I was marvelling earlier at this piece of news that Salon had picked up, of the Miss Plastic Surgery beauty contest. Are the women even the competitors here? It seems like each plastic surgeon should have his or her own entry, someone who exemplifies their work. The woman is incidental to the surgery, after all. These contests can judge their artistry and their imagination; their craft and their artistic vision. Unless the patient had a serious hand in designing her future body, I don't see how she should be rewarded.
But then, the women in more conventional beauty contests are incidental to their own beauty, which is largely out of their control and is probably something they occasionally feel to be an alien force that tyrranizes them. The fake-beauty contest is a purification of the natural-beauty contest, revealing much more clearly the underlying premises, while making it a real competition, one in which will and determination are more obviously in play. Instead of God being the artist, a human is; this seems like an improvement, a leveling of the playing field, a removal of the arbitary quality of natural beauty. Natural-beauty contests are just glamorized lotteries.
Beauty has the tendency of making the woman who bears it irrelevant, objectifying her against her will, determining the course of her personality's development by so definitively shaping how people respond to her. The typical thinking on plastic surgery is that it makes beauty more tyrannical, as one has no real excuse (poverty, morality, dignity are not good enough) for not being beautiful once you can choose to be through elective surgeries. Staying beautiful along the (always repressive) lines dictated by current fashion becomes a cultural duty, an evolution of the traditional patriarchal strategies for keeping women subservient.
But plastic surgery demystifies beauty to a degree, reducing from an inexplicable quasi-holy blessing to a far less ambiguous signifier of wealth and privilege. Beauty's meaning, it's significance becomes simple, obvious. As beauty becomes a choice, it becomes measurable in dollar terms, becomes a commodity like any other, and thus just one fetish among many rather than culture's master fetish.
Just as automakers have their concept cars that they preview at auto shows to generate interst, surgeons can have their floor model women who exemplify the latest surgery techniques. The contest can drive the technological advances, while letting those advances shape new asthetics. What is beautiful can be separated from the natural all together, and we can start to appreciate as normal, as ideal, as beautiful, women with three breasts or with legs that are four feet long or with necks that are eight inches. What this might ultimately do is undermine any universal notion of beauty, and free everyone to feel beautiful in their own imagination. Somehow, I don't think this is how it will work out . . .
Monday, December 13, 2004
Friday, December 10, 2004
The Amway society
This piece from the NY Times magazine documents some truly creepy shit in the world of advertising, in which companies allegedly recruit volunteers to hype their products in casual conversations, becoming walking viral carriers of product placements. In he article Rob Walker describesthe "growing number of marketers organizing veritable armies of hired 'trendsetters' or 'influencers' or 'street teams' to execute 'seeding programs,' 'viral marketing,' 'guerrilla marketing.' What were once fringe tactics are now increasingly mainstream; there is even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association"
As Walker notes, there's an Invasion of the Body Snatchers overtone to this; your friends, your parents, they could all be in on it -- so that's why my Dad wouldn't stop talking about National Treasure at Thanksgiving! What makes it truly scary though is Walker's claim that these new trend-starters are doing it for no pay, are doing it merely to feel what it is like to wield influence in our culture (which shows you how low politics has sunk). This is narcisissm run amuck; it's like a commercialized version of Friendster, but instead of counting your total number of contacts ("friends"), you see how much of a niche product you can move off the shelves. You get "the upper hand" on people in a consumerized version of the information-is-power mantra. You get the gratification of that power, even though it's by proxy, power suited to a corporation's ends rather than your own. (But who minds being a proxy? Most people get their pleasure by proxy throiugh entertainment and spectatorship already.) "Word-of-mouth marketing leverages not simply the power of the trendsetter but also, as [ad exec] Balter puts it, 'the power of wanting to be a trendsetter.' "
Of course, journalists and editors do this sort of thing all the time; some reviewers seem to write for this reason alone, to fancy themselves broad taste-makers, hyping something obscure to see how far their reach is. It follows that people are evangelical about products not because they specifically care about them but because the power of being persuasive is addicting -- there's an immediate gratification in seeing yourself as the cause of some clearly recognizable, unmistakable event. If you want to be truly cynical, you might conclude that Evangelicals have the same attitude toward Jesus that these volunteer shills have toward pork sausage. There's an undeniable pleasure in proseltyzing, because you talk so much from the point of view of conviction and righteousness that you begin to absorb those qualities, inhabit them habitually. Walker ends just short of this note, suggesting that becoming a shill gives anomie casualties something to believe in, that most people are desperate to join anything (a new wrinkle on the Bowling Alone thesis perhaps -- the desire to belong to a group will be thoroughly commercialized and will revolve not around companionship but around salesmanship, the Amway society.)
Another explanation for why people might volunteer to do this is that it gives people a conversational purpose. It gives people a reason to talk to others, in a culture where we are subtly encouraged to be engaged always in a one-way conversation that we control with a TV, radio, or Internet connection. People want human contact, but the pretenses for it are endangered, always threatened with being technologically supplanted (i.e., I often e-mail people who sit ten feet from me rather than talk to them. This is office protocol). But this provides people with a mission that justifies their circumventing those barriers; it transforms conversation into the latest technology. Walker quotes an ad exec: ''I think this is a new kind of media.''
