The consolations of reading, the consolations of friendship (draft) (26 Nov 2010)

I imagine a book would not be blurbed this way anymore. This is on the front cover of the Bantam Windstone edition of Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, which I found in a cardboard box out in front of thrift store in Astoria: "I found myself reading slowly, then more slowly -- this is not a novel to be hurried through, for every sentence is a delight." I found that idea appealing in a contrarian way: Here's the anti-page turner, a book that will stop my attention-deficit-driven cultural consumption in its tracks, tame it, discipline it while honing my ability to focus, to luxuriate in well-turned prose, in lapidary lines lazing their way toward nowhere in particular. And the novel hasn't disappointed in that regard; I'm halfway through it and I still don't know or even care what it is about. I just have come to trust that it is shot through with these precise observations of how a peculiar mind might register things -- a mind that, it turns out, is not so unlike my own since I recognize these observations as apt, as true. It gives me an earned but fleeting sense of empathy, and possibly with a character who is supposed to be crazy.

But I can't ignore my eagerness to be done with Housekeeping and be on to the next thing. I fidget with the book, idly riffle the pages, anxiously look ahead for the end of the chapters, try to cram extra pages into smaller spaces of free time, on the commute or during lunch breaks, when most of my fiction reading gets done. Sometimes I even get annoyed with the more eloquent passages: "Fine, I'll read that again; I know I should read that again because I barely gleaned half of it."

Maybe I'm extrapolating too much from my own experience, but I tend to associate my personal impatience in situations like these with a more general, cultural one. I suspect the existence of a free-floating ideological imperative (consume more! consume more!) that manifests in these moments of annoyance at information that comes to me not predigested. Don't they know how much I feel I must keep up with, how much information I "have to" process? Aren't they aware, as I am, acutely, of how much is out there? I sense the book dragging me away from the data stream, and I find myself resisting and resenting it, as if it were taking me away from life and from the world.

Digitization has of course made access to consumable culture a lot easier, and the internet and social media have made us aware of a lot more stuff that would feasibly interest or enrich us. On the surface, this is enormously beneficial. But this makes me aware of the shortness of my time; it works as a perpetual, low-level intimation of mortality, the opposite of Wordsworth's Ode. ("Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?")

In that poem -- very Thanksgiving appropriate, by the way -- Wordsworth rhapsodizes about "that immortal sea" of eternal truth (or something) that for him is available through contemplative reflection. He claims that "the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." It seems to me that instead of being transported to that sea, contemplation of the sort prompted by Robinson's book or that poem itself makes me feel cut off, as if I am dropping down a shaft. I find I don't want to go down into the well of deep aesthetic appreciation like I used to. It's lonely down there. Social-mediatized books (via) may help, but will likely make reading the sort of books that can take you to such a contemplative, slow place beside the point. Why read difficult books when you can read Facebook updates and chat, if what you are looking for is a sense of communion, of what Facebook calls sharing? Who needs the consolations of reading anymore?

This essay by Amanda Smith Regier touches on a related problem, the feeling of isolation that now seems inescapable if one removes oneself from Facebook. After quitting Facebook for a while, she basically concedes defeat in the face of Facebook's having made conducting social life easier -- as if the point of friendship were convenience.

While deleting myself from Facebook sounded like a liberating “eff you” to technology and the constraints of modern social expectations, in fact, it just made it harder to enhance that “real social life” I had idealized.

I don't know. I dutifully try to keep up. I try to "enhance" my social life with Twitter and Facebook, which has turned that social life into another stream of information, data crammed into spare moments rather than moments lost from time, glimpses of disconnected eternity. I'm afraid that Facebook has basically made friendship less like Housekeeping and more like housekeeping. It's obligatory but largely mechanized and demands less of our active attention, though the more we do, the more there seems to be that needs to get done. But we don't expect friendship to disconnect us from the stress and pressures of everyday life. The consolations of friendship suddenly seem superfluous too. We all just stay connected, for what that's worth, scanning the social media horizon for mentions of ourselves, for signs of our life.

Meritocratic Alibis (13 Jan 2010)

Grooming for the habitus of command begins early, and most of the kids who go to the elite schools probably have no idea that they have been conditioned to presume their own significance, to assume authority as if by some instinct of entitlement, to never doubt the value of the contributions they have to make. The rest of us, we derive that attitude vicariously from various representations of celebrity and heroism, which serves to reinforce the idea that such presumption has no place in our everyday lives. What the privileged experience as entitlement, we experience as ambition, a fire that must be continually stoked and for which fuel can be scarce.

This Boston Globe op-ed by Neal Gabler about college admissions to the elite schools states it pretty baldly:

So here’s the bottom line for all those exceptional middle-class and lower-class high school seniors who will doubt their own worth when the near-inevitable rejection letters arrive: The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in you. The fault lies in the system, and the system isn’t going to change, because it benefits the people it is designed to benefit - people who understand how much a real meritocracy would threaten their power.

Elite institutions exist to reproduce the elite class as it is presently constituted. Social mobility is held as close as possible to the point at which the elites and their prerogatives remain undisturbed but the nonelites still feel they have a chance to pursue their ambitions, if they are strong enough. But Gabler, I think, is wrong when he says that children are aware that meritocracy is a sham:

They know that America, for all its professions of meritocracy, is a virtual oligarchy where the graduates of the Ivies and the other best schools enjoy tremendous advantages in the job market. They know that Harvard or Stanford or MIT is a label in our “designer education’’ not unlike Chanel or Prada in clothes.

We are instead balancing a contradiction in our minds; the oligarchy and meritocracy coexist and we can selectively recognize evidence to support either, based on our mood and based on our situation. The ideal of meritocracy lingers on so that it can serve to always plant that doubt in the minds of the nonelites: "Perhaps the social structure is rigged for the benefit of elites, but you could have tried harder, you could have done more, as other aspirants before you were able to do." It's always there to help us redirect our discontent at ourselves. Arguably, the culture industries controlled by these elites tend to do what they can to reinforce the salience of meritocracy while casting suspicion on the idea of oligarchy. Gabler's op-ed is a respite from that, one of the reasons it seems sort of blunt.

The shock that in some quarters has greeted Roger Lowenstein's NYT essay about walking away from your mortgage when you owe more than the house is worth has to do with this as well -- we regular folk are meant to be abiding by a code of ethics and mutual responsibility that doesn't apply to elites and the institutions they run; after all this is what is supposed to make us "better than them" in the final judgment. It should make us feel that way, anyhow. "No power for you, but you're better off with dignified suffering anyway."

Quitting spectatorhood (16 Dec 2009)

I partially sympathize with John Swansburg, the writer of this Slate piece about taking a break from spectator sports. He argues that it is much easier to consume other forms of entertainment with DVRs and so forth -- that seems like a bad reason to me, confirmation of my suspicion that in deciding how to entertain ourselves. taste has been supplanted by a concern with ease of consumption. We want to maximize throughput in our brain, since there is so much "cool stuff" out there that we are supposed to know about. So when he also argues that the limitless amount of information available to consume about sports makes it an all-consuming proposition if you are going to "really care" about following a team, he's verging toward an ideological conundrum. His wish that culture was more convenient to consume is what's driven the trend of remaking spectator sports in the image of celebrity culture. Gossip about the players, grumbling about their salaries, rumors about trades and signings, all supplant to a degree the interest in sheer on-field performance, since these can be consumed in bite-size nuggets, not in three-hour sessions at a stadium in some suburban swampland. And fantasy leagues turn sports viewing into an analogue of day-trading, turning the scores and the on-field winners into arbitrary details, distractions from the real interest in relative statistical moves within individualized portfolios of performers, isolated from the context of their team.

