Lasch—The Progress-Consumption Nexus

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[74] The logic of demand creation requires that women smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others. The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, "You've come a long way, baby," and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. ... The "education" of the masses...emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority...only to subject them to a new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.

If the first part seems harsh on women, perhaps consider that Lasch, in such matters as above, does not really favor the emancipation of anyone in particular from certain communitarian strictures. In any case, the synchrony between emancipation and consumerism is undeniable, whether or not either the patriarchs or the admen have conspired to make it so, and whether or not any lesser evil can be reasonably proposed.

Related, from Lasch on Paul Nystrom, Economics of Fashion (1928):

[74, footnote to above] Family life according to Nystrom, inherently tends to promote custom, the antithesis of fashion. ... On the other hand, "the conflict of youth with convention" encourages rapid changes in dress and styles of consumption. In general, Nystrom argues, rural life, illiteracy, social hierarchy, and inertia support custom, whereas fashion—the culture of consumption—derives from the progressive forces at work in modern society: public education, free speech, circulation of ideas and information, the "philosophy of progress."

Mumford -- Art and Technics (xv)

"As against a single person who could use a brush passably, there were thousands who could take reasonably good photographs. Here the first effect of the machine process was to deliver people from the specialist and to restore the status and function of the amateur. Thanks to the camera, the eye at least was reeducated, after having been too long committed to the verbal symbols of print. People awoke to the constant miracles of the natural world, like an invalid long secluded in a dark room, able for the first time to breath fresh air... But though the art of taking pictures is necessarily a selective one, the very spread and progress of that art, not least with the invention of the motion picture, was in the opposite direction; it multiplied the permanent image as images had never been multiplied before, and by sheer superabundance it undermined old habits of careful evaluation and selection. And that very fact, which went along with the achievement of a democratic medium of expression, has raised a whole series of problems that we must wrestle with today, if, here as elsewhere, we are not to starve in the midst of plenty." (94-95)

"What has been the result of the mass production of esthetic symbols that began in the fifteenth century? ... [The good:] By means of our various reproductive devices, a large part of our experience, which once vanished without any sort of record, has been arrested and fixed. Because of the varied processes of reproduction that are now at hand, many important experiences, difficult to transpose into words, are now visible in images; and certain aspects of art, which were once reserved for the privileged, are now an everyday experience to those who make use of the resources of printing and photography." (95-96)

In other words, reproduction is also, in many instances, record-keeping. All of the oppression and dispossession which inhered in denial of the right to have a past, a heritage, a discrete culture, and indeed the very right to collective introspection vis-a-vis these identifications, to have a hard look in the mirror on the cultural level, all of these privileges have been progressively democratized by the ever-increasing ease and ubiquity of this "mass production of esthetic symbols."

Millennial Ambivalence: Sports

Sports have never been more fully integrated with the wider entertainment industry than they are right now, and neither have I, but I find, as I always did before, that sports fandom is the exception among artists and entertainers, not the rule. I for one quickly lost all interest in TV and movies as an adult, but sports have held on to an irreducible sliver of my attention where most all other artifacts of "entertainment" proper have failed. For market research purposes I suppose this puts me in an ever smaller sub-minority of entertainment consumers; truthfully, though, in my world sports are less entertainment than art, and this puts me quite at odds not only with the lowest common denominator but with virtually everything sports have become. Allow me to unpack that confession just a bit.

Like the rest of the entertainment landscape, the sports world has become increasingly ruled by "off-the-field" matters, both for better and for worse I think. Social media has given the athletes themselves greater agency in this new reality, but it is a reality which has been in the works for a while, since long before Twitter. If the proverbial aliens landed, they might conclude from the sports media's overwrought examination of every tabloid-worthy detail of the athletes' off-the-field lives that the games themselves must not be all that interesting to spectators, that the real action was in the human drama. Certainly most all sports media executives seem to have concluded this. This invites much the same question as do efforts to "humanize" orchestra musicians by shifting the focus off-the-field: Who TF cares about human dramas that are a dime a dozen? Is this really what the audience wants? Is it what the suits only think they want? Is this supposed to manufacture crossover appeal to other entertainment consumers by endowing sports with a tabloid sector? I don't know the answer, but I hate all of the choices.

