Doomed to Dilettantism

In his 1904 novel Nostromo, Joseph Conrad describes the sheltered harbor town of Sulaco as a place where “the material apparatus of perfected civilization which obliterates the individuality of old towns under the stereotyped conveniences of modern life had not intruded as yet.” It’s a bit of a throwaway line, but it captures well what it felt like in American suburbs for the past decade, watching the countryside turn into shopping centers and chain stores.

The financial crisis may have halted the proliferation of strip malls, but during the real estate boom they had been metastasizing at a rate impossible to ignore. (This chart, which depicts the spread of Wal-Marts across America, can serve as a suitable proxy to show the relentless momentum of building.) As the farmland was transformed into huddled complexes of McMansions, the well-travelled roads connecting developments were filled in with commercial-real-estate projects that seemed redundant even at the time — how many supermarkets are really necessary in one square-mile area? Does every fast-food chain need representation on each malled-up stretch of suburbia? Who exactly was doing all this shopping at Dick’s Sporting Goods and Pier One Imports? Who is eating at all these Panera Breads?

The store whose sudden ubiquity I found most baffling was Michael’s, the big-box craft-supply store. You know, “Where creativity happens.” The slogan is a perfect piece of mental jujitsu, because the exact opposite is true: Michael’s seems like the place where creativity is interred. The last time I was in Michael’s, on a fruitless search for miniature rubber babies (don’t ask), it struck me as a great big repository of sadness. Scrapbooking, arranging silk flowers, collecting rubber stamps and stickers — these activities, I’m sure, bring great joy to many (I’m imaging elementary-school teachers across the country), but while I was in Michael’s, I couldn’t look past the possibility that people might actually be purchasing decorate-your-own-mug kits.

Michael’s seems to specialize in these all-in-one-box kits in which the manufacturers try to package the creativity inside, as though they hope to assuage the fear they imagine their customers must be paralyzed by: “We’ve thought of the project for you, don’t worry. All you have to do is follow directions. And if you can’t think of what slogan to emboss on your mug, we’ve provided some for you!”

Such kits are basically the home-consumer version of deskilling, the process by which artisans are gradually stripped of their craft knowledge and their descendents are forced to joylessly follow standardized operating procedures instead. In factories, this process turned carpenters into punch-press operators. At Michael’s, the kits condense the process, hoping to take the artisanal urge and nip it in the bud.

For example, rather than sell you the raw materials of soapmaking, Michael’s offers only soapmaking kits, preempting your chance to learn how to make soap for real. If for some benighted reason, your first move upon deciding to become a soapmaker was to go to the place “where creativity happens”, you would have been stuck with a half-assed block of glycerin and some cheap plastic molds. The end-product, had you followed through, would most likely be rather unimpressive — kind of like the beer you can make with Mr. Beer home-brew sets.

The same is true for dumbed-down computer applications: Most of the people who have GarageBand on their iMacs will never record a song, let alone become musicians — though its inclusion in Apple’s standard software suite does allow for some pleasing flights of fantasy about what we could do, and the sort of person owning a Mac makes us into. And the peculiar popularity of Guitar Hero may best example of the culture indsutry’s success in deskilling hobbies to make them more “fun”. Guitar Hero seems like karaoke without the bother of having to hear the sounds you make, with the added bonus of a scorekeeping aspect.

If one wanted a more interactive way to enjoy music, why not dance, or play air guitar? Or better yet, if holding a guitar seems appealing, why not actually learn to play one for real? For the cost of an Xbox and the Guitar Hero game, you can get yourself a pretty good guitar. I assume I am missing the point of the game, the competitive thrill, but I can’t help but feel that Guitar Hero (much like Twitter, a service devoted to those hoping to communicate but who can’t commit to writing more than one coherent sentence) would have been utterly incomprehensible to earlier generations, that it is a symptom of some larger social refusal to patiently embrace difficulty. (Sure, TV shows may have become more “complex”, as Steven Johnson has argued in Everything Bad Is Good For You, but watching shows nonetheless remains passive, albeit more absorbing.) A society that requires such short cuts and preemptive blows in the name of the short-attention span surely must be deeply broken, our progenitors probably would have thought.

Since, lamentably, what we do for a living tends to lack meaning to us, we rely more on our leisure time consumption to supply our lives with meaning. But consumption and self-realization may be at odds as philosopher Jon Elster points out in a passage from his Introduction to Karl Marx:

Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages.

There may be a balance between novelty-oriented consuming and self-realizing praxis, but it’s not easy to achieve. Marketing pressures (which arise from the need to sell all the junk we make at our unmeaningful jobs) tips the balance precipitously toward consumption, destabilizing the economy and our own psychological well-being simultaneously. Elster, paraphrasing Marx, writes, “In capitalism, the desire for consumption — as opposed to the desire for self-realization — takes on a compulsive character. Capitalism creates an incentive for producers to seduce consumers, by inducing in them new desires to which they then become enslaved.”

