We Can Identify With You Wholesale

At this point, you could be forgiven for thinking that the format of this blog is as follows:

I make a ludicrous generalization and claim that it represents reality →

→ I decide the meaning of this supposed fact using the hermeneutics of people who once read half a used Philosophy 101 while on drugs →

→ I moralize for nine paragraphs about ways American culture doesn’t live up to my personal standards →

→ and then conclude by performing a nice little song and dance, yes a nice little song and dance about television.

Well, that’s correct. That’s exactly what I plan to do. I will never, ever do a real TV review. I had a whole piece written about past-the-shark bullshit shows that should be cancelled, and it’s sitting here in my WordPress queue alongside other pieces that will never be published because they don’t make a shredding enough point about the sad state of our sad, postmodern, dead-subject-having existence.

Well, not really. But before I get on to explaining why The Simpsons should be cancelled and shot in the face, or how The Office went from an acceptable cast comedy to cheap, aspirational dreck, I need to pick out one more philosophical wax.

A couple of entries ago, I talked about how I think the advertising viewpoint has warped American culture. Well, warped is all in who you are and what you want. If I beamed out a ten million megawatt mind control field and made people love onions, would I be warping culture? “Yes,” says the Luddite who thinks my weapon causes cancer, shortly before chugging nine cans of Monster. Also: “No,” says the deranged onion enthusiast, who is quick to point out that “warp” has negative connotations whereas this is just an innocent broadcast about onions. Well, yes it does, and so do I.

It’s not exactly that commerce is inherently evil. I mean, as a definition for evil that would taint almost the entire worldly experience. Certainly, it would taint all of TV. I’m no gnostic and I don’t think you should be either, because if we were I’d write much more of this kind of thing and much less about good shows.

The problem with advertising is that in the world of cultural products, it’s like a big contextual bulldozer demolishing all the hedgerows, treelines and demonstrators. However cleverly they hide the sales pitch, the pitch is the point of the ad; an ad can never stand for anything but a pitch, so at a fundamental level, they are all signs pointing to the same thing. That’s why people of certain sensibilities always seem to find ads “ugly,” no matter how “beautiful” the contents may be. It’s why advertisers have to continually run from what they’ve created, changing strategies, looking for new buttons they haven’t pressed yet.

It’s worst for whatever hapless piece of art gets sucked down the intake. Of all cultural products, art is maybe the most sensitive to context; this is why Impressionist paintings that inspired towering, idiot fury in 19th century critics are today topics of sarcasm to people with every valid reason to find them hopelessly tacky. Like websites, art can be “relocated” by anyone who can link to it. Whatever “I’ve Got The Power” once meant, now it means Toyota power steering, Pampers training pants, Hotel.com, T-Mobile wireless and whatever they flog with it next. Probably Swiffer Wetjet. Was the song ever any good? Doesn’t matter, because you will never know.

George Orwell called advertising “the rattling of a stick in a swill bucket,” but that doesn’t do it justice. If it were only that, we’d ignore rattling noises and probably be fine with it. TV advertising is like hearing your favorite song, but sung by a stick in a bucket full of swill who repeatedly forgets the words. Gradually, everything you share with people around you will have been fed to pigs and recycled as pigshit. It will be impossible to escape the smell.

Before mass media really figured out its game, ads were just standardized sales pitches: check out this product, it will oil your hair and whiten your shoelaces so you don’t look like a dick at the county ball. Remember, only Gossard’s gives you that oily sheen and whitey gleam!

But around the 1960’s, marketers noticed a disturbing trend: increasingly, youth weren’t responding to ads with the expected enthusiasm. So, they modified their approach and modern branding was born. Branding consists of sticking up a picture of something your target audience likes, and then placing your logo or product next to it to create an instant association.

Transparent or not, people bought it. It didn’t look like a commercial to them. Compared to the ad for Gossard’s Two-In-One Cream, the new ads were nothing like sales pitches. Viewers were meant to see them as a direct from-us-to-you, showing the youth that at least some companies knew what they liked, understood them, and had their dreams and interests at heart. It worked so incredibly well with Baby Boomers in particular that it remained the dominant form of TV advertising through the end of the 80’s, and a number of its biggest winners from that period are now reasonably iconic, such as famous ads by Levi’s, Calvin Klein and Absolut.

Come 1990’s, marketers again found themselves looking at an audience inured to the usual shit and cynical about the whole business of mass commerce. But by the time the public became aware of GenX’s little clichés and taboos – in part by examining shows that succeeded with that audience – marketers had cracked their code and were well on the way to inventing a boutique fruit drink to shill at them, which is the fate that awaits every generation in America at some point. The cheat code for GenX was, unsurprisingly, postmodern self-reference and knowing irony. The new ads slagged off ads, slagged off commerce, made anti-sales pitches, and told stories that weren’t, strictly speaking, endorsements; and as usual, the audience ate them up for awhile, because they didn’t seem like ads.

