Prose Style of the Cognitariet (12 Nov 2010)

As a fan of abstruse jargon, I appreciated this essay by old-school autonomista Franco Berardi (aka Bifo) in e-flux journal, "Cognitarian Subjectivation." The title pretty much gives you a flavor of how the whole piece is. I'm not sure if it's actually insightful or whether I am just pleased that I have now read enough of this stuff to be able (I think) to decode most of it. As I read, I was actually shocked when a mundane straightforward proper noun like "Facebook" was used instead of some Latinate abstraction along the lines of "mediatized integumentary hypersocio-subjectivation apparatus." But I think the gobbledy-gook approach to style here may have a political purpose -- to slow readers down and impede textual consumption. The difficulty of reading this essay models what it implicitly argues for in its content -- slowing down, intervening in the smoothly overwhelming flow of information that, he claims, we assimilate with less and less pleasure and comprehension.

Berardi's chief point here is about the mismatch of limitless online cultural production and the very limited amount of time we have to take it in. "Marx spoke of overproduction, meaning the excess of available goods that could not be absorbed by the social market. But today it is the social brain that is assaulted by an overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. The social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of networked production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the cognitive class." In other words, party by choice and party by compulsion, we -- meaning people who deal with information or media for a living or to stay "connected"; i.e. "neuro-workers" whose "nervous systems act as active receiving terminals"' and who "are sensitive to semiotic activation throughout the entire day" -- are always online, processing information, manipulating signs and tinkering with social facts, and it is wearing us out. We have harnessed our sociality to the rhythms of real-time, and we can't keep up -- instead our "emotional energy" is being "exploited," mainly by the media companies that make use of our work harvested online -- that's the assembly line, by which our experiences are reassembled into memes.

Marx also "spoke" of communication technology serving mainly to speed up consumption so that the M-C-M' cycle would spin faster -- e.g., more commodities would be sold for profit in quicker revolutions of the fashion wheel. Berardi picks up this theme and applies it to our current situation:

digital technologies have enabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannot be dealt with according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge, acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure.

What he's arguing, I think, is something that makes intuitive sense to me: because of the pressures imposed by social media, etc., we now frantically process the sorts of things we once could enjoy -- things we once had time to think about and luxuriate with (via the "intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge"). Stuff that we expect to give us pleasure, that once gave us pleasure, instead seems just as often to exhaust us. ("I'm going to download more and more music until I complete my collection of Krautrock releases from the 1970s... I know there are more out there... Must find them... Must tag them properly... Must blog them...")

After that, Berardi sort of spins his wheels in the article, throwing out some unanswerable, tangentially related questions ("Is it still possible to forge social autonomy from capitalist dominance in the psycho-economic framework of semiocapitalism?" Still? Was that ever possible?), touring through the rise of the creative class ("cognitive labor and venture capital met and merged in the dot-com") and offering some incredibly general recommendations ("If we want to find the way towards autonomous collective subjectivation we have to generate cognitarian awareness with regard to an erotic, social body of the general intellect" -- what does that mean? Apparently something to do with poetry and paradigm shifts).

Still, I think the valuable thing about this essay is simply the effort it takes to read it. Not that everything should be in social-theory code, but I found myself strangely refreshed after having printed this thing out from the pdf and sitting at my kitchen table and puzzling through it, away from screens and "semio-capital". I felt restored to myself in away: you might even call it autonomous subjectification.

Death of the Author? (5 Aug 2010)

I've thought this over a bit today and basically agree with Matt Yglesias, that the claim Trip Gabriel reports in this NYT article that the ethos of the internet is prompting kids to plagiarize more than they used to is pretty dubious. Here's the core of Gabriel's article:

Professors used to deal with plagiarism by admonishing students to give credit to others and to follow the style guide for citations, and pretty much left it at that.

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.

Gabriel's article seems like misplaced anxiety; the stakes are pretty low with plagiarism: students are basically only "hurting themselves" by cheating on their homework, as the proverb goes, and it's not like the papers are up for publication. These cheaters are not David Shields or Jonathan Lethem. The idea that students suddenly don't understand the concept of authorship reminds me of the worst nightmares of the fuddy-duddy professors who would fulminate about Barthes and Foucault and "this so-called textuality" when I was a graduate student. Where was the proper respect for Genius?

Gabriel interviews anthropologist Susan Blum, who seems like this species of worrywart.

In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.

“Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.

She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.

Obviously she hasn't hurt Mark Zuckerberg lecture about integrity and a single online identity. I'd be surprised too to find that students are uninterested in authenticity and unique identity and are seeking to merge with the multitude in a gesture of postmodern antisubjectivity. Self-broadcasting mediums and Web 2.0 seem to emphasize the value of a unique identity, not dissolve it.

Students, I suspect, don't take attribution seriously because the work they are being asked to do is not serious to them. They don't have much of a sense of scholarship as a collective enterprise, or of what they do in college as scholarship. With gen-ed classes, they know they are just marking time and doing busy work for the most part. They are right to think that plagiarism is not "a serious misdeed" that is somehow different from any other form of academic dishonesty. To pretend otherwise is to serve the ideological bidding of the lords of intellectual property.

The implication of plagiarism hysteria is that scholarship is a process of claiming ownership of proprietary information, an exceedingly unnatural attitude that students have always needed to be indoctrinated into, particularly if they want an academic career. This usually involves a series of ritualized genuflections in the form of citations of the recognized masters of a particular discipline as part of a student's professionalization into the academy.


Yglesias notes that the Web prioritizes the association of data with its metadata -- song files with the artists, etc. -- and thus generally organizes information so that it is easier to deduce where it originated if you are so inclined. It's never been easier to catch cheaters, he points out, something that was true even when I last taught college courses, in 2001.

I am inclined to think that the ubiquity of material available for appropriation and the ease of cutting and pasting itself explains most of the alleged rise in plagiarism. In my experience, most students who were inclined to cheat were way too lazy to retype passages out of a book.

Baroque Theory and Collective Action (1 June 2010)

In his review of Akerlof and Kranton's Identity Economics,Tom Slee argues that leftist critical theory uses ideology and false-consciousness-based approaches to explain what is better understood as a collective action problem.

Sometimes it has seemed to me as if all the avant-garde contortions of post-Marxist, post-modern political thought could have been avoided if sociologists had learned a little game theory. Instead, believing that it is in the interests of subjugated classes to throw off their shackles and yet seeing no shackles being thrown, they have resorted to more and more baroque explanations for this seeming contradiction.... Yet simple game theory would have cut this Gordian knot. Eagleton writes that “If it is rational to settle for an ambiguous mixture of misery and marginal pleasure when the political alternatives appear perilous and obscure, it is equally rational to rebel when the miseries clearly outweigh the gratifications.” But this ignores the collective action problem: just because it would be good for a group to rebel does not make it sensible for an individual to rebel. The contradiction is not a contradiction at all: was all this baroque theorizing really necessary?

That's a good question. Another way of putting this is that we have a variety of group identities as well as individual identities and each of these comes with different rationales for behavior, different hierarchies of motives. I think baroque theorizing can help explain the means by which these various identities are constituted and delimited, and what prompts us to switch between them. The salience of our various identities can be manipulated externally, and identities can be made to seem more or less relevant or unchangable -- just look at Facebook's efforts to persuade us that we need a one online identity to have "integrity." What we believe is important to believe about ourselves is subject to environmental conditions: class habitus; the sorts of marketing we are exposed to; the sociopolitical environment; group religiosity; etc. So the structures that lead to the cognitive dissonance that shapes our choices of whether to act in situations, or continue to act, are always in play -- at every moment the nature, salience, and apparent consequences of our identity (or rather our identities) are being negotiated.

