Culture Industry: DA REMIX!

Someone tipped me off to this paper by Xiaochang Li, a Comparative Media Studies master's student at MIT on Soulja Boy in the context of "viral video." Let me say that it is more than worth your time to read this, in the same way that it is more than worth your time to watch the YouTube video that Soulja Boy released and on which this paper comments.


Aiyo, Lil Chang, lemme break dis one down for you. Aite, one, you've clearly read some Noam Chomsky or something. I'm sure your school makes you read all the pomo-generator shit that MIT Press puts out. Lemme hit you with some fresh azz isht: dis Culture Industry jaint, by my dog T.Ado (Theodor Adorno).

Lil Chang seems to unquestioningly accept the "Soulja Boy phenomenon" as a story of someone "making it big" without the assistance of - even in defiance of - mainstream labels and the corporate culture-industry-esque record industry. Soulja uses methods "theoretically available to every member of his generation" to promote himself; though his goals may be self-promotion and financial gain, he supposedly has found a way to achieve these goals in such a way that the power is in his hands and not that of the corporation - he makes them come to him (as evidenced by the fact that he IMs the record executive, instructing him to "Meet me at my crib"). Though the culture industry is intact, it is seemingly just a shell of its former self, eviscerated of any economic power, and only providing the means through which the individual can realize himself. (Isn't this already sounding suspiciously like the free-market wet-dream?)

Lil Chang really hits his or her stride, however, when they break down the utopian political possibilities engendered by Soulja Boy's viral video self-promotion:

"What's more, there are a number of disparate groups represented across gender, age, and location, all of them reinterpreting the dance through their own communities, and linked through their ability to watch the videos across various devices, emphasizing at once a sense of connectivity, but also an urge to represent local communities and groups. In short, Soulja Boy as a phenomenon presents itself as more of a mode than a community, a practice that allows existing communities based on characteristics that are generally thought to be "disappeared" in the digital space (gender, age, race etc.) to foreground themselves."

(By the way, hasn't your thesis advisor at MIT told you that identity politics is DEFINITELY not hip anymore?)

Let's grant Lil' Chang that this phenomenon really does represent the possibility of individuals having access to the tools to "make it" in a radically democratic way that was never before possible. Though I think this is a bit utopian - isn't this the type of claim that's been made for every new form of mass media in democratic states? - we can let it stand. In fact, I think Lil Chang's argument reveal itself to be even more pwned if we grant that this is the case. Because if Soldier Boy has used radically democratic means to achieve his dream, we must next ask: what is his dream? What has he achieved?

He has precisely pwned himself, and this time it's not something to be proud of. As Adorno trenchantly perceived over 60 years ago, the culture industry (i.e., capital's colonization of the cultural sphere) has most insidiously and effectively achieved its ends precisely when it seems to have gentrified itself, when the desires of the masses are seamlessly congruent with the interests of capital. What the culture industry is 'selling' is mass culture as such, or better capitalism as such - a subjectivity perfectly adapted to the imperative of culture that is purchaseable, disposable, and constantly unfulfulling (thus creating the need for ever more consumption). One line T.Ado drops is particularly on point here: "The culture industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people." Thus it is not just that we are 'sold' the idea that we want a certain type of culture, or that we want ever more of it, but that this type of culture is essentially a conduit for the reproduction of subjectivities that are subjected to capital. Having "made it," having "achieved his dream," what will Soulja Boy do now? Well, he's signed to a major label, so most of the (substantial) profits from CD sales, tours, merchandise (tee-shirts, customizable Soulja Boy shades - did they come up with the idea to sell those after he wore them or was it the other way around?) will go to the label owner. But he will become rich too; then he'll buy lots of shit, such as the shit that he talks about in the song (BAPES, etc) that he probably couldn't afford when he was first rapping about it.

This much touted "radical democratic" "convergent" media which brought Soulja Boy to fame has achieving nothing more than reproducing the economic structure which it supposedly evaded and laying the ground for its further acceptance in the millions who watch, listen to, and buy Soulja Boy. Soulja Boy may feel himself to have "achieved", to have become successful, and - as have similar artists whose careers progressed the "normal" way, i.e. through being promoted by a label - he is successful, and he probably is happy. Without going into the question of false consciousness, the point is that the objective effect of his use of "viral video" and "radical-democratic" media is the same as if his rise to fame were due to overpromotion through marketing, except that now, the labels don't have to waste their money, Soulja Boy did all the work for them, and the profits - but more importantly the reproduction of mass culture - will be generated just the same. Soulja Boy may be evidence of a "new" trajectory for mass cultural phenomena, but to look naively at this as an instance of increasing individual creative freedom and self-actualization ignores the end result of such "new media," which is anything but liberatory.