None of that is why I am watching less sports though. I'm not watching football so much anymore because of the instant replay system, which is patently corrupt and allows referees to determine the outcome of the game as they see fit even more so than the arbitrary calling of penalties permits. The NFL system is incoherent as it is -- why should you have a limited number of challenges of referee errors? If you permit one, you almost have to permit as many as are necessary, otherwise you concede that "getting it right" has nothing to do with the system. The replay scheme instead is about generating momentum shifts with the assistance of refs, who are notoriously swayed by the home crowd's wishes (if not the casinos'). And it allows for more interminable commercial breaks.

A piece on TNR's site by Josh Patashnik looks at a legal discussion about whether every play should be reviewed. He points out helpfully that every referee decision is pretty arbitrary in football, so replay review is a Potemkin system of crypto-fairness at best. I agree with this completely:

Football does well when it successfully masks the arbitrariness of calls. When these calls are made, as they inevitably must be, it's best just to let sleeping dogs lie, grumble, and move on with the game. By attempting to achieve a standard of refereeing perfection that isn't attainable given the nature of the game and the nature of instant replay, the main effect is to heighten the salience of that arbitrariness, in a way that detracts from the confidence football fans have that the game, in the end, is a fair one.

The current replay system, for me, does precisely that for me: "heighten the salience of that arbitrariness." I hate it and that's what I don't watch many football games anymore. Once who wins or loses seems randomly determined, why bother?

'Twilight' and True Love-ism (18 Nov 2009)

Until I started writing this, my knowledge of the Twilight series isn't extensive: it's limited mainly to having noticed the covers of the books on the subway since they had chess pieces on them (for a brief moment of insanity I wondered whether they might be chess-related books -- maybe I had missed the birth of the hyper-hypermodern) and a brief discussion I had with a friend after seeing a giant poster of the goofy lead actor in a Target. (It seemed as though the photographer had him say "duh" to capture that perfect look of cuddly harmlessness.) I also know that it is about vampires and the author is a Mormon.

But the series' popularity can clearly reveal something significant -- does it herald something different, or is it a new bottle for old ideology?

Using this WaPo story as a point of departure, Tyler Cowen offers nine hypotheses, including this: "You know from the beginning that the plot twists will have to be extreme. Few movie makers offer up vampires who think pensively, talk inordinately, and live out ambiguous endings, sitting around in coffee shops." I actually would want to see that show, about the quotidian everyday life of vampires. Pace it like an Antonioni film. Explore the question of whether anything has meaning without death.

Cowen also makes the often overlooked point that "some of the popularity is arbitrary with respect to the vampire theme itself. There is a clustering of production in any successful cultural meme, once that meme gets underway. You might as well ask why there is so much heavy metal music today." Culture is subject to momentum, to booms and busts, cycles of overproduction. Once a particular solution for an ideological social need is devised, it can perhaps crowd out other solutions. Then "Harry Potter" or "Twilight" becomes the all-purpose answer to a shared wish for fantasy that might have drawn a variety of nuanced responses. That is to say, network effects and the rewards for individuals that come from them begin to preclude the pleasure that might derive from choosing our own fulfillment from a more diverse field of cultural products. Slate had a piece arguing that since 1960 we have always been in the midst of some sort of vampire craze or other.

But what, then, is the underlying issue that we as a culture have settled on vampires to solve? A month ago, Esquire ran this story arguing that vampires are metaphors for gay men -- fundamentally inaccessible to teen girls:

Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet.

Girls not yet ready to enter fully into mature sexuality find in vampires/gay friends something both threatening and harmless at the same time.

Karl Smith draws a related conclusion: "A vampire wants you, in the absolute worst possible way. And, once he has you, at best you are transformed forever, at worst you are dead. This is a clear metaphor for the most pressing issue in young teenage minds." Basically vampires are about ambivalence toward sex, and a way of processing in coded form all the mixed messages girls receive about sex.

This Salon article about adult Twilight devotees views the Twilight books as essentially romance novels with enough genre stylization to not seem as such to those who get into them. Janice Radway's Reading the Romance might be useful, then, in figuring out the appeal -- Radway argues that romance novels ameliorate the conditions of patriarchy by dignifying female roles within it. In the Salon article, this is related to the myth of true love:

"This is what I call 'true love-ism,'" Laura Miller told me. "True love-ism is the secular religion of America, one that all of us can believe in. What's appealing about Edward is his certainty. He craves Bella monogamously. The book feeds the delusion that an erotic god could love you, and that he'd also be faithful."

In Miller's review of the books, she argues that

Even to a reader not especially susceptible to its particular scenario, Twilight succeeds at communicating the obsessive, narcotic interiority of all intense fantasy lives. Some imaginary worlds multiply, spinning themselves out into ever more elaborate constructs. Twilight retracts; it finds its voluptuousness in the hypnotic reduction of its attention to a single point: the experience of being loved by Edward Cullen.

Miller quotes an adult reader, who describes the books' appeal like this:

Twilight makes me feel like there may be a world where a perfect man does exist, where love can overcome anything, where men will fight for the women they love no matter what, where the underdog strange girl in high school with an amazing heart can snag the best guy in the school, and where we can live forever with the person we love

(Coincidentally, this is how I interpret Just One of the Guys.) Miller's gloss on this -- "The 'underdog strange girl' who gets plucked from obscurity by 'the best guy in school' is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join" -- relates it straight back to the first novel in English to become a popular sensation, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. So perhaps this is proof that we haven't progressed very far ideologically; conservatives would perhaps see this as proof that certain roles and fantasies are hard-wired into humanity's circuitry. (I don't endorse those conclusions.)

Bonus material: Path dependency and status quo bias as ideology (31 Aug 2009)

I've got a post up at Generation Bubble about the usefulness of such concepts as path dependency and status quo bias to conservatives. Like the placebo effect, which is apparently growing stronger, the strength of these other psychological effects are probably controlled by ideology -- that is, their intensity can be manipulated by how ideas about them are repeated and ratified in the public sphere, ideas that become accepted as common sense, things that we fall back upon as natural explanations for phenomena, and natural ways to respond. These biases are real but perhaps not as inevitable as the way we report on them makes them out to be. And they are downright untrustworthy when deployed in reactionary argument.

A related thought: the rhetorical deployment of the findings of psychological research would seem to have an impact on the ongoing validity of those findings -- our psychology may change in reaction to how certain aspects of it are abused in argument.

