mutually occluded

In a post on “Anthropology as connoisseurship”, Rex of Savage Minds observes:

Obsession with the details also does not fly well in an age when what we are supposed to be doing is creating generalizing social science. So perhaps connoisseurship as a model of anthropology has drawbacks both for the politically engaged and the scientifically neutral. Still, I think we should try giving it a run for its money again.

To which Kerim, in a post titled “The end of the connoisseur?”, responds:

Anthropologists traditionally deployed their authority as connoisseurs to shape and contextualize the context within which “we” learned about and encountered “other” cultures. Hell, we even had a role defining how people learned about and encountered anthropological knowledge. But now that carefully cultivated connoisseurship is becoming less and less important as Google algorithms and Web 2.0 recommendation engines become the primary gateways.

Thus, for Rex, connoisseurship fundamentally runs against the dominant strains of anthropology; while for Kerim social media has rendered connoisseurship unimportant. In each case, the connoisseur concept or archetype appears to be lagging behind more contemporary concerns.

While it’s probably true that connoisseurship is no longer a talked-about category for understanding culture –- i.e. it doesn’t come up very often, as a word or framework –- this isn’t to say that the practices it refers to aren’t still in practice. Recommendation engines may make a mockery of taste and aesthetic judgment, but this shouldn’t prevent us from appreciating other Web 2.0 platforms — social media sites, lifestreaming, even blogs — as forms of connoisseurship. If the connoisseur is obsessed with details, then it would seem that the ’social media turn’ points to a veritable resurgence, rather than disappearance, of discourses built around a special, targeted, some would say, ‘niche’, focus.

Likewise, to Rex’s point, who’s to say that a form of connoisseurship – the Benjaminian flaneur, for example, who wanders the city in its entirety, applying his discriminating taste everywhere he looks – isn’t compatible with that global, generalizing picture demanded of anthropology today? Lifestreaming services in particular seem to mesh both perspectives — a diverse, global distribution of content, on the one hand, and highly focused, niche authorities, on the other — so, in a certain sense, Rex and Kerim might just be on to something when they bring up this seemingly antiquated, but in fact much revived, concept of connoisseurship.

The problem with this “experiment” is that the second question put to the executive - ‘This business plan will maximize profits but help the environment’ - does not correspond to the first question (’This business plan will maximize profits but harm the environment’). It’s a false, forced analogy - with predictable results.

There’s a good reason why, aside from questions of normative baggage, the respondents perceive ‘harm’ caused to the environment as intended but ‘help’ for the environment as not. The first question makes perfect sense: environmental damage is traditionally a known side-effect of business practices otherwise concerned with maximizing profit. Thus, to do nothing to prevent anticipated environmental effects is an active, intended, and moral endeavor.

Helping the environment, by contrast, is not as much a matter of negligence and passivity. The sentence, ‘This business plan will maximize profits and also, as it were, help the environment’, simply doesn’t make sense - which is to say, it’s not a recognizable, coherent proposition. The environment cannot be helped incidentally, at least not in the way the environment can be harmed incidentally, as an (acceptable) effect of other practices. (No company has ever found, much to its surprise, that it has been helping the environment all along.) To help the environment, a company would have to actively implement specific measures, something most people probably otherwise understand; but this sense of clear intentionality is lost in the unusual wording of the question (which makes it sound like helping the environment can be a side-effect in exactly the same way as harming the environment can be). Thus, the respondent confronted with this sentence will most likely not only think it doesn’t bear much on the question of intentionality but will find its formulation more strange and less natural than the contingency with which it’s contrasted.

It seems to me that this experiment was not in fact designed to determine popular understandings of intentionality as they relate to helping and harming the environment. What the philosophers did instead was force fit the questions to a model that quite clearly attempts to reduce, in advance, any difference in response to the substitution of a single word - with the goal, presumably, of showing how common sense beliefs of everyday people are “normatively loaded” (which I think is otherwise true, if poorly demonstrated by this study) and effectively triggered by unmistakable semantic markers.

Branding strategies and the marketing studies that inform them are increasingly taking into account the rules and conventions that shape consumer attention.