Theory speculates on what the fulcrums might be for that exogenous manipulation of identity, rather than accepting predefined identities from empirical observation or self-reports. Is that methodologically dubious? Possibly, but it may help open avenues of exploration for more empirically oriented social science.

Slee points out that "what game theory brings is an explanation of why certain patterns persist, and the introduction of identity extends these explanations to many important patterns." One can see the power of this approach in Slee's book No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart and in the work of economist Thomas Schelling, to give a few examples. They reveal how well-intentioned people can help perpetuate macro-level injustices or conditions they long to reject and change. It shows how self-interest is not all that socially benevolent in many situations. What we believe is good for society (or our group identity as a member of a community, etc.) turns out not to be something we can act upon directly; what we can directly affect as individuals has unintended, contrary consequences at that social.community level.

But ideally baroque theory can investigate whether power in society turns us against collective identity and traps us in self-interested behavior that reinforces existing power relations. It can explore why game theory holds for human behavior, rather than accept its structure and logic as given. This is part of what makes it so frequently baroque; it sometimes attempts to explore human behavior without recourse to formal logic or a stable definition of rationality or a simple, measurable balance of pros and cons. (I tried to make a similar point in my post on Identity Economics.)

Identity, ideology, and micromotives are concatenated in a complex cluster. Slee makes a crucial point that illuminates how ideology tends to work: "To articulate beliefs carries with it a cost." That cost is socially negotiated -- a matter of not just education and diligence but of courage. When beliefs are "expensive" to express (to bring it back within economics-style analysis), we avoid clarifying them even to ourselves and find ourselves conforming to beliefs that are already circulating and are attached to generic identities that are also circulating. Power adheres there, in that circulation. In other words, that is how ideologies become hegemonic; that is how identity's building blocks, which dictate the limits of our identity, are determined. Who circulates them, and how, and what drives up the cost of expressing beliefs? These are the questions of baroque theory, perhaps of sociology in general.

Abstract Thoughts on Identity (7 May 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Journalism vs. theory (28 Dec 2009)

I make fun of awkward academic writing as much as anyone, but this crack by Christopher Shea in the Boston Globe Ideas blog about something Matt Yglesias wrote about Avatar annoyed me nonetheless. The post is titled "Someone Remembers His Theory Classes!" and gently mocks Yglesias for this sentence: "The Avatar narrative starts with a form of reactionary anti-capitalism and thus ends [up] re-inscribing the logic of colonialism inside an ostensibly anti-imperialist story."

In keeping with the blog's mission, Shea probably wants to call attention to the idea behind that Yglesias's sentence and maybe even champion it. But he still feels obliged to write as though the main thing the sentence connotes is "I've read political theory." This reduces ideas to the level of a personality game, to a matter of peacocking cultural capital. Ideas, from that point of view, are merely counters that all signify the same thing, ultimately: status.

This is what media and mediatization has become. It's no longer about information dissemination so much as it about systemizing information, reducing its significance to a single dimension. Everything is reduced to a play of identity signifiers, making everything a posture, rendering all ideas into gestures of identity creation, attempts at ego projection and nothing more. That's what I argue in this essay, at any rate, drawing from Baudrillard's "Requiem for the Media" (pdf).

It's not as though Yglesias's point is obscure or difficult to grasp as he phrases it. "Inscribe" is critical-theory jargon, but even so the word has not been twisted or distorted from its ordinary meaning. Avatar pretends to be against capitalism and environmental destruction and for indigenous claims and thus against "evil empires", but in the end the film is so patronizing to the natives it invents for its plot that it retells the same old imperialist "White Man's Burden" tale. (More on that to come in my next post.) But Shea acts as though he has made that point simultaneously obscure and flashy. I think this is a bias that is endemic in journalism. Journalists seem unable to resist the impulse to feign ignorance or impatience with certain semi-erudite expressions in order to curry favor with an audience they presume is equally impatient and ignorant. But it is not theoretical language that's obtuse. If journalists assume readers don't want to hear about "imperialism," readers never will, and journalists will accordingly be open to the accusation that they are that empire's most effective flunkies: they hide the fact that the empire even exists.

Muerte al voice mail (2 April 2009)

Tyler Cowen linked to this NYT piece about the incipient demise of voice mail. When I clicked on it, I was astounded by what appeared in my tab as a description of the article: "For some, voice mail is losing its allure." For some? Its allure??? Who are these people who like voice mail?

The article notes, "In an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through 'ums' and 'ahs' can seem too much to bear." But that's a burden in an technological regime, I would think, and has nothing to do with "the age of instant information gratification," which ordinarily I'm rather concerned about. I think we feel obliged to consume too much of experience as information and process it. But on this subject of voice mail, I'm completely in sync with the techno-optimists who regard change as inherently positive. If you yearn for voice mail these days, you are hopelessly nostalgic for something that was actually detrimental and inefficient. I'm almost to the point where I have a revolutionary fervor about eradicating voice mail, and regarded it as somewhat treasonous when someone leaves me one or checks their own, thereby encouraging the continued exchange of information by that moribund medium.

I am heartened, then, by this:

Research shows that people take longer to reply to voice messages than other types of communication. Data from uReach Technologies, which operates the voice messaging systems of Verizon Wireless and other cellphone carriers, shows that over 30 percent of voice messages linger unheard for three days or longer and that more than 20 percent of people with messages in their mailboxes “rarely even dial in” to check them, said Saul Einbinder, senior vice president for marketing and business development for uReach, in an e-mail message.

I would have though that the end of voice mail would be celebrated by everyone, and its disappearance would go altogether unlamented. The article sets up a time frame that partially explains where its coming from -- in the 1980s voice mail was an innovation that must have seemed liberating; it ended the tyranny of presence. It made makeshift solutions to communications overload, like call waiting (an invention that never should have been), obsolete. But email should have ended the tyranny of the spoken word several years ago -- and I can't wait until all incidental mobile-phone communication is conducted through texts. No more frivolous speech acts!

For Charlie Park, 30, a Web developer in Williamsburg, Va., a text message is more efficient and — equally important — more respectful of the recipient’s time.
“You never send an e-mail that says, ‘Hey, e-mail me back!’ You’re always sending information,” he said.

I would hesitate to equate information delivery with "respect" -- that makes humans too much like mere data-processing machines -- but in my mind, this trend toward text is returning the sanctity to conversation, so that it requires all parties to be present and attentive and committed to a leisurely, reciprocal exchange of ideas. If talk doesn't rise to that level, let it be text.

The article ends on a sentimental note (a daughter's loving voice mail for her father), and the privileging of voice for communicating emotions. Not to go all Derridian, but the idea that presence is in the spoken word, and only distance is in l’écriture is a somewhat pernicious bias.I discover more about what I think by writing then by talking, there's no reason why that wouldn't be true about emotions. Somehow it almost seems easier to contrive emotions when speaking than when writing, where it takes careful, arduous artifice to produce an inauthentic emotion.

Attacking Žižek (5 Dec 2008)

Anyone at all familiar with Žižek's work would be able to see through Adam Kirsch's hit piece in the New Republic, which basically seeks to argue that Žižek is a totalitarian anti-Semite who uses jokes as a cloak to mask his hateful agenda. Kirsch employs the usual hit-piece tactics, selectively quoting and failing to fill in the necessary context in order to interpret what is quoted, remaining willfully tone-deaf to irony (and claiming that one must do so to understand the "real" message of the work), and using tautological ad hominem attacks to bolster the argumentative claims when necessary. In all likelihood, Žižek would probably welcome this kind of attack, as it tends to reinforce his claims about leftism and liberalism while raising his profile even further. His intent is to make readers uncomfortable; Kirsch's piece makes it clear that he has somehow managed to get under Marty Peretz's skin.

