Instant intimacy

Popular entertainment tends to reinforce a notion that emotional states are easily accessible, identifiable, and instrumentally manipulated. A film's score swells and the camera pulls in for a close up and we start to feel our eyes well, as though a switch was thrown in our tear ducts. We hear the music of confessional singer songwriters and revel in their authenticity (or blush at their shamelessness). We watch crime drama and we have an immediate sense of who we're supposed to think is guilty, and a sense of who probably will be. We watch The Real World and the way the show is edited with its musical cues and so forth lead us to believe we can instantaneously judge what's going on in these people's heads (aside from "not much"). In short, our entertainment prepares us to expect emotional immediacy, and then reasonable accuracy in our snap judgments of how people feel. It trains us to read others in specific ways, to attend to certain sorts of cues. It leads us to expect an astounding level of intimacy to be instantaneous.

In this, entertainment is doing its part to accomodate pressures brought on by the time squeeze everyone feels under capitalism, the sort of thing Juliet Schor describes in The Overworked American. The time squeeze is exacerbated by the elevation of convenience and of mass-quantity consumption as values in their own right. We don't have the time to respect the complexity of other people's feelings, or even our own. We are acclimated to immediate legible emotions that can be processed the way Monsanto processes chicken feed. Identity itself becomes based on convenience, on the most expediant stories we can tell to ourselves about ourselves. This makes conformity has a high value, because it is by far the most convenient identity, with all its nuances pre-packaged.

The definition of intimacy changes in response to its immediacy. It is no longer a matter of deep understanding but a matter of quick pigeon-holing. It becomes a management process where by another's feelings are dealt with, expedited, pumped through a system, spent like petty cash. A natural love for convenience, above and beyond that which is motivated by natural human laziness, engrains itself deep in our character. Our most intimate relationships become ideally the ones that cause us the least trouble, which makes the ones we really have perpetually frustrate us. And that frustration only reinforces our fantasies of simplicity, of emotional processing that is much more efficient.

The American "Jobs Creation" Act

Here's a shock. Bush's "American Jobs Creation Act," a corporate-welfare scheme by which corporations can repatriate money earned overseas at a lower than ordinary tax rate, isn't actually creating jobs. In fact, the companies taking advantage of this have been cutting jobs as they are reaping its financial benefits. National Semiconductor announced it was cutting 6% of its workforce the same day it announced it was taking advantage of the Jobs Creation Act to repatriate $500 million. NSC seems to have a perverse eagerness to expose the sham nature of this bill; its spokesman is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that this bill was a tax break and nothing more, and that calling the law the American Jobs Creation Act was "marketing." Nice. Good to see that laws need to be "marketed" to the American people, I guess since they best express their vote by shopping anyway, right? I'm glad the language of law has become commercial. The spokesman's sage advice: "I would not trust the title of any law and what it really says." Too bad American journalists don't abide by this.

Williamsburg, the Authenticity Capital of the World

Richard Sennett's excellent The Fall of Public Man depicts the increasing isolation people experience as public life becomes more and more ruled by questions of authenticity -- contemporary society doesn't permit a person to stand independant of his public roles, and no distinctions are recognized between public and private behavior. The truth of one's inner self is held to be accessible through all instances of behavior equally, and thus we are required to monitor it constantly, as though we are always being scrutinized, as if our entire self-concept is at stake everytime we step outside. The paradox is that you end up having to make a big show of believing your own bullshit to demonstrate just how authentic you are in being yoursel, to prove you are not being a phony, even as you calculate how best to show you are organically what you are.

I always marvel at friends of mine who live in the post-collegiate crypto-artist ghetto, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where everyone seems to be posturing at all times, and every walk down the street becomes a confrontation between those who are "real" Williamsburgers and those who are nouveau hipster arrivistes. One's made conscious of this displaying-authenticity problem during even the most innocuous trip to the bodega. It seems like everyone is trying to demonstrate some leading-edge trend in hip to thereby prove they would have had the same leading edge before, and moved to the neighborhood before everyone else, and therefore belong more than you do, so get the hell off their street! (These same people often make a show of tryng to elude capitalist consumerism, only to fall prey to its most insidious psychological weapon, status-positioning anxiety, and its most nefarious currency, cultural capital.) These hipster turf wars epitomize the "tyranny of intimacy," the way status-consciousness infiltrates the most inocuous of quotidian tasks. Suddenly the trip to the laundromat is fraught with anxiety. Does my laundry look cool enough? How casual should I be in my laudromat wear? Will it be cool to wear my house slippers? Does my bed head look like real bed-head, or does it look like I moussed it? While I'm waiting for the spin cycle to finish, should I read magazines or would it be better to read Kierkegaard, or maybe a book of John Ashbery poems, he's pretty cool, or maybe something more obscure, maybe something in a foreign language.