Beatles Rock Band (18 Aug 2009)

Though it has a great hed, Daniel Radosh's article on the new Beatles Rock Band game reads like a long infomercial, or like a textual equivalent of one of those fake-documentary shows that gets made to promote movies, with interviews with the stars and the director that can be clipped out for use on Entertainment Tonight or get thrown on the DVD as bonus "features." (Though I can understand why Radosh took the assignment -- who wouldn't jump at the chance to interview the last living Beatles?) It did nothing to allay my confusion about music-based games. Changing radio stations in the stolen cars in Grand Theft Auto still seems a more meaningful musical gaming experience to me than playing Simon to the beat on plastic mini-guitars. I still think I may as well try to play guitar and suck, or simply play air guitar rather than try to master the irrelevant and counterproductive ersatz fretwork of Guitar Hero. (Guitar playing involves raising to the level of instinct the movement of your fingers up and down the fretboard along with the rise and fall of melody. Guitar Hero seems capable of thwarting that development.)

And I continue to think statements like this one -- "Playing music games requires an intense focus on the separate elements of a song, which leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of musical composition" -- are pretty ideological, wishful thinking asserted as nebulous fact by the game's marketers. ("Knowledge of the alphabet leads to a greater intuitive knowledge of poetic composition.") This tepid endorsement has the same hopeful vagueness: "Olivia Harrison, George Harrison’s widow, who stopped by Abbey Road while Martin was working, recalled her surprise upon first playing Rock Band a few years earlier. 'You feel like you’re creating music,' she marveled. 'It must engage some creative part of your brain.' " Of course, you are not making music and are only simulating creativity vicariously. But if the game satisfies the brain's creative impulses, why not just call it real creativity, the same way we might call crack-induced euphoria "true happiness"?

My interaction with music has always been a different sort of game, in which I scored points with myself for memorizing lyrics and remembering song titles and the names of the musicians in bands that most people had barely heard of. Music trivia seemed the natural game to play to me, and the rewards didn't seem to cancel out the pleasure of listening but instead enhanced it with context. That trivial information could buy my way in to some conversations and establish bonds with people who otherwise would have ignored me is a happy by-product. The games circumvent all that; it houses the information and its interfaces commandeer the social engagement.

The mix of social, cerebral and sensuous elements in my response to music is most satisfying when it seems immediate and fused, a kind of physico-cognitive dance that occurs spontaneously with the sound. I tap my hand, maybe imagine an album cover, sing along in a way that makes feel as though I am merging with the music and its mood. I wouldn't want someone or something to judge my ability to keep time with the drummer while I am tapping my foot or measure the synced-up relevance of my air-guitar strumming. This makes me more self-conscious rather than less, seeming to defeat the whole point of immersing myself in a song. I'm "inside the music" in a ineffably complex way that seems direct as opposed to mediated.

So I just don't get Rock Band. I don't want a game to mediate music to me when music is already mediating other, more profound experiences -- memories, dreams, secret pathways into the hearts of friends or imagined strangers, sheer abandon to sensory stimuli. These are enough to hold my attention; I wouldn't want those experiences endangered or compromised or supplanted by the discipline enforced by a game that measures your attention. That seems to me like covert industrial training.

Maybe if I could get over the scorekeeping component and think of it more like karaoke, I would understand it better; as this explanatory comment of Radosh's made the most sense to me: "What nonmusicians want, it turned out, is a sense of what it’s like to perform the music they already love." I understand that desire, though it seems strange gratified in this form, largely free of the effort and frustration that actual collaboration and mastery entails.

I don't quite accept the argument that Rock Band is akin to things like Flight Simulator games that let you pretend to be a pilot without having to actually learn. Music appreciation is richer and potentially deeper than simply getting to pretend to do something you can't actually do. So the music games seem to be ruining richer soil, precluding the deeper engagements for a mediated, preordained, regulated one. It's the apotheosis of Adornoesque fears of debased, administered culture squelching the free space of aesthetic creation in which resistance and protest could still be mustered. Instead we'll get Rock Band: Woody Guthrie.

The need for spaces in which interactivity is not preprogrammed and which allow for an unbounded sort of imaginative engagement seems crucial, akin to the information-free zone Jason Zegerle posits in this TNR post.

I like to learn covers of songs on guitar, and I think it has something to do with this, retracing the steps of musicians you have come to think of as being beyond merely creative -- it seems almost unbelievable, miraculous, that you can actually just play "Dear Prudence," that your fingers are retracing that immaculate moment of creation that John Lennon had when he discovered it and it actually sounds sort of the same for you. It's like touring a holy land, or standing in some spot where a famous speech was delivered.

But I don't feel like I become these legendary rock figures when I play their songs on guitar. It seems like the video games are trying to promote a much more direct sort of vicariousness that cuts out the other potential pleasures of music, as if the reason to love music is simply to imagine yourself being loved by an audience, being someone else.
What McCartney says at the end of Radosh's piece is pretty incisive:

The teacup clattered quietly on its saucer, and McCartney thought about the changes he’d seen in the music world. “There were no cassette recorders” when he and Lennon first started writing songs, he noted. “We just had to remember it. Then suddenly there were cassettes, then we were working on four track instead of two track, then you got off tape, then you’ve got stereo — which we thought just made it twice as loud. We thought that was a really brilliant move.” After the Beatles came CDs, digital downloads and now video games. “I don’t really think there’s any difference. At the base of it all, there’s the song. At the base of it, there’s the music.”
And the future? “In 10 years’ time you’ll be standing there, and you will be Paul McCartney. You know that, don’t you?” He made a sound like a “Star Trek” transporter. “You’ll have a holographic case, and it will just encase you, and you will be Paul McCartney.” He paused and then said, “God knows what that will mean for me.” Then he added slyly, “I’ll be the guy on the original record.”

The Beatles game makes him more famous, more relevant, more real. It makes those of us playing the game more anonymous, more immaterial, more unrealized. And the games of the future will make us able to become anyone but ourselves.

Televised food and consumption deskilling (4 Aug 2009)

Though it is part of the conspicuous flood of hype for the upcoming film Julia and Julia, Michael Pollan's article about cooking shows for last Sunday's New York Times Magazine is a fascinating look at the way food and cooking are depicted on television and what that indicates about America's relationship to consumption in general. A few things I found particularly interesting:

1. Pollan talks to a market researcher at the NPD Group, which is ubiquitous in stories about retailing in the business press.

Like most people who study consumer behavior, Balzer has developed a somewhat cynical view of human nature, which his research suggests is ever driven by the quest to save time or money or, optimally, both. I kept asking him what his research had to say about the prevalence of the activity I referred to as “real scratch cooking,” but he wouldn’t touch the term. Why? Apparently the activity has become so rarefied as to elude his tools of measurement.

I found it interesting that someone who is only interested in humans insofar as they are shopping would conclude that they are entirely fixated on convenience. The realm of retail is precisely where that potentiality in people is brought to the fore, rewarded, massaged. So it's not surprising that the NPD Group won't deign to measure an activity that runs counter to convenience, that it would prove "elusive." So is the causality backward here? Does the market research and retail analysis start with an assumption of convenience as the desirable value (if that is the goal, then we can seem to solve our problems with shopping) and then impute it to human nature, as a way of shoring up what is an ideological tenet, not a universal psychological truth?