Josh Strawn posts a useful correction to the piece here, (via Larval Subjects) though his eagerness to gesture toward Lacanian exceptionalism is troubling.

When I picked up 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real' so many years ago, I gave up on reading it because I was quite certain that anyone that wanted to understand what Žižek was talking about probably needed to understand something about Lacan. What I subsequently discovered was that one does not cursorily educate oneself on Lacan, nor is it possible to do so (even after six years of immersion, it's quite hard to feel like you 'get' Lacan). This is by Lacan's design. He famously said that the way in should be difficult. It is willful obfuscation, not plain-spokenness in the vein of Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language.' Then again, Lacan wasn't teaching politics. He was the most bizarre pedagogue. One learned from him not by way of traditional study, but through experiencing him. The teacher was not to be the disseminator of knowledge so much as the figure who provoked the unquenchable desire for knowledge.

This attitude -- performative discourse as opposed to expository discourse -- is something that lay readers invariably doubt, if not resent -- that social theorists like Lacan must use a method that justifies opacity, inscrutability, and poor expression to convey otherwise inexpressible truths. It requires a leap of faith to immerse yourself in this tortuous material in order to derive the insights, but by the time you start to understand you've committed so much effort and time to understanding that you're biased toward believing. You can no longer evaluate the insights objectively. (But then the possibility of an objective perspective on such insights is often what is being called into question by the theories.) Often the end result is the true believers become a cult that's more comfortable with dismissing those who fail to climb the mountain and make the total commitment than with spreading the important ideas the cult leader is supposed to have discovered in a persuasive way. The jargon becomes insular and convoluted; the stakes in discussing the theory begin to revolve around which disciple has the true gospel rather than whatever the substance of the gospel was originally. Nothing in the "real world" is affected, because no one in a position to effect change has any idea what the cultists are talking about.

It seems to me that by telling jokes and referencing popular culture and fashioning himself as a theoretical rock star, Žižek is trying to bring Lacanian ideas to a broader audience outside the cult and restore their relevance. His books are nonetheless difficult to understand, but they try to bait lay readers into making the effort with accessible examples and comedic hyperbole. Strawn's point, that Žižek "can't shut it off" -- can't stop theorizing and derailing himself and interrupting interlocutors -- makes it seem as though he should have a blog, where a heterogeneous, inconsistent approach to events as they unfold are generally tolerated and excusable.

Obama as historical rupture (18 Nov 2008)

In this LRB essay, Slavoj Žižek ponders the significance of Obama's election. While it seems to represent a temporary triumph over political cynicism -- "what the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions" -- does it also imply some sort of decisive break in historical continuity? Has Obama introduced a whole new game rather than merely adjusting the rules of the existing politics? (See Larval Subjects' thoughts on that here.) As the transition has been assembled, we've seen some of the same Washington power players from the Clinton era shuffled back into prominence, which has led to articles (like this one) pronouncing that nothing's really changed. This allows some pundits to dismiss the outpouring of emotion when Obama won as overdramatic self-congratulation by liberals who will deserve to be disappointed by politics as usual. (Update: See leftist philosopher Simon Critchley's view here.)

Of course, politics will largely remain the same -- various interests will continue to compete for priority and so on. This is a good thing; dreams of post-partisanship are misguided in presuming some underlying consensus among peopple with irreconcilable differences. Žižek makes this point in an aside: when the financial crisis led to bipartisan action, what that meant in effect was "that democratic procedures were de facto suspended."

But it's hard to look at something like this, the first of what promises to be a weekly YouTube chat from Obama, on a government website that is almost unprecedented in its user-friendly slickness, and not feel that something is fundamentally different about this administration. That difference -- a comfort with new media and the opportunities that stem from it -- seems irreversible. (I'm sure this has already been called Politics 2.0 somewhere.) I have to admit that it's a little sinister and Big Brotherly in feel, and I am still cynical enough to suspect these traits will help make it go over well with the general public.

What Obama's team seems to want to do is establish Obama as an untarnishable brand, anchored in images of youth and progress (hence YouTube), that can then be used to win approval for policies without having to convince people of their merits. Participating in politics tends to make people uncomfortable, and few people do it at any level beyond voting. It involves compromise and confrontation and a willingness to be reminded again and again that reality falls short of ideals. But people love participating in brands -- no compromise necessary there, as the engagement takes place on the fantasy level and consists of pure vicarious pleasure. If we become invested in brand Obama, we will end up absorbing the progressive ideology he may espouse as a kind of by-product. And this can then inform the polls that inform political decisionmaking by legislators. Maybe this is nothing new; this is the "bully pulpit" theory of executive leadership. We just have been without a credible leader for so long in the U.S. that's it is hard to remember what that is like.

Postmodern finance (5 Nov 2008)

Writing in the New Yorker, John Lanchester compares the current credit crisis to a Derridean aporia:

If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always “deferred,” moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an “aporia,” from a Greek term meaning “impasse.” There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.

Often, the temptation in graduate school was to deploy this insight to assert that there are no essential meanings, no essential values, that basically everything is relative and nothing -- say, authorial intent, a person's identity, an emotional experience, the aesthetic merit of a text -- could ultimately be authenticated. I'm not sure the same thing is happening in the financial world with derivatives -- which are well-explained at this site. By definition, derivatives derive their value from something else, but in the financial realm, the "movement of the trace," as Derrida would have called it, is not arbitrary -- the value of derivatives are not at the mercy of random concatenations of contiguous assets. Bankers may have neglected the black swans, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb has argued, but the nature of the derivatives themselves did not alter depending on the perspective of who was trying to decipher them. The peculiarity of derivative is that they allow investors to go short or long on concepts (say, the idea that G.M. will go bankrupt) rather than physical assets. This makes it sound as though there is no there there, which makes it seem very postmodern. But the key distinction in Saussurean linguistics is that the relation between the signifier and signified is entirely arbitrary. The premise of derivatives is just the opposite; contracts are drawn up to bind the parties around some very specific relation of an asset to its future value.

What is so "decentering" about deconstruction is the notion that meaning is constructed in the arbitrary relations of signifiers to other signifiers, and the total detachment from the signifieds. Financial derivatives don't detach from the underlying assets, as I understand it, no matter how opaque they may become. The problem in the crisis is not that value, like meaning, is inherently fluid (and that isn't even meant to be a pun on the illiquidity problem) but that the original amount of valuable stuff was wildly disproportionate to the amount of value being circulated in the financial system. The system was overleveraged.

The closest postmodern equivalent for this would be the notion that there is no value to begin with at the heart of things, only a convenient fiction that value exists: a Master Signfier that seems to give stable meaning to the rest of the signs and allows the joy of the free play of signifiers to begin. If you accept this, then you can argue that the crisis has come because somehow people began to question the necessary fiction (I'm not sure if this is what causes the aporia in Derrida's argument) and began believing that it wasn't fiction at all. The peculiar notion that gold has some intrinsic value is a better example of this; the value of gold is in what you can exchange it for, so it must keep moving. If you hoard it, thinking you are gathering value to yourself, you have become lost in the delusion of original, inherent value. The point is that all value is constructed in circulation. Meaning is created through the movement of the trace; the trace itself has no inherent meaning -- it's not the master signifier, even though people may need to believe it is so to start it moving.