The more we try to prove and promote our sincerity, the more insincere our interior monologue becomes, the more our lives are in cosmic bad faith with ourselves. (Fiction, by the way, may have first taught us how to read people this way, judge their sincerity and whether they are being "true to themselves" -- another way the fictional imagination may be harming us.) Soon the questions haunt us even when we don't go out on the street; we live every minute with the sense of our phoniness, and wonder if the people who pretend to love us can see right through us and our posturing. There ends up being no haven, no place where the guard can be let down, where one can stop performing the role of "one's true self." This is one of De Zengotita's main points in Mediated -- culture has made all of us "Method actors."

One of the many ironies about this is that we have become less tolerant of "inauthenticity" in other individuals, but we are more and more indulgent of coroporate interests when the dupe us with silly ads or bad product. We love to suspend disbelief for ads, but we give no quarter to our friends.

Literary fiction and imagination

The other day I mentioned the temerity of the muscians who named their project "Edie Sedgwick," casually appropriating the identity of someone defenseless to protect it and theoretically misleading those who see the name in print or in the marketplace. This band would systematically efface the memory of the woman named Edie Sedgwick as those words grew to be more and more associated with their music. Now, that growth will never happen because they play pop music; they have no chance of being especially popular or memorable in our culture and they almost surely they won't even constitute a footnote on the pathetic yet paradigmatic story of the talentless Warhol "superstar" who first (and best) epitomized his famous dictum about our "fifteen minutes of fame." I regretted mentioning them in the first place, and didn't think I have cause to mention them again, except that I started reading J. M. Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello, a purported work of fiction in which he embeds lectures he may have delivered in his own name and attributes them to the titular character, and in which a real-life novelist named Paul West, who I once had as an creative-writing instructor at Penn State, appears. I thought West wasn't an especially good instructor (I wasn't an especially good student, either) and I thought he was a bit creepy as well, and when I read that he was depicted in Elizabeth Costello as a novelist whose works were --wittingly or unwittingly -- doing evil in the world, I wanted to revel in it.

But there's more interesting things going on in the novel, even if you haven't met Paul West personally and haven't been elliptically insulted by him. The reason why Coetzee seems to be playing all these metafictional games and muddying up distinctions between realism and outright reality is because he seems to wondering what the point of fiction writing is, and whether fiction writers have any special claims to a better understanding of humanity or morality, whether they have any business lecturing scholars about anything at all, or in fact, lecturing anyone about anything. It's a novel of ideas that is against ideas, a quintessential "self-consuming artifact." Novelists, Coetzee demonstrates, can so easily elude responsibility for anything they say by simply recontextualizing it, introducing situational ironies, rendering the speaker's voice unreliable in some fundamental way. This is why he brings up West, whose novel about Nazis evokes horrors, makes his readers relive them, but the author appears to abstain from assuming responsibility for the horrors he reiterates. Is he doing something evil in exercising readers' imaginations in this way? Coetzee has his novelist character think to herself that maybe people shouldn't just write whatever they want, and that maybe people aren't necessarily improved in any way by reading "literary fiction" like West's just because it's literary.

This resonates with me, because it's like my complaints recently about imagination being overrated, or the modern fallacy that anything imaginative is inherently good. Imagination in precapitalist eras was the source of malignant demons and acute, debilitating self-regard, the source of hypochondria and dementia and quixotic delusion. It didn't make you "unique" or manifest what an individual you could be. We celebrate imagination now because it helps capitalism thrive; it allows people to accept imaginative pleasures in place of more substantial ones; it helps us replace people with goods. Literary fiction isn't exempt from the problems of commercial genre fiction, it doesn't transcend those books. Literary fiction is a genre, nothing more, and it's defining feature may be that it works the imagination more strenuously, makes one more susceptible to making one's own market-appropriate fantasias, to working with authors, those culture-industry manques, and becoming unduly invested in these imaginary worlds. I certainly don't want the fiction I read to be easy, but I'm kidding myself if I think its difficulty improves me morally or makes me immune to contemporary ideology. That would be like if I believed doing the Friday crossword puzzle in the New York Times constituted real cultural work. Literary fiction is just a harder puzzle, but the puzzles are still just distractions, preoccupations, time-killers. Literary fiction soaks up the imaginative energy that could be used for other purposes -- but alas, just don't ask me what those purposes might be.