By now, you’ve probably seen more of the latter kind than you have of the early, sales-pitchey kind. It’s so common for ads to depict their customers as losers and their spokesmen as embarassing buffoons that I have wondered more than once if some of these marketers are running a secret sabotage operation intended to undermine TV commerce itself. More likely, they’re counting on branding to work regardless of the actual contents of the spots.

Recently, marketers have made inroads to cracking GenY. The pattern is the same. New ads do everything possible not to seem like ads, whether because they seem like spontaneous pranksters in Times Square, or like zany, “random” sketches about pirates, or like college essays read aloud to neo-folk music over stop-motion dancing for no apparent reason. Often, you’re asked to follow a web URL before you actually find out who paid for the damn thing. By all accounts it works, though I have to wonder for how long. Once virals stop being novel – that is, once it becomes possible to identify one as a viral – how long before people stop entering the web addresses?

By that time, there will no doubt be a new generation of cynics to defeat and marginalize, and a new strategy for doing it. Or maybe the Internet will muddy the environment as it has with so many others, and it will be impossible for bloggers to snark about it without nine hundred paragraphs of tedious exposition first. I hope, because hope is the province of fools, that my generation are the last to be suckered by fruit drinks and obvious ploys. But this seems unlikely. As globalization starves commodity industries ever thinner, branding will probably grow in importance rather than diminish.  

At the very least, I hope that more people come to see the insult to them in all of this.

Reality TV

I have written about the appeal “realism” and “empiricism” have at the present to eyes accustomed to Culture War messages. I believe this to be true. Actually, you can see it in much of the actual agitprop for either side of this putative war, where in nearly every instance someone spins some ploy to assert pragmatism and decry ideology (cf. “reality-based community,” a very stupid term, probably a contradiction-in-terms, and certainly one that would cause Baudrillard to vomit books uncontrollably). At the same time, the talking points from the Boomers’ longest war are jokes, and lame ones even. Abortion, the environment, sexual mores, religion, aestheticism and moral-aestheticism – each comes with a built-in caricature. Family Guy riffs on two or three of them in every episode, and if the whole episode is about one, then it seems like filler.

A cheap joke about eco-freaks or Christian zealots is a joke at the expense of the expectation that these ideas have merit, that one could reasonably be an ideologue. What’s telling isn’t that the joke was aired, but that the jokes are so commonplace. Perhaps the seriousness hasn’t gone totally out of the ideas (as certain people and magazines whose initials are TNR will write a whiny editorial about me for suggesting), but real seriousness – radical, activist seriousness – is represented as a minority opinion.

And good riddance, because the Culture Wars are outdated horseshit! If we have to be fighting idiotic wars over the illusion of objectivity in morality, let’s at least have different window dressing for a little bit –

Sorry, the implant took over my hands. Where was I?

Ah yes. But lest anybody wonder if mainstream, network television can make anything un-horrifying with this fashionable positivism, think about reality TV. Why do people watch it? The implicit promise of most reality TV is of an experiment. We’re going to test and see what happens when you transplant moms across cultures. We’re going to test and see what happens when people are tempted to betray spouses. We’re going to test and see what happens when you comb over America for amateur pop idols.

The problem with Skinner’s boxes isn’t that they’re paradigmatic of modern dehumanization or some shit, it’s that Skinner boxes aren’t the conditions they purport to simulate. Same deal with reality TV. It would take a very gullible viewer to buy the come-ons and commercial spots for these shows as they’re advertised. The results of Wife Swap are only pertinent to people thinking about living with a new spouse, on national TV. As an experiment in filial commitment, Temptation Island is almost certainly too sanguine. Meanwhile, Nanny 911 founds all its “reality” claims on the ludicrous supposition that children behave “naturally” in front of television cameras.

American Idol may be successful as an experiment, but what’s the use-value of that knowledge? Study it and enter, and be shot down because it’s explicitly about looks and larynxes. Or study it and become an expert at spotting pop idols, and then — do what, exactly? Apply for Simon Cowell’s job? Or study it and learn what pop idols are, but then we all already know: they’re people picked to be voices and faces. The Idol contestants, quirks aside, aren’t a new theory of pop idolatry. They’re its reductio ad absurdum, and it was pretty absurdum to begin with.

So, this psuedo-positivism is by turns useless, misleading and incoherent. That’s no reason to moralize – by all means, let them do this stupid thing until they’re bored. Actually, quite the opposite: given that the bankruptcy of the idea is so obvious, can its public repudiation be far behind? The phenomenon may ultimately be a warning to the kind of mind that sees hazards in television trends, or connects them with larger schemes of meaning at all.

