Dig a Phony: Identity, Consumerism and the “Jelly-Jar Problem”

Is it possible to live a fulfilling life without participating in and elaborating a consumerist code that according to countless social theorists serves to supply us with our sense of ourselves?

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.

While “Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock plays on the soundtrack, Stoney pays a visit to his curmudgeonly, AWOL band mate, Dave (Dean Stockwell), who apparently lives in a rooftop lean-to built against a giant billboard overlooking Haight Ashbury. Stoney wants to convince Dave to play a gig that might secure them a recording contract. Dave proceeds to challenge several of Stoney’s articles of faith (clip): free love is nothing but a choice, he contends; selling out is irrelevant to “feeling good”; the truth is a matter of what works;  common sense of the kick-a-stone variety refutes all forms of idealism. “All the games have to go, man,” Dave tells Stoney, “because it’s all one big plastic hassle.” To which Stoney retorts, “So live in a jelly jar?” Read the rest of this entry »

Running in Place: The Traveler’s Last Pose

“Supermodernity” fulfills the implicit promise of the internet. Once we are everywhere and nowhere at once, fully uploaded, fully contained, there will be no place left to go.

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.

Once upon a time, we needed to travel to escape the way our identity was inscribed in the spaces we passed through on ordinary days — the knowledge the neighborhood or small town had of us, as well as the knowledge we needed to navigate it, and all the facts about ourselves the intersection of those two bodies of knowledge revealed. The inescapable facts of our personal history — class, family background, race, nationality, that sort of thing — came back to us in the ways we found ourselves dealing with local conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

Pataphysical Graffiti: Facebook and Privacy’s End

The nonsensical excesses of pataphysics one can now find in the very warp and weft of the social fabric, while pataphysics itself, appropriately enough, has sailed far out of sight of the shore of the normative values it once critiqued.

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 announced the death of individual privacy, dismissing it as a “social norm” from which the wider wired world has evolve away. Apparently now only a hoary fetish for Enlightenment political philosophers, privacy has exited with nary a tear nor lament. Today’s human, homo ostentatius, is a fundamentally different creature from her eighteenth-, nineteenth- or even twentieth-century antecedents. Or so saith Zuckerberg.”People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.”

Zuckerberg’s generalization strikes one as rather sweeping. Several people of my acquaintance profess themselves not at all comfortable with the — shall I say demographic nudity? — which Facebook demands of its participants. These friends of mine not only have a problem with sharing information of any kind, but also have deep philosophical reservations about those who share this information “more openly and with more people.” Admittedly, these friends occupy (along with me) a sociocultural periphery, one occupied by those who would  prove reluctant joiners to any new fad. I can’t help thinking, however, that my friends and I simply represent a contingent afflicted with a particularly acute case of self-consciousness that is more or less present in everyone, a backwardness when it comes to publicizing oneself, particularly in the manner which Facebook encourages: the revelation of personal details. Some details might be boring, others embarrassing; Facebook doesn’t discriminate. It welcomes them all. Read the rest of this entry »

Me TV: Let a Thousand Broadcasters Bloom

The networked information economy reinforces the idea that we are all individual, atomized owners of our own mini-means of production. We thereby become bite-sized capitalists, manufacturing our own identity as our flagship product, and supporting the social order that relies on such subjectivity.

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.

The proletariat may not have liberated itself as a class, but the course of industrialization offered them unprecedented opportunity to differentiate themselves as individuals.

This obviously presented a problem for Marxist theory. What if the working class didn’t want to be free? In One-Dimensional Man, Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse characterized the situation he observed in 1964 this way: “Society takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable, and it accomplishes this fact in the process of production itself.” The technological changes in the field of production that were supposed to give workers the tools to liberate themselves instead, in Marcuse’s view, gave capitalists new ways to mask the proletariat’s unfreedom. Read the rest of this entry »

Building the Mystery: Social Media as Collective Epic

Social media like Facebook and Twitter have become much more than communication devices. They have become the very means by which people secure an effective ontology. “I tweet, therefore I am.”

