It was "sparkle week" this week in the town where I'm living," when everyone has an opportunity to put out anything — broken cabinetry, old tube TVs, paint cans, boxes of moldy magazines, VHS tapes, stacks of two-by-fours, etc. — for the garbage collectors to take away. A cornucopia of utterly unpredictable things ends up on the sidewalk during this week, and we spotted several rented U-Hauls driving around, being filled up with furniture and miscellany. On the first day, we secured a set of 1950s-era kitchen-table chairs (only one of which was wobbly and unusable), and the promise of more finds seemed open-ended. All week I found myself walking around town, poking through boxes of trash, hoping for another score despite not looking for anything particular and despite whatever Covid risk inheres in rooting through strangers' garbage. I kept telling myself, I shouldn't be doing this, but then I would spot another trash pile and saunter over to check it out. Should I grab this Beverly Hills 90210 tie-in book I Hate Brenda? It might be worth something to somebody. Or maybe I could do something with this DVD player that may or may not work. Do I need a lampshade?
Whenever I feel driven in this way by an abstract assessment of what something might be worth to someone else or at some other time — I know I am deep in commodity fetishism, engulfed by that capitalist structure of feeling that makes "bargains" emotionally resonant. Getting something for free seems like a back door to the infinite, a way to divide use value by zero and make something incalculably worthy by my warped cost-benefit analysis. Of course, this merely sets me further along the path of enjoying the limitless process of exchange more than the fundamentally limited process of actually consuming things. You can only eat so many Nutty Bars (less than $1 at Aldi!).
It seems to me that there is nothing "natural" to consumerism. It's not anchored by some idea of a subsistence level; rather, it serves as the systemic expression of the fantasy of being able to banish subsistence. It rationalizes the egregious inequality capitalism produces by positing consumers as liberated and autonomous, not merely capable but compelled to never stop wanting and sometimes having more.
I’m always interested in how capitalism’s requirement of ceaselessly expanding consumer demand gets translated on the level of the individual into a compulsion to want things, a sense that insatiability is a positive character trait, that knowing what to buy our having a wish list of consumer goods and experiences is an index of how well one belongs, how successful one is at being a person. Consumerism is hard work in this sense; it takes a lot of effort to continually reproduce desire, to keep up with what is supposed to be desirable and why, to be able to see yourself being seen consuming what is supposed to be consumed in just the right way (c.f. the proverbial avocado toast brunch pic on Instagram — admittedly an outdated reference).
Because it is hard to want things, especially when we are unmoored from any framework that could fully stabilize a set of needs as "natural" or "proper to one's station" or "authentic" or so on, we become susceptible to systems that can do our desiring for us or that can automate the work of wanting more — of having a particular kind of taste for things. I have been interpreting recommendation algorithms along those lines in past newsletters: Basically, these algorithms don't reflect existing needs or wants; they are a system for instilling new ones. They solve the problem of when you want to want something, because again, this serial wanting of things is what rationalizes what it is an otherwise intolerable economic condition. So
opening Netflix or TikTok is typically not a way to watch something specific but a place to turn when you want to want something. Their algorithms produce a sense of having been "satisfied" without having to have first been deprived or lacking, without having to bring desire into a sharper focus. These systems produce desire outside the subjects who use them; they get to experience "desire" as an inert consumer good, available on demand and already enjoyed. Having had whatever videos shown to you produces you as someone who has been successful at wanting.
This is the kind of thing that Bernard Stiegler seems to mean when he talks about consumer "proletarianization" — his not entirely useful way of describing the deskilling of consumption (which I also mentioned last week, but now I've done some more reading). In For a New Critique of Political Economy he argues that a deskilled form of consumerism emerges to address the crisis capitalism would otherwise face in a declining rate of profit. Where 19th century capitalism proletarianized workers (deskilling them into "abstract labor" for the production processes), 20th century capitalism proletarianized consumers (deskilling their desire into fungible, abstract libidinal energy). This process transforms what Stiegler calls the "relations of consumption" — how the desire for things and uses we make of them are fundamentally social.
Hiroki Azuma, in Otaku: Japan's Database Animals, refers to this kind of deskilling as well, drawing on Alexander Kojève's interpretation of Hegel to argue that postmodern consumers have been "animalized" — another not entirely useful metaphor. For homo sapiens to become "human," he argues, they must "struggle against nature," whereas animals "live in harmony with nature." Human "desire," then, involves sublimation and a higher purpose than the mere satisfaction of animal wants. For Azuma, what makes human desire "human" is that it takes other people's desires into account — "the desire of the other is itself desired." People want to be wanted, and want to want things that others want — sometimes this is described as "mimetic desire" or "social proof." This is "human" because humans are purportedly alone among species in being able to conceive of intersubjective desire. Azuma argues that postmodern consumers are becoming "animalized" because they are capable of satisfying themselves without drawing on desire for the desire of the other. Instead, they are plugged into managed circuits of stimulus and response that allows them to experience pleasure without social communication.
This can be likened to "convenient" modes of consumerism that eliminate the "friction" of other people, or algorithms that supplant social communication and supply what it ordinarily produces (desire) to individuals without their having to participate or guide the process reciprocally. "The objects of desire that previously could not be had without social communication, such as everyday meals and sexual partners, can now be obtained very easily, without all that troublesome communication, through fast food or the sex industry," Azuma writes. "So it can be said that in this way our society has truly been stepping down the path of animalization for several decades."