2. Rob Walker higlighted this paragraph, which jumped out at me too:

The historical drift of cooking programs — from a genuine interest in producing food yourself to the spectacle of merely consuming it — surely owes a lot to the decline of cooking in our culture, but it also has something to do with the gravitational field that eventually overtakes anything in television’s orbit. It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

The point is that commercial television's main function is to make viewers into the sort of people who want to watch more and more commercial television. Any of its programs can be reduced to that agenda, ultimately, with the specific content of any show being something of a by-product, an alibi. As a free-flowing, ongoing form of media, television invites us to interact with it constantly; unlike other consumer goods it can refine the wants it satisfies in the process of satisfying them. Watching TV is like eating a meal that tastes great but makes you hungrier. To that end, television wants to provoke us to replace our concrete, direct activities with vicarious ones and demonstrate through its sensory manipulations that the vicarious experience (to paraphrase Baudrillard) is more real than real.

3. Nonetheless, I'm skeptical of this sort of argument: "You’ll be flipping aimlessly through the cable channels when a slow-motion cascade of glistening red cherries or a tongue of flame lapping at a slab of meat on the grill will catch your eye, and your reptilian brain will paralyze your thumb on the remote, forcing you to stop to see what’s cooking." I suppose there has been a study where the brainwave or eyeball movements of participants are tracked and measured to demonstrate some correlation between pictures of food and limbic system activity, but nevertheless, I have a hard time conceding that humans are hard-wired for any sort of vicarious experience. Such explanations for the increasing amounts of vicarious experience in our lives seems to excuse various forms of media have interposed themselves into our lives and prompted us to consume images. And it seems imperative to investigate how the seemingly irresistible appeal of images is constructed and reinforced within the realm of images -- how manipulation via images is a craft, an applied science. Our media are not neutral terrain that merely permit the unveiling of evolutionary mysteries; to what degree do they posit and condition those discoveries about the so-called reptilian brain?

4. Pollan suspects the appeal of cooking shows is that it vicariously fulfills our longing for meaningful work:

“You know what I love about cooking?” Julie tells us in a voice-over as we watch her field yet another inconclusive call on her headset. “I love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I mean nothing — you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends — assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.

Television presumably undermines the way in which such satisfaction might have been integrated into our leisure time in the form of craft-based hobbies.

5. Television is part of the culture-industry program of deskilling our leisure, or rather removing life skills from everyday, nonwork life and transforming them into hobbies for the few. Cooking, as Pollan suggests, has become another front in that war.

We seem to be well on our way to turning cooking into a form of weekend recreation, a backyard sport for which we outfit ourselves at Williams-Sonoma, or a televised spectator sport we watch from the couch. Cooking’s fate may be to join some of our other weekend exercises in recreational atavism: camping and gardening and hunting and riding on horseback. Something in us apparently likes to be reminded of our distant origins every now and then and to celebrate whatever rough skills for contending with the natural world might survive in us, beneath the thin crust of 21st-century civilization.
To play at farming or foraging for food strikes us as harmless enough, perhaps because the delegating of those activities to other people in real life is something most of us are generally O.K. with. But to relegate the activity of cooking to a form of play, something that happens just on weekends or mostly on television, seems much more consequential. The fact is that not cooking may well be deleterious to our health, and there is reason to believe that the outsourcing of food preparation to corporations and 16-year-olds has already taken a toll on our physical and psychological well-being.

Chris Dillow made a similar point in this post about cooking shows. He blames deskilling on "the spread of purely instrumental rationality - the idea that utility maximization consists solely in maximizing consumption for minimal expenditure of time and money." Not only is it an animating principle of capitalism, instrumental rationality, as the Frankfurt School theorists insisted, is the lifeblood ideology of the culture industry. (See "Enlightenment as Mass Deception") It also animates techno-utopian celebrations of the efficiency of the internet for all sorts of social-cum-commercial functions. In general, instrumental rationality alienates us from process and fixates us on the end product, convincing us that the time wasted in enjoying processes for their own sake is wasted since there are so many cool products out there for us to be enjoying in that time instead. Why cook when you can spend that time online hurtling through blog posts and YouTube videos?

This paper by JoAnn Jaffe and Michael Gertler about consumer deskilling and agribusiness probably has lots of interesting ideas on this point, but unfortunately it's gated. The abstract, though, is promising; it sounds like an academicized version of Pollan's ideas:

The prevalence of packaged, processed, and industrially transformed foodstuffs is often explained in terms of consumer preference for convenience. A closer look at the social construction of “consumers” reveals that the agro-food industry has waged a double disinformation campaign to manipulate and to re-educate consumers while appearing to respond to consumer demand. Many consumers have lost the knowledge necessary to make discerning decisions about the multiple dimensions of quality, including the contributions a well-chosen diet can make to health, planetary sustainability, and community economic development. They have also lost the skills needed to make use of basic commodities in a manner that allows them to eat a high quality diet while also eating lower on the food chain and on a lower budget.

I'm attracted especially by the suggestion that consumers are socially constructed to prefer convenience.

Here (pdf) is another paper on consumer deskilling vis-a-vis food, drawing on the paper cited above and Pollan. It focuses on deskilling, and the problems we face in trying to reskill ourselves (a process, by the way, that the Food Network blocks while seeming to facilitate it): "By gaining experiential knowledge of food, food preparation, appreciation of taste and quality, and increasing food literacy, one renders the range of products and services offered by the industrial food system as both useless and undesirable." In other words, you set yourself against a massive institution that controls most of our access points to the food chain, which means you are in for an endless headache until you are prepared to embrace inconvenience as an ethic of its own.

Work harder at consumption (3 March 2009)

Commenting on British reality-TV contest shows, Chris Dillow makes a great point about what he labels "consumption deskilling":

The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing also reflect the fact that once-basic skills such as singing and dancing have become specialist tasks performed by professionals and merely passively consumed by the rest of us. What’s going on here is a form of deskilling. But it’s a different from the one brilliantly described by Harry Braverman, who showed how workers were robbed by capitalists of their production skills. What we’re seeing here is the decline of consumption skills. Which raises a question. How can capitalism have achieved this? After all, the capitalist might have control over production - and is thus well-placed to deprive workers of productive skills - but he doesn’t have control over what we do in our own homes. So what’s going on? ...Scarce time... needn’t displace consumption skills. I suspect something else is going on. That something is the spread of purely instrumental rationality - the idea that utility maximization consists solely in maximizing consumption for minimal expenditure of time and money. Many of us take it for granted that it’s rational to spend as little time cooking as possible, and that music should only be a consumption good. What this ignores is that many things are worth doing for their own sake.

Exactly. Consumerism tends to encourage us to think of "doing things" as work and touts vicariousness as superior to actual participation. Watching and imagining become the convenient short-cuts to mastery -- "rational" ways to save time and maximize consumption, which we have limited time for, after all, in this era of free content and attention deficits.