October, a journal of art criticism, devoted its Fall 2006 issue to the life and work of Sergei Tret’iakov, a 20th-century Russian playwright and associate of such cultural luminaries as Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein. Tret’iakov aligned himself with the Constructivist movement, an outgrowth of Futurism that came to dominate the art of the young Soviet Union before giving way to socialist realism in the 1930s. Futurists and Constructivists alike reacted to the impressionism and expressionism that reigned during the late nineteenth century, and thus they dedicated themselves to scraping away these movements’ vestiges.

Tret’iakov’s contemporary, the artist, designer, and eventual Soviet cultural commissar Alexei Gan, offers this programmatic formulation of Constructivism, which emphasizes how thoroughly it embodies the spirit of the Communist revolution, as well as the workers’ paradise to emerge from it. He writes,

Construction must be understood as the coordinating function of Constructivism.

If the tectonic unites the ideological and formal, and as a result gives a unity of conception, and the faktura is the condition of the material, then the construction discovers the actual process of putting together.

Thus we have the “third discipline,” the discipline of the formation of conception through the use of worked material.

All hail to the Communist expression of material building!

The resulting artwork or “construction” fuses the “ideological,” “formal” and “material,” giving rise to “the third discipline,” so called by Gan, which pretends to completeness, the three elements reflecting each other harmoniously. One cannot deny the attraction of an art that so serenely synthesizes such seemingly disparate elements of existence. Others had made a similar effort before the Constructivists, most notably the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, whose idea of the “total art work” (Gesamtkunstwerk) set the standard for Wagner’s own compositions. Of course, history records what this idea of Wagner’s eventually led to — fascism. Read the rest of this entry »

Confessio Fraternitatis: Twitter as Spiritual Exercise

The fact that consumerism assimilates resistance in order to move merchandise makes consumerism difficult to resist. Something similar is happening with social media: We are left twittering our paranoia about what Twitter is doing to us.

You can’t be what you were. The technological changes that allow you to read this (and us to publish it) have foisted upon us a new conception of identity, one more thoroughly suited to consumerism. In particular, what began as a new-found ability to broadcast what we consume culturally and to be recognized (if not paid) for consuming well are becoming compulsions. No one any longer presumes identity to be an essence we are born with and discover; such an idea is the preferred illusion of the modern era. Rather, the newfangled notion of identity is as capital stock that we are compelled to expand roughly along the same line as that of the logic which Marx argued drove capitalists to accumulate! accumulate!

Michel Foucault’s lectures “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self” (reprinted in Political Theory in 1993) has some bearing on this. In these lectures, he begins to explain his move away from his preoccupation with power toward what is usually referred to as governmentality. Read the rest of this entry »

Me en Abyme: Value Crisis, Immaterial Labor and Monetized Selfhood

The deluge of toxic assets that swamped the U. S. economy left in its wake curious memes. As citizens come to grips with “negative equity” and a “jobless recovery,” a new iteration of capitalism is getting under way, one complete with a meme of its own. Welcome to the age of “immaterial labor,” in which unwitting proles do the work of nations simply by updating their Facebook pages.

When the big banks began to fail last fall, we began to hear a lot about “toxic assets” that had “infected” balance sheets, threatening to metastasize throughout the entire body economic at any moment. The main problem with these assets — byzantine derivatives and structured financial products that came in a blizzard of acronyms — was that no one, not even the mathematics whiz kids investment firms lured away from MIT, knew how to value them.

These  “exotic instruments” could be priced theoretically with mathematical models, like the Black Scholes formula, the Value-at-Risk model and the Gaussian copula function (all of which have since come under fire for being fundamentally, catastrophically wrong), but they were only tenuously connected to underlying tangible assets: homes, corporate debt, insurance against such debt. At the time, as long as the shadow banking system was thriving and there appeared to be a functioning market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and credit-default swaps (not to mention subprime mortgages and oversize real estate properties), one could feel comfortable with pricing them. And though these complicated instruments were diced into tranches and contingent on various credit flows, payment streams, and fees, everyone believed they had reduced the risk (the high level of which was, somewhat contradictorily, the explanation for the lucrative yields that made them so desirable as investments) rather than merely masking it. Read the rest of this entry »

In Dubious Battle: Co-creation and the Coming Insurrection

The onset of The Great Recession seemed a moment ripe with revolutionary possibility. But as this moment passed another revolution was just gaining impetus, one which threatens to divorce the very idea of revolution from the dream of emancipation.