Anyway, the tendency to mystify the doings of financial "geniuses" with this kind of postmodernist analysis is dangerous, I think, because it masks the much more apprehensible truth that the credit bubble had become a Ponzi scheme, a game where continued returns depended on recruiting new suckers -- new unqualified borrowers, new pension funds to buy up fallaciously rated AAA CDO tranches, etc. That makes for a better metaphor for the crisis than the word games of postmodernists, and is more likely to inspire the sort of regulatory action we should be taking in response to it.

Famously, the only option left open to us by postmodern philosophy is a kind of hopelessness, the "fatal strategies" of apathy or silence or heedless surrender. These are appropriate if you truly believe the entire notion of meaning or value is a sham, that every action helps reinforce the system you want to escape from. But if you believe that companies in a capitalist society actually are productive, that GDP really is a measure of value, that the economic output of a society consists at some level in things we all need to distribute and consume, then postmodern strategies are rhetorical disguises best used to distract people from that actual value while you try to secure more of it, i.e. more power over how the output of society is distributed, for yourself.

Looking for clues (24 July 2008)

I have read Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production several times now, and I still don't think I understand what he's talking about. Either that, or I can't grasp why it matters. But while re-reading it this time, I was also reading what seems to me a highly "produced" text, an Agatha Christie murder mystery, Evil Under the Sun, and this helped illustrate for me what I think Macherey is getting at.

Macherey is at pains to point out certain critical fallacies, which in his view obscure the literary object and prevent critics from generating "objective" or "scientific" observations about it. (Why deriving such knowledge is important remains unclear to me, but I may be an irredeemable philistine when it comes to "scientific" cultural analysis of the Althusserian school. Seems part and parcel of the dream of breaking through "spontaneous ideology.") One of these fallacies (the "normative fallacy" -- if I were Macherey I would be sure to italicize it) involves critics trying to restate the message of a text in their own boiled-down formulations. "Criticism proposes to modify the work in order to assimiliate it more thoroughly, denying its factual reality as being merely the provisional version of an unfulfilled intention." Such critics are intent on replacing the literary work with what Macherey characterizes as an idealized (and falsifying) version -- one that has decoded the literary text and rendered it in unambiguous language, into crystalline commentary. But no language is ultimately unambiguous; every new formulation is subject to interpretation and so on, so this is a fruitless process ("critical works which attempt to put questions about the nature of discourse when they themselves are really discourse in disguise," writes Macherey), but nevertheless a seductive one, as it places the critic closer to the truth, mediating between the author and the true essence of the ideas that the author was trying to communicate.

From the point of view of the normative fallacy, literature is a matter of stalling the reader's recognition of the message, staging a bunch of distractions and transpositions and using elliptical or periphrastic ways of expressing things so as to make a text out of something that the critic, after the fact, expresses in its essence. Literary works are just belabored or cryptic ways of getting ideas across.

Of course, mysteries are structured like this -- the author stages a bunch of delaying tactics to prevent our seeing who committed the crime, and our pleasure comes from that protraction, from the sinkhole of time opened up within the simple details of a crime. "The detective story offers the best example of this disappearance of narrative," Macherey explains. "It is constructed entirely around the possibility of this prophetic reading which completes the story at the moment of its abolition." In a sense, the detective is the critic, who retells the whole story in succinct form at the end, replacing the version we just experienced before as we read. So in Evil Under the Sun, Hercule Poirot explains away the entire book in the last two chapters and the function of all the clues Christie had so carefully planted earlier. He tells the story straight, while Christie had wound in all these distractions, detours, and misleading feints and red herrings. It gets very meta, because Christie has Poirot seem to criticize the ineffectiveness of her own imaginative conceptions earlier in the book. What we thought were just lame, lazy plot and character devices were actually clues -- they were unconvincing because they were the inventions of the failed criminals, not of Christie, and Poirot was able to deduce the criminal intent from these cliches that we could only ascribe to Christie herself (a neat trick that would seem to insulate Christie from being judged for her own literary merits). "First of all there were certain preliminary scenes," Poirot says, describing how the criminals prepared their crime. "A conventional jealous wife dialogue between her and her husband, Later she played the same part with me. At the time, I remember a vague feeling of having read it all in a book. It did not seem real. Because, of course, it was not real." So what are we, reading a book of fiction ourselves, supposed to make of that evidence? Everything in the book reads like something you'd only encounter in a mystery novel. How can we distinguish? We can't share the ground from which Poirot judges what is real and what is not.

Mysteries fit the theory of composition Poe put forward in "The Philosophy of Composition," which Macherey wants to expose as being absurd, if not an actual joke Poe was playing in inviting readers to take it seriously. Poe argues for a teleology in literary works -- the end is preconceived and all of a texts elements are designed to produce that end -- "every element should contribute to the conclusion." Poe claims that "it is my design to render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition -- that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequences of a mathematical problem." So, Macherey notes, the artist is supposed transcending spontaneity, only the reader is experiencing spontaneous responses -- the reader experiences ideology, the writer orchestrates it. And the critic who translates the work into its intentions stands even further outside ideology, exposing how ideological discourse works.

If you buy into Poe, everything in a work is intentional, and good critics can presumably read out the intention of every detail by working backwards from the achieved effect. That is what Poirot does at the end of the novel, collecting all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and placing them properly, as the hackneyed metaphor Christie works into the text would have it. A character doing a jigsaw puzzle tells Poirot, "I do think the people who make puzzles are kind of mean. They just go out of their way to deceive you." Obviously Christie is venting some criticism she must have heard often. Poirot replies the his crime solving "is a little like your puzzle. One assembles the pieces. It is like a mosaic -- many colors and patterns -- and every strange-shaped little piece must be fitted into its own place." By analogy, the text is conceived as a complete picture, and Poirot's assemblage of the pieces is the narrative we experience in reading.

But what Macherey argues is that it would be silly for literary critics to proceed in the same way as Poirot, deducing the proper meaning of every piece. He argues that this would be a "radical misunderstanding of the writer's work," and that a text is "never a coherent and unified whole" -- there are always multiple things being suggested at every moment in the text, by every analyzable aspect, and these things are often moving us in different directions simultaneously.

If I understand Macherey correctly, he is saying that what is interesting or significant about a book like Evil Under the Sun is the stuff that Poirot can't explain in his summation, the aspects of the book that aren't integrated into his construction of the completed jigsaw puzzle. The excess, so to speak. These are details that prolonged the narrative but had nothing to do with the crime; they just helped perpetrate the novel itself -- give it character types, make the motives plausible, provide the backdrop of normality on which the relevant anomalies in the criminals could be registered. In this excess, we can catch a glimpse of ideology, which Macherey, following Althusser, suggests is otherwise inarticulable. As they see it, ideology is lived in, a habitus -- tangible, not merely a characteristic of certain statements or positions. Rather it enables ideas to be formulated and expressed, and can't be expressed directly in language without again being masked or distorted. But literary texts, in their roundabout approach to rendering lived experience, capture something of it, pin enough of it down to make it subject to analysis: "The spontaneous ideology in which men live (it is not produced spontaneously, although men believe that they acquire it spontaneously) is not simply reflected by the mirror of the book; ideology is broken, and turned inside out in so far as it is transformed in the text from being a state of consciousness. Art, or at least literature, because it naturally scorns the credulous view of the world, establishes myth and illusion as visible objects." It manages to "present ideology in a non-ideological form," in what ideology enables it to say and what it inhibits.