American Anti-Realism and Advertising

Since the invention of radio and TV, Americans have lived in a more fluid cultural environment than has ever existed before. For many of us, televised fictions made up the majority of our childhood observations of life. We grew up with a major source of cultural induction separate from our parents, our educators and our leaders – we may be the first humans to have received cultural education from media alone. A naïve observer might conclude that given this, contemporary Americans should be the most skeptical, intellectual society of people around. So what gives?

Well, for a start, our media do not present observations of life, exactly. In fact, our media have no epistemic standards per se. There are laws against slander and false advertising, but there are no laws against implication, lying by omission, framing statistics, appearing to say something without doing so, glibness, funny jokes at the expense of serious points, repeating bullshit ideas until they start to sound sensible, wearing a lab coat to sell dog food, and so forth. We inhaled these growing up just by living among televisions and people who watch them. It shaped us as individuals, shaped our perceptions of the world and, in aggregate, shaped our culture. It is of us, but we are equally as much of it.

Some people think that the Big Three media companies answer to the Bilderberg group, take their memos from the Secret Chiefs of international finance in Bohemian Grove, and coordinate their programs like blitzes to make us more pliable to the corporate agenda on a day-to-day basis. They would contend that the deceit is conscious. I disagree, but find the simpler answer even more terrifying: this is what you get when advertising feeds into culture, when increasingly, people learn their basic attitudes from a systematic program of insincere flattery. This is an automatic process.

We live in a culture where supposedly, it’s okay to get what you want, as long as you pay retail value for it. But in reality, we’re all incredibly guilty. We constantly criticize ourselves for having no higher values. We’re anti-intellectual – because we disdain knowledge and erudition that “we don’t need.” We’re consumerists – because if the customer is always right, then everyone else must be wrong. We’re decadent – or so say legions of the religious, because we are so ready to forgive ourselves that we no longer crave the benedictions of God or society. We seem to feel sometimes as though this sort of moral anxiety is the only standard for authenticity in American culture.

We learned anti-intellectualism from our advertisers. They figured out a long time ago that it rates well with children. Of course, children themselves can hardly be blamed; at a really basic, brain-physiological level, they’re resistant to adult intellectuality. Like anybody else faced with something they can’t understand, they laugh at jokes about it. But anti-intellectualism is only one face of the problem, which has many. The common theme is anti-realism: the belief, pervasive in our consumer-empowering media, that wishes ultimately “mean” more than facts. That’s the heart of American consumerism and in many ways – as in movies where the messages are typically as vapid and undemanding as “follow your dream to a happy ending” – it is the heart of American culture itself.

We learned consumerism from the hasty promises of retailers and service providers: we care more than the other guy! We’ll help you faster then they will, we’ll do better work, we’ll charge less! Choose us! Keep us employed! “The customer is always right” is the final, reductio ad absurdum advertising claim. No surprise that when someone found it, everybody had to adopt it. If American consumers seem particularly blind and feckless – if they willingly fund disgusting agencies, if they make irresponsible choices, if they walk into harm from sheer failure to notice it there – can they be blamed? They’ve only assimilated one of our chief cultural messages, one that pervades not only media but the workplace as well.

Or are we too quick to forgive ourselves, as right-wing moralists often claim? Once again, be upset if you like, be dissatisfied with people – but this outcome was inevitable. Our subjectivities are inextricably entangled with the sales pitch – a purchase can be a moral choice, an aesthetic statement, a social subscription, a lifestyle, communion, confession, hajj. Advertisers encourage us toward simple moral essentialism, because ailments of that family are the ones most easily connected with the buying impulse.

The New Republic and other scolds bemoan how the pervasiveness of “postmodern” irony sucks the urgency out of moral situations. We should be asking why we find it so indispensable. The obvious answer is that Americans grow up in an environment where lies are taken for granted, where there’s an inherent conflict between the morals people “want” to have – for example on the anti-consumerist left or the fundamentalist right – and the ones implicit in the overwhelming body of communication – that is, capitalist and democratic messages we receive from the media. Maybe this should suggest some vague comfort: even born and raised in a dark hall, human beings unconsciously find the Exit sign.

But it’s hard to live in a society like this, torn constantly between a mendacious worldview that ill-equips us to survive, make good decisions, or be happy, and the sense that simultaneously, everything we know is unreal – either because the world where we live fails the one we saw growing up on TV, or worse still, because the one on TV seems more plausible than the one in front of us.

Obviously, we can’t ban dishonesty for the same reason we have failed at banning offense: it overlaps too much with well-meaning, failed communication. In any case, even moving toward the problem politically would raise all kinds of First Amendment specters, debating the relative merits of which would politicize everything and make people even more irrational about the whole subject.

