Market evil

There's a seductive simplicity to the logic thatthe market aggregates public opinion and allows it to be expressed, that each "dollar-vote" signifies assent for a particular good on the market, and for the capitalist system in general. But markets exist to separate profitable from unprofitable businesses and it cares about nothing else. It can't "care" at all. It's regulated by heartless mathematics, not the will of the people. What makes for profits is not simply winning the hearts and minds of all the John Q. Consumers out there, but ruthless competition, driving your competitors off the playing field with whatever leverage you can muster. Sometimes this leverage is in the form of popular products or recognizable brand names, sometimes it is in the form of having this much less ethical restraint than your competitors. Economies of scale reduce the field of options and force consumers into choices of the lesser evil. This cannot be considered to be the voice of assent.

The point is corporations by their nature have no choice but to pursue profit, regardless of what people want or what people are harmed by it. If it is profitable to make lead paint, no amount of brain-damaged babies would stop a corporation from doing it. I'm no theologian, but I learned one thing about Christianity in a Milton class that's stuck with me, and that's evil is always predictable, evil is incapable of doing something disinterested. What differentiates the Son from Satan is that he is able to make a purely unmotivated sacrifice.

The market assumes we are all Satan's capable of only self-interested actions and incapable of inexplicable sacrifice or true charity, that we are all essentially evil to the core. (Call it the taint of original sin?) The competitiveness inherent to it assumes an all-out Hobbesean war of all against all, as real cooperation has no market value and thus doesn't really exist from the market-legitimizes-everything point of view. Of course this is the winner-take-all, social-safety-net-free world Republicans, in their pious hypocrisy, like to imagine.

Petty disobediance

Some of us around the Esquire magazine offices were dubious of the newsworthiness of this article from the New York Times a few days ago, which details such titanic blows against the system like addressing mail to "England" instead of "United Kingdom" or ordering "small" coffees at Starbucks, petty acts of disobediance, refusals to participate in annoying marketing-engineered games of language destruction and waste, which I, by the way, wholeheartedly endorse. De Certeau celebrates this sort of thing in The Practice of Everyday Life as "tactics," a kind of quotidian creativity, a David vs. Goliath blow in the face of totalizing institutions. (He's one of the theorists whose work is unfortunately repurposed into the kind of indiscriminate celebratory cultural studies I referred to in the previous post, who view, say, Star Trek fan fiction as a subversive strike against the status quo).

It seems strange that it's the most popular story on the site, until you consider that it suits to a T the level of rebelliousness and subversion most people are capable of. Nobody likes "the system." Even the Man hates the Man. This is why most of our ads hinge on mininarratives of foiling the Man, expressing your uniqueness in the face of the System that wants to grind you down and make you into a comformatron. We love opotunities to be disobediant without offending any specific people, and the article lists ways we can "fight back" without having to have open confrontations, which would immediately end our subversion and stifle our timid dissent. We all tend to balk at the idea of actual confrontation with actual people who have been enlisted to serve and implement the System -- we ourselves are these people, after all, and we don't necessarily like to think of ourselves that way, but it's so. When we do these petty acts of rebellion that the Times details, we buy a little forgetting of who we really are.

Pornography is not sexual

One of the last places I expect to find interest political comment is Time Out New York -- I usually don't even read much other than the film listings. But I happened to catch a sidebar interview with Catharine MacKinnon, of all people -- she must be promoting a new book. MacKinnon is known for antipornography crusading, and is usually held in contempt by liberal types who want to see the porn industry as part and parcel of a freer culture, where "the man" doesn't tell you what kind of sex you can have. From that point of view, MacKinnon, and her compatriot Andrea Dworkin (who is typically denounced as a "radical" and a "castrating feminist" for her frequently misrepresented argument that all penetrative sex is rape), are ridid, prudish, humorless censors who hate sex, hate men, and would prefer that procreation be performed like a dour duty, with no spice whatsoever. The argument is that they refuse to recognize to acknowledge how women in porn are willingly exploiting the opportunities the industry affords them, and that it empowers them to use their body as a money-making tool. It's an extention of the cultural studies premise (that Thomas Frank eviscerates in One Market Under God) that discovering your market niche renders you a more complete person and that consuming pop culture is actually an empowering and quite possibly subversive act of self-production, as if the culture industry doesn't want you to make an identity for yourself out of their junk. The porn industry is all too happy to "empower" women sexually, as it makes them willing to reduce themselves to commodities, which are then subject to the predictable marketplace give and take of value establishment and profitmaking. These women are eager to commodify themselves so as to participate in a market that will assign them a value, something that society at large withholds from women generally. They become objects to be able to be priced, and they accept price as a measure of self-worth -- this is the liberating triumph of pornography, and of consumer culture generally; you make yourself a quantifiable value, a sum in a table drawing up profits and losses in an active speculative market, while your most restrictive and compromising desires for instrumental sensual pleasure and thoughtless gluttony are reinforced as those things that make you special and important.

