personal brand as neoliberal subjectivity, fashion industry as modeling circuit for development of such a self

There's probably some theoretical jargon I could find to describe what's going on with Google's initiatives in the fashion industry, but I can't think of it right now. From Silicon Alley Insider:

What Google has done for the industry is set up a digital listening post. By providing “Designer Analytics,” Google gives the boutique owners a deep dive into the habits of shoppers, telling them not just what they are buying, but why. They are given information about what specific products are “loved” or “hated”, what colors, shapes and patterns are resonating or not. Then there is a totally different, and broader, data set on the consumer trends. Here the designers learn what is happening in the aggregate to all designers, not just themselves. So industry trends in color, shapes and patterns can emerge from the general public.

Besides helping the designers find their audience, Boutiques.com is also designed to help the shopper find what he or she is looking for.

Google describes the service on the site this way:

“Boutiques.com is a personalized shopping experience, brought to you by Google, that lets you find and discover fashion goods through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers — celebrities, stylists, designers, and fashion bloggers. Boutiques uses visual technology to help fashionistas discover and shop their look and creates the opportunity for designers to showcase their collections and latest inspirations online.

“Boutiques.com is built on technology developed by our team of fashion experts who work with engineers to “teach” our computer systems to understand various patterns, pairings, and genre definitions. When signed into your account, Boutiques.com learns about your style and preferences and in turn, provides you better results and recommendations over time. Ultimately, Boutiques.com will provide shoppers with a much richer and interactive shopping experience and help drive traffic to retailers’ websites.”

Consumer behavior is fed more directly into production; it doesn't expend itself in the creation of the consumer's self-image. The pleasure consumers take in consuming by way of self-presentation is recaptured by manufacturers and used to shape subsequent designs, tightening the loop, accelerating it. We don't buy a shirt and wear it and that's that. Now the degree to which we are satisfied by the purchase, the various modes of satisfaction, are fed back into the production cycle as a component of the manufacturing process.

Consumption becomes much more directly a part of production. The self we postulate with the shirt in this example is already aware of itself as bearing that R&D responsibility; the personal brand is at stake in the degree to which one's personal efforts to be fashionable are recaptured. The success of the self depends on the success of its usefulness to industry as fashion R&D. Accordingly, the self is an ongoing experimental space, not ever anything secure or established -- it is always a capital stock to be risked in ventures, not something that exceeds or exists outside of the dynamics of the market. This is a triumph for neoliberalism and its imposing a fundamentally entrepreneurial subjectivity. We exist insofar as we see ourselves profiting, we see our personal brand equity growing (or, alas, shrinking). We don't exist when we refuse to see how our brand plays in the market-driven world.

The online repository becomes the site of the self -- the way in which the recommendation engines and tracking databases know better than we do what we want, what we should see, what we are going to do, what sorts of choices we would like to have presented to us to give us a sense of control over the actual surfeit of possibilities. The self naturally requires markets and retailers to supply it with the terms by which is can express itself, realize itself, give itself instantiated being. We rely on those accelerated exchanges, which are our opportunities to speak the self.

So we end up in symbiosis with digital devices which archive our identity-making gestures. Because the devices can record all our gestures, they all become identity making in the end -- no activity that is not overtly self-defining. To overstate it: One's identity can never be so strong as to render particular gestures negligible. The identity is always tenuous, always being rewritten anew by each addition to the archive. So it is cumulative at the same time it is totally discontinuous. Each addition generates an entirely new formulation from a selected set of gestures from the archive.

The neoliberal self is the personal brand, which depends on accelerated opportunities for consumerist exchange to augment and evaluate itself, know it exists.

MIchael Bull's Sound Moves

A bit repetitive, as though it were article expanded into a book. It consists mainly of snippets from interviews with iPod users, and seems a little dated. Offers insight into a time before iPod's capabilities were taken for granted. The interesting aspect of the book is the argument about iPods reflecting post-Fordist subjectivity. They allow users to dictate the feel of the space they occupy and are invited to believe they have escaped the imposition of conformity by "mass culture". They can alter the sound world of the workplace to ostensibly suit their needs -- do they opt out of immaterial labor and the general intellect this way?

