritually connected to any of it. What matters now is not just buying things, it is taking time for you, to create a life that is focused on your unique needs and that reflects your particular taste and sensibility."

I agree with that analysis, but I think it's not quite fair to blame consumers for falling into authenticity traps, as Potter does when he declares "we should not blame those who are selling the authentic, but rather those who are buying." At that point the business journalist in him seems to get the better of him, as he ignores his own arguments about capitalism's role in trigger an authenticity crisis. Potter, a philosophy Ph.D who writes for Maclean's, a sort of Canadian Time magazine, does a good job tracing the history of the idea of authenticity, through Hobbes and Rousseau and Hegel and Benjamin (though it was a tease to use the phrase "jargon of authenticity" without citing Adorno), but that metaphysical spadework is dispensed with once we reach contemporary times, and individuals are expected to be able to transcend the social conditions into which they were born and reject myths of authenticity out of a common sense appraisal of the benefits of capitalism and liberal democracy. One of Potter's primary concerns is with the ways the fascination with authenticity is currently taking an aggressively atavistic form, with people yearning to roll back the Enlightenment and market capitalism and get in touch with pure nature. I don't think authenticity automatically implies a look back to a phony lost golden age (though it often does). Sometimes it is constructed as agreat leap forward; sometimes it is infused with technophilia, as when Mark Zuckerberg claims that people with integrity (i.e. authentic modern persons) share everything on Facebook to prove they have nothing to hide.

And Potter sometimes seems to border on adopting the right-wing narrative that regards eco-minded consumers and lifestyle connoisseurs as some sort of liberal fascists. But by and large his tone is shaped by an apparent desire to be accessible to general readers, which makes it reasonable and conversational. He gets into some issues in metaphysics without ever becoming obtuse or recondite (i.e., he wisely leaves Heidegger outside his bailiwick here).

Potter is quick to say alienated labor is simply "the way it is" -- you know, work sucks, get over it -- which strikes me as hasty. I don't quite understand his claim that alienation "does not mean that there is a problem and that something ought to be done about it," though I suspect it has something to do with his implicit rejection the idea of human species being (i.e. he implies that having meaningful work to do is not necessarily the goal/purpose of human life) and his advocation of tolerating a rigid separation of the private and public self -- which I am totally on board with. More on that below.

Anyway, blaming consumers for allowing authenticity to become a marketing tool holds them unfairly responsible for the ontological insecurity brought on by modernity (to put it in Anthony Giddens's terms). That insecurity, in my view, brings on the crisis of authenticity, which consumerism has attempted to ameliorate ever since. Marketing cool is one of many strategies, one that was especially suitable to a fragmenting media market that allowed each of us to regard ourselves as our own niche. Marketing environmental concern -- a point Potter is especially strong on -- seems to be the ascendant strategy currently.

But the goal of selling a claim to lost authenticity is as old as the forces that first broke up traditional ways of life and melted everything solid into air, to borrow Marx's phrase (from a passage Potter also cites). The first anti-irony wave was perhaps the cult of sensibility in the late-18th century, which was a response to the rising tide of commercialism and "interestedness" in English culture as capitalism began to reshape subjectivity and inculcate rational calculation as a socially tolerated morality. Hence all the literary fad novels full of weeping men and feeling heroines -- A Sentimental Journey, The Man of Feeling, the works of Fanny Burney and Frances Sheridan and countless other forgotten late 18th century writers. The characters are obsessed, just like we are, with displaying sincere emotions without letting the fact of the display and the self-consciousness of it invalidate the gesture -- and with outdoing the displays of others on the scale of "conspicuous authenticity" that Potter derides.

In other words, the need to prove authenticity and the capacity to "really" feel things is not a new status hierarchy, but one that emerges with capitalism and consumerism (which was born in the late-18th century). It undergirds the class distinctions that come into play as aristocratic titles and such get washed away. It always serves along side of the conspicuous consumption that Veblen famously described to establish class boundaries. It's been there all the time, helping differentiate those who consume vulgarly from those who consume tastefully -- or genuinely, authentically, organically, etc. And since authenticity has no metaphysical basis -- there's no intrinsic "real self" to display; it's defined negatively, as Potter notes; it's always contingent, as Rorty argued among many, many others -- the grounds of authenticity can always be shifting in order to freshly reinscribe the hierarchy. Fashions can change as class markers get appropriated without posing an existential threat. The problem is that privilege gets laundered as authenticity and gets to pass without being questioned. It becomes authentic to be inegalitarian.

The "authenticity hoax" is precisely the Romantic idea that we have a true self to which we must display our faithfulness. We think our integrity is at stake in consumerism when really what we are doing is attenuating the status system, replenishing the "code". We think we are recalling something -- a memento of the real self -- that isn't there at all; we blind ourselves to the truth of irony, an inescapable and paradoxical self-awareness that our self is a construct, a work in progress, an open-ended (and mortal) set of possibilities rather than a timeless essence. As Potter puts in in his introduction, "we need ... an individualism that makes its peace with the modern world while allowing for a meaningful life free of nostalgia, reactionary politics, or status seeking."

That sounds pretty utopian, but it's also what Rorty seems to be after in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. He argues that, since there is no true self, we are burdened with a crushing anxiety of influence -- a sense that we are creating ourselves out of someone else's language and merely establishing our non-existence as a unique being. Each person has a "need to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own." That is to say, we need to create "authenticity" out of rhetoric, a unique personal vocabulary and point of view, through creative restatements of what has already be said, of what already simply exists. We can't be free of contingency, but must seek freedom through it. And we cannot mistake our own definition of authenticity as being the true, universal one -- we must keep it private while adhering to an ideal of cosmopolitanism in the public sphere. One needs to be an ironist, in Rorty's terms -- one must accept that our descriptive language is open to influence and is not permanent or true. So basically, when we are setting up our Hungarian statue park of the self, we should flip the motto, and make it "Irony, no mementos."

You can't ever complete the quest for the authentic self, but you can't really ever get it wrong either. You don't have to borrow someone else's notion of the authentic itself. But the idea of authenticity as it's deployed by persuasion professionals (who strive to amplify the feelings of ontological insecurity, since our feeling insecure gets us to buy goods), tends to militate against that idea obviously, positing instead the notion that we have an inner truth that we are in danger of betraying. The sustaining consumerist myth is that authenticity is a matter of manifesting individual novelty and nonconformity rather than a private mode of assimilating inevitable influences. Consumerism perverts romanticism by adopting its critique of modernity and using it to co-opt the quest for authenticity, generating a cultural environment in which most efforts at self-fashioning intensify the feeling of insecurity and phoniness. Potter notes that "selling authenticity is another way of making it self-conscious, which is again, self-defeating."

Creativity, even as it pertains to self-creation, appears as a strict matter of consumption -- not as something attached to a broader sense of practice. So all our efforts can tend to feel like poses, stabs at fashionability, attempts to crack the consumerist code and reap the social benefits. That's in part because the search for self can't take place in private anymore, as Rorty seems to hope. It is now situated in social media, wherein the various gestures and experiments we make searching for ourselves get redeployed automatically as marketing, as signifiers of what is trending.

So I think the specific way to resist the evils of commodified authenticity is to police the public-private boundary more carefully. Rorty writes that we have to "overcome authority without claiming authority" -- to slightly shift that, I think that means we have to find ways to validate our self-making project that don't rely ultimately on commercialized modes of validation, which appear to have transpersonal authority. And we can't broadcast our identity, mediatize it, because that amounts to the same thing.

Bourdieu and Bouncers (16 June 2010)

TMN linked to this article about recent research by sociologist Lauren Rivera, who worked in a New York City nightclub that preys on the status conscious. She earned the trust of the doormen there and interviewed them about how they decide to let people in.

