Shitting and I-Banking

[yes, that's a Thom Browne suit!, and yes, he's a real live I-banker!]

At the Denver airport, I'm taking a shit and reading Motor Trend ("The Homeland Security Administration has raised the threat level to, ORANGE."). After about ten minutes - I'm really just biding my time, this article on the new BMW 1 series (modeled on the 1978 2002) is really interesting, - I decide to rejoin my family, and I drop the Motor Trend on the floor, kick it to the side, then immediately leave for fear of being mistaken by the gentleman in the adjacent stall for a toe-tapper.

Isn't it exciting that Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses? What an historic moment! I think that this suggests that the country is finally ready for CHANGE. Obama, to me, represents CHANGE, leadership, a new perspective - most of all, an optimism about our country. The Democratic Party represents hope and the promise of liberal democracy, a better future for everyone, not just the special interests of a few wealthy people.

Two interesting articles in the Times today - our favorite intellectual prude Stanley Fish, arguing as always that his job as a humanist is "useless", and a piece on the decline in prestige of medicine and law. To my mind, these articles are treating a similar theme - the ways in which we try to make our intellectual, critical/ethical existence coincide with our "mundane," worldly existence.

Apparently law and medicine are losing ground because young people like myself are more interested in having "creative freedom" and integrating their work and "personal lives" such that the former becomes an outgrowth of the latter. This means, of course, that we're drawn to investment banking and management consulting, where we can truly realize our creative passion, where as Marx wrote we can "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner."

For Stanley Fish (and here I agree with the ol' curmudgeon!), no effort to justify the humanities from some outside, quantitative or social perspective (e.g., it exposes people to morally fortifying examples from literature, gives people greater critical thinking skills that they can they apply to other areas of their existence - say, their I-banking job after getting a History degree at Princeton) will work, and moreover such efforts end up devaluing humanities-oriented thought in the first place. "The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say."

Let me put it this way: is it a kawinkydink that I vacillate between wanting to be an arrogant, effete theory-hipster with an endowed chair at Berkeley, and wanting to be a high-fiving, Red Bull-drinking I-Banker who works 100 hours a week and can only relieve the tension created by my lifestyle through flagrant consumption that feeds the sublime machine to which I enslave myself?

No. This is a paradox that I have been trying to work through for the past two years, and I don't seem to be moving anywhere except into a more and more deeply emotional appreciation of the impossibility of resolving it.

How is it that investment banking (the Times article actually does cite this) could seem to people to be the most self-creating and intellectually 'integrated' profession? I think it's because i-banking is essentially what is going on, in the broadest sense of the term. It is simply bullshit to suggest that 21st century American culture is not defined by the confluence of global capital, highly specialized and exclusivized consumption, and a general sense of giving oneself over to a sublime, technologized, rationalized system the complexity of which is impossible to understand. No one knows what the fuck is going on in international finance. Though it is a cliche to cite the subprime issue, it really is quite indicative. Basically, people try to come up with more and more esoteric (the word I-bankers love to use is "exotic") forms of accounting for money, which entails allowing complex, interconnected systems to become more an more autonomous. Like critical theory, investment banking spins off more and more into its own autonomous, rational, Platonic realm of pure forms; like Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, "the fully enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant". Also like Adorno and Horkheimer, I-bankers feel fucking baller: they have situated themselves at the center of this absurd realm and have produced themselves as its product, in the same way that esoteric theory is always already an ironic self-deconstruction, an exercise in the proving of one's own uselessness, one's own ideological determination.

My latest solution to this career indecision is to try to combine them: I will be a Deleuzean schizoanalyst of the futures market (as Soros applied Popper's pragmatism to the market and made billions), I will be the next Jeff Koons, or, most recently, I will become an investment banker as an art project: I will get patrons to pay me to be an investment banker, on top of which I will make huge bonuses because I will actually be an investment banker, I will think like one, I will become one, and the patrons will get "nothing" in return, which will be precisely the substance of the art-work, and my own position as artist will be confirmed in the completeness of my existence as an I-banker, as the next Patrick Bateman.

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.

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.