MacKinnon, in this brief Time Out interview, is very concise and astute about the absurdity of making pornography the site of a battle between liberal free-thinking and conservative puritanism. "Pornography isn't about decency, and it isn't about sex per se. It isn't about smut or perversion or dirt. It is sexual bigotry. For women, it's degrading, and for men, it's conditioning their sexuality to objectification and abuse."

There's not much to add to that. Pornography's main function is to remake male libido into a selfish, isolating, distancing desire for ownership and property-collecting, and to make women into that willing property. In this it epitomizes what consumer culture acheives by and large, encouraging us to think of ourselves as the sum of what we own rather than what we do and whom we do it with. In the porno-consumer world, we're always doing ourselves, and we're always doing it alone.

Real amateurs

I've been listening to that new Sleater-Kinney album, the one that is so special and precious it can't be released until May, though the press has had it since January. The band released this statement: "We don't think of The Woods as some product getting out there early, we think of it as our art and lives and dreams. For us it's about respect and about people supporting us by being aware of our artistic intent. We ask that you please respect our wishes to present this record the way we intended. We're certain that you would want the same for your own endeavors, artistic or otherwise." Allow me to decode: The label wants to get the PR push coordinated with the mainstream press far enough in advance to place fawning articles and break the band out of the indie ghetto, so they can get "respect".

Hey, more power to them. They don't make records for fun; they make them to make a living. They are professionals. And the new album sounds like the work of professionals, punctiliously competent and confident. But I say this because my only context for forming an opinion about the album is the one formed by their statement, by their eagerness to professionalize and maximize their respect. Until its released to their fans and not just to media business types, it's just a product with a calculated pitch, it's a marketing campaign. Without a community of fans to share my response to it with, I can't really listen to it like a fan. I listen to it, wondering how it will play with their fans. I make jourrnalistic calculations about how it will be come to be described. But I can't yet really enjoy it as plain old music.

An ambitious journalism student surveyed me on my attitude about online music 'zines and the threat they may pose to the mainstream music press. Here's an excerpt:

Q: It seems like the fact that they provide timely reviews and news, specifically on their release date is one of the most attractive aspects of web zines…do you think this will effect how mainstream newsstand magazines approach reviewing
albums (rolling stone, AP, Spin etc.)?

A: It won't affect it at all. Mainstream coverage is typically guided covertly by PR and advertising considerations. Web zines are motivated by a willingness to cover anything they can get for free from the labels or their PR firms. Placing a review in a mainstream publication remains a signal that an act has "made it" on the national scene in some way. That is its function, not to offer timely information about the quality of a band's music. (That is almost never the point of mainstream coverage. It's a recieved fact that if the mainstream press are covering it, it's already supposed to be worth your attention. No one has time
for negative reviews. With so much stuff, why waste time finding out about what sucks?) Placing a review in a web zine probably means you have hired a PR firm. That web zines can occasionally scoop the mainstream press is purely incidental.
But because they are largely staffed by amateurs, web zines will give you actual opinions, not professional assessments of the current zeitgeist inflected with hedged bets on whether an act will "break out."

Q: One thing about online music journalism is that there is much more expression of opinion in the reviews, whether it be through a sense of humor, sarcasm, concept reviews…do you think people (music fans in particular) are attracted to this
type of journalism?

