The final meaninglessness of the popular
In June, Black creators on TikTok went on a widely reported strike — refusing to make dances to a Megan thee Stallion song — to call attention to how the work of Black people was often appropriated without credit or compensation. In a widely cited TikTok video, dancer Erick Louis put it succinctly: "This app would be nothing without Black people.”
One can understand TikTok as just that, an engine for appropriation that uses massive resources of surveillance and data analysis to identify value (attention and engagement in the form of virality) and transfer it to those better positioned socially to exploit it. The transfer process not only sustains the site's feeling of dynamism — all these ideas and styles moving out from different cultural corners into a putative mainstream — it also helps reproduce certain people as marginalized and other people as central, capable of exercising cultural leverage. "When the powerful appropriate from the oppressed, society’s imbalances are exacerbated and inequalities prolonged," Lauren Michele Jackson writes in White Negroes.
The things black people make with their hands and minds, for pay and for the hell of it, are exploited by companies and individuals who offer next to nothing in return. White people are not penalized for flaunting black culture—they are rewarded for doing so, financially, artistically, socially, and intellectually. For a white person, seeing, citing, and compensating black people, however, has no such reward and may actually prove risky.
This suggests that appropriation is not necessarily about some particular content being especially compelling and irresistible to the taking but about re-establishing a dominant group's entitlement to the work product of the dominated group while denying them property rights in it. It follows that "cool" — the quality that privileged appropriators are seemingly after in their appropriating — isn't intrinsic to what is being appropriated but emerges through the appropriation as its end product. "Cool" (or whatever word is currently serving its function — these words tend to be examples of the same appropriative process they describe) is cultural difference that has been reconfigured to benefit the dominant class. The point is not that there is no aesthetic merit in what is appropriated; rather it is that dominant classes can't recognize that merit or acknowledge it as anything other than difference to be assimilated for their own benefit. They are compelled to reduce genius to cool.
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In Marx: Toward the Center of Possibility, Kōjin Karatani develops a theory about how "surplus value" derives from gaps in how different communities value things. A commodity made within one context can be transported to a new context in which its unfamiliarity or distinction gives it added value to whomever is capable of executing that shift ("merchant capital" in Marx's account).
This reorients the site of exploitation from the realm of production ("the factory") to the realm of circulation (markets). It sees capitalism's development less as a matter of industrialization so much as the integration of diverse communities into the same economic system to exploit differences between them in the process of exchange. Karatani writes:
The development of a commodity economy liquidated the difference between value systems that were previously regionally isolated, ‘socially’ connecting global production on a large scale in one clean sweep. Obviously, those regions that, despite their isolation, enjoyed self-sufficiency, were no longer able to function without a relation to the world market, and so became rapidly impoverished and divided in class terms. Production gradually transformed into commodity production, and these regions were enclosed by the commodity economy. But this process was driven by merchant capital’s capacity to gain surplus value from the erasure of difference itself.
Platforms like TikTok are integrated sites of both production and circulation. Their owners get to harvest value in both moments, exploiting the creators who are producing content for less than what they are paid for it and exploiting gaps between communities by shuffling content around to where it will generate the most engagement and hence advertising revenue, a process that could be described as "gaining surplus value from the erasure of difference itself." The platforms aren't rife with exploitive forms of appropriation as some kind of accident, an unfortunate by-product of democratizing participation in media or whatever. Neither is it the result of egregious ethical shortcomings of a few bad apple users. Rather they are designed to foster and accommodate appropriation, to extract the value from it.
One can think of "the erasure of difference" as a kind of arbitrage slowly draining the exploitable value of "difference," while reinscribing the hierarchies that produced it. While difference, from the perspective of the dominant class, might be felt as a fear or fascination with the other, its suppression or resolution is an economic rather than a psychological necessity: Capitalism requires systematic production and elimination of difference to reproduce itself as universal.
The encounter with difference, then, will always be to some extent an awareness of this arbitrage opportunity. One must assess whether one is in a position to take advantage of it or has instead been positioned to be taken advantage of. It becomes hard to differentiate between recognition and exploitation. Work becomes a matter of reproducing the difference that the extraction of its value perpetually drains. "Connectivity" and networks are well-suited to this; algorithmic organization of social relations can be optimized for it, on the basis of emerging gaps or persistent identity markers, like race.
"Surplus value is born on the margin between differing systems of value," Karatani writes. Communications technologies, in their pursuit of scale and range, are means for identifying and manufacturing those seams between different value systems, different ways of life, and then orchestrating their foreclosure. "Capital ceaselessly creates margins, gaps and differences," Karatani argues. "In the era of industrial capitalism, an unprecedented velocity of technical innovation became the motivation and condition of its existence." That innovation, in other words, is oriented toward finding gaps and erasing them, transferring value to the dominant classes.
"Capitalism is preordained not to civilize the world but to preserve and maintain itself through technical innovation." Karatani writes. "Seemingly useless technical innovations too are essential to capital's preservation. This springs not from any human 'natural' necessity, but from the necessity of the expansion of value." When I read that, I think of "seemingly useless technical innovations" like TikTok and the initial insistence that it is innocent fun, a reprieve from the pressures of other forms of media production and consumption, satisfying a "natural" desire for self-expression, distraction, connection, etc. But it is another procedure for the "expansion of value," which is to say the production of difference as vulnerability, as repeated erasure.
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One response to cultural appropriation and the "erasure of difference" would seem to be to find ways of reproducing secrecy or opacity. But this can be self-defeating, a kind of self-marginalization that preserves the gaps for later and intensifies their charge.
In Blues People, Amari Baraka discusses this with respect to the evolution of jazz and its relation to commercialization:
Its secrecy had been a form of protection and incubation; but for it to remain secret or exclusive at this point in American social history would make it as sterile as the culture from which it was estranged. Secrecy had been the strength of the Afro-American culture when it was dependent largely on folk sources for its vitality, but now it had to be reinterpreted in terms of the most profound influences in the open field of all existing cultures, or it would retreat to the conditional meaningfulness of the folk or the final meaninglessness of the popular.
Secrecy, Baraka suggests, becomes detrimental when it no longer signifies anything beyond estrangement and exclusion from the mainstream; it just becomes another word for the exploitable difference. It's just waiting to be found out, rather than having an autonomous vitality of its own.
The dilemma, as Baraka suggests, is that removing the gap, eradicating the secrecy and the marketable notions of authenticity built around it, threatens to resolve not into due respect but into the "final meaninglessness of the popular." He seemed to hope that the "open field of all existing culture" would eventually be the proving ground where such meaninglessness is to be avoided, where value would refer to aesthetic quality rather than cultural positionality or vulnerability to appropriation.
TikTok and other platforms seem to present themselves as that open field, embracing all kinds of cultural production from all levels of society with little apparent gatekeeping, but in effect they are largely the opposite: algorithmically constrained, top-down-controlled platforms that reinscribe marginality for profit, over and over again. The meaninglessness of the popular is the corollary of the erasure of difference for value. Both can be traced in the treadmill movement of millions of individualized feeds.