The revolution wasn’t supposed to be televised. The idea was that we would all unplug from all the administered culture that stupefied us and transform the world with spontaneous justice and generalized, self-evident righteousness. Youth would lead us away from our square, suburbanized plastic hassle of a life and into the streets to speak truth to power and turn the military-industrial complex on its head. Our voices, buoyed by a sense of emancipation for the first time in humanity’s history clearly in view, would be raised in a deglobalized communal chorus for peace.

But instead of eschewing pop culture to wage political battles, many young people, as it turned out, delved ever deeper into it, convinced that it was their culture and they were, in some obscure way, guiding it. The route to power was not via opposition to the existing power structure but through mastery of the minutiae of art and music scenes. Everyday life would be change by making it cooler. Read the rest of this entry »

Split Definitive: A Review of Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View

The Parallax View (Reprint Edition)
by Slavoj Žižek
The MIT Press, 448 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-51268-8

The Parallax View, which first appeared in February 2006, was reprinted in April 2009 in a paperback edition that includes substantial additions by the author, the ever prolific “Elvis of Philosophy,” Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is the closest thing to a rock star the academic Left is likely to get; the industry has its celebrities, to be sure, but none of such aptitudes — and amplitudes — as the man from Ljubljana. The Parallax View stands, then, as his Blue Hawaii, the “magnum opus” of his substantial oeuvre. Such a claim notwithstanding, The Parallax View proves a generally rewarding if uneven work.

Cribbed from the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani (to his credit, Žižek is forthright in his appropriations, quoting liberally from Karatani’s Transcritique), a parallax gap, the lynchpin concept of Žižek’s theoretical apparatus, is an “observed difference [that] is not simply ‘subjective,’” Žižek writes, but “is rather … an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view [which] always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.” For instance, from one perspective an individual’s condition appears as one of freedom; from another, however, it appears as one determined by immanent constraints. (Goethe fairly captured this parallax when he wrote, “None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.”) The validity of the one, moreover, does not depend on the other’s invalidation, and, in fact, cannot be brought to invalidate the other. They simply exist as true propositions separated by an insurmountable gap. The task, then, becomes then not a matter of resolving the antinomies (by definition an impossible task) nor even to harmonize them, but simply to think them in their mutually contradictory character as a precursor to their theorization. Read the rest of this entry »

Life or Something Like It: Homeownership and Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception

Can greater participation in the US economy lead to diminished political standing? Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben might just answer “Yes.”

Like the plot of some reform-minded Victorian scribbler’s novel, it seems that the usually suspects in the boardrooms of Wall Street are once again poised to cash in on lavish bonuses despite the ongoing economic recession and the collateral damage it’s visiting on employment numbers. How nice it must be to have the productivity of an entire citizenry (the portion of which that still has jobs, anyway) as an insurance policy against imprudent speculation!

If you’re familiar with the work of Italian philosopher and critic Giorgio Agamben (he’s all the rage in lit-crit circles these days), particularly his concept of Homo sacer, you know that Homo sacer is a juridical designation that has its root in Roman law and applies to individuals who for legal reasons cannot be sacrificed. That is, they’ve been juridically divested of qualia which conventionally apply to them in ordinary circumstances, like, say, those of a law-abiding American citizen who enjoys rights and protections secured her by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Agamben introduces a distinction in what French theorist and intellectual historian Michel Foucault takes to be a unitary status on the part of the living human individual; Foucault’s disciplined subject represents bios, the organic expression of interlocking discourses that animate her subjectivity, whereas Homo sacer represents zoë, “bare life” that’s been placed outside regimes and discourses by the very powers from which these regimes and discourses flow. Homo sacer as subject is no longer subject to the law, or, more specifically, is a subject who is subject to the law that no longer applies to her. The power of this designation resides with the sovereign. He can decide on who or what counts as  zoë or bios and can determine what Agamben calls “the state of exception.” Read the rest of this entry »