A: I don't know. I think people say they are, and want to be, but aren't really. They are looking for confirmation of what to be into culturally, and that confirmation comes from established mainstream sources. They read to make sure they aren't missing out on something "important." I think people want to make sure they know about the things they ought to know about and that they aren't becoming ignorant culturally, and that they ultimately enjoy tighter, more polished writing animated by the authority and confidence a professional writer brings and the clarity of story-pegs that editors bring out. It may be that people like online music journalism when it's brief, sharp, and funny, and that standard of quality is pretty rare. Opinions for their own sake are pretty boring. And the judgement of online reviewers is pretty erratic, adhering to no
coherent criteria. For better or for worse, mainstream music magazines are guided by the same criteria -- they cover what they think will sell magazines and they pretend that whatever that is is good and important. There's a consistency to that.

Well, I felt awash in cynicism after sending these answers off, felt that this bleak outlook wasn't entirely representative of how I feel. And I neglected to mention the one form of music writing that always brings me joy, the one type that gives me hope: the music reviews on Amazon.com.

I love to read the reviews of records on Amazon.com. I think it is the most reliable source of opinion out there in the music marketplace, far more entertaining and illuminating than what you find in the music press, which is larded over with bombast, hype, and treacle. These are often the ravings of enthusiasts, making their case for their favorite band, or angered ex-fans venting their sense of betrayal. But sometimes they are these measured, articulate accounts of the record from people who are congenitally addicted to giving their opinion, who can't withhold their opinions on anything, and have to express them somewhere. In other words, these are pre-professionalized critics, untempered by market/audience considerations and unhampered by editors. What is great about these reviews is that you don't have to wonder about what's really at stake for the writers. The real amateurs are motivated by some raw need to communicate and leave their mark somewhere, and I recognize myself in them. This sympathy makes me trust their authenticity completely.

Reading Amazon.com reviews makes me understand why I read any reviews in the first place. It's not for information about the music. Taste in music is pretty fickle and idiosyncratic; it resists coherent explanation and steady criteria, and it often depends on context: where you are when you hear something and how popular it already is and what your friends think of it and what the musicians look like and how cool their CD designs are or whatever. One reviewer's opinion isn't likely to worth much as an assessment. But what's so nice about the Amazon reviews, especially when there's a lot of them, is that it creates a sense of consensus and community. And only within a community is it even worth forming an opinion about something, articulating it in clear terms, even to yourself. One of our culture's biggest fallacies is the idea that you can have an opinion on culture in isolation from fellow participants. There is no pure reaction, no way in which some essential ontological you unaffected by environment is able to register how it feels when hearing some ontological essence of the music free of all the implications of how it was made and distributed to you. That history, the way both you and the record got to be in the same place at the same time, is not just a factor in the listening experience; it is the entire listening experience. And those histories are made by people, by a variety of intersecting communities who all ultimately configure what we end up cherishing as our unique personal self-defining opinion.

Without a community within which to situate your position, you don't even bother to have opinions about things as ephemeral as pop music. It would just exist, pleasant noise; all albums become an ambient Eno record. I am one of those people who needs to have a reason to listen to music, who wants to express an opinion, for whom the construction of an opinion constitutes meaningful work, salvaging life experience and redeeming it, making it amount to something. I can't stand the idea of having things happen to me without my commenting on them, assessing them, remembering and reconfiguring them in some way -- I don't want to be passive, I want to rework everything I experience to take claim of it, to stay actively engaged. So I am so grateful that these Amazon reviewers are there, to provide a community, to give me a mirror in which I can recognize myself, to validate my whole approach to life. So I read Amazon.com reviews to find confirmation not even of my attitude toward a particular album, but of myself, my whole way of thinking. I read them to consume authenticity.