So what is left over in Evil Under the Sun after Poirot is finished giving the official solution to the book? Quite a lot, actually. What's particularly jarring are the superfluous suspects, who are given reasons to kill that are convincing enough within the context of the novel but then are dropped as irrelevant red herrings once the real killer is revealed. But if one of these alternate suspects was the guilty party, the novel wouldn't change much at all. The motives are purely on the level of surface, one as significant as any other. Whether the woman was murdered by her stepdaughter or a drug-smuggling ring makes no difference in the world of Evil Under the Sun. The suspects are perfectly interchangeable, like the cards in a game of Clue. The implication of this is that there is always a superfluous amount of evil, that crime in the culture she depicts is overdetermined, but at the same time utterly arbitrary. No deeper implications can be inferred from the occurrence of any crime; each is isolated from larger social problems or deeper psychological insights.

But the main thing is the sexism -- after the crime is solved, Christie is at pains to deprive the working woman character of her job, marrying her off to the husband of the dead woman, who was killed basically because she was a vain and pathetic attention-seeker. (Christie basically leads us to believe that she deserved to die.) This betrothal was utterly unnecessary to the mystery aspect of the novel, but it ties together other assumptions animating the plot about a woman's place and her proper aspirations. Working women are essentially no different than criminals, cold-bloodedly calculating how they can prey on the world for gain. They should instead be at leisure, prettified trophies for the vacationing men to ogle at their own leisure (their attention should not be co-opted by ostentatious female vanity). If they become ornaments, they might be spared the unpleasant business of having murderous motives assigned to them.

Difficult theory (7 May 2008)

Larval Subjects, an academic blog, makes the case that difficult theoretical writing -- think Deleuze, or to cite the worst I can think of, Laclau and Mouffe -- is a "form of intellectual terrorism."

I have increasingly found myself suspicious of the “difficult work”. On the one hand, I read texts in the sciences that express extremely complex ideas in very basic prose. Somehow I’m just unwilling to concede that what Hegel is trying to talk about is any more difficult or complex than what the biologist, complexity theory, economic social theorist, ecologist, or quantum physicist is attempting to articulate. This leads to my concern. I wonder if terribly dense styles such as we find in figures like Deleuze, Lacan, Hegel, Derrida, etc., etc., etc., aren’t a form of intellectual terrorism. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not referring to the quality of their concepts or arguments. What I am referring to is a general writing strategy that demands so much work on the part of the reader in the art of interpretation, that by the time you’ve managed to make heads or tails of what Lacan is arguing or Hegel is seeking to articulate or Deleuze is seeking to theorize, you have so much invested that you simply cannot think critically about that figure.

Are social theorists so vain as to believe that their insights are so idiosyncratic that they must invent their own impenetrable and uneditable style to convey them? That was the sort of excuse I used to make for their unreadable prose when I was suffering from that compensatory overinvestment in what I read, what Adam Kotsko has called academic Stockholm syndrome. Then, I'd argue that the tedious hair-splitting and neologisms and abuse of erudite, Latinate vocabulary captures nuances otherwise inexpressible, rather than serving merely to scare away the skeptical. Clarity was, as far as I was concerned, a bourgeois comfort promoting intellectual laziness and capable only of expressing received wisdom and status-quo-preserving "truths." Even now I am tempted to argue that difficult books slow our rate of consumption and thereby serve as a de facto blow to consumerism, which is predicated on perpetually accelerating it, and leaving us in ever more need of further efficiencies. As the Larval Subjects blogger says at the end of the post, "We live, we work, we must integrate superhuman bodies of information. Perhaps a little consideration is in order." But why must we? Difficult texts that we must read at a page-per-5-minutes rate force us to consider that, at the very least in deciding whether to keep crawling along or instead switch to something faster -- like blogs on an RSS feed, where I initially read the LS post.

But in retrospect, I now think that I learned to love my critical-theory tormentors after being shut in with them for too long, and came to believe on faith the truth of their assertions to the degree that I tortured myself in trying to understand them. It was an sure way to resolve the cognitive dissonance that came from spending so much time trying to assimilate what in the end were some pretty basic concepts. "Truth is relative." "Concepts are often defined in terms of their opposites." "Needs can be as arbitrary as wants." "Education is a system of social control." Etc.

Chances are theorists are merely too lazy to find clearer ways to express themselves (or they have cowed all potential editors), especially when opacity also serves a beneficial end casting the aura of difficulty over their works to make it seem more profound, and the scholars that pursue it to comprehension more ascetic. With that in mind, it's worth remembering what Nietzsche said about asceticism in The Genealogy of Morals: "For a very long time the ascetic ideal serves the philosopher as the sole phenomenal guise under which he could exist qua philosopher." Writing difficult prose is a will to power in the face of impotence, futility, death, indifference. This can prompt a grandiloquent egotism: "Whoever, at any time, has undertaken to build a new heaven has found the strength for it in his own hell." Difficult prose may be just as difficult for the writer as it is for the reader, but necessarily so, because the ideas must seem tortuous to feel true. I am really a philosopher if I use words like noumenon and being-for-itself and velleity. "What, then, does the ascetic ideal betoken in a philosopher? … Asceticism provides him with the condition most favorable to the exercise of his intelligence. Far from denying 'existence' he affirms his existence, and his alone, perhaps even to the point of hubris."

And those following the "ascetic priest" are, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, a "vast flock of defeated, disgruntled sufferers and self-tormentors." Yes, that sounds familiar -- a lot like my graduate seminar in Critical Theory.

(Update: Carl Dyke touches on some of cultish and ascetic aspects of theory -- in a far more theoretical way -- here.)

Deconstruction time again (10 April 2008)

At the NYT site, Stanley Fish recently posted this essay in response to Francois Cusset's new postmortem, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Having recently re-read 1984, the discussion had extra salience for me, as most discussions of theory eventually get around to the attempt to control thought and reality through language, as Orwell illustrated with Newspeak.

Walter Benjamin argued that "the only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." Orwell in 1984 was implying the same thing. The Party obliterates the past and makes its hope inaccessible. Was deconstruction doing the same thing?

French theory is usually taken as an assault on Enlightenment thought, and therefore a threat to liberal society as we know it. Fish modifies this slightly:

what was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the “I” facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the “I” and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.
The solution to the problem in the rationalist tradition was to extend man’s reasoning powers in order to produce finer and finer descriptions of the natural world, descriptions whose precision could be enhanced by technological innovations (telescopes, microscopes, atom smashers, computers) that were themselves extensions of man’s rational capacities. The vision was one of a steady progress with the final result to be a complete and accurate — down to the last detail — account of natural processes. Francis Bacon, often thought of as the originator of the project, believed in the early 17th century that it could be done in six generations.

This is what Fish calls the Baconian dream, the Enlightenment project of an airtight scientific explanation of all observable phenomena, which replaces the need for God as an explanation. Secular folk generally take this sort of thing for granted nowadays, and we tend to have a blind faith in the benevolence of science.

Summing up the general thrust of deconstructive theory, Fish invokes this quote of Hobbes's: "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things." In other words, truth is manufactured in discourse and is malleable. 1984, which is preoccupied with the totalitarian implications of a Berkeleyesque idealism (wherein there is no reality outside the mind), takes the absence of a 100 percent verifiable real truth outside of human minds and runs with it. In the novel, the Party must eradicate once and for all the fantasy of independent, noncontingent truth to reduce everything to power, which they monopolize. This supplants what Fish calls the Baconian dream in providing "the final word" on nature. The Party is the final word on everything in 1984, and it utters that final word in whatever form suits them as the unknowable Real moves on. The novel makes clear that science is at the mercy of politics, and serves political ends, not objective, neutral ones.

But Fish is right to say that deconstruction, which sets out to expose the political agenda of seemingly objective practices like scientific method, is itself apolitical. As he explains,

No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.