According to the New York Times, in a forthcoming article, “The Power of Strangers,” (to be published in The Journal of Consumer Research) Rosellina Ferraro, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, and her colleagues have found that the efficacy of a brand depends, to a certain extent, on the subject’s relative state of attention. In one study of what they call “incidental brand-consumer encounters”,

each subject was shown 20 photographs of people in various situations and instructed to focus on facial expressions. Afterward, each subject was offered a bottle of water from a selection of four brands. The experiment had nothing to do with facial expressions and everything to do with which kind of water they chose: the subjects had been divided into groups, based on how many of the photos they viewed incidentally included a bottle of Dasani water. Among those who looked at Dasani-free pictures, about 17 percent chose that brand. But about 40 percent of those who viewed a group of pictures that included 12 with a Dasani presence made the brand their pick. Since subjects who actually noticed the brand in the pictures were eliminated from the results, that spike in popularity evidently came from exposure that the subjects weren’t even aware of. “In essence,” Ferraro says, “we have these brief social encounters fairly regularly, and they may have an impact on our choices.”

The importance of conditions of attention - with brand saturation on one end, and inattentive absorption on the other - to consumer perceptions and purchasing habits is one good reason to oppose studies like Ferraro’s to the wave of recent scholarship that favors a more ahistorical view of the efficacy of brands.

On the latter end of the spectrum, David Wengrow’s recent Current Anthropology article “Prehistories of Commodity Branding”, which made some noise amongst the poststructuralist-weary liberal academic left, makes the argument (which I am in fact otherwise partial to) that commodity branding is hardly exclusive to late capitalism. On the contrary,

comparisons between recent forms of branding and much earlier modes of commodity marking associated with the Urban Revolution of the fourth millennium BC suggest that systems of branding address a paradox common to all economies of scale and are therefore likely to arise (and to have arisen) under a wide range of ideological and institutional conditions, including those of sacred hierarchies and stratified states.

The argument then proceeds to examine the “material and cognitive properties of sealing practices” in the ancient world; but, again, Wengrow seems to overlook the importance of brand saturation, mass distribution, and the resultant conditions of consumer attention that, in my opinion, more suggest a break with premodernity than continuation with it.

The conspicuous absence of this line of thought perhaps explains Wengrow’s distaste for the poststructuralist theories that seem to too freely dispose of “choice” and “freedom” on its account.

A possible objection to a more catholic approach to commodity branding—one which steps outside the framework of wage-labor capitalism—is that commerce (along with, by extension, consumer choice) was tangential to the organization of pre-modern economies (Polanyi 1957). For adherents of this view some tyranny or other can always be invoked to explain the uniqueness of modern consumption patterns: the tyranny of gift exchange, of sacred economics, or of the hierarchical state. Yet there are many reasons to doubt this evolutionary scenario, some of which arise from the recent experience of mass consumerism itself. The intractable consumer who rejects choice in favor of conformity, who chooses brand loyalty over brand novelty, is an undeniable part of the modern scene (Miller 2001). Frederic Jameson (1991, 266) goes so far as to suggest that “market as a concept rarely has anything to do with choice or freedom, since those are all determined for us in advance”; we select among commodities, “but we can scarcely be said to have a say in actually choosing any of them.” (8)

While Jameson does go too far in claiming consumers’ choices are “determined for us in advance”, Ferraro’s study shows just how erroneous it would be to underestimate the importance of prior states of distraction and inattention to present, seemingly autonomous decisions.

Screenshot courtesy Electronic Arts (via Wired)

Tom over at Mind Hacks makes a few interesting observations regarding the disjunction between real and virtual selves. Referencing Clive Thompson’s Wired article, he notes that, in the video game Mirror’s Edge, “the visual cues about what your character’s arms and legs are doing (they appear in shot as you run and jump) makes the game a convincing proprioception hack.”

Elaborating on this strange effect, Tom mentions Jaron Lanier’s first VR experience with sensory-motoric disjunction in the 80s. The relevant passage from Lanier’s post, which I reproduce below, is historically important.

Of course there were bugs. I distinctly remember a wonderful bug that caused my hand to become enormous, like a web of flying skyscrapers. As is often the case, this accident led to an interesting discovery.

It turned out that people could quickly learn to inhabit strange and different bodies and still interact with the virtual world. I became curious how weird the body could get before the mind would become disoriented. I played around with elongated limb segments, and strange limb placement. The most curious experiment involved a virtual lobster (which was lovingly modeled by Ann Lasko.) A lobster has a trio of little midriff arms on each side of its body. If physical human bodies sprouted corresponding limbs, we would have measured them with an appropriate body suit and that would have been that.

I assume it will not come as a surprise to the reader that the human body does not include these little arms, so the question arose of how to control them. The answer was to extract a little influence from each of many parts of the physical body and merge these data streams into a single control signal for a given joint in the extra lobster limbs. A touch of human elbow twist, a dash of human knee flex; a dozen such movements might be mixed to control the middle join of little left limb #3. The result was that the principle elbows and knees could still control their virtual counterparts roughly as before, while still contributing to the control of additional limbs.

