Let Them Eat Lifestyle

I liken Whole Foods to a certain mega-chain bookseller I once worked for. To the higher-ups books were simply salable units; ghost-written WWF-wrestler biographies and Shakespeare’s works enjoyed equal esteem. I see the same basic attitude at work in Whole Foods: the signs taxonomizing the food are in place simply to facilitate its movement from shelf to register to paper or plastic. Whole Foods’s marketing aesthetic is a thoroughly pragmatic one—one that attempts to ensure that not one organic banana goes rotten, nor one fair-trade espresso bean unground.

A priori delimited grocery purchasing options, which come courtesy of the cultural logic of late capitalism, are likely exacerbated by such entities as Whole Foods, but this may just mean that the terms and conditions under which smug, sanctimonious people express their smugness and sanctimony have shifted. The world will always have its assholes; the only relevant question is whether they wear the somber fustian of Puritans or the unbleached hemp of tree-huggers. Hence the pragmatism I sense behind Whole Foods marketing strategies. More than anything, they reflect not the shopper’s native impulse toward epimeleia heautou, but rather her acquired impulse toward self-actualization within the discourse of lifestyle politics. In other words, the experiential gratification of shopping at Whole Foods trumps the actual utility of shopping there. I mean, if Whole Foods were really about bringing healthy food to the people, about offering a viable (Or should I say “sustainable?") alternative to the factory-farmed fare on the shelves of conventional supermarkets, why the hell do they charge six dollars for a bag of granola? Because the foodstuffs therein are actually positional goods, of course! One can feel all earthy and earnest and bourgeois-bohemian while he also, and perhaps unwittingly, circles the wagons of class ever closer at a time when the foundational American principle of upward mobility has never been in greater jeopardy.

If the concern is to find some amenable grocery milieu in which to apotheosize one’s authenticity, then one need look no further than Whole Foods. If, however, the concern is simply to feel the wan thrill of self-congratulatory cosmopolitanism (I can think of no identity more alienated than that which has been fashioned in accordance with the injunctions of political correctness) then, by all means, one should visit the haphazard cornucopias of Chinatown and the farmers’ market. Cosmopolitanism as I use it here involves a dialectical double-movement where the ethno-geographically relative position one understands herself as occupying in the “global village” becomes actually a subtle re-assertion of Western prerogative—something Zizek inveighs against in The Ticklish Subject. This cosmopolitanism, or “one-world Weltanschauung,” is not, despite protests to the contrary, radically pluralistic Progressivism, but is rather old ethnocentric wine in new bottles—with a dash of Orientalism thrown in for good measure.

Old Wine in New (Left) Skins

Why do the regular contributors to The New Left Review so doggedly insist on a thoroughgoing politicized subjectivity? Is it simply the intransigence of hidebound Marxist-Leninists which is to blame? The absolute centrality of the political in the constitution of subjectivity has been dead in the water for at least a decade and a half now, especially in light of recent innovations in the areas of emergence and self-organization. Recent hypotheses about the genesis and etiology of neural net assign great importance to “mirror” neurons, which allow human to develop theories of other minds. Networks of mirror neurons develop at such an early time in lives of people that researchers believe they develop a sense of others even before they develop a sense of themselves as discrete entities. The brain’s plasticity and acute receptiveness to stimuli may just mean that moral decisions that have organized themselves in response to stimuli of a certain sort. Instead of presuming, then, top-down ideological interpellation from the get-go, one can say with equal plausibility that certain attitudes and conventions of behavior tend to dominate, and in turn tend to give rise to moral agents who tend to make similar moral judgments.

In their prolonged May-’68 hangover, however, which would be quaint if it didn’t tend to produce retrograde currents of thought, The New Left Review crowd seems on the one hand to reject top-down, administrative notions of individuation, à la Althusser, but at the same time, and rather reductively, insists that the subject is always-already political. Their musings never fail to strike me as a variations on a theme established by Pierre Bourdieu: that the actions of an individual both produces and is produced by determinate structures. This idea seems to me to hedge on notions of causality. In the perspectival shift from actor to context, from the individual to the social, something does appear to get lost, to elude expression. A discourse capable of addressing the complex, nonlinear situation of the actor in the social field would be of tremendous value here, and would perhaps lead us away from Bourdieu’s shoulder-shrugging structuralism, which I suspect is the result of a certain intellectual impasse, namely, that the political is the only paradigm on which a responsible materialist theoretician may hang his hat—an assumption that to my mind is beset by uninterrogated aporia of its own. It seems, then, that the folks at the NLR like to take us for a ride on the same carousel, only we don’t recognize it as the same because the carousel’s creatures have been painted different colors since our last ride.

Preening Monsters of Inconsequence

Today, Tom Ashbrook, host of the NPR call-in show, On Point, invited three recent university graduates to wax prophetic about their professional futures. The show's introduction had already set my expectations quite low, but the blather that followed forced me to switch off my radio in disgust. These three newly minted alums have heads so full of Madison-Avenue platitudes that I really despair for the future. They're not stupid, nor are they dull. Rather, they're cagey and single-minded, albeit provincial and unenlightened, attesting to saccharine dreams of affluence and seamless self-actualization—dreams which at this historical and cultural moment are risibly recherché. And they attest to them with such a tone of unalloyed optimism that a postmodern subject like me cannot help thinking that they're playing to the audience, that they "doth protest to much."