Urban life doesn't impose its rhythms and symbols on them so much as they impose a soundtrack on their journey through urban spaces, taking in from those spaces only what suits them and blotting out the rest. They "subjectivize space -- consume it as if it were a commodity. In the process, immediate experience is fetishized.... Users prefer to live in this technologized space whereby experience is brought under control -- aesthetically managed and embodied -- whilst the contingent nature of urban space and the 'other' is denied." Basically, iPods foster the illusion of control by imposing sensory deprivation. We become dependent on them to "feel free" and autonomous, withdrawing to its tiny space, where we are lord and master.

Because we can carry so much music with us, we stop letting music dictate a mood to us; we choose music to suit our attitude. We don't listen; we deploy music as mood enhancer or stimulant or whatever.

Also, iPods are a polite means by which we permit ourselves to ignore everyone else. "The use of these technologies simultaneously fulfills the desire for, or management of, social proximity." That is, we use them to control social presence, to moderate (through socially accepted means -- accepted perhaps because they are new technologies and that excuses the rudeness), our level of engagement with others in public spaces.

Rebranding the American system to include redistribution

From Steve Waldman at Interfluidity:

Health care costs are millions of people’s livelihood, and inefficient health care costs are a big part of that. Much of how modern economies survive is by protecting information problems and barriers to competition that sustain overpayments. This broadens the wealth distribution while permitting recipients the fiction that flows of purchasing power involve no transfers (“welfare”), only proud, self-reliant income. The theory of labor unions and the theory of an inefficient health sector are identical, except one is more transparent and the other has proved more capable of buying political protection. The problem, in both cases, is not that there are transfers, but whether the distribution of transfers — to whom, from whom — is wise and fair. By forcing ourselves to pretend there are no transfers, we prevent ourselves from even posing the question.

Perhaps I am a creature of the conventional wisdom of my day, but I want to tell it strong. It is not those who advocate, but those who prevent, stabilizing transfers of purchasing power, who are the true Marxists. These self-styled capitalists do not espouse Marx’s theories, but they do something much worse: They perform them. They behave in precisely the way that Marx expected capitalists to behave. They cripple the American system’s greatest strength — its ingenuity, flexibility, adaptability. They prevent the sort of collective action through which earlier generations proved that capitalism could made be consonant with decent, stable, and broadly prosperous societies. In doing so, they risk proving Marx right.

Not only do I agree with the substance, here, but I think Waldman is doing something interesting rhetorically, which enacts the point he is trying to make.

The way I would put what he is saying is that with redistributionist welfare policies (which are necessary to stabilize a capitalist economy), ideology is everything. They must be presented in a way that masks incidental injustices and preserves the fiction of individual autonomy to the highest degree, for in that autonomy, more or less, resides the quality of life the system is erected to maintain. Not material wealth or endless distraction, but the sense that one is the author of one's own life within an essentially open social field. I would argue that we intentionally prevent ourselves as a society from "posing the question" of the fairness of transfers, since scrutiny unwinds the idea most of us are not in reality children at the mercy of a paternalistic government. Posing the question (Marxists might call it "highlighting the contradictions" or something like that) presents the possibility of disrupting the necessary transfers, which, as Waldman notes, are the way government solves the collective-action problem that capitalist accumulation creates (i.e. all capitalists must be rapacious and accumulate for its own sake or else be extinguished through remorseless competition). Instead the illusion of unrestricted freedom allows us to tolerate the hidden subsidies, the cronyism, the intermittently manifest inequality.

But whereas in other countries, this evolving regime of transfers is labeled social democracy or even socialism, Waldman tries to assimilate it to capitalism itself -- to the real "American system," not the conservative free-market fantasy version of it -- and argue that the only successful capitalist societies are the ones that take on these socialistic redistributionist elements. He's essentially rebranding American capitalism: it's not the deregulated libertarian marketplace; it's a mixed economy that balances entrepreneurial ambition with social welfare. Its innovative engine is not a matter of deregulating and finding new ways to profit, but in finding new and cleverer ways to solve capitalism's collective action problem.

The point then is to redefine the American system to include different standards of fairness and social welfare -- to fight on that ideological terrain -- without pretending to be making nonideological statements yourself. Instead, seem to concede to the opposing view will hijacking their preferred terminology.