It's refreshing to think that there are real people out there, not professional opinion-makers but real amateurs, who are having these spontaneous, unrehearsed responses to music. And that sense of spontaneity, that sense of unpracticed being-in-the-moment is something we have learned to value, something that seems to be more and more rare in a hypermediated culture full of pseudoevents and entertainment wholly given over to emotional engineering, extracting Pavlovian emotional responses from us without ever really challenging our preconceptions, our ideological safehouse. Spontaneity guarantees a kind of truth, a freedom from the calculation -- the ads and the flattery and the manipulation and the efficiency -- that dominates the public sphere. It shows us that people can really still be "in touch with themselves" and know their "real" feelings. But then, it's ads themselves that conjure this spontaneity as the true ultimate value, as the guarantor of truth. Spontaneity is already been reified into a product, another manipulative device. Paranoia closes in. These Amazon.com reviewers, are they just marketing spontaneity to me, too? Already, I'm sure, savvy PR firms have begun to hire fake fans, fake amateurs to gush about records on Amazon, perhaps Amazon themselves will hire them and get them started. There are some reviews that read suspiciously like the press releases that barrage my inbox every day, I'm sure of it. These aren't real amateurs. I want some real amateurs, dammit!

The fact is, in a culture so phony that it must fetishize spontaneity and authenticity to the degree that ours does, even amateurs have to be self-conscious about their amateurism. The false notes creep in to their reviews, the posturing the preening. And we are all pitch-perfect unforgiving critics of those. I can look in the mirror and see that, too.

Damn hippies

The Wall Street Journal frequently finds room on its front page for purely ideological stories, that is things that are in no way newsworthy but establish some cherished ideological point for the Journal's core readership. In today's case, a story called "Left in Nepal at 3, Daja Takes Decades to Find Out Why" (in the first column), that point relates to the selfish foolishness of those who sought alternatives to the status quo in the sixties. The story manages to massage all the sweet spots of mainstream anxiety, which stems from middle class folks being encouraged on the one hand to be radical non-conformists (in their consumption choices, consuming ever more "extremely" to differentiate themselves) and on the other to be passive anti-intellectual quietists who go with the flow, lest they begin pursuing "alternative lifestyles" that will lump them in with homosexuals and habitual drug users and Muslims and all the rest on the lunatic fringe. Stories like this one help assuage the cognitive dissonance that threatens to overtake those whose lives must be lived in the nexus of these cultural contradictions. Human interest stories are always about enforcing ideology, about reassuring readers that the prevailing values are the only logical ones, the only ones that make sense, the only ones that work. In exchange for subscribing wholeheartedly to such ideological values, stories in publications like People and Reader's Digest are able to inflate with a fulfilling sense of uplift, a satisfying sense that all is right in the world, at its core. The Journal story is especially effective, because it allows a vicarious imaginative escape into hippiedom while ultimately condemning it, rewarding readers for having done nothing about their own daydreams of such a liberated life.

The Journal story details the fate of a white man who was raised in Tibet, de facto proof, apparently, that his parents, wealthy privileged liberal ingrates with Hollywood connections, were negligent. The key paragraph is halfway down the column: "He was an odd casualty of an era in American history when many young people dropped out of the mainstream and abandoned their families in pursuit of enlightenment and adventure. Some turned to communal ways of child-rearing. Some, like Daja's parents, essentially quit parenting and left their children for others to raise."

The hypocrisy of this paragraph is almost beneath comment. Never mind the nannies who typically raise the children of the Journal's core constituency. Never mind the "essentially" slipped in there to allow this distorted picture to pass as representative. Never mind the man is referrred to as a "casualty," as if his upbringing in a monestary (where he was forced to spend "lonely years" exploring "broad philopsphical riddles" such as "what is right?") made him for all intents and purposes, dead. Note the way that communal methods are elided with abandonment as if they are equally reprehensible choices and the way "enlightenment" is linked with "adventure," to make the package of the two seem equally capricious and irresponsible.

Damning details mount, including Daja's parents' experimentation with "psychedelic drugs" and "love-ins," which made them "flower children in the classic sense" and the fact that Daja's mother refused to sufficiently mourn her mother's death by suicide, which the story strongly implies was caused by Daja's mother's marrying in a tie-dyed dress. Daja's mother, now known as "Wongmo" remains a Buddhist monk, which has taught her that "Just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad or wrong." The story's writer, Clare Ansberry, has thoughtfully and diligently endeavored to trivialize Buddhist life with such well-chosen quotes and details, emphasizing everywhere Wongmo's selfishness, shallowness, and inauthenticity, and then quoting liberally from her mea culpa to her son to solidify the emerging epitomizing portrait of a bad parent, one who leaves the mainstream with idealistic visions only to produce a misfit child who spends his life trying to atone for her mistakes. Never leave the mainstream, not if you love your children. Don't question how things are. Your children will despise you for it.