Placebos and ads

I've just taken a few ibuprofins for my headache, and now I'm indulging my magic faith in medicine, expecting the headache to go away. It isn't. Perhaps if I watched a few ads for a branded placebo I could take, my headache would be more responsive. The placebo effect has always fascinated me because it seems to me the essence of advertisements. The psychological methods to sell goods flow directly from the placebo effect. The placebo effect shows that there's a raw power in simply believing what we read or hear; it underwrites and vindicates a faith in the face of rationality for the sensational claims advertisers make for sham products. The histroy of consumer capitalism is closely bound up with that most durable and profitable of commodities, the patent medicine. I've recently argued that pornography might be the commodity ne plus ultra of modern American society. The patent medicine was arguably the quintessential commodity of the nineteenth century, the commodity that consists of nothing but what ad copy attributes to it; it literally doesn't exist as commodity without its marketing component. It's the anti-durable good, it preys entirely on ignorance, credulity, and desperation on the consumer's part.

I used to wonder if the efficacy of placebos was reliant on the activity of one's imagination. In other words, does having an active imagination makes placebos work better for you, or make you more susceptible to believing marketing promises? I sometimes think that entertainment's function is to strengthen the imagination to make ads work better, to make us more willing partners in constructing ad discourse's fantasy world of perfectly efficacious and emotionally nourishing products. Imagination becomes the alibi for our being duped -- we like being duped (as PT Barnum knew) because it has worked the muscles of our imagination, because in being fooled we broaden our inner world even as our scope of action in the real world is curtailed. Because we like being duped, because this enables our placebos (the gizmos and tchtchkes of consumer culture) to make us feel better, we embrace ad culture and invite it to structure more of our lives and identities. (This is sort of what James Twitchell argues in his books, but he gives it all a positive spin.)

Ads posit a person we want to be, not merely a rich, attractive, forever youthful person, but a person who is open, optimistic, trusting, not cynical, susceptible to spotaneous warm feeling, and quick to accept intimacy. Our culture works hard to make those traits that make one vulnerable to ad exploitation seem desirable traits, to be signs of our "feeling heart" -- this is why 18th century sensibility, the discourse of spontaneous warm feeling and trust, of imagining another's feelings, was so critical to kicking off ad-driven consumer culture. By not being skeptical of ads, we can demonstrate our feeling heart, our good nature. If we're bitter, skeptical, resistant, we prove how deviously calculating we are, how miserly and suspcious. Irrational behavior is made, via entertainment, to be seen as pleasurable, de facto. Rational behavior is on the other hand suspicious. Sensibility first codified these oppostions (with its key tropes that become proto-brand-names capable of evoking a predictable emotional response that bypasses reason), which were extended as commercial entertainment developed. Advertising adopts the function popular entertainment thinks it has to itself, providing the medium through which people comprehend their own feelings and desires.

Customarily we celebrate the imagination in our culture as this unquestionable force for good, as if more imagiantion automatically equals a richer life, a healthier culture. But the broadening imagination tends to be in the service of making us adapt ourselves to consumerism, to make more of what mass culture serves us. Niche marketing and "productive" consumption ruses expand our imaginations but along what seem like the wrong channels. The expansion of our mental world through consumer goods and what we can do with them inhibits our ability to imagine alternatives to consumerism, to conceive of alternate pleasures to shopping, pleasures that afford richer and more lasting satisfaction.

The pleasures of disappearance

I am one of maybe seventeen people in the New York metro area who doesn't have a cell phone. I have many good reasons for this: one is my reluctance to buy something that sells me back the right to communicate or one that sells me time. I'm resistant to buy a product whose pricing structure seems intentionally confusing, designed to assure that you don't really know what you are paying for. I'm reluctant to give myself a objective correlative for my own laziness, to give myself a tool that lets me keep options open even longer than I tend to do already -- the cell phone makes it so you never have to commit to anything, and even when you've made a commitment, it allows you to revise that commitment perpetually. Cell-phone users think they are perfecting their ability to make plans, but in fact they are dismantling it. And I certainly don't need any more devices that allow me to elude face-to-face contact with others, that allow me to technologize my communications and treat others like devices or impediments to my convenience. Every minute I spend talking to someone on a phone instead of face-to-face is a minute I'm dehumanizing the both of us. (Better to write a letter to someone far away, and respect the reality of distance.) I certainly don't want five thousand "anytime minutes" and feel I've contactually obligated myself to that much isolating alienation per month.