Britney as Vanitas

Does anyone else see a relationship between this Holbein painting ("The Ambassadors," 1533) and Britney Spears? Holbein's use of the vanitas/memento mori is striking it a way that I cannot get over. While one is tempted to dismiss the "anamorphic" rendering as sort of silly, a "vain" technical flourish, it makes the skull completely unintegrable with the aesthetic and narrative space of the painting itself. The vanitas is somehow excessive, scandalous even; or rather it makes the painting itself scandalous, uncomfortable to look at, embarrassing. The work of art is of course always 'calling out' to us, interpellating us as a subject that sees it; yet here there is another layer: it sees us seeing ourselves as called out by it, and it mocks us for it. I think, then, that this is a sort of formal achievement of the representative function of the vanitas in painting. It's not just a question of either the futility of earthly existence or the carpe diem imperative, but a reminder of our position in creating the terms by which such questions arise in the first place (i.e., how our subjectivity is not given, not transcendent, not 'eternal').

Take another look at the Britney video below. Obviously this video is very uncomfortable. There is something about how she sort of stands around with this spectacle whirring along effortlessly around her. When she used to make all of the moves, when her body was 'toned,' more machinelike (a sex robot, both there just for me and totally indifferent to my existence), when her face was more successfully frozen into an expressionless come-hither/I-don't-even-need-you-to-get-off look, she was integrated into this spectacle, it worked with her and around her. Now she is a "stain," as Lacan calls it, in this spectacle: that which destroys the interpellative coherence of the representation. When she moves around awkwardly, it's too human; her body is too voluptuous; her wig reminds us that she has real hair; her off-cue lip-syching makes it too obvious that she actually speaks. Yet we can't help but feel that she is now somehow less real, less human, less "Britney" than she was before. The stain is that unassimilable mark that is both more human (the skull, the fact of death) and less human (it feels less alive, less "full," than the ambassadors standing next to it) And this "stain" calls out to me; in noticing it I have let myself be tricked into acknowledging the fact that it is there for me, that, to the extent that it is a signifying event, it is there in me, and that it is signifying nothing other than 'me'.

So, Holbein. The vanitas reminds us of our frailty, of the essential constructness and humanness (i.e., in the sense that these are the same thing) of aesthetic pleasure, of life as experienced by the subject; with Holbein (as opposed to the traditional use of the vanitas, where it is simply a 'normal' skull placed along with other objects in the picture), it does so in a thoroughgoing way, not just as one more 'motif' in the work; we must experience this constructedness and our own place as the chief (if you'll pardon my reference to Ayn Rand) 'architect' of it. The new Britney, this 'failed' Britney, this 'more real' Britney, is fascinating, horrifying, and most of all uncanny for this same reason: we cannot get over, we cannot 'forget,' her 'actual' presence in this spectacle, which is actually nothing other than a sign for our own presence which her 'absence' would/should otherwise smooth over.

Inhaling your own shit is hip

Hippest new trend of November 2007: Jenkem.

"Originally Posted by pickwick
Well today I finally did it. I became probably the first person in America to huff his own shit gas."

It's Britney, Bitch!

OMG Guys.

Um, this reminds me of Adorno's dictum that "the greatness of a work of art consists solely in it's ability to give voice to that which ideology hides."

While I'd love to amuse myself by relating this to Foucault's "truth games" (see the 'perfomative' S&M at the end), the sublimity of technology (maybe I could throw, like, Baudrillard in there?), the radical contingency of the subject implied by the double-remove of a lip-sync'd "It's Britney, bitch," or by spouting out some faux Perez Hilton-esque sassy commentary about some small detail that you can only notice by pausing the video, somehow I can't help but feel that posting a video such as this, which every ironic little college student does, is not only nothing other than 'sound and fury, signifying nothing,' but some sort of bullshit, ultimately conservative resistence-as-acquiescence. I would like to take refuge in the notion that one could reactivate the type of critique found in Adorno's Minima Moralia and that this could then mean something, be an outraged but not sanctimonious protest, an ethical working through, a bringing-to-the-fore of 'inherent contradictions.' I'm not sure, really, that that's anything other than self-indulgence.

That said, here are some funny things I noticed about this.

-Hey Britney, have you put on some weight there??!!!11!?? I mean, you still look great but maybe that baby took a toll on you or something!

-Those moves are cool but next time try to get them sync'd up a bit better!

-'Gimme more'? GREAT! LOVES the refrain. Perfect for clubs, can't wait for the Oakenfold remix, also it speaks so eloquently to the current state of our consumption-oriented culture!

