A particularly illuminating comment by @DGHFrost following an Economist article on the joys of euphemistic understatement in British management speak. This is another version of that “What the English say vs. what they mean” document that’s been going around the intertubes in the last couple of months - naturally I’m a native speaker, but I gather it’s baffling and/or hilarious if you’re not.

Also interesting, however, is the tone on the Economist’s comment thread - zero rudeness, and 100% on topic. One or two mild jokes about girlfriends being as indirect as British managers, but no misogyny.

Extraordinary. Round of applause for their mod team. And NB that civility has been achieved alongside anonymous usernames - the two are not incompatible.

Will Self on our current “strange interregnum of titillation between cultural hegemonies” - aka The News of the World closes as media’s tectonic plates shift, Guardian CIF, Monday 11th July.

One must always be skeptical of “egalitarian web culture” arguments - usually they first uncritically assume this is a good thing, and then secondly fail to observe that privileges are required to be able to join the elite “equal” group.

Self falls into this trap to some extent - Twitter is not a level playing field, we just have new opinion leaders - @chris_coltrane and @brainpicker rather than print journalists more formally anointed.

But yes to the way that Self doesn’t rank this egalitarianism as better or worse than previous mediated pyramidal models - and yes too to the way he connects it to that other rise of the demos, the reality TV show and voting formats. Not a connection I’ve seen made much before.

And yes to this idea that web culture is still new - sure, 17 years old, but still changing very rapidly and more open to disruption and surprise.

The orgasm became a battleground: was the “apocalyptic orgasm” the key to revolution, as Reich and Mailer claimed, or a false aim that camouflaged the hipster’s narcissistic and hedonistic selfishness?

Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love - or the Orgasmatron - with a philosophy that true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown. Nice article about how his ideas became fashionable in the US post-WW2 among the Beat Generation and other writers & intellectuals.

Nice point at the end:

Reich’s ideas certainly became a rallying point for a new generation of dissenters, and his orgone box, however unlikely an idea it may now seem, became a symbol of the sexual revolution. But it was also a symbol of how the use of images of sexual liberation to sell things had become big business; when it was realised that new sexual attitudes couldn’t be contained, they were exploited. In January 1964, Time magazine declared that “Dr Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big orgone box.”

With today’s model, it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books that a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.

[…]

Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested (with reference to Reich), as having ushered in “a more devious and discreet form of power”

The massive carnal void at the heart of “sexy”, which is not at all sex but nonetheless a kind of desire, still - desire to be young cool attractive, to be wanted, desire to be desired, desire to rebel in just the right way, desire to fit in, desire for the mirror to look back at you and say, Yes. You are part of society. You exist.

It looks like an SEO string for the most attention-grabbing subjects on the internet 2010, which might explain why the Sunday Times commissioned cultural critic Camille Paglia to write about why Lady Gaga means Sex is Over.

Which is to say, how the archetype of the sexy cinematic blonde has now been obliterated by Gaga’s non-stop cultural quotation / appropriation, (somehow when Madonna did this it was ok,) with lots of tasty asides about how Gen Y are so digital we can’t speak / feel / fuck any more.

Overall the article was quite entertaining (it successfully made me pay for a real dead-trees copy of the Sunday Times, extraordinary!) but not entirely coherent - a sub-Baudrillard piece that correctly identified the proliferation of symbols, but yet could not see that such a deluge is as much constructive as destructive.

I will, soon, do some proper reading of B. and come back to this. For now, however, I shall simply appropriate comments left under the (underwhelming) Guardian article in follow-up…

On a more serious note, I actually think Gaga is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. Madonna’s use of sex might have been revolutionary at first - maybe - but in any case, it quickly became less about sex - and all the messy, subversive, human experience it entails - than about making money. Gaga, I would say, recognises this, and does not try to sell sex as such - instead, she creates an image of sexuality that is so relentlessly artificial that it reminds us of just how trite and used-up most ‘artistic’ representations of sexuality nowadays are.

And I think Paglia, in her hand-wringing about mutilation and death, might also be missing the point. Freud postulated that there is a death drive at least as powerful as the death drive; countless others have pointed out that the loss of self via sex is comparable to a kind of death (not for nothing is climaxing called ‘la petite mort’ in French). Maybe Gaga is actually drawing our attention back to this darker side of human sexuality in her own way - now that would be a really interesting move.

said Feierabend

Gaga is an entertainer doing a pretty good job of one-upping a milieu that adores “trashiness.” Her native environment - the pop-industrial complex - revels in cheapness and disposability: buy it, throw it out, get the flashier new one. The product isn’t supposed to have substance; if it did, the consumer might be satisfied. Shape-shifting Gaga embodies this principle - she’s a mile high but just an inch deep. Where the previous product had flash, Gaga has flash, bells, whistles, and big shiny whirling things - and she’ll keep adding gew-gaws until the whole structure topples over.

said Ciccina

The argument Paglia should have made was one about surfaces.