Kunkel's LRB article about David Harvey and crisis

From this LRB article, which more or less digests Harvey's 1982 book Limits of Capital.

Marx proposed that ‘the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself,’ and Harvey glosses the idea: ‘The necessary geographical expansion of capitalism is … to be interpreted as capital in search for surplus value. The penetration of capitalist relations into all sectors of the economy, the mobilisation of various “latent” sources of labour power (women and children, for example), have a similar basis.’ Hence both the involution and the imperialism of capital, commodifying the most intimate of formerly uncommodified practices (education, food preparation, courtship) as well as sweeping formerly non-capitalist regions (China and Eastern Europe) into the global market.

The expansion is always to accommodate the surplus value that is unaccounted for on the demand side -- nothing of value there to exchange for it in order to realize the profit. So capital absorbs new spaces and makes further claims on time, on future production (through credit).

I'm interested in social media as a manifestation of the subsumption process, the means by which "intimate uncommodified practices" become susceptible to commodification, circulation, valorization, etc. The quest for new profit opportunities, essentially -- enclosing commons.

Also interested in how acceleration serves capital's "overproduction" crises. The acceleration of exchange appears to absorb more production, and allow for valorization to exponentially expand, while at the same time suspending more money capital in the process. The danger for capitalism is always the money and commodities will cease circulating, as capital is critically a process, is always in motion in order to be at all. Static capital is not capital at all within capitalism; it is a pile of worthless shit.

Kunkel discusses three aspects of the Marxist "falling rate of profit" thesis.
1. full employment gives labor too much bargaining power (disproved by flexible capital in globalized system)
2. organic composition of capital shifts: "given increased technological and organisational efficiency, for using relatively less labour than capital in production. Since profitability reflects the ‘rate of exploitation’ – or the ratio of the surplus value produced by the worker to the wages he receives – using less labour relative to capital diminishes profitability, unless capital goods become cheaper or exploitation is ramped up. This problem too can be solved, at least in principle: the capital/ labour ratio can simply be rejigged by deploying more labour relative to capital." I think this problem also gets solved with "fictitious labor" -- immaterial labor invested in symbol/semantic production; and then through labor collected by capital through online networks without requiring the payment of wages. Need to think about this more, but the appeal of digitality for capital is that it allows for near infinite exploitation of labor per unit of hard constant capital. The network effect inverts the organic composition problem. (Would love someone's help/advice on what to read on that topic.) Social networks allow technology to increase the amount of labor that goes into a commodity, because the "commodity" is reshaped as a bottomless pool of information, an ever-refreshing occasion for data collection; the data becomes the product, the digital medium the occasion and means for data circulation. The circulation process becomes the source of utility, of use value, of pleasure. Am I on to anything with this?
3. underconsumption -- a restatement of the missing Surplus Value issue. Not enough paid out in wages to allow for the full realization of profit in exchange. The mother of all contradictions, as Kunkel would have it. Could be solved by ever expanding luxury consumption, but marginal utility of money declines as personal wealth increases, also positional goods and potlatch destruction attract more of the wealth, taking it out socially necessary investment circuit. Another way of saying that overaccumulation has occurred -- capital cannot be invested profitably; it can only be devalued -- but whose? "In social terms, this will take the form of a contest between creditors and debtors over who is to suffer more devaluation."

Not sure why this crisis is not solved by "quantitative easing" up until the point of inflation. This would allow for accelerated exchange in order to valorize capital. That gets you the Freidmanite idea of matching the money supply growth to the overall rate of growth.

Not so sure about this either:

The relationship between credit and commodities is in this way translated into spatial terms as an uneasy rapport between one kind of capital, highly mobile or liquid, and another kind – ‘fixed capital embedded in the land’ – defined by its inertness. Here, in the latent conflict between migratory finance capital and helplessly stationary complexes of fixed capital, including not only factories and office buildings but roads, houses, schools and so on, Harvey has found a contradiction of capitalism overlooked by Marx and his heirs.

