Slavoj Žižek has a good essay in the LRB about the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He looks at the idea that the end of the socialism brought in its wake a realistic mind-set grounded in the “truth” that markets and capitalism are the only basis for a social order that works. He basically argues that after the Wall fell, the same sort of people maintained political control. Neoliberalism has its power elite, just as Warsaw Pact countries had their Politburos. What’s striking about the velvet revolutions, Žižek argues, is that after the fall of the Wall, these elites turned out to be the same people:

Indeed, one could argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the disillusioned former Communists were better suited to run the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to indulge their dreams of a new society based on justice, honesty and solidarity, the ex-Communists were able without difficulty to accommodate themselves to the new capitalist rules. Paradoxically, in the new post-Communist condition, the anti-Communists stood for the utopian dream of a true democracy, while the ex-Communists stood for the cruel new world of market efficiency, with all its corruption and dirty tricks.

He sums up the ideological usefulness of this misrecognition: free marketeers can argue that their revolution was betrayed and demand more radical reforms.

In the 1990s, it was believed that humanity had finally found the formula for an optimal socio-economic order. The experience of the last few decades has clearly shown that the market is not a benign mechanism that works best when left alone. It requires violence to create the conditions necessary for it to function. The way market fundamentalists react to the turmoil that ensues when their ideas are implemented is typical of utopian ‘totalitarians’: they blame the failure on compromise – there is still too much state intervention – and demand an even more radical implementation of market doctrine.

Markets don’t exist by virtue of natural law; impersonal exchange is hardly inscribed into human genetic code. Violence, or its implied threat, establishes the terms of exchange, or worse, the arbitrary neutrality of a society governed by unimpeded markets fosters an anything-goes climate where violence between competitors is tolerated, and is inevitable.

—Rob Horning

At Generation Bubble, Anton Steinpilz brings up Whit Stillman’s 1990 film Metropolitan, which played as a sort of fond lament for the1980s. The film is extremely enjoyable despite being borderline reactionary—it’s open to an interpretation (not a likely one, but one useful for the suspension of ideological disbelief) in which the implicit politics are meant to be foibles of the characters rather than Stillman’s own, which makes it pleasantly watchable. (I’m especially fond of its weird, stilted Hal Hartley-esque quality, it’s closet-drama dialogue.)

The beaus and debutantes of Stillman’s hyperstylized New York were meant to be old, old money—so old that social-capital preservation was never supposed to be a concern for them. But as Steinpilz notes, the film is shot through with melancholy at the possibility that the whole social-capital system (which the film, with its coming-out balls and stilted drawing-room conversations and Victorian concerns about moral turpitude, lovingly depicts/invents) is becoming supplanted by a raw-money culture in which manners don’t matter. The unleashing of the financial sector brought about a whole new class of “vulgar rich,” the sort of people that Tom Wolfe (in many ways Stillman’s artistic grandfather) scorns in his work. Stillman’s characters—even the crypto-Marxist among them—all subscribe to the primacy of social capital; they are all entranced by the same chimeras of tradition, which they take to be lineaments of an eternal and proper social order—the inverse of the Fourierist fantasy one of them espouses. Rather than an explicit program that must be imposed, entailing all sorts of overt dislocation, the traditional order Stillman idealizes works hegemonically, which means that it has an effortless grace, the sprezzatura of the privileged. Though the character Charlie appropriates the term “bourgeoisie” for his neologism “urban haute bourgeoisie” to describe the characters in the film, they are really anachronistic petit aristocrats (which makes sense, since they are styled after the gentry from Jane Austen’s novels.) The bourgeoisie, in actuality, were the ones who routed Charlie’s kind in the 19th century. The bourgeois ideals—opportunity, mobility, enlightened self-interest, economic transparency, etc.—are what Charlie rejects; he implicitly endorses a rentier system where social betters are ensconced in a divinely ordained hierarchy.

Arnold Kling recently cited a quote from Gordon Wood that I think is relevant here:

After all, wealth, compared to birth, breeding, ethnicity, family heritage, gentility, even education, is the least humiliating means by which one person can claim superiority over another; and it is the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion.