What makes instrumental rationality spread is advertising discourse, which conveys that ideology regardless of what specific product it touts. Consumer-goods manufacturers obviously have a vested interest in promoting vicariousness: If we find little meaning in our work and prefer consumption to concentration and collecting things to hobbies, they obviously benefit to a far greater degree than they do if they are merely outfitting us for activities other than shopping.With marketing to remind us of all the goods we are missing out on, the pressure to conserve time is always growing; and consuming instead of doing lets us save time while working through our leisure to-do list. (It's apropos here to cite my favorite Minutemen song, "Shit From an Old Notebook": "Let the products sell themselves; fuck advertising, commercial psychology, psychological methods to sell should be destroyed because of their own blind involvement in their own conditioned minds.")

Vicariousness lets us evade that supposedly dismal slough of practice necessary before the "rewards" begin to come in -- before our guitar playing or cooking or whatever is professional grade. That is what Dillow is talking about with "instrumental rationality" -- the idea that only the ends justify the means, which must be kept minimized. The end result of anything we do is reified, in the sense that it becomes a kind of object we add to our collection of accomplishments. That feat of collecting such end results outweighs, or even obfuscates, the pleasures of having experiences themselves. (This is also why the "buying experiences" idea bothers me.) Dillow notes that happiness research suggests this is actually happening -- people are finding it hard to identify what will make them happy and make systematic mistakes.

Losing touch with the desire to pursue pleasure through doing things, the pleasure of the sheer fact of being alive and humanly productive, is a fundamental sort of alienation, and, as Dillow notes, Marx's critique of capitalism pivoted on this idea. "Marx’s gripe with capitalism was that it transformed work from a means of expressing one’s nature into a force for oppressing and demeaning people. So great has been capitalism’s triumph that many of us don’t even appreciate the possibility that Marx could have been right. It’s just taken for granted that work must be alienated drudgery."

So it is vis-a-vis consumption deskilling: Consumption should take work; it is not work's opposite. We must be actively engaged for consumption to be meaningful, or life-affirming or some such slop. If we instead look for short cuts to accelerate our processing of leisure goods, we, ironically enough, succeed in making consumption more work-like -- at least in terms of how work is falsely conceived under capitalism, as disutility.

Microaudiences (25 Feb 2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Operational aesthetics in Survivor (29 Jan 2009)

In the comments to my post about complex TV, McChris pointed me to this essay by Jason Mittel, "Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television." Mittel provides an interesting survey of narrative in TV over the past few decades, even if his account tends toward the telelogical -- despite an evenhanded tone, the emphasis seems to be on how TV is necessarily becoming more complex and viewers more sophisticated. I'm not convinced that TV is necessarily evolving toward the good or has any role in improving audiences. TV has done a good job of improving its own reputation, however, as Mittel points out. But the fact that audiences are now expected to be engaged with the form as well as the content of shows, as Mittel amply demonstrates, is simply a change, a way for shows to introduce novelty -- not a move to a higher level of aesthetic appreciation. Viewers may need to invest more time in shows and engage with them in a more interactive way, but these developments are not necessarily positive (or negative). That one can spend an entire Saturday watching episode after episode of Mad Men testifies to how compellingly crafted the show is, but it also might leave one empty and exhausted, frustrated with oneself over all the other activities you neglected. (I use "one" as though I'm not talking about myself.)

Toward the end of the essay, Mittel focuses on shows that call attention to their own production:

The viewers of such complex comedies as Seinfeld and Arrested Development not only focus on the diegetic world offered by the sitcoms but also revel in the creative mechanics involved in the producers’ abilities to pull off such complex plot structures, a mode of viewing Sconce labels as “metareflexive” but that warrants more detailed consideration. This set of pleasures suggests an influential concept offered by Neil Harris in his account of P. T. Barnum: Harris suggests that Barnum’s mechanical stunts and hoaxes invited spectators to embrace an “operational aesthetic” in which the pleasure was less about “what will happen?” and more concerning “how did he do that?”20 In watching Seinfeld we expect that each character’s petty goals will be thwarted in a farcical unraveling, but we watch to see how the writers will pull off the narrative mechanics required to bring together the four plotlines into a calibrated comedic Rube Goldberg narrative machine.

He adds that such shows "convert many viewers to amateur narratologists, noting usage and violations of conventions, chronicling chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and continuities across episodes." It seems that Mittel has in mind scripted shows exclusively, but I feel the spur to amateur narratology most of all when I watch the reality game show Survivor, the script for which must be found after the fact in the editing room. Examining scenes in terms of how contestants are shaped into characters and given story arcs and conflicts can often be as suspenseful as the action depicted in the show, since careful attention to the narrative structuring can clue attentive viewers in on who will ultimately win. In a sense, that is where the action is in each episode, in the editors' choices. And rather than merely marvel at how they are woven together, as one would with a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, viewers instead have the opportunity to try to calculate out the ultimate purpose of those choices and deduce the denouement that would make them necessary. Referencing scripted shows, Mittel coins the term "narrative special effects": "moments push the operational aesthetic to the foreground, calling attention to the constructed nature of the narration and asking us to marvel at how the writers pulled it off." All of Survivor is one long narrative special effect, except writers aren't involved.

Since the contestants can't be judged for their performances, and there are no writers, viewers have only the editors to second-guess. Editors become the auteurs, just as DJs have become in the pop-music world. Like the Bush administration, the show's editors make "reality," very usefully directing our attention to the means by which this is accomplished. The ability to see how "truth" is being manipulated in its presentation on TV has never been more important. So perhaps all the complexity on TV serves a laudable political function after all.

Complicated television (26 Jan 2009)

The increased complexity of TV shows is sometimes offered as evidence of an increasing sophisticated audience who has come to appreciate greater complexity in their entertainment. Look at shows like Lost and The Sopranos with their ambiguity and their multiple, interweaving plot lines and so on. Presumably, the implication seems to be, people have adapted to the conventions of television and require greater amount of complexity to hold their now-mammoth capacity for attention, for holding complicated details suspended in their minds.

But this argument, as flattering as it is to us and despite how pleasant its justification of our couch-potatodom may be, doesn't seem quite right. The shows aren't more complex so much as they eschew unnecessary reiteration of what is going on and what the conflicts and tensions are supposed to be. In reminiscing with a friend about Twin Peaks we recalled how the integrity of the show was compromised by the efforts it had to make to bring in and acclimate new viewers who arrived at the show late -- perhaps after the avalanche of hype that greeted its first few episodes. New shows don't confront that problem. Writers and producers don't have to worry about incorporating inane exposition (like you see on daily soaps -- the convention that most makes them seem sort of dense to non-viewers) or introducing new plot lines to hook new viewers. They know that when people hear hype, they will start from the beginning, not tune in in medias res. The writers can therefore plot accordingly, comfortable in the knowledge that new and potentially confused viewers can (a) see episodes on demand or during one of HBO's frequent re-runs, (b) catch up online, (c) rent the DVDs, which come out almost immediately after a season first airs, or (d) download episodes from pirate sites. Considering (c), it almost behooves producers to insist on a certain complexity that would require viewers to pony up for the DVDs.