New capitalism is all about flexibility, mobile capital finding sites of profit. "‘The disjunction of the quest for hypermobility and an increasingly sclerotic built environment (think of the huge amount of fixed capital embedded in Tokyo or New York City) becomes ever more dramatic.’"

This analysis depends on the extent to which fetish about land -- that its value always goes up -- is widespread. Misrecognizing housing as an investment rather than a commodity good. It depends how seriously we consider land to be better form of collateral than other assets. "Harvey’s bold and ingenious solution is to propose that, under capitalism, ground rent – or the proportion of property value attributable to mere location, rather than to anything built or cultivated on the land – becomes a ‘pure financial asset’" -- I kind of suspect that is pure assertion, a speculative postulate necessary for the subsequent analysis. The "spatio-temporal fix" theory sounds a lot like Austrian-ish "recalculation" -- investment in future production that turns out to be unwanted. Think the dematerialization of capital rescues it from its contradictions, not spatio-temporal fixes. The material detritus of the circulation process ceases to be capital when it ends up devalued in the hands of the end consumer -- what isn't written off as "consumption" of that material is just deadweight loss for the consumer. That is to say, this sounds about right: "Devaluation, being ‘always on a particular route or at a particular place’, might serially scourge the earth even as capital in general, loyal to no country, remained free to pursue its own advantage."

This seems like the key paragraph to me -- "crude" as it may be:

But it is the broader and more systematic Marxist perspective that ultimately and properly contains Keynesianism within it, and a crude Marxist catechism may be in order. Where does an excess of savings come from? From unpaid labour – for example, that of Chinese or German workers. And why would such funds inflate asset bubbles rather than create useful investment? Because capital pursues not ‘high social returns’, but high private returns. And why should these have proved difficult to achieve, except by financial shell-games? Keynesians complain of an insufficiency of aggregate demand, restraining investment. The Marxist will simply add that this bespeaks inadequate wages, in the index of a class struggle going the way of owners rather than workers.

That is something clear to rally people with. Profit is being extracted from the social system by capitalists, who choose to sit on it or compete with one another in status games or use it in high-finance gambling games that don't yield productive activity but rather lead to zero-sum redistribution.

The other game, in theory, is to have banks give credit to the poor so that they can consume the surplus, as long as they creditors don't get wise to the flimsy quality of the credit -- suppressed wages are replaced by credit until banks refuse to lend, don't think they can squeeze it out of the debtors. This is the classic Ponzi scheme/bubble scenario, which inevitably happens when investment becomes speculation -- think Minsky and Fisher might be as apt as Marx and Harvey on this subject.

cocktail napkin notes about personal branding

1, Branding is a culture-wide idiom now for meaning-making. It provides the terms by which we conceive of and interpret the artistic, the authentic. It suggests the means of self-production, how to reflexively grasp the contours of the self and set goals for its elaboration. No longer dictated by tradition, the self can be conceived along the lines of a firm, with no limits to its growth or its lines of business.

2. Branding is a commodified and reified form of meaning, always already conceived for a market; it is meaning that is given coherence by the anticipated market. A personal brand is a deliberately commodifed form of self that anticipates the market's verdict to guide its development. Branding is meaning abstracted, decontextualized, reified. It is meta-meaning, an emodiment of the possibility to mean, with nothing particularly significant about the specific meaning evinced by any particular brand. The specifics are arbitrary; what matters is the market share and attention and loyalty it can garner, not what it putatively says.

3. Naomi Klein, recalling her No Logo in a Baffler article, notes that "creating meaning was the new act of production" for companies in the new economy -- reminiscent of Coca Cola's CEO declaring the beverage maker a "media company." As manufacturing jobs went abroad, the creative-class strata of jobs remained, the elaborate facets of brand management, marketing and design.

4. Brand equity is much more concrete and relevant to decisionmaking now, with the internet designed to measure it and actualize it, defining it with precision as a quantity (a number of hits, or followers, or searches, or what have you) rather than as nebulous balance-sheet estimate, or a vague quality of good will. Brands, thanks to the internet, are becoming means for rationally measuring communicative impact, for eradicating the nebulous guesswork of traditional marketing. Branding is embodied persuasion, the attention economy's equivalent of hard currency.