That’s a justification for wealth betokening meritocracy, an order to supplant the unjust aristocratic one based on inherited social capital. The virtue of hard work supposedly replaces the genetic lottery, though humanity is basically consigned to eternally squabbling over status as part of its inherent nature.

Nowadays, the term “urban haute bourgeoisie” most likely does not conjure up debutante balls and Upper East Siders. For me, it evokes the scene on the Lower East Side, the cultural entrepreneurs and their hangers-on. It turns on cultural capital rather than old-style social capital, which has perhaps receded to an inaccessible demimonde, far away from hipsters and reality TV cameras.

—Rob Horning

Nicholas Carr linked to Duran Duran bassist John Taylor’s essay (!) for the BBC about how the internet changes music consumption. He relates a story about seeing Roxy Music on television in 1972 and riding his bike for miles to go to a shop where he could buy the record.

We had no video recorders, and of course there was no YouTube. There was no way whatsoever that I could watch that appearance again, however badly I wanted to. And the power of that restriction was enormous…. The power of that single television appearance created such pressure, such magnetism, that I got sucked in and I had to respond as I know now previous generations had responded to Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show, or The Beatles, or Jimi Hendrix. I believe there’s immense power in restriction and holding back.

The moral is familiar: On-demand culture deprives cultural-industry product of its aura, and consumers are left with a shallow and superficial relation to it. That seems to sell the power of the product itself somewhat short—if the songs are really good, the aura artificially secured by restricted access presumably shouldn’t matter to our aesthetic response. The would-be John Taylors of today should be listening to “Virginia Plain” over and over again despite downloading it. As he points out, the internet can free us from the tyranny of what’s popular now and let us discover and become obsessed with culture from a diverse range of eras and locales.

—Rob Horning

The narratives of subjectivity are supplied by the institutions that one encounters in society; these take the inchoate and infinitely generative biological, neurological, genetic stuff that is the raw material of identity and bound the set, permit it to take coherent, knowable shape. The institutional framework provides means to think identity out of the raw material. It reduces the infinite possibilities to a select finite set that suits the existing social order. It supplies a grammar, a syntax to the genetic stuff that makes it speak something comprehensible to the individual and his society. (Lacan’s and Althusser’s version of subjectivity—we route the inchoate stuff of self through social institutions so that they mirror/speak it back to us, and we obtain self-knowledge, the selfhood that society makes out of us.) This self then reproduces the institutions that made it, doing the work that sustains their power to shape subsequent generations. That is, until technological disruptions change the reproductive circuit.

In consumer society, marketing is the main discourse for impoverishing the narratives of self. It provides idealized prefabricated social imagos around which any given individual’s self can crystallize. But Web 2.0 platforms are taking over for marketing, or at least marketing is evolving through these platforms into something more integrated with the discourse of friendship. Marketing and friendship have become inextricably intertwined, so that having a friend is an inherently commercial operation. Worse, the same came be said of having a self—it will need to be grounded in commercialized, corporatized discourse before we apprehend it—our self-knowledge comes to us preloaded with the prerogatives of corporate consumerism, which has at that point transcended the need for overt marketing, as the marketing is interwoven with the ways, the language, the terms, the categories in which we know ourselves.

Social networks externalize those ways, integrate them as a seamless, coherent platform. The narratives of subjectivity are even more impoverished by the restricted classifications of digital data possible within these platforms, though it remains generative to the subject himself—it seems to solve the (false) mystery of self more completely than any technology heretofore offered—but the sad irony is that the technologies produce the mystery and the ersatz solution. The self we are compelled to produce online is winnowed, smaller, with less potential for growth and less curiosity, the more we produce it and add to the archive that will dictate our future choices.

Its permanently insecure subject and its economy of identity are geared toward reproducing not the capitalist system necessarily but its own peculiar consumerist modalities. The hyperpersonalization that emerged from capitalist individuation combined with a return of communal needs in the new form of the digital network. If you go to the most recent issue of Fibreculture, you can read all about that.

—Rob Horning

A useful myth took definitive hold in the Reagan years about taxes: the government steals our income through taxes and helps the lazy poor with massive transfer payments. Liberals have never managed to effectively counter this nonsense, perhaps in part because they are bought off by actual massive subsidies of their own, which arguably come at the expense of the poor. (Dean Baker and James Galbraith each have good books on how this works.)