I mean, such "golly-Mister" ambitions do not accord with what market demographers otherwise tell us about the current lot of early twenty-somethings. They're the ones the Culture Industry so breathlessly panders to, the ones who inform media content. If we regard these realities as more indicative than any rah-rah rhetoric they can muster, then here's what they say about themselves in the lifestyle choices they make: they're the MySpacers, the FaceBookers, the lappers-up of bloody delicacies proffered by the latest cinematic torture-porn, the freak-dancers, the body-obsessed, the compulsive exercisers, the blasé wearers of overpriced slave-sewn garments, and, most abhorrently, the tunnel-visioned enablers of the status quo. Abu Ghraib or Grindhouse — it's all the same to them, just as long as the current geopolitical situation doesn't prevent them from plunging headlong into the economy to snatch up dollars that, if you pay close attention to how these twenty-somethings couch their remarks, they believe are theirs by divine right. American prosperity, a pettifogging abstraction which conceals real exploitation and malfeasance, is for them a roasted goose of such abundant flesh as to surfeit generation upon generation forever. They scoff at such secular Armageddons as peak oil and global warming. Sure, they've seen Al Gore's film—but that Hummer H2? Man, it's just to pimp a whip to pass up.

These folks represent, in other words, the undiminished legacy of the Eighties, the decade of their inception: "Show me the money, and Devil take the hindmost!"; "trickle-down" everything. They are all ripples and surfaces illumined by sparks of excessive self-regard, are the people for who life is one elaborate reality-TV show. Children of the simulacrum. More troublingly, they're a generation for which the contortions of public relations have become a veritable habitus: good is what nourishes the ego; evil is what you didn't get away with. The real is the rational. They'll certainly profess to hold the interests of others as they're own, when it's convenient to do so, but the clichés with which they express these interests, and the utterly diffuse and noncommittal means they suggest to secure them ("I owe other people a friendly smile." "The best thing I offer other people is the ability to listen." Political boilerplate at its most nauseating.) leaves you suspecting that they're real desire is to drink and fuck and speed in their cars and screw each other over.

Unlike people their age of decades past, they're not romantics; they opt instead for the treacly cynicism that is PC permissiveness. They're infantile, and, if crossed, will rage and will seek revenge remorselessly. They are, in short, preening monsters of inconsequence. This is, however, something Tom Ashbrook or anyone else National Public Relations will never tell you; o them, they are the dominant ideology made toned, flawless flesh, shaped in the most flattering light and without shadow or remainder. You can almost see them in the studio sleekly basking in the eminently deserved approbation which the dull pseudo-liberal hordes of NPR listeners so slavishly heap on them.

Ars poetica

It seems that, since the advent of mass literacy and increased leisure time, poetry has become a lifestyle accoutrement, because, in its printed, widely distributed, form, it finds itself in a riotous market of many genres that have in common being committed to paper and bound between covers. Its been a long-held belief of mine that poetry, freed from the formal constraints necessary for mnemonic facility (rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.) once the printed text became its predominant medium, was able to evolve to its present form of "difficulty"; the text has been made static for the reader to regard at length. It’s a two-edged sword, however, because the "thing-ness" of a book helps literature a long way down the path of reification. In his recent Slate article, poet Robert Pinsky seems to insist on some sort of ahistorical aura around poetry that has continued undiminished since Hesiod, or earlier, but this petitio principii obscures the more fundamental consideration of how poetry ever came to achieve that aura in the first place.

I’m basically parroting Benjamin here when I say that I think Pinsky’s twist is that he’s attempting to argue poetry’s characteristic aura as being more a matter of technical than mystical accomplishments, but this seems to play right into the hands of latter-day technocrats for whom the pleasure of the text is always a matter of increased complexity—a measure of technological advance—than perhaps more familiar aesthetic categories. Its simply one aspect of the same mentality in which the fact that a German car with GPS, a Bose sound system and highly precise climate control commands a higher price than it would if its signal engineering feat was that it could go 100K miles without an oil change or a tune-up."

In other words, I imagine poetry these days represents an item of consumption, a geegaw to marvel at for its technical sophistication. The public, especially when it’s exhorted to celebrate the mandated “Poetry Month” of April, is expected to cast an appreciative if not entirely understanding eye upon poetry as a feat of engineering virtuosity, much the same way magazine ads for a Mercedes Maybach caress us with its list of technical specs., or the way wonks at Wired rhapsodize over an Apple iPhone ("It’s a cell phone and mp3 player ... and so much more!). I guess what I have in mind is poetry as a spectacle that engenders a class of experts to mediate its masterful performance for the rest of us; so much criticism these days seems fit more for technical specialists than true scholars — “author-period-genre” compartmentalizations and highly specific interpretive procedures in the interest of individual advancement. I guess one could always take the Bakhtinian line that the lexicon is a priori a neutral site of ideological contest fought by how signs are inflected or voiced that makes the difference. But this also seems a too-facile resolution to a complex problem.

And, after all, maybe our engagements with poetry and ad-copy are fundamentally not so different. Each involves a complex tangle of knowingness, naïveté, envy and attraction, among other things. This sounds like some limpid New-Critical insight, I know, but perhaps its in the unique configuration and intensities of the encounter between a particular poem and a particular reader that constitute authentic experience, which is characterized by multiplicities as opposed to monads, immanence as opposed to transcendence. Authenticity resides in the event of reading the poem, not in how we digest and monologize it into the poem for our own purposes or for the edification of others.