Stiegler, making a similar point, argues that people's desires have been "grammatized" and made predictable through their exposure to vicarious media forms and marketing (forms of what he calls "exteriorization").
When exteriorization, which is the root of ... the question of this production of self by self in which the human consists, reaches the stage where the exteriorization of memory and knowledge becomes hyperindustrial, then it is at once what extends without limit the power of hypomnesic milieus, and what allows [consumers] to be controlled — controlled by the cognitive and cultural industries of control societies which now formalize neurochemical activity and nucleotide sequences, and which thereby inscribe the neurobiological substrates of memory and knowledge.
That is, I think, a belabored way of saying that the media is now so extensive as to be capable of reprogramming our relation to memory, gesture, and pleasures and standardizing them, working against our capacity to individuate ourselves as apparently should be our destiny. If you prefer it in Stiegler-ese, here is another take: "In other words, proletarianization is a process of losing knowledge — that is, also, a loss of savor and of existence — which is engendered by grammatization insofar as it short-circuits the processes of transindividuation through which, by becoming individuated through work, that is, though learning something, the worker individuates the milieu of their work." The result of this is what Stiegler labels "systemic stupidity" (a term not likely to convince anyone who finds anti-consumerist theory inherently elitist).
In Azuma's terms, "systemic stupidity" is animalized consumption that is detached from any master narratives that could give it that higher purpose and instead plays out as the compulsive fulfillment of base needs. Otaku — that is, obsessive anime fans — are emblematic consumers of this type who "detach 'form' from 'content'" not "for the purpose of finding meaning in various works or engaging in social activities but rather in order to confirm the self as a pure idle spectator (which is the self as 'pure form')." They content themselves with consuming endless configurations drawn from a database of emotionally triggering components — a foreshadowing of Netflix's or Pandora's or porn sites' attempts to disaggregate content into its component appealing parts and Frankenstein together new iterations that can serve specific niches or search terms. It also seems to me an apt description of algorithmic culture, which lets us experience the self as "pure form," not defined by any particular content but pliable in response to it, achieving a status of being "a pure idle spectator" who consumes the self itself rather than some other representation of reality. This is fetishized consumption purified of usefulness, of an explanatory logic that exceeds the consumer around which it is organized. The feed is just for you; you are the only reason for it appearing in just that way, and it accomplishes nothing beyond allowing you to enjoy your pivotal centrality to that closed loop.
The result is consumers who are isolated and atomized without being individuated, in Stiegler's sense — that is, they are cut off from the social context that allows individuation to occur and have meaning. Azuma puts it this way: "Today, emotional activities are being 'processed' nonsocially, in solitude, and in an animalistic fashion. For in the postmodern, database-model society, there cannot be such a thing as a grand empathy. Today, many otaku works are clearly consumed as tools for such animalistic 'processing.' "
I understand this concern and usually argue something implicitly similar: Capitalism produces consumers in its image and instills in them the desire for the kinds of standardized culture it can reproduce profitably. We are isolated and controlled through consumption (and not through its prohibition). Through forms of media we internalize certain patterns of pleasure and behavior that valorize convenience and efficiency and condemn the complications of interpersonal relationships. Media provide emotional experience on a commodity basis, decontextualized and abstracted from the fabric of social relations. They induce a compulsive passivity that simulates autonomy with none of the responsibility.
But in recounting these theories, though, I become increasingly wary of their implications that there is a correct way to consume — a non-"stupid" way to do it like a "human." Critiquing consumerism fails, I think, if it leaves the impression that there is a right and a wrong way to do it, or that there are individual immunities available for the especially conscientious or "empathetic" consumer. Everyone is essentially complicit in a libidinal economy that is fully subsumed by capitalism. Empathy is on its terms. To be fair to Stiegler, he seems to be at pains to articulate that — asserting for instance that consumerism is a poison that appears as a cure even while trying to evoke the possibility of solidarity beyond consumer capitalism.
Algorithms, in supplying a proxy for that desire of the other, keep it alive in a diminished, distorted form. They too present themselves as the partial cure for the poison that they themselves have introduced — you can't have society anymore but you can play the social game through the metrics and opacities that drive algorithmic culture, which is full of people on screens, trapped in crystal like the villains of Superman II.
Perhaps this personal anecdote illustrates something about vicarious experience in the social media era. Lately I have been trying to complete this old SNES game, SuperCastlevania IV, which I have been playing for over a month. This couldn't be a more atomized and grimly compulsive scenario: sitting along at my computer plugging away at a video game that hasn't been relevant in generations, whose completion has no intrinsic meaning and would impart no real sense of accomplishment. It partakes of no master narrative other than within the hermetic Castlevania universe that I know nothing about. It is just a game I remember playing when I was younger.
I reached a point where I couldn't get any further; I couldn't execute the serious of jumps and whip-throws necessary to get over this series of turning cogs in a giant clock or something. I probably tried 25 times. There was no grammatization of this particular set of gestures setting in. In frustration I searched the level, and a YouTube link to a complete walkthrough of the game posted by some random person came up. I watched it to the end, past all the levels I had already beat to the level I couldn't clear and beyond, really spending time with how they played this game, their personal flair with it, their occasional missteps, and I don't know if I was cured of the desire of the other or not, but when it was done, I didn't want to ever look at SuperCastlevania 4 ever again.