5. Brands are measurable concrete clusters of meaning, and their reach (the attention they can secure across a population) is a kind of brand equity that can be used to make rational calculations about risk and reward. It attempts to assimilate the mysterious process of self-fashioning and soulcraft into capitalist calculation, the sort of logic verified by social experience as "true" and practical and "realistic." It is not "realistic" to not regard oneself as a brand. It is an impractical romanticism, to be ridiculed.

6. The personal brand seems capable of capturing and controlling the risk we face in identity formation, giving us a calculus by which to proceed. This empties the self of its effervescent spontaneity, rendering it practically flexible instead; it can always be judged in terms of brand strategy regardless of the level of calculation in the moment. Retroactively, experiences are made to seem like brand-building ploys; anticipating this, we strategize more and more, let that frame of reference subsume more and more intimate and private behavior.

7. Wilde's link of socialism to unlimited individualism suggested this line of thought: Personal branding may be a manifestation of what the fabric of everyday life would be in a socialist society, in which it would incumbent on every individual to make explicit and manifest what his unique capabilities are, so that society could make the most use of them. There would be no hiding in corporate structures in meaningless wage work, no separating the work self from the private self. One would have to be an inveterate self-promoter to secure the social resources to fulfill one's potential, or to even develop the potential, expand the scope of ambition. Personal branding is an attempt to define one's unique blend of traits and interests as undeniably socially necessary. We need to justify our right to exist through some social code, some language which would most likely resemble branding. Self-marketing will not be eradicated but universalized in some utopian conceptions of socialism. Self-exploitation would supplant capitalist exploitation, which may be why some view digital sharecropping, volunteer free labor and the like as a revolutionary practice.

8. With the infiltration of the branding metaphor into our concepts of identity, branding can be misapprehended as one of the surest routes to self-knowledge -- the way to get to know oneself is to trace out one's abilities in terms of a brand and brand equity. This sort of thinking produces a reinforcing feedback loop. It seems empirical, the real self, socially validated and tested, supported and understood, not conjectural or provisional though certainly not fixed. Branding is a hermaneutic for identity and its social impact. It delimits the self to social impact and makes that impact interpretable.

9. Wrapped up in mediation and symbols; in the tenuous self and not the structuring systems that shape its form, its everyday reality. (?)

10. Brands are the total breakdown of communal collective identity, of relational identity. The personal brand obviates even the possibility of a "role player" sort of identity as in a traditional community. The personal brand grows itself on a balance sheet, and it is not limited by the context of a particular community. Like capital, it is theoretically infinite, which is why it appears preferable to the communal identity.

11. Ideas and innovation, immaterial wealth is credit coded in symbols and promises that steal material wealth from the future.

12. Flight from industrial materiality is a way of robbing the future, deferring materiality's limits (?)

13. Gamification seems like a another way to cement personal branding template -- leveling up, quantifying skills, doling out measured rewards, etc. Game mechanics are analogous to personal branding techniques

dialectical thinking about new capitalism, social media

A key question for me is whether social media "solves" the contradictions of new capitalism that shifts all sorts of risk onto workers while disembodying itself or whether it facilitates that brand of capitalism's emergence. I suppose it does both at once, which is why it has managed to thrive. That which facilitates the change in capitalism also ameliorates the change for subjects within capitalism. Social media creates new opportunities for capital while it creates new mechanisms of solace for the increasingly isolated subject. Social media extends the compensations of consumerism for the meaningless sphere of production. We lose real skills of production, gain skill in making/communicating our self.

new capitalism, social media

Miscellaneous thoughts inspired by Richard Sennett's Culture of New Capitalism:

1. Information technology deskills communication. It takes away the craft involved and makes it a brute force proposition -- matter of quantity and filtering rather than precision.

2. The ubiquity of advertising discourse and branding allows retailers to get rid of its own salesforce that once served as intermediary between consumer and goods, teaching them in a local context what to want and how to use it and what it is for. Now we rely on national advertising and personal networks for this information. It allows retailers to be big warehouses of stuff, like Wal-Mart.