Yes, it turns out people can learn to control bodies with extra limbs!

I find this moment in the history of virtual reality especially important (a good deal of my dissertation focuses on it). It can be compared to Frank Biocca’s experiments (for the military) where the displacement of vision by head-mounted see-through visors caused discrepancies in the hand-eye coordination of the user, which at first induced simulation sickness, but then, much to the surprise of the experimenters, the subject rather quickly adapted to the new proprioceptive coordinates. (See, for instance, his 1998 Presence paper, “Virtual Eyes Can Rearrange Your Body: Adaptation to Visual Displacement in See-Through, Head-Mounted Displays”.)

This shift in the goals or possibilities of immersion was somewhat unintended, however. (For some time Biocca considered sensory disjunction a problem to be solved with better technology, and Lanier attributes the discovery of these possibilities to a ‘bug’.) In any event, the experimental pursuit of these virtual body effects has changed the development of virtual reality technologies considerably: for one, VR is no longer simply thought of as consigned to reproduce or mimic the real world body of the user - which has led to an equally radical shift in conceptions of the self, the body, and its (physiological) limitations. (One can even discern a new techno-spiritualism emerging alongside these discoveries. To be sure, the opening-up of new possibilities for bodily experience has brought with it a powerful rhetoric of freedom from the body.)

London, November 26: Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG with Antoine Bousquet of Birkbeck College will present a public lecture on ‘Battlespace/s: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare’.

Manaugh’s lecture will be an analysis of ‘cities gone wild’ and their relation to war, architecture, science fiction and geopolytics.

Being a fan of Rafi Segal’s important A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, I look forward to hearing (or rather reading, since I won’t be able to attend) Manaugh’s thoughts on Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land.

via Eliminative Culinarism: BLDG Blog: a lecture on feral cities

17 to 18 April 2009
Binghamton, NY, United States

This conference seeks to explore the interconnectedness of technology,
relationality and practices of resistance. We conceptualize technology
broadly, as referring to systems, methods of organization, visual/imaging
techniques, and political strategies and tactics, as well as to specific
material objects and systems of objects – tools, commodities, bodies.
We seek papers which explore the polyvalent deployments of technologies
in both reproducing extant systems of power relations and their attendant
practices of subjectification, as well as their role in fashioning
resistant subjects, practices, and communities. We understand these
processes and poïetic productions as thoroughly embedded, in terms of
both historical contingency and geopolitical location.

Relationality is the cloth of subjectification processes. It is real and
imagined, and inextricably linked to the production of subjects and
technologies in both oppressive and resistant logics across different
geopolitical locales. This conference also aims at igniting discussion
and debate on the contrasting logics of resistance as they are enacted
from disparate geopolitical positionalities.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary emphasis of Binghamton University’s
Program in Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture, we seek work that
flourishes in the conjunction of multiple frames of epistemological
inquiry, from fields including, but not limited to: postcolonial
studies, decolonial studies, queer and gender studies, ethnic studies,
media and visual culture studies, urban studies, science and technology
studies, critical theory, continental philosophy, and historiography.
Workers/writers/thinkers of all different disciplinary, inter-
disciplinary, and non-disciplinary stripes welcome, whether academically
affiliated or not. Submissions may be textual, performative, visual.

Submission Guidelines
Submission deadline: January 31, 2009

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract along with a cover letter that
includes your name, academic affiliation, contact numbers, complete
mailing address, and e-mail address, as well as information regarding any
technological equipment you may need for your presentation. Papers will
be considered for a 20 minute presentation, followed by discussion, so
please limit the length of paper to 10-12 pages.

Email address for inquiries and electronic submission of abstracts: pic.conference.2009_at_gmail.com

Organized by: Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture @ Binghamton University

Deadline for abstracts/proposals: 13 January 2009 [add this deadline to Google Calendar]

Check the event website for latest details.

Peter Howarth’s November 6 LRB review of Robert Frost’s recently published Notebooks mentions the first draft of his unpublished play about the duel to which Ezra Pound challenged the poet Lascelles Abercrombie in 1913, “after Abercrombie had proposed that modern poetry could learn from Wordsworth’s interest in contemporary speech” — a suggestion that could have just as easily been made by Frost.

In any event, the play’s comparison between metrical form and free verse, as they concern ‘mass production’ - the one of poems, the other of poets, – seems to suggest that these two poetic modes have much more in common than they would each like to believe.