But though some academics harped on social construction of gender and the canon to try to expose and unsettle established "natural" hierarchies, most others realized that the deconstruction game was a never-ending spiral that pulls down all authority if pursued to its logical conclusion. It's not a very useful tool in and of itself, since it can be used only to make one argument -- there are no given truths. But the inescapability of this conclusion led ultimately to an enhanced interest in "historicity" among academics in American English departments -- in the absence of absolutes, various socially constructed phenomena (i.e. everything) could be compared and critiqued after being "situated" in a historical moment through close reading "texts" (i.e. everything). And various discourses regarding said phenomena could be surveyed and a dignified role for literature asserted -- it's constructing historical reality! You can then bypass more-tedious research and its decidedly undramatic conclusions for intuitive leaps of insight derived by sensitive readings of novels and tracing patterns of tropes. This means that you don't have to do much more than parse the rhetoric in a text to draw historical conclusions from it and start making a transhistorical case for the "invention" of this or that ontological category. Then you can write books discovering the invention of the fact, the invention of shopping, the invention of woman, the invention of basically everything. Better yet, these categories are constantly reinvented because they have no firm universal basis.

The problem with French theory is less its assault on truth, but its assault on clear straightforward expression. Its jargon is an even more recondite Newspeak than that spoken by Enlightenment rationalists, with their zeal for coining words to categorize everything. The near-incomprehensible discourse in your average text by Lacan or Derrida became a convenient tactic for professionalizing academics to adopt in order to demonstrate that what they were doing was over their philistine critics' heads. It also made for a useful test of graduate students' willingness to play by the rules (will they write in this putrid style to keep enemies at bay?) and doggedly attempt to follow absurdly nuanced trains of thought, which make needless distinctions apparently designed to confuse and alienate the less learned, who can't even begin to contextualize what is at stake in such dithering. One night with Kristeva or Spivak quickly weeds out the nonbelievers.

But deconstruction -- the idea that ideology is constructed and malleable -- has mainly been a boon to advertising, supplying a working model for undoing prejudices against, say, wasteful spending or frivolous identity-making. Deconstruction immediately opens the possibility of ongoing, perpetually incomplete (and perpetually profitable) reconstruction. Hence women are always "becoming" women and men, men, and so on.

Everyone an outsider artist (8 Feb 2007)

At academic blog the Valve, Joseph Kugelmass has a post that seems relevant to what I was trying to get at yesterday -- the problem of having to seem unaware of your calculating signaling in order to for these signals to seem authentic and succeed. For this, Kugelmass cites master semiotician Björk (emphasis below is mine):

"I don’t really know why I’m obsessed with swans but, as I said, everything about my new album is about winter and they’re a white, sort of winter, bird. And obviously very romantic, being monogamous. It’s one of those things that maybe I’m too much in the middle of to describe. When you’re obsessed with something, you can explain it five years later, but in the moment, you don’t know exactly why. Right now, swans seem to sort of stand for a lot of things. I see a picture of a swan now and I go [takes a deep gasping breath], but two years ago it didn’t do that to me." —from an interview with Bjork by Donna Karan, Interview, Sept. 2001
Bjork contradicts herself remarkably here. She begins by giving a series of revealing, thoughtful interpretations of her own decision to wear an ungainly swan dress to the Oscars, after decorating her album Vespertine with images of swans. She then immediately disowns these interpretations by claiming that she’s “too much in the middle of” the phenomenon to describe it. In other words, she does what she can to preserve the aura of the symbol of the swan, by protecting it against the corrosive process of becoming conscious of its meanings. However, by doing this, she is actually giving in to us. As everybody knows, the dress Bjork wore to the Oscars was criticized far and wide for being incredibly ugly. It did not look like a dress—it looked like a ridiculous swan costume.

If I interpret this right, Kugelmass argues that we demand a dog-and-pony show from artists in which they disavow their own awareness of what they are doing so that we can all believe they are doing it for reasons both we and the artists would like to assume are real. We want them all to fit the stereotype of outsider artists, working from an untutored and ambition-free impetus. This keeps the artist's ego and career investments from spoiling our aesthetic experience.

Kugelmass cites this in response to a debate amid academic blogs about the invocation of theory in blogging, and his post nicely performs the method it simultaneously intends to scrutinize. (He invokes some pop culture references -- Björk and Daniel Johnston -- to elucidate some high-theory-like insights about praxis.) I like it when the form an argument takes reinforces its content, even though it can sometimes seem like a flashy trick -- which brings us back to the question of how calculation and spontaneity play into the perception of sincerity. Should academics work like Daniel Johnston, whose mental instability frees him from the accusation that he is being too calculating in his choice of motifs and topics, and allows us to appreciate them without fretting about how clever Johnston must think he is for coming up with them? (Kugelmass seems to argue that just as we don't discredit Johnston for logical inconsistency, heterodox use of tropes or choosing ideas that don't entirely cohere, so we should not dismiss theory for similar sins but seize such criticism as opportunity for clarification. That he can imagine a comparison between what he does and the art Johnston makes implies an equation of criticism with art itself, another can of worms.)

I found Kugelmass's conclusion a bit unhelpful: "As somebody who does theory, I’m obliged to respond that the success of the performance is the truth of the author’s faith." But what about when the success is being measured in terms of how truthful it seems? The nature of the problem is that we have a hard time separating success from the good or bad faith of the performer -- this has been true since moral virtue became a spectator sport in the 18th century. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Something other than the ideas themselves always seem to be at stake in discussions of capital-T theory, namely what it is that humanities study is supposed to accomplish. Upon coming across an lit-crit article that foregrounds "trendy" social or literary theory, some reactionaries (me included, at times) assume that it has been forced in to show what a smarty-pants the author thinks he is, that it is not organic to the argument, and thus the writer is making a "bad-faith" argument and is engaged in an intellectual exercise rather than a sincere, impassioned argument. But trying to assess how organic the rhetorical elements of an argument are seems impossible to determine, if not beside the point -- it's applying a piece of critical dogma (literary works should be unified and "organic"; evaluating organic beauty is what we should do in English class) to something it's not equipped to process. If that line of attack seems too facile, a skeptic will perhaps provoke a definitional skirmish (e.g. what "real" feminism is, what counts as a novel, when the consumer revolution really occurred, etc.) that is less about the subject of the paper than it is about policing academic turf and perpetuating the professional viability of a particular interpretive approach. Perhaps the scariest thing that every graduate student in literature must confront is that, given how subjective the parameters and goals of the field are, every disagreement can be seen as a kind of ego-bruising, academic turf war -- how one continues to fight the good fight after having stared into that abyss is the mystery that separates PhDs from ABDs.

Why theory? (8 September 2006)

Via a tip from Crooked Timber comes this essay, a pretty heavy Althusserian reading of the Gang of Four's praxis by Timothy Sexton, arguing that the band merged critical theory with rock music to intensify the contradictions we all experience as subjects within consumer-capitalist institutions and possibly subvert the culture industry. It's not light reading. Sample sentence:

Gang of Four locate their Marxist theory in the Althusserian notion of expressing resistance through the contradictions inherent in the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) of the corporate-controlled rock music industry, and the way in which Gang of Four express their theory of Marxist thought is by inducing in the listener an alternative consciousness achieved through contradictions and disorientations that serve to mirror the very sense of disorientation and contradiction that capitalistic consciousness creates.

While insightful, the article's stern humorlessness seems almost parodic -- a clever reminder perhaps of why the Gang of Four chose to express its ideas through music and not theoretical essays. But it may be that there is no light-hearted way to get across the idea that social being and material conditions determine one's consciousness, not vice versa, and that our illusions of autonomy make up the better part of our chains.