“Bouncers are status judges who make hundreds of status decisions every night. They do it by having hundreds of patrons line up and on the basis of very little information, they size up who will be an esteemed customer,” Rivera says.

Basically, she was investigating how status can be conveyed and interpreted in an instant, and what sort of skills are required for both signalers and decoders. Also, to what degree are those skills consciously and reflexively deployed, and to what degree are they simply internalized, an automatic way of interacting with the world -- assimilated into the habitus.

The article foregrounds this finding:

Through conversations and observations, she found that bouncers ran through a hierarchical list of qualities to determine in seconds who would enhance the image of the club and encourage high spending. Social networks mattered more than social class, or anything else for that matter.

If you are recognizably famous or connected to someone who is, you get in. You generally don't get in, apparently, if you are (a) not white or (b) not a woman. Not exactly a startling discovery.

More interesting is Rivera's report that bouncers look down on bribes, suggesting that they are invested in their ability to accurately assess something more nebulous than raw wealth -- that they are proud of being able to distinguish souls of gold from souls of bronze. This suggests that they have a nonfinancial stake in making the sort of social and cultural capital that gets you into clubs nonconvertible. The value of those capitals lies in their inability to be priced and sold -- they are not commensurable. They serve as a kind of stringently controlled currency of which the bouncers of all people are the de facto central bankers.

It may be that status is always trying to wash itself of the taint of the money or the primitive accumulation, as Marxists call it, to which it is ultimately traceable. People with status want to close off the route they took to acquire it, protect their place on the perch, so always there is the effort to make status ineffable, a matter of subtle distinctions and elusive signifiers of style. Status must obfuscate its origins; it must seem inevitable and inborn, a matter of blood. But in order to maintain that illusion, would-be aristocrats need to hire gatekeepers, like these club bouncers -- in other words, you still need muscle, an authority that arbitrates what is stylish and what isn't, and enforces the distinction so you don't have to dirty your own hands. The effortlessness, the sprezzatura of the stylish is enabled by minions.

Conspicuous consumption is only a clumsy first step toward a different sort of command over social resources, one which can mobilize large pools of labor devoted to nothing more than protecting your status. An entire bureaucracy of status workers are made necessary by the need to keep social and cultural capital distinct from money, comprising not just bouncers but designers and editors and trend spotters (the ideological bouncers) as well as the more traditional types of servants, the personal assistants and the groomers and so forth.

Status laundering calls for a delicate balance. This bureaucracy must be ceded enough power (or cultural capital) to make status distinctions credible, real, efficacious, but it can't have enough power to acquire too much status for its own ranks. The bouncers can't get the idea to let themselves into the club.

Fashion As "Consumer Entrepreneurship" (23 April 2010)

A few weeks ago, Tyler Cowen linked to this essay by Jason Potts about fashion, in which he likens fashion cycles to business cycles and argues that fashion is what allows consumers to assume risk the way that entrepreneurs do. It's an interesting read, though for me it mainly sharpened my sense of which assumptions about fashion I accept and which I reject. I agree with this:

fashion seems to be an expression of risk culture on the consumer side, just as entrepreneurship is on the producer side of the economy. Could it be, then, that a rational, open society not only accommodates fashion, but actually requires it as a mechanism of competitive advantage and productivity growth?

But rather than claim that "a rational, open society" needs fashion, I would change that to "consumer-capitalist society." Consumerism requires fashion to sustain growth. If consumers lack the will to "explore new consumer lifestyles" they may fail to spend and begin to save, thus crippling the demand necessary to fuel economic growth. Thus fashion -- consumer risk -- is necessary to make us discontented with what we already have and regard it as obsolescent.

Fashion is the "creative destruction" of our tastes in things. It undermines the cultural capital that exists in the tastes that currently reign, Potts suggests, and puts new cultural capital up for grabs.

When a fashion cycle comes to an end, those who placed unfortunate bets during it are put back on a more nearly equal footing with those who were successfully fashionable. To be fashionable in the next cycle, fashion victor and fashion victim alike must pay the price of tooling up again in line with the latest trends.

That sounds sort of egalitarian, which is not how I would describe the fashion world. Each turn of the fashion wheel does not wipe the slate clean. People who "bet wrong" on fashion don't get to start fresh with the same amount of credibility. It's not a roulette wheel. Fashion mistakes have a cumulative weight; misjudge trends and people will ignore you next time. If you keep changing fashions in an attempt to hit a winning one, you run the increased risk of digging a deeper and deeper hole, like a liar who is trying to maintain earlier lies by piling on new ones.

And people enter the fashion field with different levels of social and cultural capital to begin with; fashion is a means to leverage those differences and make them effective. Fashion allows a status difference to translate into being treated differently, preferentially. The process of making fashion change allows those with the cultural capital to have greater say in what form those changes will take -- they can guarantee that they will suit their strengths in other areas or assure that fashion serves other ends they have, like making a profit. And fashion is programmed; the industry dictates when changes will occur and has professional consultants to determine what those changes will be. They may bubble up from the street or from amateurs, but amateurs cannot validate their innovations culturally. They need to be sanctified by the fashion industry; they need to become sellable.

It is easy to see how makers of fashion-oriented product are taking risks -- people might reject the goods. But consumers shoulder an aspect of the risk involved in fashion as well -- and what is at risk for them is status and, to some degree, self-esteem. Fashion, Potts claims, "a mechanism to periodically liquidate certain elements of a consumer lifestyle, triggering the incentive to learn about new things and to demand new goods." Potts views this "social pressure" as an inherently good thing. As things go out of fashion we are prompted to engage with the world to discover what has become fashionable, thus expanding our "flexibility in consumer lifestyles" and allowing us to experience the "sublime pleasures of risk-taking" -- kind of like what the subprime crisis did for the financial sector.

Potts's bias is clear -- he regards entrepreneurial risk-taking as good and necessary for everyone: "Fashion is part of how economies evolve, not of how they decay. It is another name for consumer entrepreneurship: and the more we have of that, the better." But that assumes people are like businesses (the brand of self) that need to constantly grow, and that analogy is, in my opinion, false. The notion of an ever-expanding, limitless identity is a construct that suits consumerism, but is it not an inherent human capacity. We don't naturally long for an ever-changing, ever-growing self that is perpetually unsatisfied with itself. Identity can and does have limits; recognizing those limits brings peace of mind. Potts argues that "consumers who opt out of social competition for the 'quiet life' fail to develop their ranges of experience and capabilities." Perhaps, but nothing about a "range" of experiences makes it preferable to the experiences themselves, even if they be limited in number. Everything that Potts regards as positive about fashion pressure for the economy is probably not so good for individuals.

Fashion effectively functions as a mechanism to induce and accelerate learning in complex lifestyles, enabling these lifestyles to become more complex still, thus improving their productivity in generating valuable consumption services.... Fashion is good for the economy because it is a mechanism to promote experimentation, learning, and re-coordination.

The valuable consumption services come at we the consumers' expense -- our lives become more "complex". In other words, fashion is the means by which we are exploited for surplus-value extraction as consumers, to complement the way it is extracted when we are wage workers. For consumers, fashion does not "promote experimentation" -- it makes us the subject of experiments. It doesn't promote "learning and re-coordination" so much as anxiety and confusion and disorientation that makes "learning" a desperate necessity.

Fashion tells you that you are a fool to prefer the experiences to the range, and it applies "social pressure" to make you change your view. By following fashion and disseminating its dictates and by innovating on its terms, we create additional value for the retailers of fashion-oriented products -- a description that is coming to embrace virtually everything that can be bought and sold. All we gain for what we have risked is an enlarged but more tenuous sense of self -- it's an identity bubble, with an inflated value that's rooted in a superficial expansion in knowledge of trends. But it could burst at any minute by a blast of existential angst. What does it all mean? Nothing. It means you have to keep changing for the sake of change itself or else confront the emptiness.