And in such a consumer-driven society, what else is there to talk about but shopping, commodities. If your friends started talking entirely of products, would you really notice a difference? (That might be going too far -- sorry). As an advertising plant, you'll have the scoop on new things (which makes you more interesting) and you'll have prepared talking points (which makes you more eloquent) and you'll have a clear-cut goal (which makes you more compelling). Indeed, Walker includes testimonials of how shy people are brought out of their shells by becoming volunteer marketers, walking advertisments. People are accustomed to paying attention to ads, people tolerate the invasiveness of ads far more than that of people. So if people behave more like ads, become ads, strangers are more likely to let them in. When strangers have a clear-cut sense of what others want -- to try to hawk something -- they are more likely to feel comfortable with the exchange. Walker tries to embrace all this under the idea of a "social market," where one labors not for money but for social rewards: prestige, favors, attention, etc. But this seems to me a stretch of the word market -- unless you're willing to grant that psychological needs can be charted on supply/demand graph, and friendship is subject to the law of diminishing marginal utility (each extra minute spent with a friend is marginally less satisfying).
What's fascinating to me is that the advertisers are now looking to bypass traditional media outlets and the cadre of editors and producers and go straight to consumers to be their water-carriers. Editors are used to being innundated with promotional materials (the bound galleys and reader copies are the tip of that iceberg) and perhaps not so impressed with the flood of free swag, but regular people are probably extremely flattered when they are given free junk, and probably then feel a responsibility to promote it -- like that shopworn tactic of sending people address labels unsolicited and incurring a debt of honor toward your charity organization. Walker discusses the "endowment effect," through which people attach more value to something given to them, or which they are allowed to own.
Some companies search for the people most likely to be effeectively viral: Walker describes the painstaking process companies go through to find what he calls "Magic People," those pathologically gregarious early-adopters whose self-esteem is more closely bound to being influential than the average person's. In other words, they are trying to find would be editors who aren't in the publishing business. But other word-of-mouth-advertising organizers are finally giving regular people the chance to feel like editors. This would seem to discount the notion that editors have any special insight at all, that anyone can start talking about anything, and people will be interested and persuaded -- provided its face to face, and that's the catch: people will tolerate nonsense in conversation, for the pleasure of human interaction, that they would never tolerate in a magazine or on TV, morning shows notwithstanding.
As Walker notes, there's an Invasion of the Body Snatchers overtone to this; your friends, your parents, they could all be in on it -- so that's why my Dad wouldn't stop talking about National Treasure at Thanksgiving! What makes it truly scary though is Walker's claim that these new trend-starters are doing it for no pay, are doing it merely to feel what it is like to wield influence in our culture (which shows you how low politics has sunk). This is narcisissm run amuck; it's like a commercialized version of Friendster, but instead of counting your total number of contacts ("friends"), you see how much of a niche product you can move off the shelves. You get "the upper hand" on people in a consumerized version of the information-is-power mantra. You get the gratification of that power, even though it's by proxy, power suited to a corporation's ends rather than your own. (But who minds being a proxy? Most people get their pleasure by proxy throiugh entertainment and spectatorship already.) "Word-of-mouth marketing leverages not simply the power of the trendsetter but also, as [ad exec] Balter puts it, 'the power of wanting to be a trendsetter.' "
Of course, journalists and editors do this sort of thing all the time; some reviewers seem to write for this reason alone, to fancy themselves broad taste-makers, hyping something obscure to see how far their reach is. It follows that people are evangelical about products not because they specifically care about them but because the power of being persuasive is addicting -- there's an immediate gratification in seeing yourself as the cause of some clearly recognizable, unmistakable event. If you want to be truly cynical, you might conclude that Evangelicals have the same attitude toward Jesus that these volunteer shills have toward pork sausage. There's an undeniable pleasure in proseltyzing, because you talk so much from the point of view of conviction and righteousness that you begin to absorb those qualities, inhabit them habitually. Walker ends just short of this note, suggesting that becoming a shill gives anomie casualties something to believe in, that most people are desperate to join anything (a new wrinkle on the Bowling Alone thesis perhaps -- the desire to belong to a group will be thoroughly commercialized and will revolve not around companionship but around salesmanship, the Amway society.)
Another explanation for why people might volunteer to do this is that it gives people a conversational purpose. It gives people a reason to talk to others, in a culture where we are subtly encouraged to be engaged always in a one-way conversation that we control with a TV, radio, or Internet connection. People want human contact, but the pretenses for it are endangered, always threatened with being technologically supplanted (i.e., I often e-mail people who sit ten feet from me rather than talk to them. This is office protocol). But this provides people with a mission that justifies their circumventing those barriers; it transforms conversation into the latest technology. Walker quotes an ad exec: ''I think this is a new kind of media.''