But a paragraph like this is frustrating:

In a system that engages in the use of ideology rather than force to control its underclass and that engages in the practice of diversion through the type of distraction that Walter Benjamin discusses, the danger for that system lies in the realization of discontent by its inhabitants. When the discontent rises to a pitch and the diversions of entertainment no longer occupy the mind, that is when the alternative consciousness can be raised. Once again Gang of Four reveal their ability to exploit contradiction by engaging in the diversion of leisurely entertainment in order to raise awareness about the discontent that a happiness that is dependent on consumption of leisurely entertainment ultimately brings. Reaching the point at which this awareness of why one finds himself discontent despite owning so many things he was assured would make him happy is what ultimately concerns Gang of Four and is the cornerstone of their theory.

Would it corrupt the argument to edit this into the following? When a system uses entertainment to oppress workers, the danger is that workers will at some point cease to be entertained. The essence of Gang of Four's approach was to turn the trap of entertainment against itself and use it to reveal to its consumers the empty futility of consuming, freeing them to be receptive to new and potentially revolutionary ideas.

The opacity of the language precludes the writer from reaching the audience the Gang of Four was able to reach; perhaps this demonstrates an alert fear that the commentary may be superfluous if it is indeed accurate. I used to think that complex arguments required a certain amount of jargon and repetitious phrasing to achieve the precision they aimed for; now I tend to think it's equal parts carelessness and suceptibility to the tortuous diction of other theorists such a writer is probably reading.

Writing that way is an attempt to sound theoretical, to connote "theoreticity" regardless of the nature of the ideas. It is the linguistic equivalent of wearing a Ché shirt. Not that I think Sexton is some kind of poseur, though, in writing this essay -- it's more that it seems he needs to adopt a stilted prose style to have faith that his argument will be taken seriously, and ironically enough, in a culture debased by infotainment and copy laboriously edited to be effortless, this has the effect of making it seem utterly marginal.

His point about the Gang of Four's theoretical approach -- that it stages in its songs a dialogue between the voice that wants to go along, get along and the voice that is becoming aware of the systematic ways his identity is circumscribed by material conditions -- may have broader application to all theoretical writing that attempts to be accessible. It's user-friendly (i.e., condescending?) aspects gives voice to the deep-seated urge to reaffirm the status quo even as the gist of the writing may intend to subvert existing social relations. If this practice is effectively dialectical in the Gang of Four's music, Sexton might give it a chance in his prose.

Conspicuous cognition (27 July 2006)

Maybe Terry Eagleton is right, and we are now in a period "After Theory". But the generation of liberal arts students who were obliged to read Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, et. al., still remain, and some of them are now working critics. This, I think, explains the surprising amount of coverage that Green Gartside and his "band" Scritti Politti have recently generated with a new album. Gartside is almost too good to be true: You couldn't ask for a better subject upon which you could trot out all that poststructuralism you were forced to learn. At a time when theory was still fresh, Gartside started a band named after a book by the Marxist cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci, wrote a song that announced his love for Jacques Derrida (appropriately called "Jacques Derrida"), and slowly charted a course toward mainstream pop at its most synthetic without ever abandoning his frequent lyrical allusions to linguistics and psychoanalytic theory. Hence, there is a lot of postmodern praxis to explicate: the fusion of high and low culture, the intertextuality of social production, the reification of ideas in language, unstable irony, love as a metaphor for ontological and epistemological dilemmas epitomized by deconstruction, etc. Infuriatingly, none of this stuff makes Scritti Politti especially pleasant to listen to (as anyone whose given "Anomie and Bonhomie" a listen); suitably they are much better in theory than in practice.

The working critics of 1985, when Scritti Politti released its most successful album, Cupid & Psyche 85, were not interested in such stuff (and neither, likely, was the audience): David Fricke's Rolling Stone review, which was content to dismiss Gartside's lyrics as "abstract word games," seems to have set the tone in America. This album yielded the band's only U.S. hit, "Perfect Way," which managed to reach the charts despite being packed with puns on Lacanian buzzwords, lacks and voids and difference, that went over just about the entire audience's head. (I remember liking the song when it came out, but wondering if it was going to get me beat up. But that fear abated as it became almost an act of courageous subversion in my high school to stop listening to Boston and Foreigner and adopt a fancy for wimpy English pop.)

Now, as the articles linked above demonstrate, that is one of the first things noted about the song, suggesting something of theory's lasting practical impact on the mundane level of magazine culture. Part of what makes Gartside fascinating is that it remains unclear why he decided to saturate his songs with graduate-seminar material -- was there a subversive agenda at work, and if so what did he want to subvert, the complacency of the pop audience or the pretensions of the theory itself (which, of course, would instruct us to see him as doing both simultaneously)?

But even though critics are now willing to frame their discussions of Scritti Politti with references to Lacan and Derrida, they remain unwilling to take the theoretical ideas seriously, instead reducing them to superficial appliqués, tokens in a round of philosophical hide and seek. In other words they do a reductionist postmodern move on Gartside's songs and refuse to attribute any depth to them even while acknowledging their complexity. The generation of critics who mastered poststructuralist theory had no interest in carrying the revolution forward; they are content to know the ideas and deploy them dismissively in order to send a discreet message about their own educational capital: "I may be writing popular journalism, but I've cracked the spine on Anti-Oedipus too." So if theory can be said to have failed, perhaps it's because those who learned it and put themselves in position to disseminate its ideas only managed to see it as an intellectual status game. It may even have a Vebelesque aspect; we flaunt knowledge of theory we regard as worthless because it proves how much time and intellect we had to waste on something so apparently useless -- it's conspicuous cognition.

Derrida for CEOs (20 July 2006)

Derrida famously declared, "Il n'ya pas de hors-texte" -- there is no outside of the text -- a foundational postulate of postmodernism that points to the intertextuality of all culture, the absence of a transcendental point above the fray from which to observe cultural phenomena, and perhaps above all, the lack of ontology for things outside the manner in which they are represented -- that being, the "real," adheres somehow to the order of language, not the order of material objects.

Most people who never sat in a graduate seminar think this is nonsense, but I found some support for Derrida's dictum in a remarkable declaration mentioned in this AdPulp post. "Three years ago at Madison and Vine, Coca-Cola's then CEO stood up and told the room his company was not in the business of selling sweet drinks, but was in fact a media company selling brand impressions." That's a pretty astounding statement -- Coca Cola doesn't sell soda, they sell the name "Coca-cola" -- but it seems inescapable, self-evident, when you think about it. The material world recedes as the nebulous concept of the brand, which exists only as language, becomes primary. The products themselves are effluvia, arbitrary conduits for the brand, in which all value is stored. If we can't consume a product as an idea, as a lifestyle, as a set of prepared, intertextual connotations, we really can't at this point consume it at all. The water pours down our throat, but if it's not Evian or Dasani or whatever, we won't even notice it; it's is below the level of consumption and thus sub-real.

Beyond the profit motive (15 June 2006)

A few months ago, on a tip from BoingBoing probably, I downloaded a pdf of Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, which in the spirit of its subject, open-source "social production," was being offered for free by the author as if it were software source code. I never got around to reading it, in part because a 350-plus page pdf is a little unwieldy, and tying up the printer with a document that big would attract unwanted attention even at my laid-back workplace. So I forgot all about why I was interested in it in the first place until I read Paul Duguid's review in the TLS. Duguid frames his assessment around a Microsoft origin legend, in which Bill Gates stops tinkering with software as a hobby and seeks to make it proprietary, declaring in a letter to a computer club that no quality software will be written if no one can make money by doing it. Gates was voicing a principle that animates mainstream economics back to The Wealth of Nations, namely that the profit motive and market-organized competition are necessary to motivate people to take risks, innovate, and produce what people want -- to make "quality". Without the exercise of self-interest, enlightened or not, one's efforts will be dilettantish, personally satisfying perhaps but not socially productive.