So I would argue that the apparent increase in complexity in TV shows is a consequence of the new technologies in delivering content as opposed to the advancing tastes of the viewing public. Lost, for instance, would be unthinkable without those technologies. The audience would have necessarily dwindled as it went on (because new viewers would be hopelessly confused) or the show would have had to solve many more of its mysteries more expediently, to make space for entry points for latecomers. So lamentably, Twin Peaks was ahead of its time in this sense; if it were being made now, there probably wouldn't have ever been that awful Miss Twin Peaks side plot.

Oh, what I want to know is are you kind? (6 Jan 2009)

Via 3QD comes a link to a Guardian article by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, lamenting the lost art of kindness. The gist is that the rise of rational self-interest under capitalism has made the inherent impulse to be kind seem suspect. Of course, this is hardly a new question; it was a dilemma that greatly exercised 18th century moral philosophers. The authors cite Hume (somewhat misleadingly) and attribute to him this rather maudlin commonsense view: "Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: 'He has forgotten the movements of his heart.' " But the question of whether we have a moral sense that compels us to varying degrees to be benevolent stretches through much of the English philosophical tradition, most notably in Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, an influence on Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments has a great deal to say about human motive and instinctual sympathy.

The moral sense was a kind of mental organ that conveyed the rightness or wrongness of a deed without our having to make recourse to logic or reasoning or upbringing. People of better quality were presumed to have a more strongly developed moral sense as a given, though it could be sharpened through exercise -- this is one of the early excuses for sentimental fiction; it trained readers when to cry as if on cue. Thanks in large part to sentimental fiction -- one of the first forms of entertainment to reach a broad audience -- the issue of the moral sense became the crux of the sensibility fad, one of the earliest examples of a commercially manufactured zeitgeist. Typically sentimental heroes and heroines are depicted as emotional sounding boards, passively responding to tragic events and modeling the reaction readers are supposed to have. Meanwhile, rational calculators pursing their interest are demonized as heartless and cruel, eradicating kindness of altruism and the rest of it. Luckily, God generally steps in to resolve the impracticalities of ignoring the realities of incipient capitalism. (Outside of fiction, we don't have that leisure.) The appeal to innate kindness was invariably a method for building up class distinction, whether to preserve aristocratic prestige from vulgar upstarts or to give the vulgar upstarts a way to compete with aristocrats on a level playing field. The moral sense, which anyone can claim, supplants the bloodline as the preferred mode of innate justification for class privilege. Sensibility also serves as a way of redeeming the cruelty of what Marx calls "primitive accumulation" -- the various methods of dispossession and immiseration and proletarianization necessary to launch capitalism in earnest. If you assert the durability of the human heart under siege, and furthermore imply that the heart's glory is revealed only under duress, you do much to justify that siege and embrace that duress as a necessary if not fortunate evil.

Also, by associating kindness with extraordinary heroism, it makes it into a kind of abnormality, as the authors of the Guardian piece point out. "Kindness is seen either as a cover story or as a failure of nerve. Popular icons of kindness - Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa - are either worshipped as saints or gleefully unmasked as self-serving hypocrites. Prioritising the needs of others may be praiseworthy, we think, but it is certainly not normal." But I don't think it follows that kindness is now universally regarded "with suspicion" as the authors assert -- that seems like a purely polemical proposition intended to evoke the possibility of some revolution in friendliness after which everyone will smile on everyone, no polite nicety will go unperformed, we'll all ride on unicorns, sing and dance with peace and love, and anger will be an altogether forgotten emotion, a distant memory, like racism and sexism and all those other forms of discrimination we have defeated. Maybe if we solved some of society's obvious injustices, kindness would take care of itself. The authors assert that "Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers." That is wrong; I think that they openly know that it is the condescension of the entitled.

There's a good chance that I am precisely the curmudgeonly sort of independence-loving troll the authors would like to gulag, but I found this utterly false:

There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.

Is there really such a deficit of kindness? I live in a reputedly unkind place, New York City, but I experience quotidian kindness from strangers on a near daily basis, whether it's someone reminding me that I've dropped my scarf, or someone slowing down in a revolving door so I don't get smashed, or someone exchanging a look with me about something odd going on, or what have you. It's hardly the "forbidden pleasure" the authors make it out to be. I get the sense of humdrum human solidarity so routinely that I only realize how much I take it for granted when I experience the false pleasantry in the suburbs from salespeople, who are virtually the only strangers I have occasion to interact with. Usually I have no need to be preoccupied by it and am not afflicted with the absence of opportunities to express it. That doesn't mean there are not also routine expressions of callousness either -- every time someone stops at the top of the subway steps to continue their cell-phone conversation, I am reminded of how easy it is to slip into a private world of blithe inconsiderateness. And when I am approached for spare change and fail to break my stride, my own callousness is brought home to me. But I'm hardly preoccupied by it and rarely complain of it.

I wanted to sympathize with the authors' concern with the dearth of kindness, which seems closely related to my cardinal complaint about society, its celebration of convenience as an end in itself. But the authors' nannyish tone about the subject, I must admit, made me increasingly annoyed. Probably because I am desperately rationalizing my meanness:

Kindness - that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself - has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality). No one yet says parents should stop being kind to their children. None the less, we have become phobic of kindness in our societies, avoiding obvious acts of kindness and producing, as we do with phobias, endless rationalizations to justify our avoidance.

But a concern with kindness seems like a fundamental evasion of more substantial problems; kindness itself is the rationalization, the way to short-circuit arguments about the institutional change we should be seeking. Alas, I am one of those "radicals and socialists determined to replace charity with justice, elite kindness with universal rights." I should recognize that instead, we just ought to worry about being nicer and less competitive. The authors recognize the "bullying" of kindness welded to power, but seemingly fail to recognize that they are inseparable. Kindness only becomes salient, becomes worthy of note, as a dimension of power. Outside of power, it's just an expression of the species' inherent activity (as the authors' reference to Darwin supports). It's nice to be nice, but something is not nice about noticing it and advertising it. At that point, kindness is being offered as justification for something unkind we are doing elsewhere.

A theory: When kindness is performed out of social necessity by those without the privilege of inward-looking selfishness and individualist isolation, it doesn't register as "kindness." When one finds they must make a conscious effort to be kind and must trumpet their efforts to have it recognized as such, it's probably already too late for them to be worrying about kindness -- they have already become the beneficiary of an unequal society to the degree that they are conscious of being or not being kind. If you think, "how kind of me," how kind have you really been? Being kind has already become an expression of class privilege, not human fellow feeling.

Thoughts on Papa John (25 Nov 2008)

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

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

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

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

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

The pleasure of multiple selves (2 Nov 2008)

In the Atlantic, Paul Bloom has an article about the ways in which having multiple personalities is not a disorder so much as it is a natural part of our psychological apparatus. (The disorder comes when our multiple selves grow unruly.) Bloom is interested in how this proliferation of identities relates to the sorts of questions that often come up in behavioral economics, the conflict between short-term gratification and long-term rational prudence.

We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the definition of I. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds­—like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist.