And in such a consumer-driven society, what else is there to talk about but shopping, commodities. If your friends started talking entirely of products, would you really notice a difference? (That might be going too far -- sorry). As an advertising plant, you'll have the scoop on new things (which makes you more interesting) and you'll have prepared talking points (which makes you more eloquent) and you'll have a clear-cut goal (which makes you more compelling). Indeed, Walker includes testimonials of how shy people are brought out of their shells by becoming volunteer marketers, walking advertisments. People are accustomed to paying attention to ads, people tolerate the invasiveness of ads far more than that of people. So if people behave more like ads, become ads, strangers are more likely to let them in. When strangers have a clear-cut sense of what others want -- to try to hawk something -- they are more likely to feel comfortable with the exchange. Walker tries to embrace all this under the idea of a "social market," where one labors not for money but for social rewards: prestige, favors, attention, etc. But this seems to me a stretch of the word market -- unless you're willing to grant that psychological needs can be charted on supply/demand graph, and friendship is subject to the law of diminishing marginal utility (each extra minute spent with a friend is marginally less satisfying).
What's fascinating to me is that the advertisers are now looking to bypass traditional media outlets and the cadre of editors and producers and go straight to consumers to be their water-carriers. Editors are used to being innundated with promotional materials (the bound galleys and reader copies are the tip of that iceberg) and perhaps not so impressed with the flood of free swag, but regular people are probably extremely flattered when they are given free junk, and probably then feel a responsibility to promote it -- like that shopworn tactic of sending people address labels unsolicited and incurring a debt of honor toward your charity organization. Walker discusses the "endowment effect," through which people attach more value to something given to them, or which they are allowed to own.
Some companies search for the people most likely to be effeectively viral: Walker describes the painstaking process companies go through to find what he calls "Magic People," those pathologically gregarious early-adopters whose self-esteem is more closely bound to being influential than the average person's. In other words, they are trying to find would be editors who aren't in the publishing business. But other word-of-mouth-advertising organizers are finally giving regular people the chance to feel like editors. This would seem to discount the notion that editors have any special insight at all, that anyone can start talking about anything, and people will be interested and persuaded -- provided its face to face, and that's the catch: people will tolerate nonsense in conversation, for the pleasure of human interaction, that they would never tolerate in a magazine or on TV, morning shows notwithstanding.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Movie-trailer jouissance
I don't go to the movies very often, but when I do, I'm always stunned by the previews. I'm also stunned that people quietly tolerate the commercials that are typically foisted upon you, but I've come to accept that most Americans view commercials as a legitimate form of entertainment and nothing to be skeptical or resentful over. Wasn't part of the attraction of the theater the freedom from such messages? Didn't you pay your toll to enter a commercial-free space? I guess not. (By the way, this may be the future, I think, where freedom from exposure to commercials will be seen as a privelege worth paying for, and commercial free zones will become new enclaves for the elite).
Coming-attractions trailers are more tolerable because custom justifies their presence to a degree, but what stuns me about them is how efficiently they make all movies seem equally repugnant -- trailers flatten all films out to predictable moments of sitcom cleverness intersperced with rapidly edited scenes of sex (if its a romance), explosions (if its action) or landscapes (if its an art film). If there's a voiceover, it drips with condescending pretension, soaringly confident in the film's ability to manipulate you as planned, assuming it can predict your emotional reaction to every one of the film's carefully choreographed moments. Who wants to consent to this kind of social engineering? Doesn't everyone recoil from this? Obviously not, since these previews keep getting made. My stubbornness to resist manipulation likely blinds me to the obvious, that for most normal people, being manipulated is entertaining, it's the essence of why they go to see movies. They want their emotions predictably exercised, the way you might work your abs and pecs at the gym. These trailers are likely carefully focus-group-tested (I imagine test audiences strapped in with electrocardiograms) to establish their efficiency as emotional stimuli, thus they are ideal occasions for moviegoers to calibrate their own responsiveness. If they don't react as the preview seems to anticipate, they aren't filled with superiority and disgust (as I, shameless elitist, am) but with a sense of foreboding, that they are culturally out of step, that their chance to remain easily entertained is fading. I've always felt (to my detriment) that it's shameful to be easily entertained, when it's really a great accomplishment, a suspension of ego, a surrender to a collective norm, an assent given to one's culture, a vote cast with one's deepest nature, with one's ability to feel pleasure; if one is capable of being stirred by previews and by ads and by all of culture's various ruses and pitches, one might convert the drudgery of the status quo into a perpetual buzz of jouissance. Conformity isn't weakness, nor is it easy, as cultural critics typically suggest in their fulminations (I know I have). It may be the supreme act of rationalized pleasure calculation, directing effort where it will be rewarded with the most happiness. And that makes it even scarier.