Cultural Studies - On ‘Mad Men,’ The Allure of Messy Lives - NYTimes.com

Not sure I buy the overall thesis of this article, but nonetheless it fascinates me

Everyone who lives above the poverty line but isn’t wealthy pretty much has no choice but to work for a living doing something which rewards them with survival tokens.

Working as a telemarketer, for example, allows you to have food, clothing and shelter, but doesn’t put you directly in charge of creating, growing or killing those things you need for sustenance. Instead, you trade in tokens for those things. As a result, you have a lot of free time and some leftover tokens. We don’t directly compete with each other for resources like we did for the millennia before mass production.

Before this setup, people were often defined by their work, by their output. The things they owned were usually things either they handmade, or were things other people made by hand. There was a weight, an infusion of soul, in everything a person owned, used and lived in.

Today, everyone is a consumer, and has to pick from the same selection of goods as everyone else, and because of this people now define their personalities on how good their taste is, or how clever, or how obscure, or how ironic their choices are.”

Source: Selling Out « You Are Not So Smart

Nice post about how there’s no such thing as “selling out”, detailing how status works in youth scenes and/or counterculture and arguing that the drive to stay one step ahead of the mainstream serves consumer capitalism very nicely thank you.

 I want to unpick the quote above, however - the bit about what our relations with material culture were like “before this setup”.

It’s interesting because it’s a Marxist argument, even though You Are Not So Smart appears rather too skeptical to be a blog advocating anti-capitalist revolution. The paragraph draws on the basic Marxist distinction between two groups. Under capitalism, workers do not own their ‘means of production’ (e.g. the factory or company they work for) and are thus alienated from their own labour by being paid a wage that does not fully compensate them for the increase in value their labour has generated. The resultant commodity is thus:

“a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.”

[Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chaper 1 section 4]

So much so obvious, I’m sure, to anyone who might be reading this. As I recall off the top of my head, though (That’s ok, right? This is Tumblr rather than academic?), Marx formulates the relationship between the pre-capitalist producer and the things s/he makes as the converse of the quotation above: the value of goods is recognised as the value of the labour that went into it, and as the labour is not alienated from the worker, the value of an item remains a social relation between the worker and whoever subsequently uses/buys the item.

In short, things are not just objects but social relations - social relations between people who know each other in a “before-this-setup” pre-capitalist situation, yet now social relations that are ‘alienated’, i.e. impersonal and mediated by money.

You Are Not So Smart essentially mystifies this distinction in saying that “before this setup”, the things people owned had “a weight, an infusion of soul”. That seems to be a poetic way of saying that goods used to have meaning, way back when - except that of course that they’re also arguing that goods have meaning now (as commodities). Rather, this talk of “weight” and “soul” would seem to be saying that meaning created through direct social relations is superior, more emotionally profound, to meaning created as part of broader commodity culture.

Is that true? It seems sentimental. Commodity culture is still itself a set of social relations, even if they are weaker social ties than those embodied in “that dress my mother made for me” – and it generates a much vaster array of meanings than were available to most in pre-capitalist societies.

Also, “people were often defined by their work, by their output.” Were they? When everyone’s a self-sufficient farmer, does the food you make define you? It sustains you and those around you, and it’s indubitably imbued with social meaning - but surely people in agrarian & nomadic societies are instead defined much more by their relationships with each other and by their relationships with place and land. You Are Not So Smart seems to have got it backwards: the things people produced didn’t define identities; instead the things they produced were defined by the people who made them.

In fact, I wouldn’t assume that people in pre-capitalist societies had identities in the way that that term’s familiar today. The concept of “the individual” is much more culture-bound than we usually realise. For example, the UK Borders Agency is deporting gay asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East on the grounds (against UNHCR advice) that they can be “discreet” about their sexuality and move to another part of the country to avoid those who know about their past. (See the Somali Gay Community website.) The reality: in many parts of the world a person without family is not a person – identity is understood as your position within family & community relationships, such that the atomised individual cannot be socially legitimate.

We in the West – and now the urbanising developing world – define ourselves through our relationships with commodities precisely because we no longer live family-oriented, community-based lives, and must thus search elsewhere for meaning.