On the plus side, I do think this Total Access has been constructive in greatly inhibiting the suspension of disbelief on which all entertainment makes its nut. People feel differently about the concussion issue in football, for example, but however they feel they are not allowed to ignore it, and that is, if not a happy condition in which to find ourselves, then at least the necessary first step toward happier times. This is just one of what seems like a dozen or so utterly delectable sports world nuggets for the dime store metaphysician to savor: everything contains the seeds of its own destruction, and sports fans alive today are getting to watch a generous handful of those seeds sprout and run amok both on and off the field. The money finally got so huge that the full weight of the human intellect was brought to bear on these primitive games, such that rule changes are now endemic to pro sports as the leagues desperately try to plug procedural holes that almost no one was even aware of 20 years ago. Social media has enabled smart athletes to make even more money on themselves, and dumb ones to find new and better ways to piss it away with each tweet. Teams are hardly identifiable by their uniforms anymore, because they have a dozen alternate uniforms and must keep them all in game circulation so as to keep all of them flying off the shelves at once.

Indeed, even I find myself perversely enjoying the spectacle of all of this and occasionally, as today, attempting to unpack it as if it mattered as deeply to me as music does, as deeply as in my weaker moments the outcome of a Big Game seems like it does. Ultimately though, both music and sports are things to do, not just things to contemplate. I consider the receptive end of the transaction to be active rather than passive in both cases, especially when done in person: crowds affect the outcomes of both concerts and matches in very similar ways, excepting of course (usually) the absence of zero-sum winning and losing in musical performance. I'm not really sure how knowing that the pitcher and the hitter have recently had a Twitter spat, or that the oboist has three children and two French bulldogs at home, figures into this equation for most people. I know that for me these are sideshows without which I would still enjoy listening to music and watching sports, and probably enjoy it more that I currently do precisely for not having to hear about all of this. Most every person-to-person interaction I can recall indicates that I am indeed part of a silent majority on this point; the towering piece of anecdotal evidence to the contrary is the wider thrust of all formal art and entertainment production towards tabloidism, oversharing, and backstory. I consume a certain amount of this residually, because I don't have a choice. I am not happy about it.

The process which was set in motion the first time a local pro sports team imported players from a neighboring town has now found its apotheosis in the holier-than-thous who "root for players, not for teams." Neither M.O. is any more or less rational than the other, but a player-centered fandom certainly represents the ultimate triumph of backstory over forestory. Formally at least, sports teams still win or lose "as a team," as the saying would have it, not as individuals or brands. So far this is one rule which has not been changed with an eye toward wider appeal; instead it is concertedly elided by an ever-growing sideshow of player-focused media content, most especially fantasy sports. I have had to resort to speaking of "material football" around my fantasy-playing co-workers in order to differentiate my interest in the games from theirs. Ironically, much like the nametags we wear at work, this twisted rooting interest doesn't actually allow fans to get to know the players as individuals but rather enables them to bypass this altogether to arrive at a false intimacy; instead of bringing fans closer to players, players literally become numbers, interchangeable chess pieces without human qualities, just as the team owners are so often accused of viewing them. (NFL = "not for long.") This is hardly more rational than rooting for the team from the place you grew up. What it is is more permissive of self-styling. When I was a teenager, self-stylers were known as "frontrunners" and roundly mocked. This was not that long ago.