Coming-attractions trailers are more tolerable because custom justifies their presence to a degree, but what stuns me about them is how efficiently they make all movies seem equally repugnant -- trailers flatten all films out to predictable moments of sitcom cleverness intersperced with rapidly edited scenes of sex (if its a romance), explosions (if its action) or landscapes (if its an art film). If there's a voiceover, it drips with condescending pretension, soaringly confident in the film's ability to manipulate you as planned, assuming it can predict your emotional reaction to every one of the film's carefully choreographed moments. Who wants to consent to this kind of social engineering? Doesn't everyone recoil from this? Obviously not, since these previews keep getting made. My stubbornness to resist manipulation likely blinds me to the obvious, that for most normal people, being manipulated is entertaining, it's the essence of why they go to see movies. They want their emotions predictably exercised, the way you might work your abs and pecs at the gym. These trailers are likely carefully focus-group-tested (I imagine test audiences strapped in with electrocardiograms) to establish their efficiency as emotional stimuli, thus they are ideal occasions for moviegoers to calibrate their own responsiveness. If they don't react as the preview seems to anticipate, they aren't filled with superiority and disgust (as I, shameless elitist, am) but with a sense of foreboding, that they are culturally out of step, that their chance to remain easily entertained is fading. I've always felt (to my detriment) that it's shameful to be easily entertained, when it's really a great accomplishment, a suspension of ego, a surrender to a collective norm, an assent given to one's culture, a vote cast with one's deepest nature, with one's ability to feel pleasure; if one is capable of being stirred by previews and by ads and by all of culture's various ruses and pitches, one might convert the drudgery of the status quo into a perpetual buzz of jouissance. Conformity isn't weakness, nor is it easy, as cultural critics typically suggest in their fulminations (I know I have). It may be the supreme act of rationalized pleasure calculation, directing effort where it will be rewarded with the most happiness. And that makes it even scarier.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Traveling: the pursuit of mediocrity
In this travel piece in Slate about Andalusia, Elisabeth Eaves rightly complains about the wiser-than-thou tone of those travel guides that encourage you to stay away from the things that tourists do. Often these are the very things one has traveled for, often we want to experience the cliches, if only to be able to authentically dismiss them later. It's no good being better than something you've never even experienced.
It's fruitless to oppose authentic experience to cliched, touristic experiences: Since the many places that survive on tourism are earnestly and overwhelmingly engaged in the manufacture of prefab touristic experiences, these experiences are the authentic ones; their fundamental to the nature of the place you've come. Everything else is everyday life, which you'll be unable to penetrate adequately without adopting the place as your new home. You might take away impressions of this everyday life, but these differences you note will serve only to highlight the everyday life in wherever you're from and make you understand the contours of that better -- a worthy endeavor for sure, but providing you with nothing more authentic about where you're visiting. As a tourist you always taint the data you're collecting about wherever you are, so there's no point hoping for some anthropologically pure experience.
What traveling does, and what Eaves hints at in her insistence on "having fun" instead of pursuing the "Real" Andalusian life, is enable you to enjoy the mediocre with a clear conscience, with your ignorance about the place allowing you to be tolerant of second-rate experiences. You don't mind hearing a crappy band play in a crappy club, or eating crappy food in a crapppy restaurant because you don't know any better, and you are happy to trust your instincts and then not judge yourself. The brevity of your visit makes you see the fruitlessness in weighing your decisions too carefully, and this helps you to lower your standards without fretting about it. In a sense, this is what "fun" is: suspending judgment for sensual immersion. Eaves puts it this way: "I cling to the hope that visiting a new place can be about more than what's hot and what's not; that I can still do a few things without mediation. After all, I travel partly to escape the sort of place where knowing the names of obscure bands has become a substitute for enjoying music, and getting into the newest restaurant a stand-in for appreciating food." That sounds very noble, but the upshot of it is that people with discriminating tastes are shallow, and people who immerse themselves sensually in whatever presents itself to them are "real" and authentic, unmediated. Is every aesthetic choice, then, mediated; every application of criteria the importation of some shallow bias smuggled in from some media item one was exposed to? I hope not, though that's the kind of doomsday scenario Baudrillardian macroanalysis of media culture tends to imply, that all the criteria we hold as essential to defining our real being (reduced to the tastes we hold, in a culture that puts so much emphasis on consumption and defines freedom as the freedom of choice between plasma or LCD flat-panel televisions) are really things we've adopted from somewhere else, are really the dogma of someone or something else, some institution, that we have absorbed and have come to feel a deeply personal stake in. A grim thought.
Anyway traveling allows you to flip things so that you delight in mediocrity rather than discrimination, and enjoy ignorance rather then the delight of flexing what things you've learned about the business of life (which Eaves hastilty dismisses as "a vast, shallow pool of knowledge." At home, it's pleasant to know things. Away, it's pleasant to feel no shame in knowing nothing. So from this perspective, you don't travel to discover anything except your own ignorance, and to see what kind of half-assed encounters you can Mr. Magoo your way into.
It's fruitless to oppose authentic experience to cliched, touristic experiences: Since the many places that survive on tourism are earnestly and overwhelmingly engaged in the manufacture of prefab touristic experiences, these experiences are the authentic ones; their fundamental to the nature of the place you've come. Everything else is everyday life, which you'll be unable to penetrate adequately without adopting the place as your new home. You might take away impressions of this everyday life, but these differences you note will serve only to highlight the everyday life in wherever you're from and make you understand the contours of that better -- a worthy endeavor for sure, but providing you with nothing more authentic about where you're visiting. As a tourist you always taint the data you're collecting about wherever you are, so there's no point hoping for some anthropologically pure experience.