What an uplifting story. It buoys the good feeling I received when I saw reported enthusiastically that Philip Morris hopes to expand tobacco operations in Indonesia, "a tremendous growth opportunity," since American smokers have the unfortunate tendency to quit or die of cancer. All is indeed right with our world.

Management gurus

In One Market Under God, Thomas Frank raises an interesting point about the evolution of management theory. Citing the rising tide of critiques of Taylorism in management literature, he argues that scientific management, while maximizing profit across the board for industry, raised two ideological problems for corporate interests. The first was that its repressive totalitarian implementation lent itself well to labor organizer's critiques and helped union recruitment. The mechanisms of exploitation were simply too overt, unmistakable to even the most resolutely quietistic working-class stooge (Wal-Mart employees voting against unionization being perhaps the exceptions). The second is that top-down management schemes suggested that central control and command did make things more efficient (as opposed to something more like the chaos of competing interests in a marketplace). If central commmand worked, then government intervention had an ideological basis that profiteers were unwilling to admit. Thus the apologists of management literature set out to give scientific management a makeover. As Frank points out, management theory almost never affords new techniques, it always serves to legitimize those which already exist, and those that exist always serve the same function -- to "manage" labor by masking the manner in which it's exploited. That is where "human relations" departments come from, they manage the relationship between employer and employee in order to make that relation best serve capital. So they confuse you about your benefits packages, discourage your using your vacation days, perform all sorts of harassing inquiries ostensibly to demonstrate they care about employees but really reminding employees that they are being carefully watched, proliferate all sorts of euphemistic jargon, and so on and so on. They are agents of distortion and confusion, not unlike real estate brokers and used-car salesmen.

Management tracts have recently been called upon to justify worker insecurity in the face of downsizing and outsourcing and other stock-price-inflation tactics employed by options-rich CEOs. Hence the success of Who Moved My Cheese? which is quite possibly the most moronic book ever taken seriously by adults, and that includes the Harry Potter series, Dr. Seuss, and The Tao of Pooh, which reads like Moses Mainomides in comparison to the idiocy contained in Cheese. The core point of Cheese is that a worker must be flexible in this day and age. No repsonsibility is assigned for the chronic instability of the economy. It's simply presented as a natural condition, as God's work in his unfathomable wisdom. No longer sufficient to ask, How high? when told to jump, Cheese encourages workers to just start jumping like crazy, whether or not they have been asked. It pushes meek sycophancy and misplaced self-flagellation to new extremes and expects no worker to protest or sense irony in being compared to a helpless rat trapped pointlessly in a maze while its masters move its food around for no other reason than to see how obediant the rat will be.

No one should make the mistake of taking management theory seriously. (In fact, Frank ran a pretty severe risk by immersing himself in them to criticize them. Repeated exposure is wont to corrupt your thinking process and infect your language with insidious jargon and passive-voice sentence constructions) In practice it serves as a palliative for those undertaking corrupt business practices, a salve to managerial consciences when money no longer works (as if that day ever comes). The only question worth pondering, perhaps, is the degree to which these gurus are believers in their own bullshit.

Real estate brokers, petty thieves

I am currently looking for a new apartment in the neighborhood where I live, Astoria, in Queens. Perhaps this would be a trying experience anywhere -- an old professor of mine who enlisted me to lug boxes of books for him when he moved insisted that studies have shown that moving is as stressful as a death in the family -- but it is especially difficult in Astoria, where the apartment rental market is controlled by that rarefied species of parasite known all too well to New Yorkers, the real-estate broker.