Love in the time of cultural-capital-acquisition strategies (9 April 2010)

I have an essay up at Wunderkammer about strategic taste formation and the difficulties faced in opting out of that sort of game. It was prompted by this strange dread I felt at the prospect of having to listen to the new Joanna Newsom album and investing the requisite amount of time to be fair to it somehow. I started to wonder if it even makes sense to try to be fair to cultural product, whether that isn't some sort of mystification for cultural-capital acquisition. Cultural capital seems to be the same sort of thing as the courtier's sprezzatura -- it needs to appear effortless and unselfconscious in order to be efficacious. The best way of accomplishing that is to try to take oneself out of one's own loop -- to trick oneself with the idea of "really liking" certain highly unlikely things.

Douglas Holt's 1997 paper (gated link) "Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu's theory of tastes from its critics" has some interesting insights on the subject of cultural capital. First, he captures the essence of Bourdieu's Distinction in this sentence, which is the animating idea of the Wunderkammer essay, though I don't think I stated it outright: "Bourdieu argues that cultural capital secures the respect and esteem of others through the consumption of objects that are 'difficult' and so can only be consumed by those few who have acquired the ability to do so."

But it is not as simple as that -- the signaling function of difficulty needs to be aestheticized, generalized, and hidden from ourselves. Basically, various genre-specific forms of cultural capital are useful only if they allows seemingly subjective tastes to become commensurable, weighed on the same scale, and to have that scale describe the social hierarchy in a direct and experiential way. In other words, cultural capital is a process by which we abstract from the specifics of what we like in order to understand where our tastes place us in the status hierarchy. But the tricky part is that this process of abstraction is less a cognitive operation than a praxis -- we don't calculate in our minds what our tastes mean; we live them and in the process reveal to ourselves the class status embedded in our habitus, or the approach to life we have learned from our upbringing and environment, plus the modes of cultural appreciation we have managed to master and internalize so that we operate them convincingly.

Why can't I ever seem to put this idea across without jargon? The display of taste can't be a tactic; it has to play naturally to have its desired effects. So our strategic acquisition of cultural capital has to disavow itself in our own minds. This leads to our living some contradictions: this is what I think I was experiencing in my dread about Joanna Newsom.

The problem we face is how to convert cultural capital into something "spendable" in social interactions without destroying its value in the process -- without seeming to be trying too hard. This involves all sorts of contortions and feints; it involves a perpetual process of becoming that mirrors the perpetual evolution of fashion. After all, if we achieve a sense of being what our cultural capital implies, we would nullify it.

Thus Holt makes the point that consumption style is more important than its substance, as the substance is designed to continually change. The specifics of fashion change, but understanding how and why it changes can provide an unchanging modicum of social status. We are becoming at the level of specific tastes, so that we have being at the level of consumption style (habitus). Consumption styles are commensurable, even when specific tastes are not. What's important about finding the commensurability is not being able to rank ourselves so much as it is to help us form our social bonds, to help us read the social terrain. It seems likely, in fact, that those social bonds are what mirror back to us the sense of our own status -- that confirm what we otherwise can only suspect about ourselves. Here's how Holt puts it:

Class boundaries are formed only to the extent that there exist social interactional processes through which otherwise incommensurate field-specific cultural capitals are aggregated into meta-field attributions of status. For example, does one, as a nonparticipant in the consumption field of leisure reading, acknowledge and grant status to friends and acquaintances who have highly developed tastes for prose? I believe that this conversion of field-specific to abstracted cultural capital - while a problematic iterative process - is a pervasive feature of contemporary social interaction. People constantly make such judgments to assess their affinities with others' tastes in the process of choosing friends, lovers, and business acquaintances. If this process is significant, it suggests that in an increasingly fragmented cultural world, status judgments based on shared interests are less important than those based upon similar styles of consuming, which can be applied to any cultural category.

I bolded the part above. The depressing implication (but maybe it shouldn't depress me) seems to be that we choose friends the way we choose any other consumer good -- it's all with an eye to cultural capital, how it will play. The process of cultural-capital conversion makes friends and lovers equivalent to tennis rackets and interior decor. It's all on the same continuum. As Holt puts it: "a single symbolic currency that functions as a status resource." I wonder if this has always been the case, or whether it is a manifestation of a more open and mobile society, or whether it is a reflection of capitalism reorganizing our personality structures.

As a by-product of the cultural capital process, Holt notes, "status boundaries are reproduced simply through expressing one's tastes." This poses problems for cultural egalitarianism, if there is such a thing -- and I think there is and that "poptimism" is a expression of it. The cultural egalitarian wants taste to be a kind of democracy, with each person's taste validating that person's equal standing in the aesthetic realm. But the signaling we perform to find one another reproduces the social (not personal) hierarchy that makes us prefer some people to others, that allows us to experience love and friendship in the first place, such as it is in our culture. Companionate marriages, for instance, depend on "consumption complementarities", as this essay by Stevenson and Wolfers details. We need the hierarchy to order our social lives in a way meaningful to us -- to find the "one." And by reproducing the "code" of that hierarchy (the various nuances of consumerist signals defined in their expression) in our courtship rituals, we make that hierarchy stronger when we find that person (or thing). Ideally, the mate/consumption partner stays loyal and true even as the objects they consume together change. Hence our choice of partner substantiates our habitus (or consuming style) that might otherwise be lost in all the surface changes to the specifics of what we consume.

Choosing a partner then is first enabled by the little ephemeral choices: these allow us to find "the one". Then having the "one" stabilizes the overriding meaning of subsequent choices, reorienting them back to that original partner choice, which becomes a touchstone for their meaning even as the social meanings at large, at the level of the broader consumption code, are changing uncontrollably (and faster than ever with the advent of the internet.) That is to say, falling in love or choosing close friends is (among other things) a way of trying to seize control back over the meaning of our consumption, to create consumption communities that seem to stabilize the meaning of products and practices that, in the wild of the globalized meme market, change faster than anyone can keep up with. The consumption community defrays the damage, distributes it among the group so that one need not face it alone. It makes the whirlwind of fashion manageable, allows it to pass through our lives as harvestable energy - turning over our belongings and behaviors as a means of letting us grow closer to the loved ones in our lives -- rather than blowing us around like paper dolls.

Social Media Anxiety (31 March 2010)

In this post about social-media anxiety, Jonah Lehrer makes some interesting points:

The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page views to unique visitors.
What I'm most troubled by is the desire of individuals (especially myself) to constantly check up on these numbers, and to accept these measurements as a measure of something meaningful. We've taken the natural nebulousness of social interactions -- I might know you're important, but I don't know how important -- and made them explicit. The end result is that our online relationships are shadowed by power relations.

Amen. Social media quantifies something essentially qualitative and makes it more amenable to economic analysis, as well as making "winners" and "losers" more explicit. All of this makes sociality more openly competitive. And because we compete with everybody in the word theoretically, we are far more likely to be anxious and disappointed with our current status. We can always directly compete with someone more popular or revered or whatever than us. Lehrer notes of a famous friend that the resulting asymmetry has "warped the nature of his online social interactions." We are all being warped in the same way; the asymmetry hits us all. It's an version of the problem brought on by advertisements, which establish a false frame of reference for how life is being lived by our peers.