What traveling does, and what Eaves hints at in her insistence on "having fun" instead of pursuing the "Real" Andalusian life, is enable you to enjoy the mediocre with a clear conscience, with your ignorance about the place allowing you to be tolerant of second-rate experiences. You don't mind hearing a crappy band play in a crappy club, or eating crappy food in a crapppy restaurant because you don't know any better, and you are happy to trust your instincts and then not judge yourself. The brevity of your visit makes you see the fruitlessness in weighing your decisions too carefully, and this helps you to lower your standards without fretting about it. In a sense, this is what "fun" is: suspending judgment for sensual immersion. Eaves puts it this way: "I cling to the hope that visiting a new place can be about more than what's hot and what's not; that I can still do a few things without mediation. After all, I travel partly to escape the sort of place where knowing the names of obscure bands has become a substitute for enjoying music, and getting into the newest restaurant a stand-in for appreciating food." That sounds very noble, but the upshot of it is that people with discriminating tastes are shallow, and people who immerse themselves sensually in whatever presents itself to them are "real" and authentic, unmediated. Is every aesthetic choice, then, mediated; every application of criteria the importation of some shallow bias smuggled in from some media item one was exposed to? I hope not, though that's the kind of doomsday scenario Baudrillardian macroanalysis of media culture tends to imply, that all the criteria we hold as essential to defining our real being (reduced to the tastes we hold, in a culture that puts so much emphasis on consumption and defines freedom as the freedom of choice between plasma or LCD flat-panel televisions) are really things we've adopted from somewhere else, are really the dogma of someone or something else, some institution, that we have absorbed and have come to feel a deeply personal stake in. A grim thought.
Anyway traveling allows you to flip things so that you delight in mediocrity rather than discrimination, and enjoy ignorance rather then the delight of flexing what things you've learned about the business of life (which Eaves hastilty dismisses as "a vast, shallow pool of knowledge." At home, it's pleasant to know things. Away, it's pleasant to feel no shame in knowing nothing. So from this perspective, you don't travel to discover anything except your own ignorance, and to see what kind of half-assed encounters you can Mr. Magoo your way into.
Monday, December 06, 2004
The rich inner life
In an essay in the most recent New Republic, Lee Siegal makes the case that the culture industry's depiction of gangsters influences American's perceptions of themselves as "consumers, as beings driven by appetite and enticed by America's promise of absolute gratification on just about every front," and that The Sopranos dramatizes psychological interiority gone amuck: "The show is a semi-comic playing out to the absurd and bitter end of the endless contemporary revelations of inner life and private life that neutralize our attempts to make sense of right and wrong." This latter point smacks almost of fundamentalism: the endless dramatization of the casuistry of mitigating circumstances has eroded all faith in moral certainties, to the point where obvious evil can come to seem justified and excused on its own terms without need for forgiveness. Reality TV, from this point of view, is an endless rehearsal of how one plumbs interior depths to rationalize behavior, TV becomes a training course in how to rationalize inappropriate behavior.
This seems right to me, but only in its consumerist aspects. What commercial TV does, is raison d'etre, is to provide the viewer with arguments that justify his or her purchase of unnecessary goods, to eradicate the resistance that might come from common sense, or abstract logic, or conservative traditions. Psychological interiority is a means to that end. Typically, enamored of our own alleged depth, we invert things; we presume our depth preexists the ads, the programs that cater to it, that dignify it, that enshrine it as the storehouse of our essence. The space of our rich inner life constitutes our real self, we think, and the larger that space is, the better. But it may be that that inner-life space is carved out by the very pitches that presume its existence, that the rich inner life is in fact a retreat from life (which consists primarily in social engagement, not withdrawal) and a collapse to a far more vulnerable state where the lack of social connection makes one prone to all sorts of insecurities about oneself and one's place. The glamorization of the rich inner life is the primary achievement of the culture industry, since what it sells is the kind of ripe fantasy that only one with a rich inner life would prefer to actual living. The rich iner life is the space where passive entertainment happens. It is compensatory for a stifled life; liberating the interior life, encouraging the imagination to be more free -- these aren't increases in freedom but the signs of one's being deprived of it, of having one's real scope limited. The "deeper" we are, the stronger are our chains.
We believe this interiority is necessary to understand ourselves, our deeper motives. But we don't understand ourselves only when we are isolated from social involvement, as we are to an increasing degree. Interiority makes that alienation worse while it masquerades as its cure. Siegel points out how The Sopranos dramatizes that inwardness is no protection from the vagaries of "real life." It becomes "absurd" when confronted with the more powerful explanatory logics of exploitation and greed. This is exactly right, and highlights the function of interiority: to mask exploitation and encourage individuals (newly minted by capitalism's enormous emphasis on the atomized consciousness) to assume personal responsibility for how they have been shaped by systemic forces much larger than them; this nicely protects that system from scrutiny and protest while ensuring for that system a more insecure, pliable and compliant populace.