The latter part is what caught my attention, because I've had an interest in the concept of vicarious pleasure from when I studied 18th century novels. Bloom notes the ubiquity of vicarious pleasure and it's centrality to modern life:

The population of a single head is not fixed; we can add more selves. In fact, the capacity to spawn multiple selves is central to pleasure. After all, the most common leisure activity is not sex, eating, drinking, drug use, socializing, sports, or being with the ones we love. It is, by a long shot, participating in experiences we know are not real—reading novels, watching movies and TV, daydreaming, and so forth.
Enjoying fiction requires a shift in selfhood. You give up your own identity and try on the identities of other people, adopting their perspectives so as to share their experiences. This allows us to enjoy fictional events that would shock and sadden us in real life.

I always figured the roots of that primacy of vicarious pleasure were in the development of the novel, since the novel, the printed book, was the first reified form of that elusive pleasure that comes with being able to escape into fantasy, to become another self for the sake of entertainment. For the first time, the kind of self-fashioning became a product that could sit dormant on a shelf instead of an elaborate experience that required social engagement. Typically this pleasure that novels reliably supplied on demand was condemned as "escapism" -- and it is an undeniably antisocial pleasure to withdrawal from company into a guided tour of your own imagination.

Novels were also condemned for setting bad examples, for divorcing experience from moral responsibility; as Bloom points out, fictions allow us to experience as pleasure the sadistic doings of a Tony Soprano. Lots of early novels, especially during the "age of sensibility" in the second half of the 18th century, made this their explicit subject -- they investigated our ability to sympathize with others and in a way become them, and they encouraged readers to experience vicariously such dignifying scenarios as giving alms to the poor and protecting innocent virgins and so on. Adam Smith founded his moral philosophy on this notion of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

But the special pleasure of fiction is that you can imaginatively experience both the side of the hero and the villain simultaneously and vicariously derive pleasure from both, nullifying the presumed moral edification that was supposed to be involved. Fiction doesn't yield just one new self, but multiple selves simultaneously. This proliferation is rightly recognized as a subversive form of pleasure, though early entrepreneurs quickly seized upon it, and used it as the foundation of marketing, which in turn spawned the profitable market for mass-manufactured consumer goods. In trying to sell these goods, the entrepreneurs, proto-Barnums all of them, took their cues from how novels worked on their readers; they presented the goods as opportunities for buyers to imagine new selves for themselves, not mere opportunities to simply acquire useful household items. Goods were transformed into implements of a fantasy lifestyle, less useful in and of themselves than as prompts for deeply imagined fantasies. (Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch offers an extreme illustration of this. In the novel, workers who are marooned on a inhospitable planet are supplied with miniature, doll-house versions of the comforts they have been forced to surrender and a drug that lets them project themselves into the universe of the doll house, and imagine a whole luxury-filled life based those miniatures. The drug proves irresistible and highly addictive.) The early middle class's experience with fiction, with the forced fantasy of moral sympathy and sensibility, prepared them for the pleasures of lifestyle marketing, whose efficacy helped grow the consumer goods market. From our handling of fictional narratives, perhaps, grows our facility with maintaining multiple selves in a way that is pleasurable rather than psychotic. But do we become addicted to the procuring of new selves rather than developing and integrating the ones appropriate to our situation in society?

Typically, critics of vicarious pleasure (me included) argue that it robs us of the opportunity to experience some true, authentic pleasure, that would presumably reflect our true natures. But if the research that Bloom highlights is correct, it substantiates what postmodern theorists have also suggested, namely that there is no one authentic self whose pleasures and desires need to discovered and privileged -- no master self whose integrity is threatened by the simulacrums offered through vicarious experience. Instead we are by nature a plurality of possibilities, anchoring our sense of self in contextual clues, in the exigencies of the moment, and delighting in the freedom of being whatever we can imagine in the circumstances that present themselves, whether it prompted by prepackaged entertainment or by the sort of situations we manage to blunder into in our lives.

In fact, the fantasy of a master self whose authenticity is sacrosanct and unalterable, is one of the appealing fictions that marketing most masterfully exploits. It is always promising us what we "really" want, encouraging us to find and gratify our true desires, to become who we really are, to get in touch with our nature. This "true self" may in fact be the best fictive creation of advertisers, their most pleasing fantasy on offer -- the "real" you" that knows no contradiction or insecurity or indecisiveness about what it wants. Perhaps it is no accident that shopping has become the primary forum in which we seek to discover the authentic self; that may be the only habitat in which such a creature exists.

Broadcasting the self (8 Sept. 2008)

This Sunday, the NYT Magazine had a piece by Clive Thompson about Facebook's news feed feature, which broadcasts a user's profile activity as a stream of syndicated updates to selected people in the user's network. Thompson explains how the feature initially raised privacy concerns, but then users seized upon it as a convenient new form of maintaining intimacy without the nuisance of actual interaction. One could keep up with friends the way one keeps up with blogs in Google Reader -- hurriedly, casually. (This morning I plowed through 100 posts, all of them seemingly about the atrocious unemployment reports and the long-anticipated government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) He then relates the phenomenon to microblogging services like Twitter and other applications that automatically chronicle and broadcasts one's activities.

The applications -- sometimes with our voluntarily assistance, sometimes not -- do a good job of transforming our life into digital information that is easy to manipulate, heightening our "presence" online and make our shadowy self there seem more concrete. We fix our identity in a forum of public surveillance, to make it seem more authentic, more fixed. The price we pay for this is that identity becomes delineated by the categories most conducive to digital transmission: Twitter epigrams; lists of our favorite bits of culture; short videos of ourselves; etc.

As we generate more data that is captured and rebroadcast, we seem to take on more substance and become more significant -- especially considering the way in which that data is processed to direct targeted advertising appeals and other forms of recognition from our actual friends our way. It's easy to imagine a scenario when the recognition from the ad groups supplants our interest in friends' approval. Marketers can be better than friends because they will pay us -- as the buzz marketing firms already do to spread idle chatter about products. At Mind Hacks, Vaughan Bell posits the possibility that advertisers will find the most popular people within specifically defined networks and pay them to host relevant ads on their profiles.

You could identity the most influential people in the 18-25 age bracket, or the most influential in a small town, or the most influential people that like a certain type of movie. Online networks can then sell advertising space ranked by influence, like Google sells adwords based on popularity. Better still, it gives a quantified way of sponsoring highly selected people. You could be the David Beckham of 18-35 year old salsa fans in your town, sponsored to put the latest Latin sounds on your playlist.

Like celebrities, each of us will have an individual worth to advertisers, a price on our profile, and we will be the commodity that technology companies sell to marketers.

So Facebook and like technologies will allow us to leverage our friends into sponsorships, and our sponsors will perhaps become our real friends, when our former friends perhaps begin to regard us as just an extension (maybe useful, maybe not) of that commercial world. And it's worth nothing too -- "better still," as Bell says -- that we will all be in competition with one another to establish our dominance within networks and secure the ad dollars that end up being pumped into it. Maybe this kind of alpha-dog thing happens automatically, but the incursion of commercial interests will make the competition explicit, introduce the wonders of capitalist "creative destruction" to our social lives, which have heretofore been organized around achieving continuity for our self-concept.