Lehrer is forced to admit that "it's all too often true: we're a craven species, obsessed with status for the sake of status. And that pursuit of status shapes so many of our interactions, both in person and online." That's basically what Bourdieu demonstrates in Distinction; status lurks behind many things like aesthetics that have pretensions of seeming objective. Hierarchies are always trying to establish themselves as part of the unalterable natural order; a follow-up hypothesis is that the more of social life that they affect, the more natural they seem. One of the depressing aspects of social media is that is that they seem to promise to do away with hierarchy through democratized access, but instead the access extends hierarchy's reach into spheres of life that were previously not directly accessible to power. Status plays even more broadly in our lives.

And that has consequences like what Amanda Marcotte describes in this post, where status trumps one's desire to be happy. She illustrates this with the strange antipathy some middle class Americans have for the health care bill that is likely to improve their lot as well as that of society generally.

There are levels of meaning that are simply more important to people than happiness or even realistic risk assessment. Until you understand this, the outrage over health care reform will never make sense. From the rational actor/happiness project perspective, there is no reason for your average middle class tea bagger to be up in arms over this health care reform package. It won’t do anything to hurt them, and for a lot of them, it will have substantial benefits. The simple reduction in fear of being unemployed alone should argue for it, as should the ability of middle class people to continue doing what they already do, which is extending young adulthood for their children until their mid-20s so those kids can situate themselves into more lucrative and stable careers. I could go on, but seriously, the package has a ton of goodies for these folks. And yet they freak out. Don’t they want to be happy?

Well, maybe, but it’s certainly less important to them than maintaining their sense of superiority to other people. They don’t want the rising tide to lift all boats, if their neighbor’s boat lifts up. Just as many people will give up 2 hours of their precious day sitting in traffic instead of having to dirty themselves by being neighborly or, god forbid, living in a smaller place in the city, so they’ll give up reliable health care in order to make sure that others they deem lesser don’t have a share in it.

This sort of thing used to be attacked as a manifestation of "the zero-sum society". The seeming paradox is that status becomes more pressing when digital abundance has the potential to relieve certain sorts of inequality. But we don't really want to get rid of inequality, because it anchors our perception of status. We embrace innovations that supply new ways to feel slighted.

A zero-sum society is not inevitably brought on by natural conditions -- or "Ananke." Instead, it's a matter of the way humans seem to be wired. If you believe what Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontents (I don't), status competition is civilization's way of containing our dangerous instinctual aggressive impulses, our natural yearning to rape and kill one another. I guess I'm more in the blame-capitalism crowd, even though human aggression predates it. Like they say, capitalism is the worst system except for all the others.

The meaning of human capital and the future of the humanities (28 March 2010)

Is college just for the credential, or do people actually learn anything? What improves the college graduates "human capital": what they learned in class or the mere fact of the diploma? Considering the policy of lax grading, just getting in to the "elite" schools seems to function as proof that a student deserve a permanent competitive advantage in the labor market. But that would seem to make the entire edifice of secondary education a big charade, and the professors who are involved with it clearly aren't that cynical or in such colossal bad faith. And motivated students seem to appreciate learning for its own sake, whether or not that helps them gain an economic footing in society. But if we learn for the sake of fulfilling our human potential, but the economy denies us a way of making that fulfillment socially meaningful, we become drop-outs of a different sort, free-loading off society pursuing our own esoterica while contributing nothing. Or the alternative is that we are being trained into a condition of inevitable frustration, "overqualified" for whatever socially necessary but soul-crushingly dull tasks fall our way.

So what is the deal with higher education under capitalism? Is it a consumer good (entertainment for students) or a raw material of production (inchoate knowledge transmitted and transformed into human capital to be applied practically in the economy at large)? Is it a mandatory furlough period to ease job market pressures? A way to stock individuals with useful modes of information processing and a diverse base of more or less random learning that may or may not yield surprising ideas for innovation? A period during which the critical networking skills for the "social factory" are honed? Is it a way of sorting workers into their various destinies based on their ability to figure out the game of capitalism (how to acquire status that can masquerade as hard capital) and master its strategy (figure out who is worth knowing and how to manipulate them into helping you)?

Mark Thoma linked to this post by Frances Woolley, which questions whether human capital is a myth, and highlights what is at stake.

For example, if what is taught at universities actually makes people more productive, then simply taking university courses should be enough increase earnings. In fact, to get much of a payoff from university education, you have to finish your degree (the “sheepskin effect” ). One reason education pays is that completing a degree “signals” your ability, determination, competence and general stick-with-it-ness.
Perhaps we should think of human capital as a fairy tale, a reassuring bedside story. But the power of fairy tales is that they reflect certain elemental truths about the human condition. People who teach economics may find it deeply comforting to think that their pay is justified by their high levels of human capital.
But human capital is more than a comforting story – it is a myth that shapes our understanding of the world and thus public policy. Ontario’s government is urging universities to increase retention rates, so everyone who starts university completes a degree. If the human capital theory is true, then this is sound policy: more students completing university means more human capital means a more productive economy. If, however, the value of university education is as a signal of ability, then one of the most important things that universities do is fail students. Unless some students fail, the ability to complete a university degree confers no special distinction on the graduate.
Whether or not human capital theory is true determines the best response to the demographic challenges ... If education makes people more productive, then more education can increase the productivity of our economy – possibly enough so that fewer workers are able to support the large number of pensioners. If, however, education is basically about sorting workers – if people are getting more and more degrees in hope of eventually capturing that one elusive stable professional job with benefits – then the best way of responding to the demographic crisis is to scale back post-secondary education. Doing so would effectively increase the size of the working age population substantially, easing demographic problems.

Scaling back education is hard to accept from that utopian point of view that it enriches human potential independent of its social benefits -- it helps people live richer lives. Thoma's autobiographical anecdote in his response to Woolley is a pretty good example of that. He defends education for its own sake rather than for productivity, and concludes: "I believe education is the key to a better future and I will not give up trying to increase access to as many people as possible. I don't care at all if it dilutes the signal to employers, they'll just have to figure out some other way to cull the herd."

That echoes a point Marcuse makes in Eros and Civilization:

Productivity ... expresses perhaps more than any other idea the existential attitude in industrial civilization; it permeates the philosophical definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending ego. Man is evaluated according to his ability to make, augment, and improve socially useful things. Productivity thus denigrates the degree of the mastery and transformation of nature: the progressive replacement of an uncontrolled natural environment by a controlled technological environment. However, the more the division of labor was geared to utility for the established productive apparatus rather than for the individuals -- in other words the more the social need deviated from the individual need -- the more productivity tended to contradict the pleasure principle and to become an end in itself.

But, he argues, historical conditions are so improved by productivity that individuals can begin to see the way back to their own needs, afforded enough leisure to conceive strategies for ending "the subjugation of man to his labor." Education begins to push in two contradictory directions, honing productivity while teaching people not to waste that productivity on meaningless work and channel it instead into their own potential.

At its heart, Eros and Civilization celebrates education for its own sake and not as preparation to reproduce the existing social order. When you strip away the Freudian claptrap, Marcuse's argument is basically that we misapprehend the needs of the system for our own wants and needs. In other words, we become convinced that we need to go to college to get a job rather than to learn, that the job market will reveal to us what we should do with our lives and our time. This he calls "surplus repression," as it directs us toward alienated labor (working for somebody else and not on something that we are personally invested in) that is not really necessary any longer for survival (at least in developed nations -- whether we are obligated to perpetuate capitalism in the West so its benefits can trickle down and liberate the poorer countries is a different question). Marcuse: "The elimination of surplus repression would per se tend to eliminate not labor but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor." That is basically what's at stake in defining the purpose of higher education: either it is worker training and sorting, supported by capital and carried out for its benefit, or it is a refuge from that organizing logic, a place where one learns what it can mean to be a human. (Hence, the humanities.)