Now, one does not grow up dreaming of becoming a real-estate broker. There are no children's books glamorizing their profession. Real-estate agents don't appear as the heroes of films (if they appear they are usually caricature villains, comic relief, emblems of a habitual, institutionalized corruption or hysterical phoniness -- like Annette Bening's character in American Beauty) and the real estate profession is not one assumed as an alter-ego for superheroes. No one has epiphanous moments when they realize that real estate is their calling (unless you call the moment when they hear how much money they can make for what little they do an epiphany). And parents don't marshall up all their persuasive forces and save all their money for fancy colleges to insist to their children that they grow up and become real estate agents. No, people drift into the real estate business because they think it's easy money. It's not a business attracting the best and brightest a society has to offer. It's a profession attracting the sneakiest and greediest.

Deception is part of the real estate agent's stock-in-trade, even in places where the real estate market is not as contentious as it is in New York City. They must be deceptive because they spend they time helping customers while their financial interest and duty lies with the seller or lessor. They are duty bound to encourage the customers to take the worst deal offered them, and if these clients do the brokers maximize their profits. The ones that are successful are the ones that are best able to make their clients think they are watching out for them while stabbing them in the back. They are the slick talkers, the ones who seem so empathetic and understanding, the ones who want to take care of everything for you (so you won't know how badly you're getting fucked). Real estate agents thrive on the complexity of transactions as these discourage people from understanding what is going on. They benefit from confusion and do what they can to foment it, like their evil brethren in the advertising industry.

In most apartment-rental markets, brokers are hired by slum lords to rent out their unrentable properties. These brokers collect only from the landlords for the service of strong-arming a poor desperate sucker into one of their flea traps. The actions of these brokers are ethically dubious enough, but at least they earn their pay, even if through ignominious deeds. But in New York, inexpicably, brokers collect both from the landlords and the renters, presumably on the theory that they are matchmakers when really they are like fee-charging double-dipping ATMs that hit you up at the machine and on your end-of-month statement. Their fees are openly contigent on the amount of rent paid per month, so they have no interest in serving as an honest broker between negotiating parties. And because of the chronic shortage of apartments in the city, their work does itself. They just sit back and collect when anxious renters come to them. In longtime immigrant communitites like Astoria, the brokers are typically bilingual mediators between generally suspicious homeowners with no mastery of English and no savvy with real-estate law, people who long ago left the city but maintained their childhood homes, and renters, who are usually desperate to find a place in a tight market.

Don't expect a New York broker to call you with apartments. You end up calling them daily, begging to be shown something as if you were a temp calling every morning hoping for an assignment. Usually they will try to distort your sense of what are fair prices by showing you a few hell-holes that haven't been inhabited for years so that you'll take the first mediocre thing that comes along. Generally they prefer to deal on an all-cash basis, likely to mask some of their earnings from taxes. It is easy for them to do, because there is no product of their labor that can be readily traced. They don't produce anything; they simply leach away money by virtue of being favorably situated and totally shameless. Long practice has given these bloodsuckers a truly contemptible sense of entitlement, that their money should be easy and that you'd be crazy to resent them for it. This is the system, they seem to say, you have no other choice. Grow up and deal with it. Like all status quo systems it's very existence serves as the strongest argument in its favor, and it can always resort to using the "be realistic" case for justification. It exists because it's realistic, and one is being unrealistic if one expects something better.

Obviously, if markets were truly efficient and the consumer was truly sovereign, an honest, fair broker should make a killing, and they should force dishonest brokers out of the field. But efficient markets break down here for a number of reasons. It may be that cloistered ethnic groups ambivalent about renting tolerate poor service and have an artificially limited set of brokers with whom they feel comfortable working. And rent stabilization may play a part in discouraging honest types from entering the field and in keeping the number of openly and honestly leased apartments on the market minimal. And the graft-like nature of the business seems institutionalized, so these profit margins are preserved at the expense of greater ones theoretically available to those willing to do a more legitimate day's work. I'm sure everyone's maximizing their utility somehow (Gary Becker would be able to defend it as rational, I suppose) but having been on the cusp of taking a truly compromised apartment, I don't feel that way. I felt like utility has been minimized for me, as my time has been wasted and my willingness to spend more is meaningless. Just another petty gripe, I guess. I should grow up.