There are exceedingly few players who are equally valuable in fantasy and material football, except perhaps for those who are equally worthless because they don't play at all. There are just as few whose aesthetic qualities and winning qualities are commensurate. Peyton Manning has been posited as among the most aesthetically unappealing great players. Mike Trout is not exactly unappealing, but his style lags well behind his substance. Kemba Walker just looks good in Celtics green and is, incidentally, also performing quite well in it. It just had to be a city like San Diego that brought Wil Myers and Manny Machado together, though some observers think the Padres are, whether because or in spite of this, finally headed for better times. Indeed, since I can walk to Dodger Stadium, and because the Dodgers and Padres play there 9 or 10 times a year, this is bound to be something I think twice about the next time I have a chance to go. There is a remote corner of my brain where there lives a standard-issue entertainment consumer, who is rationalistically put off by the idea of consuming the same entertainment product more than a couple of times. Happily for me, the artist who has the run of the remaining neural pathways is there to remind me that players evolve, stakes change, crowds affect outcomes, and that baseball is, like all great sports, just quirky and high-variance enough in its formal dynamics and material realities alike so as to preclude any two games between the same teams in the same building at the same time of day being remotely the same experience. High art can compete with that; tabloid journalism can't.

Mumford -- Art and Technics (ivb)

If the acronym STEM once found merely prosaic use, it now by its mere existence and invocation encapsulates quite neatly the territory which the objective has pillaged from the non-objective. STEM encompasses the most lucrative professions and growthiest growth industries, and also demands the most rigorous academic and technical skills. It experiences shortages of qualified (home-grown) workers, and it is also too white and too male for its own good. For all of these reasons and more, STEM Matters. If "modern man" has, incidentally, also "patterned himself on the machine" with terrible consequences, if money cannot actually buy happiness (still), if the academic topics thought most rigorous are really just the most objective ones, if nature can be thought to trump nurture even where diversity is valued over homogeneity, that is none of STEM's business. STEM is too busy making money, improving lives, and generally being awesome. If you want in on that action, then STEM is what you do.

Artists as a group are liable to be more unified in their general sense of objection to this situation than they are in the substance of their specific critiques. I tend toward Mumford's outlook, seeing in the current condition of American art and artists several particular manifestations of a more widely observable human dynamic by which the objective, the quantifiable, and the provable runs amok. Against this there is the option to play ball, to commence laying out the various strictly objective cases for the value of art and artists: educational, therapeutic, economic, activist, and so on. To me this latter tack has always looked self-defeating. The harder we work at proving our own objective worth, the further we get from actually doing so, and the more ridiculous we look both to STEMers and to each other. Objective value is not what we do. I fear that we let the Technics terrorists win by trying to play their game.

In spite of this division among artists, or perhaps because of it, the A-for-Art eventually wedged its way into the acronym, forming STEAM. It takes an artist to notice a sort of symbolic conflation of chemical and physical transformation in this too-cute linguistic maneuver, and also to appreciate and reclaim the irony. STEM always carried a cultural charge and was bound to be reactive for this reason. How stable, then, is the new molecule? Where, really, are the affinities between STEM and The Arts? There are some good ones, to be sure, but do they supply the necessary energy for a change of state?

Mumford's Functionalist rejection of Industrial Design is a powerful rejoinder to orthodox STEAM rhetoric. In what he classifies as "machine arts," with printing as the paradigmatic example, "we give up a certain subjective freedom in order to better serve a common collective goal." (74) And so,

by very reason of its impersonality and standardization, a machine art, once it has achieved a high level of form, is not subject to endless variations: the main problem is to keep it at its original high level.

Whereas "repetition without variation and re-creation is fatal to the existence of the humane arts,"

This is not so with the arts of the machine. Here the type is the supreme achievement; for the sake of functional economy, for the sake of order and common use, the fewer new demands that are made, the better. The capital danger in the arts of the machine is misplaced creativity, in other words trying to make the machine take over the functions of the person. (73)

I read this as essentially a consequentialist argument. To me it is at least imaginable that pure design considerations could be applied to a more-or-less perfected technology without affecting its functionality. Mumford's unwillingness to abide, say, the painting of typewriters and coffee grinders even after they have been designed, manufactured and purchased (p. 80), seems calculated to project total rhetorical consistency rather than rhetorical grace. This is the intransigence which earned Functionalism its staunchest enemies: what kind of Puritan would want to live in a world where purely decorative touches were so deeply mistrusted as to be veritably quarantined even from the most quotidian of technical pursuits? Ironic, then, that such radical anti-functionalists as Jorn and Debord unequivocally shared Mumford's contempt for "the canons of conspicuous waste, dear to the businessman, and the newly rich" by which "someone is picking your pocket of money you might use for better purposes, under the pretext that he is furnishing you with art." (75)

In other words, where the Situs wanted to liberate desire, Mumford was deeply suspicious of it. Both saw consumerism channeling desire to nefarious ends, but where the Situs saw unmediated desire as the weapon that would topple entrenched power, Mumford saw desire as one side of an essential duality which demands balance, discipline and restraint rather than release.