Quality brands as moribund middlebrow propaganda (22 March 2010)

In a recent New Yorker column, James Surowiecki argues that retailers are succeeding by eschewing the middlebrow and either making luxury goods or cheap, "good enough" stuff. I had trouble following some of his logic (I didn't really understand what he was getting at in his point about economies of scale) but I thought this was interesting:

In the past, these companies were able to charge a premium price because their brands were taken as signals of reasonable quality and reliability. Today, consumers don’t need to rely on shorthand: they have Consumer Reports and J. D. Power, CNET and Amazon’s user ratings, and so on, which have made it easier to gauge differences in quality accurately. The result is that brands matter less: a recent Nielsen survey found that more than sixty per cent of consumers think that stores’ generic products are equal in quality to brand-name ones. In effect, the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price.

It seems like a good thing if people aren't mistakenly equating brands with merchandise quality. But I wonder whether that has anything to do with information access. It seems like it could reflect an ideological shift, or a shift in the significance of branding.

Surowiecki depicts middlebrow shoppers as dupes who mistook brands for indicators of quality while they bumbled in the marketplace, with no inner resources to draw on to tell what's what. The brand reassured them they weren't making a mistake, even if the quality wasn't there. Paradoxically, the wealth of new information available makes the possibility of making a mistake much higher; there's more we should have and could have known, and we can quickly confirm our disappointment online if something goes wrong with something we purchase. A form of decisional paralysis may set in as brands are devalued, or at least come to signify qualities other than quality.

But brands have more work to do besides signal quality. They need to be more flexible in what they can mean, what sort of fantasies they can evoke. They need to have richer personalities (ugh). What is precisely middlebrow is the idea that a brand signals only quality, and that idea is perhaps dead. (Surowiecki's muted nostalgia for it altogether befits the middlebrow magazine he writes for, its own brand an increasingly irrelevant signal of quality as magazines founder.) Instead, the ways in which products denote class distinctions have become more complex; the grammar which retailers and consumers alike must use with products more sophisticated.

Performative shopping and "hauls" (22 March 2010)

Marisa Meltzer has an interesting piece at Slate about teenage girls who make "hauls" -- videos of the stuff they bought on shopping trips. Meltzer compares hauls to tech-unboxing videos; they reminded me of when I freelanced at Lucky.

Making haul videos probably seems entirely natural, like it might have seemed to form a garage band in past decades. The consumer society's great achievement is turning shopping into the viable medium for creativity and social connection. It seems natural, inevitable even, to relate to other people that way. Meltzer makes her own haul video and concludes, "With a camera on me, everything I bought felt inherently important." The way to intensify our feelings is to film them and launch them into the world, imagining someone will watch and care enough to judge us. That fantasy is not new, but the means for seeming to fulfill it are (you don't have to, say, start a band, practice, and try to book gigs at the VFW), and they are of course going to be commercially exploited. That's one way to interpret the long-term game plan of Facebook and YouTube.

It was predictable that hauls should start happening, considering the commercial inflection of online sharing -- and also because shopping is always getting harder and harder. There's inherently a vague dread in making the commitment to spend, considering the way that consumerism relates to identity, and these sorts of decisions are being logged permanently online. It's a semiotic jungle out there; the meanings are multiplying and teens especially want advice on how to buy what will send the messages they want to send in the appropriate way. Adults have more leeway in inventing their own meanings, or have come up with disassociative strategies about what we all have to do in terms of self-presentation. Teens have fewer defenses.

The sample that Meltzer provides is pretty polished; the girl shows the pieces she bought, models them, and explains why she pulled the trigger on them. I imagine there are less polished versions, that are more desperate or more ostentatious. Bourdieu-style analysis could break such videos down by class; you'd predict that as you move up the hierarchy, the more pretenses at being disinterested in the presentation there would be, the more likely the discussion would be couched in aesthetic terminology.

The rhetoric in the video is straight out of Lucky, in fact, and reminded me of the weird admiration I had for the copy there, the quixotic optimism in all products, that there was something unique and redemptive to say about everything if you were ingenious enough and mined the thesaurus thoroughly enough for new adjectives. I enjoyed the way the editors there would heedlessly and inventively transform nouns and verbs into adjectives to invent entirely new criteria by which to evaluate boots and jackets and lipstick shades. Here's a more or less random example that gets at what I mean: "The structured sweetheart neckline combined with the blousiness makes it super flattering--and the unusual mosaic pattern is so cool. To offset the girliness I'm going to wear it with some thick gray tights, these futuristic BCBGMaxAzria platforms and Diesel's oversize boyfriend blazer." (Before I worked there, I never had heard of "boyfriend" clothes." The paradoxical conundrum implied by that appellation -- clothes for women made to simulate clothes for men that women would borrow under intimate and cozy conditions? -- made me want to break out my copy of Barthes's The Fashion System to figure out what it meant. But I think this Sociological Images post shows how the phenomenon has reached dizzying ironic heights well beyond interpretation.)

Lucky taught me how shopping could be a vector for unfeigned enthusiasm strong enough to entirely mask the underlying cynicism. People who love shopping are not in bad faith, and they seem to honestly want others to experience the joy and confidence it can intermittently bring them. That same hopeful tone animates the haul video; she's not out to exclude anyone, though that could certainly be the effect. Instead, she is aping the mass-media tone of inclusion and eager solicitude. She's not doing anything wrong; she seems successfully well-adjusted. Meltzer notes that girls like the one in the video "resemble the popular girls at any high school, which is precisely why they are so appealing to other teens." The popular girl doesn't have to snub you, she can just make you a follower without following you back.

Anyway, that's what is so disheartening about online sociality to me: the likable girl in this shopping video is the face of marketing's future. Marketers will seem more well-intentioned than ever; they will be our peers. And we won't notice that our peers talk like a commercial because we'll be using the same idiom ourselves.

Natural hierarchies and bullying (23 Feb 2010)

Chris Dillow makes a good point about ideology in this post, about UK press coverage of bullying as a social problem.

What makes a bully? Opportunity, that’s what. The overwhelming majority of cases of bullying arise from inequalities of power. It is bosses who bully underlings - rarely vice versa.... However, this answer is missing from the pop talk of bullying. Instead of attributing bullying to inequalities in power, it’s blamed upon personal traits.

This is generally how ideology works, by naturalizing things that are actually the product of inequality. Then we blame ourselves for failing to cope with "reality," or for not being "realistic," or for having some inherent defect, weakness, or failing. Dillow adds that this ideology masks the inherent tendencies of social hierarchies to be "dehumanizing and demoralizing." Also interesting is Dillow's assertion that cognitive biases are the expression of ideology in practice as opposed to being mere biological idiosyncrasies.

But is there a viable way to rid society of hierarchies? Or are they inevitable, built in to the basic distribution of ability across a population? Another way of posing the question: is competitiveness ideological? It seems to me that evolutionary psychology is often invoked to argue that competitiveness is inherent to the species and not the product of social relations. Perhaps that is so, but competitiveness need not yield power inequalities. In a different sort of society, power would not be the only reward worth playing for.

Internet sociality seems to prompt the development of more and more hierarchies, as it permits people to seek out the subsets and the criteria by which they can dominate. Everyone can seek a niche that they can master. So rather than let ideology mask hierarchy, we make hierarchy obvious because a different sort of ideology allows us to believe we dictate the terms, the principles of organization within our chosen sphere. Eventually, though, this collapses back into a question of power -- who can you force to acknowledge that they exist in a particular hierarchy that you dominate? At that point, a third sort of ideological mystification would have to be enlisted, one which lets us be blind to the fact that other people don't care where they fit in to our special hierarchy of our own devising. All the while, of course, the hierarchies that matter in the last analysis -- the ones that dictate social relations and apparently stem from the distribution of capital -- would still operate unquestioned. There is always a hierarchy of hierarchies.

