Generation Bubble
Archive for November, 2009
Confessio Fraternitatis: Twitter as Spiritual Exercise
Were we to turn off our computers or throw our smartphones in the river would the resulting isolation serve to neutralize us as thoroughly as participation in the new technologically mediated social system promises to? The technology itself, its propensity to capitalize on network effects, inevitably becomes coercive, reshaping the sphere in which identity can appear, in which vital recognition can occur. Our situation with social technologies is akin to that we face with consumerism. It’s difficult to resist consumerism because the resistance itself can so easily be transformed by the very system it wants to reject into a signifying product to be consumed for identity purposes. Something similar is happening with social media: we are left Twittering our paranoia about what twitter is doing to us.
Detroit Nosh City: Glemie Beasley and the Future of Food
The one-two punch of de-industrialization and real-estate devaluation, though it dealt grievous injuries to the city’s two-footed denizens, has, strangely enough, set Detroit on a path toward becoming a veritable bushmeat Eden.
Artificial Paradises: The Shopping Mall as an Aesthetic Category
The endgame for the benevolent authoritarianism implicit in shopping-mall hegemony is, of course, the “totally administered life” Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer variously warned of. The mallification of all shared spaces, from airports to campus bookstores, sure seems like one more step in this direction. According to the ideology of the shopping-mall aesthetic, every bystander or traveler is a potential consumer. Our previously unique and interesting spaces have been Haussmannized into vast boulevards of cheaply-made goods, wherein government officials and market researchers conspire to keep us shopping so that we may always be disgorging both precious dollars and vital demographic data, the blood and lymph of the contemporary body economic.
Me en Abyme: Value Crisis, Immaterial Labor, and Monetized Selfhood
If capital has run out of productive investments for making goods and services, and the cycle of expanding fictitious capital has played itself out for the time being, it may retrench by financing a manufacturing project that never ends — the production of the self, as carried out in the “social factory.” The postwar transition to consumerism initiated this transvaluation of value in the realm of consumption. Rather than imagining ourselves valuable for the traditional role we assume in our community, we instead try to discover and enlarge our subjectivity through publicized acts of consumption — be they conspicuous luxuries or altruistic acts or clever, innovative re-uses of goods, or what have you. We consume to create cool, which in turn reflects the glories of its creator. But from the point of view of capital, our acts of everyday self-realization are perceived as knowledge production for the information economy, elaborating the intricately woven code (as Jean Baudrillard calls it) that constitutes the symbolic value of brands and goods.
Spin Cycle: Biking D. C. Hipsters Revive Dandyism
The biking dandies and quaintrelles invoke a narrow spectrum for their rainbow coalition. Hip-hoppers and heshers, one gathers, need not apply. How this wished-for amalgam of social cliques is supposed to happen within the dissolving medium of dandyism is not entirely certain. One imagines that all this supposed de-cliquing can only lead to dislocation and anomie, as hipsters parasitize preppiedom and preppies extract some of the value hipsters have added to the preppie look. A climate of antagonism, recrimination and refusal would likely follow, proving ruinous to the urbane charms of a Saturday’s cycling.
Formlessness Meets Functionlessness: Stefan Ulrich’s Real Doll For The Creative Class
As Ulrich sees it, the creative class is marginalized because it has voluntarily given up the very things that give comfort to traditional marginalized groups. Creatives are alienated not at the level of the political, the economic or the social, but at the most basic human level. If the life of the poor is not the life we imagine for ourselves, it plays out as a parody of that life, following the same rituals of family, church, marketplace, and the political. At the center of all these rituals are the comforts of home, place, and humanity. Where the old alienation could be said to take place in a geographic location, the new alienation of the creative class is played out in lonely hotel rooms across the globe. And why is the creative class so alienated? Because it has chosen to be alienated in order to keep up with the dictates of money and success.