From the standpoint of effective communication, the handwrought manuscript tended by its very elaboration to lose sight of its essential reason for existence. In this respect, its development was very similar to that we often find in other arts, a tendency on the part of human fantasy, once it is emancipated from the restraint of practical needs, to run riot, to seek to prolong the esthetic moment beyond any reasonable duration. ...Quite evidently this desire to prolong a pleasurable occupation, while it makes for a good life, has its own kind of shortcoming; and in the case of the book, the very esthetic excellence of the illuminators and illustrators served also to retard the process of copying and so limit the circulation of books. (69)

I suspect that printing is a well-cherrypicked example to which there not as many companions as Mumford would have us believe. That said, the current smartphone/tablet landscape seems as good an illustration as any of how collisions of agendas can disfigure a technology to the extent of interfering with a quite settled functional profile. Yet another CalArts memory comes to mind, that of Barry Schrader asserting that the digital computer is a settled type of machine which has not meaningfully changed in decades, thereby eliciting raucous protest from a gaggle of BFA-1 Music Techbros, who were palpably invested in the idea that they were entering a cutting-edge field. Mumford's Puritanical version of Functionalism (he reluctantly but unapologetically embraces both labels) is a bit hard to relate to personally, even for me; but read consequentialistically (and, as it were, pessimistically) it certainly is not lacking for anecdotal support. The balance between art and technics is an achievement, not a given, because the conflicting impulses at play here (the need for expression and the need for order) are so fundamental and powerful.

I think also of a passage from Cory Doctorow:

I’ve seen sausages made. I’ve seen laws made. Both pale in comparison to the process by which anti-copying technology agreements are made.

This technology, usually called “Digital Rights Management” (DRM), proposes to make your computer worse at copying some of the files on its hard drive or on other media. Since all computer operations involve copying, this is a daunting task — as security expert Bruce Schneier has said, “Making bits harder to copy is like making water that’s less wet.” (27)

Apple in particular, with the i-Devices, not only has made an end run around this "daunting task" but also figured out how to have people literally lining up at midnight to pay steep prices for the privilege of being thus manipulated. STEAMers sure are correct to see the iPhone as a money-machine which fully integrates the initials. It seems to me that this is, however, exactly the kind of mongrel contraption which Mumford theorized, a weaponization of aesthetics in service of endless consumption, resulting in a sleek supercomputer that can't keep a webpage loaded unless you threaten to fight it. (Yes, I own one.)

Incidentally, musical instruments are excellent examples of machines which achieve their visual appeal rather by accident, and where there are, with a few exceptions, not very many things you can do to them to change their appearance that won't at least marginally affect their utility. Instrument building is also a near-perfect STEAM topic, sitting as it does squarely on the intersection of art and technics, of rugged necessity and personal expression, of the machine arts and the performing arts. Yet even among the most accomplished high school instrumentalists, how many play so well that the differences between silver and lacquer, pistons and rotors, funnels and bowls, are viscerally rather than intellectually or rationally known? And what about the vast majority who are less accomplished, or who know these things only as abstract information that they have learned secondhand, or who have never stopped to consider them at all without prompting?