The Urban Haute Bourgeousie (11 Nov 2009)

At Generation Bubble, Anton Steinpilz brings up Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan, which played as a sort of fond lament for the1980s. The film is extremely enjoyable despite being borderline reactionary -- it's open to an interpretation (not a likely one, but one useful for the suspension of ideological disbelief) in which the implicit politics are meant to be foibles of the characters rather than Stillman's own, which makes it pleasantly watchable. (I'm especially fond of its weird, stilted Hal Hartley-esque quality, it's closet-drama dialogue.)

The beaus and debutantes of Stillman's hyperstylized New York were meant to be old, old money -- so old that social-capital preservation was never supposed to be a concern for them. But as Steinpilz notes, the film is shot through with melancholy at the possibility that the whole social-capital system (which the film, with its coming-out balls and stilted drawing-room conversations and Victorian concerns about moral turpitude, lovingly depicts/invents) is becoming supplanted by a raw-money culture in which manners don't matter. The unleashing of the financial sector brought about a whole new class of "vulgar rich," the sort of people that Tom Wolfe (in many ways Stillman's artistic grandfather) scorns in his work. Stillman's characters -- even the crypto-Marxist among them -- all subscribe to the primacy of social capital; they are all entranced by the same chimeras of tradition, which they take to be lineaments of an eternal and proper social order -- the inverse of the Fourierist fantasy one of them espouses. Rather than an explicit program that must be imposed, entailing all sorts of overt dislocation, the traditional order Stillman idealizes works hegemonically, which means that it has an effortless grace, the sprezzatura of the privileged. Though the character Charlie appropriates the term "bourgeoisie" for his neologism "urban haute bourgeoisie" to describe the characters in the film, they are really anachronistic petit aristocrats (which makes sense, since they are styled after the gentry from Jane Austen's novels.) The bourgeoisie, in actuality, were the ones who routed Charlie's kind in the 19th century. The bourgeois ideals -- opportunity, mobility, enlightened self-interest, economic transparency, etc. -- are what Charlie rejects; he implicitly endorses a rentier system where social betters are ensconced in a divinely ordained hierarchy.

Arnold Kling recently cited a quote from Gordon Wood that I think is relevant here:

After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.

That's a justification for wealth betokening meritocracy, an order to supplant the unjust aristocratic one based on inherited social capital. The virtue of hard work supposedly replaces the genetic lottery, though humanity is basically consigned to eternally squabbling over status as part of its inherent nature.

Nowadays, the term "urban haute bourgeoisie" most likely does not conjure up debutante balls and Upper East Siders. For me, it evokes the scene on the Lower East Side, the cultural entrepreneurs and their hangers-on. It turns on cultural capital rather than old-style social capital, which has perhaps receded to an inaccessible demimonde, far away from hipsters and reality TV cameras.

Where Nobody Knows Your Name and They Never Know You Came (2 Nov 2009)

I have a post up about the end of anonymity over at Generation Bubble. As I was writing it, half of it got deleted in a Word Press malfunction, so I'm afraid it became a little disjointed as I struggled to reconstruct what I had had before. My overarching point is that Web 2.0 innovations encourage us to eschew online anonymity and stay logged on as our actual selves -- fusing more completely our online and offline social lives. More important, when we conduct various transactions online, whether they are purchases or pleas for attention, they are associated permanently with that integrated identity, enriching the data that can be mined from it. Consequently, we begin to believe that we deepen our identity by contributing more data to the online archive, despite the fact that it is being exploited by the corporate interests who control the archives. We become more of person, with a more compelling identity, the more through our online presence mirrors our offline existence.

I argue that this is the completion of a trend away from the impersonal markets that once signaled freedom from sumptuary laws and class-based discrimination in the world of consumption, and toward the idea that what we consume should be precisely associated with who we are. An anonymous purchase is a pointless purchase.This begins as a nostalgic movement to restore communal meaning to a world made atomistic and alienating, to make social relations more relevant in a world that has been structured to isolate us (a complaint I've made a lot over the years here). But what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. (What economists Wolfers and Stevenson call hedonic marriage: "what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.") The more transactions we make in the markets in which we can't hide our identity, can't pay cash, the more articulated our identities become. We "share" more and more in order to be.

An example of this process takes on a positive spin can be gleaned from this Amanda Marcotte post about karaoke and halloween. She argues that "Americans are increasingly putting a premium on fantasy and performance as valuable things" and that the popularity of karaoke, Halloween, performative video games like Guitar Hero, etc. are all manifestations of this. She notes that technology has helped usher in this change as well: "Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves." It is that incentivizing that worries me; that is what masks the joys of anonymity, the concordant satisfaction with more local and unmediated forms of attention and affirmation. Marcotte is not worried about the mediation of social recognition, its conflation with commercialized self-display and personal branding, regarding instead the right to public performance as merely a more rewarding form of recognition.

Performing for others has almost completely lost its stigma, and thank god. The performer enjoys it, and the audience enjoys it (even if they’re waiting their turn). It’s a lot like sex---once the taboo comes off for you, you wonder what you were so worried about for so long.

If only everyone were so intent on enjoying the performances of everyone else and reciprocating attention. Marcotte makes it sounds like recognition never shades into passing judgment ("Performing gives you a place to figure out what your strengths are, instead of focusing on the shame of having weaknesses"); built in to her analysis is the assumption that these spaces of costume parties and karaoke parlors are nonjudgmental. But the less stigmatized this look-at-me behavior is, the more necesary judgment passing becomes. Online, ceaseless judgment is implicit, as the fantasy of broadening one's reach brings one into contact with strangers, whose affirmation takes on a greater value (i.e. "How refreshing it is to have strangers applaud blog posts than friends, who sort of have to say nice things").

That kind of nonjudgmental mutuality Marcotte posits seems less likely the further we move from face-to-face interactions toward mediated online interactions. Social networks and so on keep score of attention in measurable ways, heightening the stakes, and our physical isolation erodes the traditional mitigating forces of courtesy (which is where the stigma against performing, of hogging attention, arose from in the first place). The danger is that performance as a gift, a carefree act of self-forgetting, instead becomes an ongoing requisite act of self-definition. We perform ourselves all the time, then, and make it act of striving -- these performances I tend to equate with the identity-building rituals of consumerism.

Once we surrender anonymity, our consumption inevitably plays in various social hierarchies; we can't avoid being judged for it, can't avoid trying to use our transactions to enhance our social or cultural capital. The effort to escape the blank rational choice of impersonal markets, the sterile individualism, ends up making our economic behavior even more instrumental, as "economic behavior" now encompasses all our efforts at self-fashioning, which now happen in public, in real-time, in our online gambits for status. The best hope is that there are enough social hierarchies to play in that we can find one which matches our emerging predilections, validates us as winners. But ultimately the hierarchies themselves are made into metahierarchies to delineate the underlying class structure (inherited from the past, the same haves and have nots) once again.

I am wondering if it's best to strive for an anonymity at the expense of social participation and concretized selfhood, or whether there is some balance to be struck between the implied atomization of impersonal markets and voluntaristic social relations that are not ultimately reducible to identity posturing. Can we separate consumption and identity by having some alternative way to make sociality robust? Does this question even make any sense? Can we refuse to have an identity, in the branded-lifestyle sense, but still have a stable set of social relations? Can social identity be divorced from status competitions? As Marcotte warns, "Once you get a taste for performance and self-expression, it’s hard to give it up."

UPDATE: More from me on this subject here.