The constant updates, according to the sociologists Thompson consults, supply those interested in tracking us with a simulation of "ambient awareness": "It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye." When conducted via online updates (or phone text messages), it requires persistence to achieve this effect; it works cumulatively: No one message is important, no specific thought communicated is important, but the totality presents a character in the round, and engages us, proponents claim, the same way fiction does. "Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel." If all parties are sharing their streams of data, this would seem to convey the reciprocity we presume is necessary for friendship, but the medium may interfere with that, encouraging us to embark on a kind of vicarious intimacy, an intimacy once removed that allows us to inject the drama and fantasy and daydreaming we can indulge in when lost in a novel.

If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in “parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

We basically transform ourselves through the technologies into a form of character-driven light programming. To the friends to whom we broadcast our updates, we become a moment's distraction, a breath of novelty, an entertainment channel. Thompson points out that the "ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some." With this sort of audience out there, we can generate our own Truman Shows with the tool available and then we have the opportunity to check our ratings in terms of the online attention we have generated and then adjust the sort of life we live accordingly. The users that Thompson interviews express a sense of achieving a deeper intimacy with those they track:

The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.”

Perhaps, but what is characterized as "raw" here may merely be the effect of the immediacy of the medium on the same surface that friends always present to one another, and the layer that is now being simulated and broadcast. And parasocial relationships become the template for friendship generally; what was once spontaneous and intimate grows more and more caluclated, contrived to produce certain effects, drive traffic, entice readers, supply the simulacrum of intimacy that the medium enables. The habit of Twitter and other digital updates may change the nature of what we think to offer in friendship while eroding the space that once felt sheltered, the personal realm that was autonomous and spontaneous as opposed to designed and self-consciously elaborated. Thompson offers this grim assessment: "participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world."

One of the Twitterers that Thompson interviews relates that "Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before.” That seems a good thing, but Thompson is rightly suspicious about the changes "friendship" must have undergone to enable non-social to suddenly feel comfortable being social. The technology may allow for introverted or indifferent people to be more interested in the lives of other people, but perhaps only because it lets us be voyeurs and fantasists.

Thompson notes that social networks and microblogs allow people to increase their number of "weak ties": "loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently 'friended' them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist." But the weak ties may come at expense of deeper ties, especially because they are more instrumental, more tangibly useful -- a wide network will yield you helpful information to deal with a broken refrigerator, or a sketchy transmission mechanic, or a wireless router problem or what have you. That is information whose worth immediately becomes evident.

The "usefulness" of friendship, though, is more difficult to assess; it doesn't bear being measured, and in fact may perhaps be defined as precisely that which can't be measured. It's not in the number of texts a person has sent you. Not to get too mystical (or mystifying) but friendship is elsewhere, outside the numbers. It is in the friction of real presence, in the accumulation of pregnant moments shared doing nothing specific, simply recognizing the otherness of the person you are with and committing to hold on to that sense and respect it. Thompson finds that some Twitter users experience it as serial meditation: "The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to 'know thyself,' or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness." But perhaps our problem is a surfeit of self-reflection, a morbid preoccupation with knowing ourselves, making identity. Moments with friends may those moments where we are in a deep mode of self-forgetting, and the last thing we will want is Twitter interrupting, bringing us back to ourselves, forcing us to yet again to express our identity at a remove, alienating us from the present moment and urging us to accept, in lieu of the present, the perpetual archive of mediated utterances we've come up with instead of living.

Precious moments (18 June 2008)

I've been reading Swedish economist Staffan Linder's The Harried Leisure Class, which examines the impact of time constraints on consumption. Linder argues that the time it takes to consume and maintain the goods a larger income allows us to acquire must be taken into account when evaluating our decisions regarding whether to save or spend, whether to work more or seek more leisure. These sorts of concerns have returned to prominence recently, but under a new name -- such is our customary passivity and our habit of pathologizing and psychologizing social problems with regard to consumption that the problem of time scarcity has been reintroduced as the "attention economy," with many of us suffering from an "attention deficit."

Linder foresaw this turn of events, recognizing that we would struggle to find time to make use of all the goods we acquire, and that we would be easily seduced into believing that we could make fertile exchanges between productive work time and consumption time in the search for more marginal utility from the expenditure of our precious moments. In other words, if we can increase our income and buy more things, we would take our utility that way and figure we'd actually consume the stuff later, when presumably we'd have more time to do so and wouldn't have as much capability to earn. Hence working and shopping replaces the actual enjoyment of leisure. Collecting books replaces the pleasure of reading them, and so on. "One may possibly buy more of everything, but one cannot conceivably do more of everything.... The purchase of more expensive golf clubs is taken as an indication that golfers are devoting themselves more to their sport." I suddenly understand my absurd music collection in a new light.

We are too deprived of time to do any better -- we think that working and earning the money to buy a bunch of books is better quantitatively than working less, buying one book and reading it carefully. And because conserving time is of the essence, it makes more sense to buy more things thoughtlessly and discard the rubbish than to consider every purchase carefully -- we have a surfeit of goods and money, what we lack is time. That is why the 99-cent store is such a suitable emblem of our culture -- an overwhelming avalanche of cheap goods that we can even begin to process the true worth of.

As Linder explains it,

The yield on time spent in acquiring information on different decisions would gradually deteriorate in relation to the yield on time spent in production. This must lead to a reallocation of time. The time used to acquire information must be reduced per decision. One has to concentrate on acquiring information only of such value that the yield on time spent for this purpose will be as high as in the production of goods. It pays to make a larger number of mistakes in expenditure, instead of preparing all decisions very carefully -- and thus having correspondingly less time to acquire income. As the scarcity of time increases, we can expect a decline in the quality of decisions.

This in turn reinforces the appeal of the throwaway society, and the idea that the moment of purchase is where the pleasure is achieved, not the moment of use. The moment of use is where the inevitable disappointment comes when we realize we just acquired more crap. Linder speculates that planned obsolescence can be better understood as the consumer's preference, since it means the product will ultimately make fewer time and maintenance demands on the consumer.

Similarly, advertising is appealing to us because it limits the time we spend in decision making, regardless of whether it steers toward a wise one. "People can be made the victims of persuasion not because they are irrational but because they are rational. Since they are rational, they are not prepared to spend all their time gathering information on what are the best things to buy" -- service journalism notwithstanding. "The increase in the volume of advertising can hardly be attributed to sales departments having become increasingly malevolent or the customers increasingly irrational." Instead, we'd rather save time and risk being mislead by advertising then research all our purchasing decisions -- the number of which are continually increasing, as we substitute acquisition for usage of goods. I have tended to see the appeal of advertising as the vicarious enjoyment it enables -- it helps us frame the fantasies that makes goods seem useful to us, particular in shaping the identity and lifestyle we want to project. But this same inducement to vicarious consumption is compelling in relation to our own goods even after we own them -- ads help save us time by doing the consuming and enjoying of the goods for them. We can just buy them and know through the ads that we could in theory enjoy them, probably sometime down the road (that will never come). Linder argues that "one actually wants to be influenced by advertising to get an instant feeling that one has a perfectly good reason to buy this or that commodity, the true properties of which one knows dismally little about." If that is the case, then we are consuming decisiveness as an end in itself, as the pleasurable commodity that ads are able to supply. As usual, the item itself around which the decision making is staged is superfluous, a souvenir of the pleasure of choosing.