3. Consumerism legitimates the subjectivity new relations of production require. It emphasizes future potential rather than achieved skill. The ability to desire new things instead of appreciate what one already has more thoroughly mirrors the denigration of skills in the new economy, which stresses flexibility, team building, starting over with skills development as the firm demands.

the flexible organization puts a premium on portable human skills, on being able to work on several problems with a shifting cast of characters, cutting loose action from context. The search for talent, in particular, focuses on people with a talent for problem solving no matter the context, a talent which skirts becoming too ingrown. Potential ability emphasizes the prospect of doing things one has yet to do; achievement and mastery are selfconsuming,the contexts and contents of knowledge used up in being used. Consumption of goods plays a key role in complementing and legitimating these experiences.

4. Sennett argues that "new capitalism" -- post-Fordism or whatever you want to call it -- changes workers relationship to time. That is, in its emphasis on flexibility and short-term goals and its dismissal of institutional culture and bureaucratic mediation, it shortens the scope of institutional time. Under old bureaucratic capitalism, a more stable work life supplied a coherent life narrative to workers and engendered committment, to the firm and to the delimited identity.

The secret of this militarized capitalism lay in time -- time structured so that people formed a life narrative and social relations within the institution. The price individuals paid for organized time could be freedom or individuality; the “iron cage” was both prison and home.

I wonder if social media now supplies a means for organizing people's experience of institutional time as real time -- the logical end point of new capitalism's development; which suggests Facebook is the ne plus ultra of the new capitalist firm). Does it supply users with an instantaneous sense of narrative agency that must then be constantly refreshing with further updates -- all this to compensate for the loss of less immediate and palpable but far more secure narrative agency derived from a stable life plan. "Insecurity is not just an unwanted consequence of upheavals in markets; rather, insecurity is programmed into the new institutional model. That is, insecurity does not happen to a new-style bureaucracy, it is made to happen." There needs to be counterveiling forces to this insecurity.

5. Sennett argues that new capitalism takes away the worker's sense of being useful -- institutional knowledge is neglected or destroyed, and firm organization and new communications technology allows for orders to be sent out wihtout workers mediating them or moderating them in accordance to their experience. They lose "voice" in Hirschman's sense. Again, social media compensates by permitting an ersatz usefulness through sharing -- social capital through voluntary participation, as though the nature of what is volunteered is as immaterial as the nature of what's consumed is immaterial to the pleasures of self it can facilitate. In capitalist society, capital perverts our sense of what is useful to what is profitable -- a worker has value to the extent of contributing marginally to the firm's profitability. "If only reformers could accept that usefulness is a public good, they could engage with the anxiety and fear of uselessness spawned by the most dynamic sectors of the modern economy."

Social media offers a concrete alternative to that ideology of value. But when social media in private hands means that control over the idea of "usefulness" remains private, subject to manipulation for other than the general, public good. Facebook can instigate sharing for marketing purposes, not out of social necessity; this undermines the social recognition that social media can otherwise organize. It becomes a field for personal branding within the capitalist ideology of value (profit) rather than a place to reorchestrate community hollowed out by capitalism.

6. Much childhood nostalgia is a nostalgia for the limits dependence imposed on us and for the deprivation that forced us to discover internal resources to compensate. How limits opened up the imagination, the exact opposite of how marketing encourages us to imagine the freedom of having no limit to what we can consume or be.

7. Sennett make the case that a return to craftsmanship can return the ideal of commitment to the lives of individuals -- an ideal systematically stripped by the flexible/precarious regime of new capitalism:

We’ve seen why commitment is in increasingly scarce supply in the new capitalism, in terms of institutional loyalty. The sentiment would be irrational — how can you commit to an institution which is not committed to you? Commitment is equally difficult in the new culture’s recipe for talent. Mental mobility eschews getting deeply involved; ability is focused on operational technique, as in the SAT, an exercise in problem solving rather than problem finding. Which means that a person becomes disengaged with the reality beyond his or her own control. Commitment poses a more profound question about the self-as-process. Commitment entails closure, forgoing possibilities for the sake of concentrating on one thing. You might miss out. The emerging culture puts enormous pressure on individuals not to miss out. Instead of closure, the culture counsels surrender — cutting ties in order to be free, particularly the ties bred in time.

This plays out across all sortos personal as well as professional relationships -- and most important, it plays out in our relationship to ourselves.