Soviet Consumerism (10 Aug 2009)

Someone on Metafilter had linked to Real USSR, which offers essays and photos of Soviet material culture. It seems like a useful resource in imagining what a postconsumer (or non-consumer) society might look like. The Soviets apparently failed in achieving a positive example of such a society; its citizens, at least in Western representations, were hungrier than their non-Communist counterparts for branded goods and the world of status consumption from which they were by and large excluded. Their seemingly dismal lack of consumer goods was possibly the best propaganda weapon for the U.S. during the Cold War: Dowdy, nondescript proles standing in lines outside gray, barren Soviet distribution centers would be contrasted with the glitz of shopping malls and the endless opportunities for self-aggrandizement. Who wants to work for a collective goal when we can enjoy a solipsistic reverie in which all causes begin and end with ourselves?

Consumerism in Western society, at any rate, is strongly associated with atomistic individualism, offering the illusion of transcending social reciprocity for a higher convenience, in which pleasure is served directly to us through various purchases in well-stocked retail outlets. Pleasure is presumed to be a matter of accumulation -- is constructed to be that sort of thing, a matter of developing the richest self through consuming and mastering the greatest amount of stuff. In Soviet culture, consumerism must have meant something else entirely, carving out a space for subjectivity -- for an alternate currency of information, about goods and what they might signify -- in an authoritarian state premised on surveillance and information control.

Anyway, the posts at Real USSR give a glimpse of the resourcefulness of Russians in the face of deprivation and the ideology that was meant to justify it or excuse it. This resourcefulness is the kind of thing I tend to sentimentalize as what's lost in consumer societies -- only the Soviets probably didn't experience it as pleasure, despite the faint nostalgia of posts such as this one about DIY fashion. It was likely felt as necessity pinching in, complicating everyday life. It was official ideology impinging on autonomy in ways that symbolized how dominated the populace was:

During the Soviet times fashion was first and foremost, an instrument of propaganda of hard work attitudes and education of good taste. Therefore the way people were dressed was very strictly regulated – just like anything else, fashion had to be “planned” and “approved”.

In other words, old-fashioned sumptuary laws were in place to discourage fashion from becoming a medium for suggesting social mobility. The link between autonomy and personal display is maintained where ideally it would be dissolved. The inescapability of invidious comparison is still implied. The post mentions the "fashion neighborhood watch" -- a sort of inverse of the feeling I have when I walk around the East Village feeling helplessly uncool. I tend to aspire toward sartorial anonymity for very different reasons than the Soviets might have -- but then again maybe they are the same, a yearning for safety. Invisibility in a socialist society is suspect because everyone is supposed to be responsible to every one else (in reality, the state) in the collective project of society -- you have to be visible but undifferentiated. In a consumer society, visibility traps one's aspirations to individuality in the realm of fashion -- judgment of who we are remains on the surface level, and can't break through to the aspects of personality that are not so easily displayed. Consequently, the culture industries work hard to produce legible symbols for every possible personality trait, de-authenticating them in the process so that all identity can be regarded suspiciously as pretense.

This post, about Soviet brands, surprised me, because I had sort of assumed that there were no brands in the USSR. The post highlights a perfume called Red Moscow, the name of which suggests how branding was co-opted for propaganda purposes -- of course it makes sense that the state would invent nationalist brands. I tend to take it for granted that brands of products function only to help individuals brand themselves, to allow them to project certain traits along the lines described in the previous paragraph. (For producers, brands allow for the elaboration of differences between competitors' commodities where there are more or less materially indistinguishable.) But Red Moscow suggests that brands could be contrived to close off avenues for the development of a superficial self. Nationalist brands would enlist users into helping complete the ideological project of the state, not the self -- a state that may not allow for an autonomous self. Such brands would demonstrate conformity and obedience in a much more direct way than our brands, which entice us to show off our conformity to the general significance of participating in fashion and having a lifestyle. Consumerism is soft coercion in that sense; it allows for a space where conformity can comfortably coexist with rebellion -- the revolution is reduced to continually turning over one's personal affect within a game whose rules are thereby protected from change.

Customer satisfaction and American Idol (9 June 2009)

Robin Hanson, an economist who frequently writes about signaling -- how cultural capital is deployed -- notices this WaPo account of the flaws in customer-satisfaction surveys. It turns out that people are systematically biased toward giving people who are (in Hanson's interpretation) perceived to have higher status a better evaluation.

Hekman [the study's lead author] found that these objective measures of performance correlated with patient satisfaction reports only when the doctors were white men. For women and minorities, extra quality, accessibility and diligence not only did not result in better evaluations by patients -- they produced worse evaluations.

As someone who, as a college instructor, was frequently rated by my "customers," the study's findings ring true to me. I could coast on my white maleness where my female colleagues couldn't; they, meanwhile, were being told how unfashionable their clothes were and how they should smile more. I always resented the way universities would rely on evaluations in their decision-making, and the idea that teachers' pay could be affected by it seemed like a great reason to get out of the profession altogether. Some evaluators will do their best to be objective but have their opinions colored perhaps unknowingly by their desire for what Hanson calls status affiliation; others will gleefully regard the survey as an opportunity to vote in a popularity contest.

Hanson seems eager to differentiate status affiliation from outright racism:

People usually invoke two explanations for such behavior:

1) Irrational or ideological racism or sexism.

2) Rational stereotyping that just happens to go wrong in these cases.

But a third explanation seems to me more plausible:

3) We prefer to affiliate with higher status folks. If female doctors, black or female sales clerks, or latino golf club employees are considered lower status, then customers will be less satisfied with them even if they do exactly the same things.

That seems like splitting hairs to me -- racism, sexism, income inequality, class bigotry, and so on are better justified if they can be displaced and relabeled as status concerns. Ideological racism is precisely what this study describes, the systematic association of status and better performance with otherwise irrelevant characteristics. The close association of status with race and gender and so on is what makes racist ideology seem perfectly rational, excusing us for our prejudice. And that association is justified, in a tautological sort of way, through surveys and such that seem to instantiate democratic participation. Hey, we're voting! We matter! But in that spirit -- that voting is about boosting our own self-esteem -- we vote as a way to express what we would like to be affiliated with, not what we have decided about the matter at hand. If we have no comprehension of the matter at hand, so much the better; our ability to vote our ego becomes that much easier to countenance.

Democracy is all well and good, but it seems to be evoked at times to justify and glorify something altogether different, when uninformed people are invited to rate the performance of those whose work they aren't that qualified to evaluate. Such surveys, popularized by shows like American Idol, end up having the function of negating the idea that objective standards are relevant, and promote the idea that status and popularity are always trustworthy proxies for quality. This durable species of capitalist ideology is a close cousin of the kind of market-think that views price or brands as always-reliable signals of quality. This shifts the responsibility for perpetuating status-quo inequities onto ordinary people, making it seem the natural order of things and an expression of the people's choice. So, any time we cast an ignorant vote, fill out some comment card or cast a vote on So You Think You Can Dance out of some vague and unquestioned impulse about their "talent", we strengthen the grip of this ideology.

Outsourced motivation (20 March 2009)

At the Atlantic's website, Reihan Salam files a report on the tech companies debuting projects at South by Southwest, which has apparently transformed itself into a milieu for venture capitalists rather than A&R men. (Related question: In our iSociety, has music become subsumed under technology?) Salam highlights the proliferation of services that attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. He describes Loudcrowd, which serves up social games to isolated people, commercializing our reluctance to be out in the world where we can't control everything. Channeling Allen Bloom, Salam writes that Loudcrowd suggests to him "anomic dystopia" -- I guess I'd define it as a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can "unite" us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services like Loudcrowd seem to meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. Increasingly, simply hanging out seems like wasted time unless someone is keeping score or is broadcasting it to others who are not there.