The richness of our inner lives is an illusion, an effect rather than a cause of the way commodities are perceived. It is in fact that commodities that have the rich inner life, which they transfer to us, which we imagine we access and assimilate to ourselves by acquiring them. Goods replace the social contacts, the interpersonal interactions that create one's character, and thereby seem to embody the result of those interactions, they seem to possess the characteristics of the social exchange they have supplanted. We buy the goods thinking we are expressing an inner life through them, but really we are trying to stock the fictitious, nebulous inner life with the qualities we see in these goods. Anthropological accounts of consumerism, like that of Mary Douglas, stresses that commmodities serve as a communicative language -- this seems right, but under capitalism, this discourse of goods becomes the master discourse, becomes the essentially authentic way to express oneself, to express and thereby discover truths about oneself, about one's inner life.
So, in the absence of social life, we develop an inner life, which seems feeble, barren even as the advertising and entertainment cultures insist that it is always integral, boundless, the core of our being, the purpose of our consciousness. To stock this inner life, our new responsibility, we participate with new fervidness in consumerism, as this provides us the tools with which to articulate that inner life in the way recognized as authentic, to write a history of our interiority, to ground that interiority in material things. Unlike our actual real lives, which are limited by mortality, our inner lives are entirely unlimited, can grow and grow perpetually, just like the capitalist economy. Th labor of building our inner self, of forging our identity, such ceaseless and tireless work but of unique and lasting interest to ourselves (if no one else) is the best possible compensation for the lack of meaningful work in the society at large. Who cares if you spend your day processing medical bills. The real work you're doing in life is getting to know the real you, buying the products that will help you discover whether you, say, like classical music or have an aptitude for speaking Russian.
This seems right to me, but only in its consumerist aspects. What commercial TV does, is raison d'etre, is to provide the viewer with arguments that justify his or her purchase of unnecessary goods, to eradicate the resistance that might come from common sense, or abstract logic, or conservative traditions. Psychological interiority is a means to that end. Typically, enamored of our own alleged depth, we invert things; we presume our depth preexists the ads, the programs that cater to it, that dignify it, that enshrine it as the storehouse of our essence. The space of our rich inner life constitutes our real self, we think, and the larger that space is, the better. But it may be that that inner-life space is carved out by the very pitches that presume its existence, that the rich inner life is in fact a retreat from life (which consists primarily in social engagement, not withdrawal) and a collapse to a far more vulnerable state where the lack of social connection makes one prone to all sorts of insecurities about oneself and one's place. The glamorization of the rich inner life is the primary achievement of the culture industry, since what it sells is the kind of ripe fantasy that only one with a rich inner life would prefer to actual living. The rich iner life is the space where passive entertainment happens. It is compensatory for a stifled life; liberating the interior life, encouraging the imagination to be more free -- these aren't increases in freedom but the signs of one's being deprived of it, of having one's real scope limited. The "deeper" we are, the stronger are our chains.
We believe this interiority is necessary to understand ourselves, our deeper motives. But we don't understand ourselves only when we are isolated from social involvement, as we are to an increasing degree. Interiority makes that alienation worse while it masquerades as its cure. Siegel points out how The Sopranos dramatizes that inwardness is no protection from the vagaries of "real life." It becomes "absurd" when confronted with the more powerful explanatory logics of exploitation and greed. This is exactly right, and highlights the function of interiority: to mask exploitation and encourage individuals (newly minted by capitalism's enormous emphasis on the atomized consciousness) to assume personal responsibility for how they have been shaped by systemic forces much larger than them; this nicely protects that system from scrutiny and protest while ensuring for that system a more insecure, pliable and compliant populace.
The richness of our inner lives is an illusion, an effect rather than a cause of the way commodities are perceived. It is in fact that commodities that have the rich inner life, which they transfer to us, which we imagine we access and assimilate to ourselves by acquiring them. Goods replace the social contacts, the interpersonal interactions that create one's character, and thereby seem to embody the result of those interactions, they seem to possess the characteristics of the social exchange they have supplanted. We buy the goods thinking we are expressing an inner life through them, but really we are trying to stock the fictitious, nebulous inner life with the qualities we see in these goods. Anthropological accounts of consumerism, like that of Mary Douglas, stresses that commmodities serve as a communicative language -- this seems right, but under capitalism, this discourse of goods becomes the master discourse, becomes the essentially authentic way to express oneself, to express and thereby discover truths about oneself, about one's inner life.