Because I know I’m a crank and behooves me to fight my natural pessimism, here’s at least an idea submitted for consideration: if we are going to continue having a massive advertising media, then we should establish a genuine counter-culture to mitigate its effects. But whereas the 60’s counter-culture emphasized developing new values in reaction to the prevailing ones, I am fairly confident that this isn’t the part modern Americans need to worry about. We’ve proven again and again that we can formulate alternatives to mainstream anti-realism, particularly in periods of falling economic fortunes. What we need is a parallel apparatus, a parallel media – one with epistemic standards different from those of the advertising world even if they’re no deeper or truer.

Journalists, scientists and various movements of the arts have all tried at various times to represent themselves as bearers of epistemic standards. They grasped correctly that modern humans’ relationship with reality is what is now at stake. For the sake of surviving modernity, we need to do better than they did.

House, M.D.

In theory, FOX’s House, M.D. is a show about the thorny side of science. Greg House is a cranky rationalist who trusts instruments more than patients and violently abhors sentimentality. That’s a pretty stock character in American fiction; the twist is that House isn’t a villain, but a doctor who saves lives by making deductions. Like an Ayn Rand hero, he’s an unabashed technocrat whose certainty arises from painstaking rigor. No doubt that was FOX’s notion – at a time when many wanted to believe that individuals could act alone and be right, FOX gave them a character who did and was. But unlike 24, a contemporary show that implied the same idea more directly, House didn’t start out reliant on totalisms.

Dr. House ended each episode by being right about the causes of the symptoms, but throughout it was intimated darkly that he was wrong about a large number of other things. He’s shown to be a strange and troubled man who poorly understands faith, hope, even love, and that’s part of the show’s conflict: placebos work but are dependent on actual belief, which is precisely of the order of things that can’t be furnished just by knowing about the placebo effect. House is against unfounded belief and doesn’t understand people who survive on it. Are they deluded, or is he in some way very blind?

Initially, the show wisely avoided answering the question. At the very least, writer David Shore threw it to relativism. House is irascible and that privileges him to certain insights, but makes him irreconcilable with his surroundings. Shore refused to let him have it both ways; what put House over his colleagues in medicine was often also destroying every aspect of his life, troubling his few relationships and jeopardizing his job.

But the show ultimately hinged on patients’ survival. By showing rational empiricism working in life-or-death situations, it defended science in a way that’s really out of character for American TV. We fear godless (or heartless) thought and tend to valorize authenticity or moral purity instead – Americans are romantics. In fact, House echoes that mandate when his deductions come in the form of psuedo-intuitive epiphanies (cf. “the lunatic shaman”) rather than reasoning, which is about half the time. He may be a scientist-hero but the emphasis is still on hero, somebody who appeals to the discursive universe and is rewarded. Not surprisingly, the heroic aspect wound up being the door through which mediocrity entered; in subsequent seasons, presumably to continue upping the tension, House was made crankier, more aggressive, more prone to apparently irrational outbursts. Episodes always resolved with House shown to be right, but now his coups were for private genius, not rationality or the scientific method.

In a third season arc, House irritates an FBI agent who then opens a case against him. Dialogue reveals the detective as notoriously arrogant and self-assured in his profession, and it looks for awhile as though House might soon be made the subject of his own posit – that is, as though he might have to abandon a cherished, unfounded belief (viz. his own invincibility) or face the consequences. But rather than face the demon they have summoned, the show’s writers sacrifice Lisa Eddelstein’s character and their last vestige of credibility by having her perjure House out of the charges. What could have lead to a beautifully symmetrical irony instead establishes House as an infallible Trickster figure – an archetype TV has already got an enormous glut of.

The problem is, the Trickster archetype is an ideological mismatch; at heart, it’s an appeal to the authenticity of the exceptional over consensus. House has always lied and mislead, but chiefly in the course of collecting data and administering cures; the Tricker lies to disabuse you of the notion of Truth. There’s some value in that, but it’s not an argument you should hear from a doctor – at least in the terms by which the show made its initial appeal.

In that context, House’s unilateral decisions are insane, and no amount of being right can justify them even in hindsight. As a creature of the romantic spectrum, he’s a self-biased Frankenstein in whom any trust would be unfounded. Of course, the writers had played fast and loose with the facts of biology and medical practice before, but this sort of ontological mismatch is a flaw on a different scale entirely – and a deathblow to a show whose central sympathy claims are predicated on a philosophical argument. Without that propping up the (essentially unlikable) character, House will probably spend the rest of its time on air chasing down irrelevant supporting cast subplots. That’s a rent-seeking stall by the writers. For all intents and purposes, it’s done speaking.