We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. As Salam notes, It's easy to imagine this evolving into a social engineering system in which we are told what we should enjoy by virtue of how many points some commercially interested party has assigned it. But where he points out that "this concept of layering games over real life is an extension of something we all do: apply our own standards and expectations to the social world," he fails to note that these services are endeavoring to perform that function for us, pre-empt our own standards while substituting their own.

Meeting with your friends too boring? Social life too uncompetitive for you? Enter Foursquare, "an ingenious service that turns finding your friends into a Zelda-like quest," according to Salam. He quotes this description of the service from the NYT:

Foursquare players "check in" via iPhone application, text message or the Web. That alerts their network of friends to their current location, in case they feel like dropping by to say hello or have a drink. (If you're flying solo, or on a date, Foursquare allows you to check in without posting your location.) Players rack up points for checking in at unusual places, early hours of the morning or in the same location as other users in their network.

It seems strange that we would need to incentivize ourselves to have a social life, but that seems the inevitable outcome of technology-assisted convenience. Convenience tends to be a matter of avoiding interpersonal hassles in favor of a solipsistic world in which we have individual control over as much details of our experience as possible. The ideal, from the perspective of technology, would be a situation in which we don't have negotiate any aspects of shared space or time with anyone. "Sharing" itself would become passe. (Where's the incentive?) Instead, we broadcast at one another from our hermetic worlds. Why trouble yourself with reciprocity when you have the tools to broadcast yourself to those who happen to be interested, and filter out what bores you among everyone else's broadcasts.

Drawing on Will Wilkinson's argument about the proliferation of coexisting status hierarchies making us all feel like achievers (as if these are not themseleves ordered into a hierarchy), Salam suggests that these virtual games mapped on real life are useful because they "introduce new hierarchies designed to make life more fulfilling and fun at a faster rate than we've seen in the past." Generally, that seems like a grim take on human nature, that it requires hierarchies for their to be fulfillment and fun -- that winning is the only joy we know. But stranger, especially for a conservative like Salam, is how he posits acceleration as basically beneficial. This seems to me another of technology's detrimental effects, given our consumer society -- tech is tailored for increasing our cultural consumption throughput. Making social life into a game, quantifying it even more precisely, seems very likely to exacerbate that tendency, nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value. ("I wanted to see that painting show at the Met, but I saw that the Guggenheim was worth more so I went there instead." "Would have went to see your band, but seeing the band playing at Mercury Lounge was worth more points. Sorry.")

Shepard Fairey and notoriety art (20 Feb 2009)

Graphic designer Shepard Fairey, now famous for the "Hope" posters for the Obama campaign (which has kicked up a legal battle about fair use), had a retrospective recently at the ICA in Boston. Peter Schjeldahl, writing in the New Yorker, was not particularly impressed.

Warhol sublimely commodified images of Mao and the hammer and sickle four decades ago, in keeping with an ambition—to infuse subjects and tones of common culture with powers of high art—that has not grown old. Warhol’s revelatory games with the cognitive dissonance between art and commerce have galvanized artists in every generation since. But you can stretch a frisson just so many times before it goes limp. Like the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who included a Louis Vuitton boutique in his Los Angeles retrospective, Fairey reverses a revolution achieved by Warhol, along with Roy Lichtenstein. He embraces a trend in what the critic Dave Hickey has called “pop masquerading as art, as opposed to art masquerading as pop.”

That remark is a bit cryptic, particularly if you are skeptical about the dichotomy between pop and art. Around what concepts can that dichotomy be organized, anyway, in our culture? Can you refer to the intentions of the work's creator? And then which intentions are artistic, and which ones aren't? Evaluating how purposefully commercial a work is no longer lets us pigeonhole it along these lines. Art, after all, is big business, an investment category. Artists have become self-conscious businesspeople, producing their work along industrial lines and with a mind to maximizing its market value by controlling its scarcity and promoting it with various stunts. And the nature of the audience has changed, with the democratization of cultural consumption and the ease with which certain sorts of works can be distributed. Whether something is pop or art may depend entirely on the spirit with which it is contemplated by the viewer -- the aesthetic quotient of a particular piece may rely as much on the cultural know-how of the audience as the proficiency of the artist. If we are conditioned to judge visual works by how effective they are in capturing our attention -- the way marketing efforts are judged -- than is it inevitable that artists will move toward catering to that principle?

These are the sorts of questions Rob Walker gets into in an essay he posted to his site about Fairey from a few years ago. At the time Walker was writing, Fairey was working in marketing but also conducting guerrilla art projects, blurring the lines (at least in his own mind) between the two.

When I interviewed Fairey for that magazine article, I of course asked him about the contradictions involved in, say, being someone who has both wheat-pasted the icon face over Sprite billboards – and who has actually done professional design work for the company that owns Sprite. “People make this very black-and-white delineation,” he said. “But I say, ‘How would you feel about it if it were a little more ambiguous? If all companies had marketing materials that didn’t insult the consumer? That were somewhat creative and intelligent and almost like an art piece with a product behind it?”
In other words, instead of responding to the encroachment of evil branding into the supposedly pristine authenticity of the street by withdrawing – why not engage? If the idea of spreading the Obey image is to see how far the Obey image can spread, doesn’t it make a certain sense for it to show up on apparel that is sold in chain stores? If a multinational can put its icons on the street, maybe the street should put its icons into the shopping mall.

Drawing on cultural historian Jackson Lears's Fables of Abundance, Walker contrasts Fairey with Joseph Cornell, another artist who appropriated materials from pop culture and refashioned it into art. But Cornell's work was obsessional, private. It didn't seem to be made with the idea of seeing how far his influence, or his trace, could be spread, as is the case with Fairey's work. At the Cornell retrospective I saw in Salem, Massachusetts, the intimacy of the work was unmistakable; peering at his boxes made me feel a bit voyeuristic, even as I was inspired with a notion of my own potential creativity, the ways I could indulge my own obsessions (whatever I discovered them to be) with certain motifs of imagery, certain juxtapositions. Cornell's art doesn't seem to want to redeem his found objects so much as to render them mysterious, with all the mystery that a specific person's peculiar and ineffable fascination can supply them with. Cornell's work would not make for effective marketing material. The resonance of his designs are too inward and idiosyncratic. They are what no effective advertising can be: creepy.

Advertising is never creepy, always cool. And Fairey's work seems to fit that aesthetic, prompting viewers to respond with the recognition that something hip is happening in Fairey's mode of appropriation. Once you recognize that commercial persuasion has crowded out the space for art appreciation for just about everyone in our culture, the natural response is to try to function within commercial persuasion, adapt its ends to one's own purposes. You can turn yourself into a brand, or you can take personal pride in how effective you shape the image of a product's brand. Or you can work as though influence (cool, or hip, or what have you) was a medium all its own, with a meta-aesthetic beyond a given work's persuasiveness. (You see this when people judge Super Ads in terms of their creativity rather than in terms of how many more people purchase the thing advertised.)

Popularity has become a medium in which artists now prefer to work. Artists can now treat the delineation of their influential scope as the measure and the message of their work; this iss perhaps the most characteristic aesthetic for which contemporary culture can take credit -- the essence of art in the early-internet era. Artists can extend and measure their reach, "subvert" mass persuasion by perfecting it. But the pursuit of such scale, of making notoriety art, corrupts the intimacy that art like Cornell's had succeeded in achieving in the past. Or worse, it permits that intimacy to be refashioned as marketing, so it seems like our closest intimates, those privy to our deepest desires and concerns, those who can give them form that can stir and move us, are advertising copywriters.