Indeed,

Behind the appearance of printing from moveable types, apparently so sudden, and on superficial analysis just a great mechanical feat, we find a thousand years of self-discipline and esthetic training, which went along with the effort to respect the gifts of the spirit and to deepen the inner life. Some of that training still is important for those who would design typography. You might think that, once printing was achieved, it would be possible to cut loose entirely from these earlier sources; but in fact the continued interdependence of art and technics could not be better illustrated than in this wholly mechanical art. ... As soon as the art of the calligrapher fell into decay, the art of type design became more difficult, for in aiming at mechanical accuracy and finish, the designer often lost the precious touch of the hand itself. Once utilitarian and rational interests predominated over esthetic ones, as they did in the nineteenth century, there followed a series of lapses both in type itself and in the layout of the printed page... (71-72)

Again, there is a consequentialist flavor to this view, but Mumford is hardly the only one to advocate for the continued need for "self-discipline and esthetic training" even as machines continue to take over more and more tasks from humans. If STEM, the brand, is too rigidly one-sided, or perhaps appears that way on the surface to concerned parents, that is a question of overall purview; the extent to which different disciplines are compartmentalized or integrated in the curriculum is an entirely different question. Maximum integration of topics seems to me unnecessary if the goal is simply to develop the whole person, though I fear the actual goal is simply to look that way superficially. Comprehensive education seems like the obvious winner in any case. But of course comprehensive education is, again, essentially politically unviable anywhere fiscal conservativism reaches a certain critical mass, and so this invites some messy workarounds. STEAMers certainly can count on the artists to play along: we're generally happy to trade our street cred for any degree of mainstream acceptance vis-a-vis this vocal minority of true believers in Hire Education. There is liable to be a personal incentive for us to integrate our marginalized disciplines with more prestigious ones regardless of the potential therein. Call it a classic democratic compromise where nobody gets exactly what they want.

Reports of My Demise (vi)

It's telling that the popular saying "The customer is always right" is seldom uttered without a hint of sarcastic contempt. That's because, as anyone who has actually sold goods or services of virtually any type has learned, the customer is almost always wrong. Wildly, comically wrong.

Why is this? We become customers when we need something we don't have, and even where "services" become reified into "goods," usually this something is, in part, knowledge. You seek out a mechanic to determine that your car needs $1500 worth of work, but because you are a Customer, you respond that you can afford $800 to get it marginally drivable and that they should be happy to have your business goddamn it. You want to know what you really need, but you will take less in order to pay what you intended to pay from the start. And so, when you sit down at conferences with your children's band teacher and this teacher insists that Johnny and Susie really need to practice more, that receiving one-on-one instruction from an established professional player would greatly help to focus this practice time, and that in the broadest sense these children will "get out of it what they put into it," you are apt to say to yourself, "Gee whiz, Mozart, it's not like we're training professional musicians here. Music is for nourishing mind, body, and soul, for helping my kids get into Yale, and for tickling their neural pathways just so, leading to success at, you know, real life jobs, like stockbroker and financial analyst. And besides, they already have soccer Mondays, youth group Tuesdays, quilting Wednesdays..." Maybe you think these things to yourself, or maybe you go out and write an op-ed to this effect for a major dead-tree media outlet. Or, if you're really ambitious, maybe you install yourself at the helm of an arts non-profit in order to spread the wisdom of protracted dabbling and gross overcommitment. Hey, you and your kids all turned out great, didn't you?

Those of us who have, perhaps ill-advisedly, chosen to devote the entire fabric of our being to music know better than to think that any student, no matter the modesty or grandiosity of their ambitions, musical or otherwise, could ever reap the benefits these people constantly namecheck from the kind of distanced, half-suspicious quasi-engagement their actions tend to beget. And yet most customers simply will not buy real musical education. Many will not or cannot accept it even free of charge; I know because I and those around me have tried to give it away on more than one occasion.

In news to no one, the idea of music moves the needle for parents and students while the reality of music does not. Vendors know the reality, customers only the idea, but it is the customer who is, in our society, always right. Exceptions are not unheard of, but they are rare. I have done my fair share of sales-pitching in committee meetings and planning sessions, in conversations with prospective parents and job interviews with prospective employers, for the kind of intense, no-holds-barred, academically rigorous and intellectually stimulating music education that has made me who I am both on- and off-stage. I typically face little or no dissent as to the abstract value of what I am proposing, but all manner of fierce resistance to its implementation. This is because customers will not buy it, administrators know that customers will not buy it, and, well, you know the rest.