So, in the absence of social life, we develop an inner life, which seems feeble, barren even as the advertising and entertainment cultures insist that it is always integral, boundless, the core of our being, the purpose of our consciousness. To stock this inner life, our new responsibility, we participate with new fervidness in consumerism, as this provides us the tools with which to articulate that inner life in the way recognized as authentic, to write a history of our interiority, to ground that interiority in material things. Unlike our actual real lives, which are limited by mortality, our inner lives are entirely unlimited, can grow and grow perpetually, just like the capitalist economy. Th labor of building our inner self, of forging our identity, such ceaseless and tireless work but of unique and lasting interest to ourselves (if no one else) is the best possible compensation for the lack of meaningful work in the society at large. Who cares if you spend your day processing medical bills. The real work you're doing in life is getting to know the real you, buying the products that will help you discover whether you, say, like classical music or have an aptitude for speaking Russian.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
A fish in a barrel
For a laugh, I decided to take the most recent book by self-proclaimed "comic sociologist" David Brooks (On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and always have) in the Future Tense -- and please let me know if you understand what that subtitle's supposed to mean) out of the office free pile and give it a read. I had some idea it would be awful, but not as awful as it actually is, painfully unfunny, like watching an endless rerun of Home Improvement, and filled with outrageous generalizations and spiteful barbs directed at anyone who won't march to the beat of the status quo. In the world of Brooks, if you refuse to acknowledge the inherent superiority of that which is popular, you are some kind of smug elitist who is ignorant to the ways in which he himself is an even worse conformist. If you disagree in any way with the prevailing ideological consensus (unless its to believe in something even more retrograde), you are a pretentious egghead enamored of your own phony creativity. Now, creativity is certainly an overapplied term, and it is often a cloak for some kind of frivolous consumerism when it's not serving as a prod to make one feel insecure about how "self-actualized" one is. But the creative impulse, the impulse to imagine other possibilities than that which exists is an important one, and as "American" as all the other things Brooks celebrates, such as the urge to be mediocre (in his celebration of "tranquil" suburban life lived at "par") and the refusal to confront responsibility (in the form of frequent relocation). To him, as to his successor in waiting, the marginally less nauseating Chuck Klosterman, the status quo is unassailable due to its sheer existence. What is, is inevitable, and the choices you pretend to make are fruitless, though they never come right out and say this and typically celebrate freedom of choice -- that's because they think these choices are meaningless, and that once you believe they are significant, that judgement matters in culture, you become an out-of-touch elitist. Brooks is relentless in his hip-to-be-square inversions which make decidedly, simplistically sensual things like pro-wrestling matches and stock-car races and dignified, and make challenging things like independant film seem like empty pretension. The lie is in opposing these to one another. One is pointedly devoid of intellectual content and the other isn't; Brooks wants to equate them because they both require the expenditure of time. But that doesn't make them comparable in any way, any more than meaningful and meaningless work can be compared in terms of their wages. He hates artists most of all, and sees anyone forced into a life of poverty by refusing to cooperate with corporate America and its standardization and imposing of empty work as borgeois-bohemian fakers too self-obsessed to see the joys of a really good BBQ and a great game of golf -- you know, the things that matter in life.
This kind of error defines his style: bogus equivelances (knowing NASCAR drivers is equal to knowing foreign languages or political events or history), mistaking causes for effects, thinking description constitutes analysis, the nominalistic fallacy of thinking a label defines a phenomenon, etc. -- in Marx's words, forgetting that the point is to change the world, not simply explain it. But that sort of efficacy on humankind's part is exactly what he wishes to deny. You can't change what exists, you should simply accept it and stop complaining, and make some jokes about it if that helps you, too. In true Panglossian fashion, he doesn't care about how things came to be how they are (since it doesn't matter, since it was inevitable anyway, and therefore unquestionable, as good as it can be) so he has no basis upon which to evaluate their justice, and when he wants to evaluate, he simply falls back on his prejudices that preceded his "fieldwork," such as it is -- so Blue State behavior, in his terminology, is inherently bad, false, contrived; and Red State behavior is inherently misunderstood, pure, sincere, etc. With no historical analysis, his judgments are wholly arbitrary (and extremely intrusive, unless you already agree with him, and are in the target audience, I suppose, for this book -- that is, you are a Everybody Loves Raymond-watching lawn-care obsessive living in prefab house built in last two or three years (to stereotype in his fashion).
Brooks can be summed up with an anecdote: I once was watching a TV interview with Robert Loggia, who was promoting the film Independence Day. The host had the timerity to question the film's merits, and Loggia angrily replied that the millions of people who have gone to see the movie prove that it's good. No one forced them to see it. They chose it, and millions of people can't be wrong. Then he said that therefore, "if you don't like Independence Day you're an idiot." That's basically Brooks attitude, and no amount of pointing the "smug" accusation at liberals will change the fundamental self-contented hubris of his stance.
Brooks wants to argue that to be American is to be a hopeful idealist, on a holy mission for improvement to fulfill the land's holy destiny, only to make that broad stereotype cohere, he has to remove those Americans who don't fit, namely the poor, who make a mockery of American self-righteousness and highlight the selfish greed of the exceptional Americans Brooks wants to cheerlead for. To simply delete the poor from his analysis of America, as Brooks openly admits he is doing (he says he doesn't find them very interesting), is to suggest they aren't Americans at all, they're instead a resident alien workforce, slaves in all but name, who have no prospects, whose dreams don't figure into the national drama? They suffer? So what. No one who matters pays attention to them or notices how they live anyway. Anyone critical of anything American is coyly dismissed in his wide-eyed tone, which communicates how silly he thinks such thinkers like Marx, de Toqueville, Baudrillard, Whyte, Reisman, etc., are without openly rejecting them and without his having to produce any actual arguments against their points. His tone is supposed to have done the work for him. He refuses to register the decline in happiness and satisfaction most Americans have felt, either in the rich body of (non-comic) sociology that attests to it or in the anecodotal evidence that's out there. He refuses to see relentless striving as irrefutable evidence of perpetual dissatisfaction and insecurity. He just asserts that it is a holy mission, citing a specious body of nationalist propaganda, and leaves it at that.