So, surprisingly, the way the loss of opportunities for self-realization plays out is not through a paucity of options but a surfeit of them, all of which we feel capable of pursuing only to a shallow degree before we get frustrated or bored. The kits at Michael’s, Guitar Hero, Garage Band — to varying degrees they all institutionalize that propensity to boredom. They make us all into Edie Brickell — they won’t let us get too deep.

With more “diversity” available, it’s becoming harder to evade boredom, which is hardly a matter of unsated individual curiosity but instead is engineered socially by proliferating options and accelerating fashion cycles. As Nicholas Carr, puts it, “Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable.”

The tendency to become distracted is not some personal failing or the indicator of someone’s weak will, but the accomplishment of a bundle of associated forces that help naturalize certain consumerist preferences. Our susceptibility to boredom is “programmable” through the amount of stuff thrown at us and the amount of stuff a “normal” with-it person is assumed to know about and the various ways cultural ignorance can be exposed. (Hence the useless entertainment quizzes and trivia contests and the like. These seem innocuous enough, but they help calibrate our boredom, suggesting what the breadth and depth of our knowledge should be.)

Fortunately, we are not yet “perfected” consumers but if we are not vigilant, our attention span will continue to shrink, and those available conveniences that help us force more and more material through our tiny pinhole of focus will proliferate. (Just as road-building worsens traffic problems, media-management and organization tools tend to exacerbate our attention problems. Hence, I spend as much time editing metadata as I do concentrating on music I’m listening to.)

Try Concentrating

Image (partial) by Izima Kaoru, Koike Eiko wears Gianni Versace, 423 ( 2006) from Excess Exhibit, Graham Dolphin, Izima Kaoru, Hetain Patel, Tom Gallant, Hancock & Kelly Live, 11 November 2006 – 13 January 2007, at Angel Row Gallery

Impelled by a sense that we must streamline our consumption and absorption of information and experiential opportunity (a need fomented by media technology, which both extends marketing’s reach and expands the amount of information we can readily acquire), we end up going for quantity over quality, the superficial over the complex, and regard convenience as an abstract good rather than being defined in relation to some other activity. Convenience only accelerates our pursuit of more convenience.

This imperative may be inherent in capitalism, which imposes a similarly irrational mandate on capitalists with regard to profit for its own sake. In the first volume of Capital, Marx describes how certain behavior becomes mandatory if capitalists are to reproduce themselves as capitalists:

It is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.

In Marx’s view, the economic roles we fulfill shape the horizon of our subjective aims while serving the underlying function of reproducing the existing system. For most of us, that economic role boils down to “consumer”, which means we must embody the restless pursuit of novelty, at least to the degree to which we want to be at harmony with the culture we live in. We become consumerism “personified and endowed with a consciousness and a will.” As a result, it’s hard to avoid the feeling of missing out on something, no matter how into whatever it is we actually are doing. Alternatives are always filtering in to taunt and tempt us, and we hold our ability to become absorbed, to achieve “flow”, in abeyance, waiting for the diversion.

We are kept always aware of what we are missing, and reminded that every moment is a purchasing opportunity. By the same token, information has never been easier to come by, yet it’s never been harder to turn information into knowledge. Instead the volume of information is an incentive to dabble in things rather than delve into them in pursuit of some sort of mastery, no matter how slight. I encounter a stray idea, digest the relevant Wikipedia entry, and just like that, I’ve broadened my conceptual vocabulary! I get bored with the book I’m reading, Amazon suggests a new one! I am too distracted to read blog posts, I’ll check Twitter instead!

Novelty trumps sustained focus, whose rewards are not immediately felt and may never come at all, as Elster points out, if our focus is mistakenly fixed on something ultimately worthless. (I’m thinking of my long investment in Cryptonomicon.) Rather than taking advantage of that “increasing marginal utility” that comes with practicing something difficult, our will to dilettantism develops momentum. Eventually, all the diversity and information-gathering convenience available to us comes at the expense of developing any sense of mastery over anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or even worth pursuing.

To take a trivial example, let’s say I’ve decide I really like psychedelic music and want to cultivate a deep familiarity with the genre. This seems plausible enough until I stumble on the hardcore psych MP3 blogs; at that point I become discouraged by the impossibility of ever catching up and listening to it all. There is simply too much, available too readily. I could still download everything I can get my hands on — that costs me nothing but disk space and a nominal amount of time — but I’ll never listen to most of it more than once. Acquiring has supplanted inquisitive use as my self-realizing activity. I have become a collector of stuff as opposed to a master of psychedelic music.