The drama fails to ignite, as did the duel (Abercrombie neatly bested Pound by suggesting as his choice of weapon that they pelt each other with copies of their unsold books), but it’s interesting for the scenario Frost embeds it in. Pound is Ezekiel Poise (a name poking fun at Pound’s Idaho medievalism by combining poesy and Boise) who has set up a poetry bureau in which rich young idiots are coached in free verse, which Poise then supplies to tame editors who would ‘publish anything Ezekiel sends them’. Imagists made much of the similarities between metrical form and production-line values, but the implication here is that it’s free verse which allows the ‘mass production of poets’, by simply making things too easy.

Photograph by © Eric Shindelbower

I don’t visit restaurants like Applebee’s or T.G.I. Friday’s very often so when I do I tend to be more fascinated (and demoralized) than I probably should be.  The signature kitschy decor, which attempts to imitate a more natural accumulation of mementos, seems just the kind of dreary, instant local culture effect that a global corporation would be intent on producing (and a rootless suburban population open to consuming). Indeed, I had assumed from the start that the so-called memorabilia was in fact manufactured and made to look old and used, that nothing on the walls was actually local, much less authentic.

Michael Tunison’s 2005 Washington Post article, “A Side of Decor“, overturned these assumptions and revealed a much more interesting story. As it turns out, the memorabilia isn’t fake, the autographs are real, and the many antique fixtures aren’t actually picked out of a mail-order catalog. Instead, with great ingenuity, a small community of hired rummagers, aficionados, and interior designers scour the earth for genuine novelties and authentic artifacts, moving town to town setting up local variation after variation.

For example, Scott Schershel, vice president of Florida-based Interior Spaces Inc., an art vendor for Ruby Tuesday, and Deborah Conrad, owner of a South Carolina-based company called Prismatic Interior Works, work as decor suppliers for the chain. According to the WP article, Schershel and Conrad

hire “pickers” to explore flea markets and rummage sales to find their stuff; then they oversee the installation. Conrad said her personal record was the year she spent 256 nights away from home, decorating yet more Ruby Tuesdays. [...] “We used to give the restaurants a little local flavor,” Schershel said. “We would contact local museums and archival societies to find old photos and other stuff related to the area. If there was a college nearby, we’d prominently feature things related to a sports team at the college.”

But as decor styles shift to more recent time periods, the strategies required to acquire the appropriate memorabilia have also shifted, causing something of an upheaval amongst the decor suppliers. The WP article describes how in 2002 T.G.I Friday’s undertook a corporate-mandated makeover that called for “a slightly less-cluttered update with pop-culture touchstones that evoke the mid-1960s to mid-1990s. That means skateboards, bicycles, classic rock and new-wave album covers, surfboards, disco balls.” But these kinds of things just can’t be as easily found at flea markets and rummage sales; the treasure hunter would instead have to rummage through their modern-day counterpart: eBay. “Which is where Michelle Edwards comes in.

Based in Nashville, Edwards, 39, is Friday’s principal supplier of decor. She’s been with the company for 13 years, part of the old guard of collectors — a group of treasure hunters hired to fan out to various garage sales and flea markets in Tennessee in search of antiques and other quaint clutter to send to wherever a new Friday’s was about to open. [...] When the corporate office decided to switch looks, most of Edwards’s old-guard collectors “didn’t see it as doable,” she said, because “when we went to this newer look, it was harder to find because it wasn’t surfacing in the flea markets.” She persisted on her own, and eBay and other Internet sites amply provided most of the ephemera that Friday’s needs.

In many ways, to be sure, work like Edwards’ creates (rather than sustains) nostalgia for pop-cultures past. It’s simply not yet clear to what extent chain decor strategies, when executed on such a large scale, set or determine what is, and what isn’t, a ‘memory’ worth reproducing. (We can credit Edwards’ many precursors for our disturbingly sterilized image of the 50’s.)

Indeed, as period styles move forward in time, we will likely feel increasingly challenged by decor decisions. That Michelle Edwards is now looking for vintage laptops on the web, rather than old road signage at a junk yard, is a sure sign of a changing pop-culture nostalgia terrain. So if, as Michael Tunison remarks, we have yet to “put a finger on the failed joviality of the retail age — and its air of enforced cheer, sentimental prefab and the replication of nostalgia”, it looks like there will be time yet for the ‘internet generation’ to hammer out a description. I only hope that the process by which our increasingly not-so-distant past gets churned into nostalgiac form becomes more a subject of critique than an object of ridicule. Disenchanted jabs at servers’ vest “flare” might just betray how little we take seriously the representation of our own recent history.