Because a cell phone doesn't connect people, it isolates them -- it's a "cell" phone, after all -- by enabling people to be distant, by inscribing that distance between intimates and associates as acceptable, typical, a given. One might get one to try to stay in contact, because one feels one's connections to others slipping away, but the phone permits the kind of "management" of those connections that subjects them to reifying control, turning them into things instead of organic, living relations, that makes certain the connections will become even fainter and more tentative, contingent, dependant on individual whim and niceties of convenience. Because of the values capitalism propagates, it is always more convenient to reject communication and social interaction, to reject unions, to avoid other people and their competing points of view. It is always easier to isolate yourself and be the king of your own fantasy world. Capitalism's propagandists (ad men and the like) expend a lot of effort to convince us that this isn't sick behavior.

But none of these is the main reason I don't have a cell phone. The main reason is that I often don't want to be reached. And I don't want my unreachability to be an issue. I don't ever want to refuse to answer someone when they call me. Maybe it's neurotic, but I'd rather miss a call than reject someone by choosing to ignore them. And the truth is, I like the idea of disappearing, or at least the illusion of it, of being beyond culture's reach, of being inaccessible as a self, as a cell in the social body. I don't think I'm unique in this. It seems like an understandable fantasy to have as a natural response to society's increasing capabilty for surveillance. The disconnected, disappearing person can be the watcher as opposed to the watched, which grants him a pretty powerful illusion of power and autonomy. This raises the question of whether my desire to transcend is any different than cell-phone technology's ability to isolate. But cell-phones isolate one to make his more subject to surveillance and social discipline (being made subject to hegemonic ideology, that sort of thing); transcendence is a desire to be beyond discipline, outside the ruling ideology. But this desire to transcend is likely just a refinement on the consumerist desire to have life be convenient; it's either a vestigial form of it (a transitional form that flourished as consumerism first developed), or a more elaborate and insidious evolution of it. Disappearance is probably the most convenient move there is.

But the roots for this aesthetic experience, of losing yourself, are deep; they are perhaps the essence of commercial entertainment. Michael Fried, in Absorption and Theatricality details the tendency in 18th century painting of obliterating the beholder's presence, of refusing to account for the beholder in the configuration of the painting's space. There is nowhere you can be standing when looking at the painting that the painting's spatial structure allows for, thus you are given the pleasing feeling of having escape extension, transcended space all together. Your presence is negated; by looking at the painting, you disappear. You become unassailable; you are in a perfect position to sit in jugement, immune yourself of being judged. Paintings like Chardin's The Soap Bubble are typical in that they depict figures concentrating deeply on some activity that makes them unaware of their own presence, that make them blithely ignorant of how they are being observed. They don't know you exist, which is convenient for you because then you don't have to worry about how to account for your fascination with them. You don't have to justify your attention or interact in any way. (As when on a subway train, it becomes easier to openly stare through the window at the faces in the winows of the express train passing you; you don't have to worry that meeting anyone else's gaze will lead to any further expenditure of effort, any awkward conversations or worries about how you are coming off). They are absorbed. You can just steal their image, and enjoy it as a thing, consume their activity vicariously without having to answer to them. We lose ourselves in their experience; we become absorbed ourselves. But unlike what we observe, we transcend observation and experience that power as well. We think we escape society's pan-optic surveillance, because everything we want to do that could be judged we are experiencing through proxies who absord the jugement for us (the celebrities we track in In Touch weekly, for instance).

In this way entertainment glamorizes and dignifies second-hand experience, passivity, things necessary to get people to consume more and do less (I know those things aren't essentially opposed, but that's a different bell to answer, a different egg to fry).