The only positive remark I have about the book is that he cites a work that seems truly neglected to me, Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Capitalism. This is an actual argument about the development of capitalism, and it's brilliant.
This kind of error defines his style: bogus equivelances (knowing NASCAR drivers is equal to knowing foreign languages or political events or history), mistaking causes for effects, thinking description constitutes analysis, the nominalistic fallacy of thinking a label defines a phenomenon, etc. -- in Marx's words, forgetting that the point is to change the world, not simply explain it. But that sort of efficacy on humankind's part is exactly what he wishes to deny. You can't change what exists, you should simply accept it and stop complaining, and make some jokes about it if that helps you, too. In true Panglossian fashion, he doesn't care about how things came to be how they are (since it doesn't matter, since it was inevitable anyway, and therefore unquestionable, as good as it can be) so he has no basis upon which to evaluate their justice, and when he wants to evaluate, he simply falls back on his prejudices that preceded his "fieldwork," such as it is -- so Blue State behavior, in his terminology, is inherently bad, false, contrived; and Red State behavior is inherently misunderstood, pure, sincere, etc. With no historical analysis, his judgments are wholly arbitrary (and extremely intrusive, unless you already agree with him, and are in the target audience, I suppose, for this book -- that is, you are a Everybody Loves Raymond-watching lawn-care obsessive living in prefab house built in last two or three years (to stereotype in his fashion).
Brooks can be summed up with an anecdote: I once was watching a TV interview with Robert Loggia, who was promoting the film Independence Day. The host had the timerity to question the film's merits, and Loggia angrily replied that the millions of people who have gone to see the movie prove that it's good. No one forced them to see it. They chose it, and millions of people can't be wrong. Then he said that therefore, "if you don't like Independence Day you're an idiot." That's basically Brooks attitude, and no amount of pointing the "smug" accusation at liberals will change the fundamental self-contented hubris of his stance.
Brooks wants to argue that to be American is to be a hopeful idealist, on a holy mission for improvement to fulfill the land's holy destiny, only to make that broad stereotype cohere, he has to remove those Americans who don't fit, namely the poor, who make a mockery of American self-righteousness and highlight the selfish greed of the exceptional Americans Brooks wants to cheerlead for. To simply delete the poor from his analysis of America, as Brooks openly admits he is doing (he says he doesn't find them very interesting), is to suggest they aren't Americans at all, they're instead a resident alien workforce, slaves in all but name, who have no prospects, whose dreams don't figure into the national drama? They suffer? So what. No one who matters pays attention to them or notices how they live anyway. Anyone critical of anything American is coyly dismissed in his wide-eyed tone, which communicates how silly he thinks such thinkers like Marx, de Toqueville, Baudrillard, Whyte, Reisman, etc., are without openly rejecting them and without his having to produce any actual arguments against their points. His tone is supposed to have done the work for him. He refuses to register the decline in happiness and satisfaction most Americans have felt, either in the rich body of (non-comic) sociology that attests to it or in the anecodotal evidence that's out there. He refuses to see relentless striving as irrefutable evidence of perpetual dissatisfaction and insecurity. He just asserts that it is a holy mission, citing a specious body of nationalist propaganda, and leaves it at that.
The only positive remark I have about the book is that he cites a work that seems truly neglected to me, Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Capitalism. This is an actual argument about the development of capitalism, and it's brilliant.
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Narrative sickness
My continued illness has me ruminating still about the story we constuct to explain our symptoms. Once we decide to enter into the medical-discourse game by going to a doctor, it becomes important that all the symptoms we think to mention fit the etiology of some disease. The details of self we share must conform to the story of some sickness, otherwise we will not experience the closure we're looking for, we won't be liberated from the panic that is the random ebb and flow that really is our life by having a formulaic plot to conform to; we won't have a future for ourselves that we can recognize, envision, elaborate, and accomodate.
That is where the heightened self-awareness that stems from (or constitutes in some epistemological way) sickness becomes a real problem -- the self-awareness makes us dredge up more and more symptoms, which become more and more difficult to fit into the narrative; we want to scrutinize ourselves into becoming a special case, transcending the formula that we yearned for -- the contradiction that binds us is thus revealed: we want a predictable, conforming life to save us from the terrors of uncertainty, the chance that we might be somewhere unpredictably awful tomorrow; and at the same time we want to be more important as individuals than any formulaic story that could be told about us, that is, we want to believe we are capable of anything, even of inventing a wholly personal illness for themselves. Hence, hypochondria as a social norm, and the secret fantasy of having a syndrome named after you.
That is where the heightened self-awareness that stems from (or constitutes in some epistemological way) sickness becomes a real problem -- the self-awareness makes us dredge up more and more symptoms, which become more and more difficult to fit into the narrative; we want to scrutinize ourselves into becoming a special case, transcending the formula that we yearned for -- the contradiction that binds us is thus revealed: we want a predictable, conforming life to save us from the terrors of uncertainty, the chance that we might be somewhere unpredictably awful tomorrow; and at the same time we want to be more important as individuals than any formulaic story that could be told about us, that is, we want to believe we are capable of anything, even of inventing a wholly personal illness for themselves. Hence, hypochondria as a social norm, and the secret fantasy of having a syndrome named after you.
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