Does the ideology of design truly deliver on its promise of a democratization of aesthetics, or does it mire people more fixedly in the dreary procedures of consumerism?
Sunt lacrimae rerum. – Virgil
Recently I found opportunity to watch Objectified, a 2009 documentary by filmmaker Gary Hustwit, whose previous outing, Helvetica (2007), peeled back the many-layered mystery of that ubiquitous font style. (Who’d have thought Helvetica, or “Helvetty” as Hipster Runoff’s Carles calls it, would prove so revolutionary? Send words out sans serif and liberate nations!) Hustwit brings must the same sensibility to Objectified that he did to Helvetica, one which consists of extended montages while plinky-plonky indie rock drones on in accompaniment. ¶ I requested Objectified from Netflix because I thought it might offer some incisive critical commentary on design and designy things. I figured that any self-respecting documentarian wouldn’t put himself to the trouble of making a film if he lacked interest in closely scrutinizing his subject. What purpose do documentaries serve, after all, if not to present the sort of sustained and objective (admittedly a fraught term) treatment otherwise lacking in popular media generally? Documentaries ought to be a countervailing force against the marketing slogan, the sound bite. ¶ Objectified, unfortunately, does not live up to this expectation. It makes a pretense of objectivity, but mostly Objectified takes an uncritical, even loving, approach to its subject. Many feet of film (or perhaps megabytes of memory) are spent in lavish regard for design and the fingerprints it leaves all over both public and private space. In this respect, Objectified leaves one with the impression of its being more a visual love letter to designers and other luminaries of the creative class — many of whom appear in the film — than a documentary, properly speaking.
My experience viewing Objectified I can best describe as one of irritation shading into revulsion. The self-indulgence of leaving the camera trained on objects undergoing manufacture annoyed me, but I chalked it off to it being sort of cinematic Hamburger Helper — filler meant to extend what is really quite meager conceit. My annoyance turned to revulsion, however, precisely as a consequence of the attritive effect of these very scenes. In their frequency and duration, these scenes helped (quite unintentionally I’m sure) the film effect a sort of deconstructive jump in place: Certain implications quite other to the filmmaker’s design (pun intended) began to as it were peek through that which actually appeared on the screen. The effect of this rather reminded me of some ideas of the French theorist Pierre Macherey, who in his 1966 work For a Theory of Literary Production identifies two registers inhering in all literary discourse: the “spoken” and the “unspoken.” This is so because literary texts “say what they do not say,” an admittedly cryptic way of expressing the idea that the particular way of wording the literary representation of some subject is at the same time a suppression of other ways of wording, and thus, of representing, this same subject. The latter are banished to “the margins” of the literary text. The actual wording appearing on the page stands as simply one rendering among myriad possible others, yet one which becomes valorized (in the Marxian sense) simply by virtue of actually being on the page. Criticism conducted in the spirit of Macherey, then, is an act of recuperation; the “spoken,” i. e., the literary representation appearing on the page, presents a point of entry through which the many marginalized other significations can be accessed in order to be brought dialectically to bear on the former — in order to produce what the French Marxist thinker (and uxorcide) Louis Althusser (who was Macherey’s teacher) calls a “symptomatic reading.” Read the rest of this entry »
Networked sociality online once seemed to promise a democratized neo-public sphere in which real-world cultural disadvantages could be suppressed and meritorious ideas could get as much attention as they deserve. All the biases that come from the ways we are embedded in society — e.g., the ways our class background inadvertently shines through, the ways our given, unalterable identity is prejudged — could be suspended; and what we had to say could in a sense be presented as pure content, untainted by the form our identity would otherwise give to it. In his 
I thought I had heard it all when I read an 
In the 1968 hippie exploitation film Psych-Out, Jack Nicholson plays Stoney, a San Francisco rock musician caught up in the competing forces of hedonism, commercialism, idealism and sentimentality. Stoney has uncomplicated desires: He wants to do his thing, play his music, earn a little bread, and get some lovin’ whenever and with whomever he can. Being part of the San Francisco hippie scene seems to grant his wishes while supplying a self-congratulatory veneer for his behavior — by pleasing himself, he can believe he is changing the world, is making a stand for personal freedom.
Is there any place where we can get away from ourselves? The insistent therapeutic command to find ourselves seems to have led to a surfeit of identity, to an oppressive self-consciousness that consists mainly of an awareness that we are fundamentally threatened with the danger of being misrecognized, of being misconstrued as someone we are not.
Zuckerberg Tyrannos: The improbable, baby-faced founder of Facebook — whose first name, for those who have been living in a cave (or, at least without Facebook) the past several years, is Mark — recently 
In the teleology of traditional Marxism, the working class was to become so immiserated by exploitation and exclusion that it would inevitably throw off its chains, expropriate the expropriators, and establish a new egalitarian social order based on the end of alienation and the maximum fulfillment of humanity’s capabilities as as species. But along the way, in the 20th century, something happened. The bondage of capitalist relations seemed to cease to be so chafing. Instead of ever-increasing misery, consumerism appeared to unleash desire and the potential for elaborate individual gratification hitherto undreamed of.
October, a journal of art criticism, devoted its Fall 2006 
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