In Dubious Battle: Co-creation and the Coming Insurrection
Unfortunately for radical revolution, political and counter-cultural activists open-source innovators were most likely the sort of people the Invisible Committee were expecting to mount the insurrection, to seize upon the general atmosphere of crisis to reconstitute life on a different footing. But the Committee fail to grasp that entertainment and labor have been merged: “Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product,” they claim. “We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us.” This is not all that paradoxical either. The “living labor” is no longer bound up in the goods as in their meaning, as in the process that animates their circulation. And that labor manifests as entertainment or self-fashioning — the authors point out that “producing oneself is becoming the dominant occupation of a society where production no longer has an object” and argue that “it now becomes possible to sell oneself rather than one’s labor power, to be remunerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite mastery of social codes, for our relational talents, for our smile and our way of presenting ourselves.” The crucial difference is that this effort is paid for not in wages but in attention.
Split Definitive: A Review of Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View
The real shortcoming of The Parallax View, as I see it, comes in the final pages, wherein Žižek, having explicated his theory, waxes prescriptive, encouraging his readers to adopt what can only be described as an ascesis of imitatio Bartlebly. Bartleby, the titular character of Herman Melville’s immortal tale, is the pioneering figure of what Žižek deems is the most effective subjective positionality of resistance. The so-called “Bartleby-parallax” manages to avoid being caught up in the Hegelian pseudo-negations of counterhegemonic practices (Oh, the ever elusive Hegelian “negation of the negation!”). And we must, Žižek warns, be as resistant to these pseudo-negations in our “preferring-not-to’s” as to the hegemonic ills the former are intended to redress — I prefer not to eat factory-farmed, adulterated, genetically modified food; I prefer not to purchase food from an organic farming co-operative. Because not to do so and to remain, rather, in the old dialectic of resorting to alternatives to dismaying hegemony, is to remain ensnared in the Foucauldian circuits of power that result in the eternal recursion and reinscription of prevailing sociopolitical relations. The parallactic Bartleby, however, disrupts the workings of ideological apparatuses by cultivating an inner disposition of refusal until, according to Žižek, there opens up possibilities which are not determined by the dialectic.
King Rat: Mickey Mouse’s Neoliberal Makeover
It stands to reason then that newest incarnation of Mickey Mouse was developed to reflect the tastes of its audience. The boisterous, sweet-tempered mouse is now a law-breaking, egocentric rat. And while Mickey’s newest incarnation may be the stuff of nightmares, it certainly isn’t anything new. In fact, it is eminently fitting. We have the Mickey Mouse we deserve. We are no longer that charmingly boisterous (and yes, sometimes devilishly devious) nation that smashed National Socialism and inspired the likes of Jack Kerouac to drive across the country and then come home, drop some speed, and write about his wonderful adventures in a strange land, but an ill-tempered, duplicitous empire on the decline, ravaged by the boondoggles and Ponzi schemes of a financial sector run amok, bereft of the hope of regaining any kind of cultural or intellectual prominence.
Children of a Lesser God: The Global Precariat and the Goldman Sachs Gospel
Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein and Metropolitan‘s Charlie Black share the sort of myopically grandiose perception of their class. For them, the value their class is made plain by its continued existence. Should their class disappear, Armageddon would ensue. Seas would boil. The moon would turn to blood. Stock options would go unexercised. It’s this inflated sense of vital necessity which lay behind Blankfein’s bloviation and Charlie Black’s lucubration. Ultimately, it underwrites the sense of the unique tragedy attending the urbanite bourgeoisie’s decline, as well as the logic of “Too big to fail” and the ex cathedra decree of “doing God’s work.” Apparently no longer content with being known as “Government Sachs” for the various former executives who now stride Washington D. C.’s corridors of power, Blankfein and his merry band seek nothing less than the foundation of one holy catholic and apostolic church, consecrated to Mammon, their tribal deity, who demands regular bloodletting and smoldering hecatombs.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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