-This will be GREAT for the emerging tween market. I envision a whole line of Britney-branded stripper poles. Perhaps a brand of low-fat, low-carb(on) diet cereal.

Blow my DILZ, Wes Anderson

I want to like Wes Anderson. In fact, I feel an almost pathological need to justify his work. His films hinge on a total aestheticization of their content; indeed the content becomes merely a staging ground for a refined, highly contextualized, highly specific, and explicitly referential aesthetic practice. As I have definitively proved, according to a strict, logical theorem derived from a synthesis of the work of analytic philosophers A.J. Ayer and John Rawls, aestheticization of narrative and emotional content -- a rewriting of the form/content dialectic where form not only subsumes content but destroys any independent existence of the latter and in which the former becomes not a transcendental category but itself a contingent, material expression of contemporary life -- is one of the only viable and 'genuine' ways of producing art today. Thus Anderson, bird-lipped, pale, and kitted out in slim bespoke 2-button suits, with his anal-retentive framing technique, his hipster color palette, his exquisite eye for the perfect juxtaposition of "quirky" though always self-consciously stylized subcultural details with the obvious constraints and influence of wealth, power, and the culture industry, would seem a perfect hero, a Baudelairian "painter of modern life."

No, Wes, no. I'm sorry. Your art is bullshit. First clue: wearing LL Bean duck-hunting boots and shorts, in Austin, Texas, bespeaks a failure to understand that, ironic or not, self-aestheticization must be firmly rooted in, indeed must grow out of, a deep contextual understanding, that is to say, it must contain an element of reflexivity. This outfit suggests rather a simple affirmation of the "preppy tradition" in defiance of circumstance, as if Anderson is intent on proving the transcendental ethical virtues of WASPiness. Second clue -- and this follows from the first --: the pleasure in each of his films, but especially this recent celebration of hipster colonialism entitled Darjeeling Limited, derives not from a self-reflexive awareness of the contingency of the aesthetic and emotional content; rather, this pleasure derives from a regressive defiance of this contingency, a forceful, childish insistence that these things are pretty, sad, 'cool,' regardless of - almost in ignorance of - their circumstance.
In "Hotel Chevalier," a short which precedes Darjeeling Limited, we get a little tableau that encapsulates all his work. Indeed, having seen this, there's hardly need to see anything else of his. There is a quite beautiful scene which consists of a slow-mo of Natalie Portman, posing exquisitely, awkwardly, nude, Jason Schwartzman covering her up with a bathrobe, and the two of them walking to the balcony of their fancy-but-not-cheesy, aristocratic-but-quirky, hotel room. Why is this scene pleasurable? Because Natalie Portman looks hot. She looks anorexic, but powerful - short hair, self-conscious self-eroticization. Because Schwarztman looks cool - long hair, ironic mustache, but rich. Clearly rich. Because the hotel is dope, and Paris is beautiful, and the idea of a life of young, attractive, ironic, anorexic leisure is decadent and appealing. And it is appealing, and one does not need to deny that. We should, however, try to problematize it; without this, Wes Anderson might as well be doing socialist realism (late capitalist realism?).

How, then, does this differ from the most conservative/affirmative of cultural production? Only in that Anderson is playing to a different (richer, younger, more 'aware') demographic. The ideology, the impulse behind it, is the same. Everything here, all the impossibilities of this scene, are staged not as a sort of beautiful nostalgic failure (as in, I would argue, Miami Vice) but as something real, a "really" beautiful "lifestyle." Anderson's cultivation of a very specific aesthetic is a question of instituting his own self-production as a model for others; he is saying, look at how beautiful this lifestyle I've thought up is. Wouldn't you like it? Or, at the very least, wouldn't you like something equivalent of your own? The problem is, it is completely un-self-aware, and the embededness of his aesthetic with the usual suspects - capital, social class (here obviously fictional, yet still operative as an ideological category), and race (i.e., how blacks and Indians are always props in his films) - is not thematized at all, only valorized and itself aestheticized.

Though Carbon Neutrality is Hip, It is Not Easy

As we've learned from celebrity icons such as Britney Spears, who shaved her head so as to reduce the need for air-conditioning in her L.A. mansion, being hip is not easy. It requires hard work, dedication, and often a fair amount of anxiety. Like this morning, after I took a piss, I hesitated for a good thirty seconds about whether to flush the toilet: would the energy and water that I saved from not flushing more than offset the damage that would be caused when I later would have to scrub down the yellow-stained bowl with cleaning products?

These and other questions, while they may appear to be the preserve of inexperienced hipsters like myself, are actually questions that even the most powerful hipsters are facing every day. As this Times article suggests, celebrities, writers, and other hip yuppies confront difficult eco-choices every day.