The ostensibly charitable segments of the arts economy upon which virtually all practicing artists today rely directly or indirectly to support themselves financially, and which, perhaps more importantly, essentially serve as the last remaining justification of our very existence, replacing aesthetic- and morally-grounded cultural consensus which has fragmented well beyond retrieval, are in spite of their loudly proclaimed "not for profit" legal status nonetheless profoundly consumer-driven enterprises. These are milieus where the heat and light of constructive competitiveness and the pursuit of mastery look just animalistic enough to turn the stomachs of the Bourgeoisie upon which they disproportionately rely for support and validation. They are where uncompromised, unmediated, untriagulated musical pedagogies and traditions go to die. And all of that is to say that they are, at least if you buy the analysis of contemporary gender constructions seized on by Hanna Rosin in The End of Men, profoundly and intrinsically feminine structures.

Certainly for those of us more or less on the outside looking in, its feminine construction explains several facets of the arts education job market: the inverse correlation between the number of teaching opportunities and the age of the students; the flooding of popular music into a socio-aesthetic-epistemological space formerly reserved exclusively for art music; and a willingness to compromise away rigorous pedagogies, the ones which might actually help justify so many public policy battle cries that that The Arts are core academic subjects, but which customers inevitably balk at on account of what is demanded of them in return to make good on this promise.

As I try to recall some of the specific places I have heard or read the core subject battle cry, I in fact can conjure only images of women, a useful reminder that the structuring of an institution or body of knowledge as masculine or feminine, as many theorists have argued, does not mean that only one gender participates in the structuring, or even that the majority of participants will be of that gender. And it most especially does not mean, if I may take this opportunity to preempt the obvious potential for misunderstanding of what I am getting at here, that people born with vaginas are inherently and irrevocably inferior to those born with penises when it comes to "rigorous" or "uncompromised" scholastic arenas. What it means, rather, is that the undue polarization of certain types of thought and behavior along gendered lines creates arbitrary burdens of expectation which mediate our ability to become our authentic selves. And so the facts on the ground leave me to wonder if the "core subject" trope has not become just one more marketing tagline that few of the men or women who might utter it out of self-interest would actually be willing to fight for.

Are you?

T.K.O. in Gamers vs. Audiophiles

Yesterday, I discovered that the local Radio Shack (in the poor neighborhood) no longer stocks plain old headphones. Instead, they exclusively carry "headsets" with a single earpiece and a microphone for speaking. While the pictures on the packaging show smiling young women in phone banks, it can safely be inferred that the target market for these devices is, in fact, young male gamers, who apparently now outnumber headphone users to such an extent that the more specialized devices are no longer worth stocking.

A trip to a nearly equidistant Radio Shack (in the cake-eater neighborhood) was more successful as customers there have their choice of several sets of headphones ranging from $14.99 to $99.99 (as well as the same selection of headsets located in a completely different part of the store). Since I seem to destroy these things regardless of quality or price, I opted for the bottom-of-the-barrel set, which is something musicians aren't suppose to do (or at least not publicly admit to doing), but in my world, harmony and counterpoint are the cake, everything else is the icing, and Grainger and Ravel are booo-ring.

An aside: a techie acquaintance chides me for shopping at Radio Shack in the first place, a chain which he says "sold out" to lowest-common-denominator consumerism years ago (indeed, as I found, it's an ongoing process). I'm a musician, not an electrician; record stores, jazz clubs and bandmates are entities capable of selling out, but electronics stores are not. When I need a piece of gear, I need it fully assembled and functional, not in raw component form, and I'm pretty much at the mercy of other people/entities who can provide such services. For reasons I won't go into, I've boycotted Target and Best Buy for years, and I have to assume that Wal-Mart is a nonstarter for anyone reading this, as it is for me. Chances are better that I simply don't know about Radio Shack's dirty laundry than that they have none; anyone out there got the goods and want to force me to become a headphone-maker? (Yeah, I'm sure it's all slave labor anyway...any American-made headphones out there?)