Benkler, as his play on Adam Smith suggests, wants to refute that, and offer open-source collaboration as an alternative mode of social production to the invisible hand -- open-source projects seems to develop through a similar form of spontaneous order, only they are not guided by the hope for profit but for a different kind of capital perhaps -- recognition, influence, potlatch destruction of one's own efforts, display of one's skill, etc. Does this form of social production create an different kind of economy, based on the gift rather than exploitation for profit? That question is what intrigues me, because it promises a different model for human interaction and ethics than the "virtuous" selfishness that often seems to power capitalism. At the risk of sounding like a naive flower child, I'll venture the uncharacteristically optimistic proposition that at least as many people need to adapt themselves to the cutthroat expectations of economic efficiency as find such selfishness natural; a single-minded focus on getting every last bit of utility you can at the margin often seems to run against human nature in a way that cooperation doesn't. One of my operating assumptions (derived in part from Galbraith, in part from Frankfurt School theory) is that capitalist society must expend a great deal of effort naturalizing selfishness at the expense of collaboration and cooperation and the satisfactions of community; so those natural pleasures that tend to isolate us or focus our attentions on ourselves and the significance and importance of our individuality -- that posit our uniqueness as a joy in its own right --are championed in our culture, and collective pleasures are suppressed, trivialized, or marginalized to "exceptional" occasions of holidays and festivals. One of the most off-putting aspects of conservative ideology is the low esteem it holds human nature, which it presumes to be base and selfish and Hobbesean at all turns, restrained only in spite of itself by the operation of the market and ruthless competition, the grim view of human nature expressed in Fredrick Douglass's observation (which I'm plucking from the end of a BusinessWeek article on spyware): "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." Hayek's Road to Serfdom is full of similar "realism", that it's hopelessly naive to assume that the pursuit of individual power could ever be hemmed in by a feeling of social responsibility. And looking at the world, it's hard not to believe that this is so. But when you contemplate the huge amount of trouble people are willing to go to to make the fruits of their labor available for free in open-source scenarios, whether they are writing extensions for Firefox or rewriting and correcting Wikipedia entries or providing free left-wing news analysis or preparing their rare unencoded albums for sharing on MP3 blogs, you get an injection of hope that there really is some utopian alternative just over the horizon.

As someone who studied Bakhtin and did a lot of fruitless thinking about the dialogic nature of texts, Wikipedia, which stages the struggles among different registers of discourse and the different agendas behind them in a text that is permanently unfinished and always changing, seems to offer a way out of the tendency toward doctrinal official versions, illustrating instead how culture can become more actively democratic at the granular level of texts themselves, whose uncertain status demands a more active participation from users. Of course, not everyone wants to be active and skeptical all the time, one of the attractive things about books, and cultural industry product in general, is that we could surrender to them and wallow in responsibility free passivity. This is one of the reasons, probably, why prepackaged culture so quickly obliterated folk traditions of communities and families making there own entertainment. After all, anyone can make pop music -- anyone does, as demonstrated by the untrained musicians who write their own tunes and make up the bulk of popular music creation. We outsource that sort of creativity because it simplifies things, makes entertainment something that's off-the-rack, ready-to-wear. We don't have to stage a private theatrical like at Mansfield Park every time we want diversion. We don't have to have pencil in hand, making disputational notes while we read whatever we read, with a mind to correct it.

And as Duguid stresses, not everyone is qualified to be producing culture that other people should have to acknowledge. Open source systems work for software production, he argues, because there are already filters in place that get rid of the folks who will do more harm than good -- namely, you have to know how to program and want to. But he wonders who will want to consume DIY culture instead of Hollywood quality. But he misses a crucial point -- the entertainment comes not from consuming but from producing the music, the film, the texts, whatever -- from working collaboratively with friends to make something. DIY culture is about the doing it, not about the enjoying it as a product later. Duguid assumes that consumers are only and merely consumers, that they by definition can only find pleasure through consumption; technology that allows intervention into existing media product allows us to become producers, to derive pleasure from activity rather than absorption.

Does this sort of production-as-pleasure move us beyond the profit motive (which seems to require passive consumers as part of the circuit of capital) in any meaningful way? Will this always be a isolated realm of exchange, far down the long tail, as Chris Anderson speculates? Maybe I should actually read Benkler's book for some ideas.

Theses about commercial fiction (23 May 2006)

I ran these before on the old blog, but with little time for writing today, I thought I'd trot out a slightly revised version of them again.

1. Commercial fiction exists to justify the status quo and make such justifications be experienced as pleasure, either through flattering the reader for his ability to predict what will happen, dignifying his customary circumstances or positing fantasies that dovetail with the commodities markets have to offer.

2. Commercial fiction thrives on the reader's isolation, which allows his fantasies to develop unchecked in the channels provided by the fiction and allows for a more absorbing suspension of disbelief. This corresponds well with how the consumer society depends on isolated consumers to permit a wider array of unnecessary purchases and to allow unsubstantiated claims about products and the lifestyles they purport to provide go unchecked. Resistance, even to the flimsy premises of genre fiction and advertisements, requires social organization -- you need a network of communication outside of mass media to set up a discourse counter to it. Isolation, on the other hand, streamlines acquiescence.

3. Vicarious participation is a prerequisite of both commercial fiction and commercial societies. In both instances we must be prepared to enjoy our emotions more thoroughly through proxies than through direct experience of nature or society. We must be prepared to choose mediated forms of experience, because of the illusion of control it affords us, over direct, spontaneous, unpredictable "natural" experiences.

4. Plausibility may be redefined within the realm of commercial fiction to suit the consumer society's requirements. Reading commercial fiction reconfigures the plausibility threshold so that only matters inconsequential to commerce and consumerist fantasy are rejected as "unrealistic."

5. The question of the commercial novel's form may best be seen as a problem of industrial design.

6. The commercial novel was one of the first commodities, and as such, it contributed to the notions that acquiring goods constitutes a story itself. The dream world we enter in fiction is akin to the dream lifestyle a product, typically branded, hopes to posit for us via its ads. A story unfolds, closure is obtained (the good is purchased) and a new story must begin. Commercial novels, in being utterly worthless after they are read once, are emblematic of consumer goods generally, which become beside the point once the pleasure of acquiring them has been acted out. (Example: the home espresso machine. Note how many of these you find in thrift stores.)

7. Our facility at enjoying commercial fiction, adopting to its conventions and enjoying its foreshortenings and its illusions, the clockwork execution of its familiar formulas, makes us able to enjoy shopping more -- the necessary pre-purchase fantasizing, how ads are metonyms for powerful narratives illustrating our values, how there can be a dramatic arc to our shopping experience, how the invisible hand is really a kind of deus ex machina.

8. Connoiseurship in the market -- the quest for distinctive goods -- has roots in the connoiseurship of feeling experienced vicariously through the earliest commercial novels and the taste in reading it allows to be expressed. The cult of sensibility taught culture to value the calculated display of feeling and find nothing inauthentic in it. Authenticity was brought to the surface as a set of signs.

9. Pleasure does not preexist systems of distribution and consumption. It manifests itself through those systems; the shape pleasure can take is defined by those systems. The 18th century commercial novel is an artifact of first forms of pleasure enabled by capitalism. (Needs are "set free" by economic growth.)

10. For commercial novels as well as consumer societies, anticipation is far more important than satisfaction.