This process will happen with more of our endeavors as what Elster calls “the marginal disutility of not consuming” grows stronger: We will have a harder time giving up the thrill of novelty, of exposing ourselves to new things, particularly when confronted with the superior mastery of those the internet exposes us to. We end up collecting things rather than knowing them, and we display our collections in the hopes that others will recognize us as though we actually have some sort of mastery.

Perhaps we have already reached a point where everyone knows the game, rendering the distinction between owning and mastering insignificant. (If I own a cool guitar, maybe a Nocaster replica or the Jag-Stang that Kurt Cobain used, does it really matter if I can play it?)

Dilettantism is a perfectly rational response to the hyperaccessibility of stuff available to us in the market, all of which imposes on us time constraints where there was once material scarcity. These time constraints become more itchy the more we recognize how much we are missing out on. We opt instead for “diversity”, and begin setting about to rationalize that preference, abetted by the way we celebrate disposability in our culture.

Mere concentration takes on more of the qualities of work — it becomes a disutility with regard to the things we acquire rather the purpose of getting them in the first place. If something requires us to concentrate, it seems to cost us more, forcing us to sacrifice opportunities to consume other available distractions. In other words, consumerism makes the will and ability to concentrate seem detrimental. The next thing you know, we’re buying soapmaking kits at Michael’s, and everyone touts Guitar Hero as a reasonable substitute for guitar playing and mocks the fuddy-duddy nabobs of negativism who are still hung up on the difference.

Generally, when the tools and processes for making art are simplified to make them accessible to casual, semi-invested would-be creators, those things then become signifiers of second-rate amateurism, and if they are used at all, they yield Mr. Beer-like detritus that no one can possibly take seriously. No one who was serious about making something would stock up for supplies at Michael’s. In most cases, shoppers are probably at Michael’s because they need to get a gift for someone or because they are indulging a vague impulse to launch into a hobby without doing much research first. That the chain is successful enough to proliferate stands as testimony to the collective crippling of our imagination.

I feel a little guilty in bashing Michael’s, because my intent isn’t to dump on the people who shop there in favor of an overclass of artistic professionals. But a process of professionalization seems necessary to bringing about a meaningful exchange between maker and user — a social relation must be brought into being in which the exchange itself matters more than the personal relation.

Often artistic professionalism is the cue to audiences that they are allowed to engage seriously with a work, to have an opinion regarding what it was about, to devote the resources to analyzing it, or even to allow themselves to enter into it vicariously. Often with homemade productions, I feel myself holding back, because I have this dread that I won’t be able to share the (frequently critical) insights that I would thereby derive.

Amateur productions don’t rise to the level where they can be seriously criticized, because their primary purpose seems to be securing recognition for their makers. So questioning what they’ve done can come across as tantamount to calling them personally worthless. I end up copping out with a line an old band mate of mine liked to use whenever he was trying to schmooze the other bands we played with: “Hey, it’s really great that you are doing that.”

Of course, in capitalist society, professionalization is a matter of getting paid. Making money — transforming a production into a commodity for sale and finding success in vending it — is the unmistakable mark of professionalism. Get to that point and you show that you’re not just dabbling; you are making customers of others and living up to their expectations. That discipline elevates your production efforts beyond hobby — you’re not just dilettanting around.

But professionalism needn’t automatically be defined by money — by selling out to The Man. It could instead be seen as a matter of creating something that isn’t merely an extension of one’s ego, giving a social life to an idea or thing that then takes on a life of its own. A noncapitalist understanding of professionalization might resemble flow, losing oneself in a process, wherein the end product is secondary to the creative experience itself but not a matter of total indifference either. Instead, it would have a ready path to becoming socially useful, to finding an appreciative audience without having to be explicitly marketed and having its meaning permanently altered by that discourse.

People who wax utopian about the internet often seem to be intimating this sort of post-industrial society, in which the internet becomes a low-barrier-of-entry distribution channel permitting our work to become socially useful without having to be filtered up through capitalist means of production first. Unfortunately, capitalist media companies and various internet startups (often under the guise of enhancing the “read-write Web”) have by this time managed to embed themselves online between most home producers and would-be consumers, and in much in the same way as Michael’s kits, the use of these intermediaries’ services tend to taint our productions automatically with amateurism. Thanks to the corporate-owned, easy-to-use services (think: Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace and the like), the space that had been opened on the internet for a different kind of professionalism is now being flooded with look-at-me productions.

If we are all narcissists, we’ll all remain amateurs, which offers an interesting, albeit functionalist, way to look at the modern efflorescence of narcissism — it seems as though there is an incentive to try to make us that way, insecure in who we are and preoccupied with gaining recognition. But sadly, a MySpace page will never make us web designers any more than a paint-by-numbers kit will make us artists.