Flavor of significance
With virtually all public gathering spaces closed, it is tempting to declare that the so-called experience economy has been extinguished. But that would misunderstand “experience” as something that requires the togetherness of the crowd, when it often involves allowing atomized consumers to stage themselves for an audience, who may or may not be present. (This is the difference between "experiences" and, say, events.)
To make experience a commodity, it must be made fungible — what matters is the souvenir (the proof, now often captured by experience-consumers themselves in an image or video) and not the possibility of losing oneself in the moment. By providing the means and the stage for these reified performances of “experience having,” social media platforms have tended to work in tandem with in-person “experience” sites, whether these be conventional tourist attractions or newly conceived photogenic spaces. One goes to gather evidence that one was there and participated in a legible “experience,” injected oneself into something recognizable and/or striking, and appropriated its familiarity, ingenuity, or exclusivity for one’s own identity, disseminated through an online profile or story stream.
That kind of “experience” may be easy to replicate within the strictures of physical distancing, because it doesn’t necessarily hinge on anything material in any given experience, but instead depends on ready-at-hand structures of dissemination. “Being there” was always an alibi for something else.
One way to describe that something else is what Emily Segal and Martti Kalliala propose in this essay, where they use “umami” as a metaphor for what “experience” retailers have tried to capture and sell over the past decade or so:
We believe that umami has been both literally and figuratively the key commodity of the experience economy. Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas...
“Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial.
It is, they note, “what you got when you didn’t get anything.” That is, it is the elusive and ever-shifting quality that is sometimes called “Instagrammability” but has more often described as “authentic,” a tautological term that typically means nothing more than “trendy in a way that disavows trendiness.” It is the quality that is defined by resisting definition, and every effort to define it tends simply to elaborate its elusiveness. It is easy to list things that fit this category but hard to extract an abstracted essence that they share.
Segal and Kalliala suggest that “cultural umami” is an experience of what might appear to be radical inauthenticity — “this doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be,” as they put it in one formulation. But the novelty of something, it’s calling attention to itself as something worth paying attention to, is a better approximation of how the word authenticity is used today in marketing contexts. Authentic doesn’t refer to integrity or fidelity, but to a kind of conspicuous being.
“Authentic” experiences and things put forward their ineffable fidelity to themselves to make us forget that nothing has an essence; there is no authentic or preordained way for something to be, or to be interpreted — no definitive angle from which to approach it, despite how strenuously “authentic” brands try to shop for the consumers that will reinforce their “realness” aura. These experiences purportedly transfer their “realness” — their conspicuousness, their notability — to consumers, giving them a sense of realness too.
Perhaps the most notable purveyors of the substanceless substance, the flavor of significance that Segal and Kalliala describe are “Influencers,” who have proliferated to try to extract and market the “umami” from as many varieties of human endeavor as possible. What makes for “authentic” plumbing? There is almost certainly a plumbing influencer on a social media platform somewhere trying to give that notion some structure and imagery. Right now, coronavirus influencers are surely emerging and gathering followers and sponsors for demonstrating the “right way” to be in quarantine. Isn't it preferable to believe that there could be a right way?
Segal and Kalliala take for granted that people have an “inexhaustible appetite for umami,” which I see as a desire for models of how to live “meaningfully,” a desire to be told what to do and told that being told is actually the most authentic way to be. The cruelties of capitalism — its fetish of competitiveness, its determination to put price tags on care and belonging, its dependence on exploitation and exclusion — make it all the more necessary to find some recompense, some ideological framework that makes it tolerable. But that appetite must be cultivated, inculcated as an appetite so it doesn't appear as a refusal, as resistance, rejection of society.
Why do we want that particular kind of “experience”? It seems to resemble what David Shields called “reality hunger” — a demand for "reality" as coalesced in appropriated fragments. Umami, in Segal and Kalliala's analysis, describes qualities of density, of “synergy,” of a whole superseding the sum of its parts. It is a kind of “deliciousness” that is encoded in a juxtaposition of signifiers but coalesces into a distinctive brand. Food dishes that convey literal umami promise that the different (and perhaps arbitrary) bits of things can be seamlessly blended into a whole. Umami experiences promise that you can similarly assemble a coherent and convincing identity out of stray salient bits.
For Segal and Kalliala, using chef David Chang’s Momofuku as an example, “metaphorical umami makes the combination of the food and the authenticity of the space somehow culminate in a desire to pay prohibitively expensive rent in a postindustrial wasteland.” Chang claims in this Wired piece that he was determined to make food worth waiting in line for, but in practice that becomes hard to distinguish from food that seems good because you waited in line for it. The line precedes the consumption and establishes its context, pre-certifies that evanescent taste of popularity that people who wait in lines to eat expensive food are generally after.
Chang asserts that deliciousness is, borrowing a term from Douglas Hofstadter, a “strange loop,” which is to say it is a tautology, like authenticity itself. It is what it is, and the trick is to make people see that as a process, and then sell that noticing itself as a commodified “experience” of flavor.
I think that "flavor is a strange loop" is a euphemistic description, to say the least. My view is that authenticity is marketing: marketing can create the lines at the restaurant that create the aura of popularity, which in turn creates the subjective experience of flavor. You eat the trend.
Influencers, then, are those people who do that sort of marketing, who have the social media numbers to prove that there is a line of sorts, a crowd around their content that becomes a self-fulfilling proof of its relevance.
Though we can’t gather as crowds in physical space, we will still gather on screens and in platform metrics. People will still want the same charge that participating in a moment gives, and they’ll still want those moments to be fungible, to be collectible, to feel personalized and exclusive. The experience economy isn’t over because we have more reason than ever to turn our experiences into media and look for ways to translate that into social recognition, into acceptance.
The gravity of the situation the world is facing would seem to make the frivolity and pretense of the experience economy instantly evaporate, but the coronavirus is not peeling away the layers of illusion to reveal an unquestioned authentic reality we all must share. The quarantine hits everyone differently; different people face vastly different risks and are expected to bear vastly different burdens, despite the superficial similarity of confronting widespread closure. What seems significant may have shifted, but it can still appear as a flavor, a seasoning amid the crowded channels on which we're broadcasting.