Diderot, the eighteenth-century critic, is preoccupied with these questions of absorption, with vicarious escapes. His art criticism -- his fondness for the sentimental domestic scenes and peasant maidens of Greuze -- exemplifies Fried's point. And his experience in reading one of the world's first self-conscious serious-minded novelists, Samuel Richardson, is paradigmatic for consumer culture's preoccupations with novels as entertainment generally. He explains how while reading, he loses all sense of himself and feels as though he is in a trance - Richardson's characters' experience supplants his own, which allows Diderot to feel satisfied and exhausted at his accomplishment of nothing at all (other than finishing Clarissa, which, at 1500 pages, is some kind of achievement). The didactisism of Richardson's novel, his intense moral purpose, seems to trigger in Diderot the ability to lose himself to the work, to commit to it completely. He is willing to enter and lose himself in the space Richardson creates, the space that will later be appropriated by ads as the place where subtle persuasion happens. The novel creates the mental space where ads can work. We go there in our minds because we think its an escape from social judgment, only to find ourselves more susceptible to advertising flattery when we're drunk on our "transcendent" power. We're ultimately not any safer when we disappear this way, through vicarious experience.

The key aspect of this space is that in it, we don't distinguish between our own experience and the experience we are enjoying vicariously. We see them as the same, as equally authentic. So when we are lost in the fictional world, and the fictional character has a proclivity for fictional Coca Cola, we experience that as our proclivity at some level, as our choice, as a choice made independent of persuasion. The fictional character's choice feels authentically ours, and we accept it as such, at least for the duration of our vicarious experience, for as long as we are unquestioningly identifying with characters in fiction, suspending disbelief, not being an entertainment skeptic, going with the flow and enjoying sentimentality. The moral didacticism that made vicarious experience possible for Diderot, enable him to feel absorbed and to disappear, have been replaced by different attempts at persuasion, the appeals of ads and the crypto-moral picture of the good life they present.

Managed presence

Nothing is more toxic than management-speak: the numbing jargon, the -ize verbs, the pretentiousness, the hubris and the blinkered myopia of their "insights," the rampant cynicism masquerading as optimism (i.e. the belief that if one's statements are either cheerful or incomprehensible enough, no one will notice how calculated their evil is), the putrid attempts at meme generation, the euphemisms, the passive voice constructions to avoid citing their own responsibility for their vile deeds. When you read The Wall Street Journal you certainly see enough of this, but at least it is leavened by the arch tone of the journalists, who at least seem to imply that we all know that such talk is bullshit. But the frightening implication remains that the people who pull the levers in the capitalist world actually think in these terms, that their interior monologues consists of this soulless discourse rife with illogic, rationalization, and self-flattery. And when your exposure to this language is unfiltered by the press, when you get a blast of it full-on in a "mission statement" or in a brochure for one of their many conferences where they "visionize operational synergies," it causes an almost suicidal sense of despair.

This is what I faced while editing material for an upcoming IT conference, in which CTOs from a variety of leading-edge tech firms (see how I've been infected by it?) blather on about their strategies for market domination and try to attract investors for their plans. All are looking for new ways to make a profit by intruding technologies into areas of life where we were perfectly happy without it before, inverting the logic of what really happens in their propaganda -- that just as management withdrew craft knowledge from workers and made them skillless and dependant on their bosses, so the tech indistry seeks to withdraw our skills of dealing with everyday life and make us slavishly devoted to our gadgets, which we suddenly need to survive in the world, whether at work or at home. Just note the simpering, drooling faces of cell-phone users as they toddler down the streets they congest while they are too busy talking, or note the pacifiied stare of a man fiddling with the little buttons on his BlackBerry. These people have been infantilized by technology, yet they consider themselves liberated. Perhaps this is what modern freedom has beeen reduced to, the freedom to act like a child forever.

Of all the troubling innovations these tech firms proposed, I was most disturbed by developments in "presence management," which is a gussied-up way of saying methods of communicating whether you are there or not. The epistimological implications of this are dizzying, as tech firms endeavor to insert technology into the very notion of existing. Once, simple ontology was sufficient. You were there, because your body was living, breathing, and reacting to external stimuli. You were present simply by virtue of existing somewhere. You didn't need to manage the notion of whether or not you existed, whether or not you were present. But thanks to the nebulous shadow world of cyberspace, presence and being have taken on various shades of gray that new tech applications hope to exploit. Now you might be "here" for certain people and absent for others, or here only in some limited capability, or here in several different places simultaneously as you take on the divine gift of ubiquity.

Once upon a time there was a social cost for being so evasive which enforced a civil discourse that made one consider the conseqeunces of one's actions. Now that cost has been eradicated, freeing people to treat other people like machines. The more social interaction is mediated by machines, the more machine like it becomes, until we finally perfect ourselves, and communuicate to each other directly through wireless brainwaves of pure digital code.