Home-owning subsidies are maybe the worst of these. Justin Fox linked to this Congressional Budget Office report about the government subsidies in housing, which estimates that (as Fox notes in his post’s headline) that only 20 percent of the federal housing aid goes to renters. The remaining 80 percent goes to homeowners, mostly in the form of mortgage-interest tax deductions. Another way of putting this is that America uses policy to create a rentier society, subsidizing landlords and creating property bubbles for their short-term benefit. And meanwhile, the report tell us, “The burden of housing’s costs is more pronounced among renters than among owners: In 2007, 45 percent of renters (compared with 30 percent of owners) paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing.”

The alibi for these subsidies to those who are already relatively privileged is that homeownership is an inherent good in its own right, a widely disputed claim. It is neither economically efficient, environmentally sustainable, nor the facilitator of more livable communities. (America’s fixation on single-family homes gives us anomie and exurbs.)

I wonder what renters like me can do about this. I have no interest in home owning, but feel like a chump for missing out on the gravy train. I’m like a middle-class person who insists on riding the bus instead of buying a car like society seems to be insisting I must. It grows tiresome to go against the grain of what society tells you someone in your class should do; to persist in it we probably need to link isolated individual behavior to an organized movement. Otherwise it seems like pyrrhic self-importance.

—Rob Horning

Lane Kenworthy linked to this NYT article by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (pioneer of the concept of “emotion work”—the often uncompensated labor of managing emotions to allow for social relations and market exchanges to transpire). The article offers an explanation of why Americans rank marriage’s importance so highly yet divorce more frequently than citizens of other nations.

Why are Americans on this marriage-go-round? Is it the “restless temper” Alexis de Tocqueville observed 175 years ago? It is true, Cherlin observes, that more than people elsewhere, we move from job to job, city to city, and even church to church. Could this be linked to a missing government safety net and ­family-protective policies? Cherlin gives little credence to this idea, but he leaves us with another useful notion — that more than we realize, we’ve become accustomed to a move-along life-go-round world.

That is of a piece with the theory that technology has made possible the marketing-driven acceleration of the pace of consumption at all levels of social life. Hochschild cites Juliet Schor who “shows in her research on ‘fast fashion’ that we consume and discard dresses, shoes, toys, furniture and cellphones at a quicker pace than we did in the past.“Spouses are just another product we are encourage to consume quickly and move on from—after all, think of all the associated consumption that is driven by courtship and wedding rituals. Why not cycle people through those as often as possible? It’s a win-win, right? Everyone enjoys the whirlwind of romance, being the center of their own drama that climaxes with a big party.

Hochschild supplies some context for that idea:

Could this “fast-fashion” culture be filtering into our ideas about human connection? On Internet sites and television shows, we watch potential partners searching “through the rack” of dozens of beauties or possible beaus. Some go on “speed dates”; others go to “eye-gazing parties” — two minutes per gaze, 15 gazes — to find that special someone. If advertisers first exploited the “restless spirit” by guiding consumers’ attention to the next new thing, a market spirit now guides our search for the next new love. The culprit is not the absence of family values, I believe, but a continual state of unconscious immersion in a market turnover culture.

It does seem that this is so, though the key idea here is that market turnover has become identity turnover, and that identity turnover proceeds whether or not it remains a market imperative. As I’ve been arguing in the past few posts, impersonal cash markets have given way to embedded markets in which subjects try to maximize their selfhood in a public forum, commanding resources to serve that end and turning attention, status, etc, into more explicit forms of currency.

The problem is that we have shifted retail consumption into the public sphere, when markets once were making it private. The cash economy democratized consumption, but social networking,etc. is resocializing it within a commercial matrix. Our self-publicized consumption is more susceptible to fast-fashion acceleration, as the signifying power of consumption gestures is relative to who else has made similar gestures and so on. The meaning in the gestures therefore have only brief shelf life. Identity needs more and different things to consume and display more rapidly—it needs more things to share. Yet the alibi of sharing hides how voracious the appetite for novelty has become.

—Rob Horning