Selling Out, Buying In, and Synthetic Creativity

What becomes clear right away in Mark Andrejevic's iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era is the ridiculous pittance we will accept for sacrificing our stakes in privacy, creativity, and the right/ability to make choices.  Now, I was already feeling this way after last week and might be reading too far in one direction, but I think iSpy also hits on the desperate need we have to feel connected to something.  I wrote about this last week in terms of affect as the corporeal, emotional ties we experience as bodies; this base connection underlies the divisions of intersectionality and between varying standpoints, possibly uniting us as sentient beings.  So what stands out to me (especially in "Three Dimensions of iCulture") is the push to plug into relationships.  This push is as much self-motivated as it is corporate.  The networking and cybernetic booms are in response to user participation.  In other words, the resonating surge in interactive campaigns would not have occurred without an expressed interest in the buying public.  Granted, the paths between individuals and technology will always be cyclical, but it really feels like without our active submission to these services and products that we would not be as bound by the technology.

It seems that in the atomization of American society we are craving bonds that let us feel like part of something.  Usually when I think about this, I envision the satisfaction of connecting with someone on an individual level or the security you feel when you are with a close group of family or friends; there is a human component that is very direct.  Based on Andrejevic's examples, it seems that we are willing to accept a range of conduits to have this feeling, even if the humans on the receiving end are just implied.  Facebook provides one of the more direct connections with individuals you have either met or are connected to through other friends.  On the other hand, Nike's interactive shoe designing campaign and PostSecret highlight the willingness to bond with a faceless entity that loosely represents a collection of individuals.  Direct connection isn't made, but the semblance is enough to fulfill something on some level.  In this way, capitalism can creep even further into our everyday lives.

As some of you know, I am fascinated with the power of nostalgia.  Tapping into people's emotional memories of the past, even pasts they have never experienced personally but are familiar through popular culture, can be an extremely powerful motivator.  We see it with political and advertising campaigns, as well as with tourism, in film, etc.  It's all over the place and it is essential for the interactive pull to hit at our motivators and heart strings.  Andrejevic asserts that the nostalgia for interactive culture pulls at our understanding of a pre-industrial past.  We long to be more than consumers (M.A. uses the term "prosumers") and the act of helping to create, even when creation is simply choosing from pre-selected options (like the Qdoba menu or Nike's iD shoe customizer).  In this way, we are allowed to be producers without doing much of the real production.  We can sample a few options, point or click at what we want, and then someone else (or a program) will do the physical work.  Although we are doing a kind of work, the work is merely for the corporations involved (ie. David Bowie + Audi mash up project) Like the relationships, it doesn't have to be real as long as it gives of the feeling of realness. 

Another element of iCulture is an increase in peer-to-peer surveillance and the surge of biometric technologies to help with this.  We are "looking for physical evidence that can't be staged" (38).  Again, I think on some level we must be aware that by plugging in and signing on we agree to the farce of connection, but we are still starving for proof of anything.  Biometrics speak directly to the physical evidence we are craving, whether it's a lie-detector in a Judge Judy courtroom or monitoring somebody's heart when they're on a reality show date, we want to know the "truth" - it is written in your guts and in your circulatory system.  In general, this also points to the suspicions we have about everyone even when we're striving to make these connections.  Background check websites, credit check, bad date check - all of this can be done before you even meet someone face-to-face.  Combining these two anxieties are the Forget-Me-Not Panties Andrejevic mentions that were meant as social commentary, but mistakenly were take serious by some less ironic parties who were actually interested in investing.  But unlike the panties, this Dramatel commercial is a legitimate service.  I'll save the discussions of race and gender for another time, but the push for surveillance of a mate is intense.

Tasting the Affect

The reason I chose Ben Highmore's "Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics" alongside our other readings is simply because I love to eat and I thought perhaps placing this first exploration of affect in the context of something I enjoyed would somehow magically make me understand.  I'd just be relishing a bowl of sweet potato stew and suddenly draw links between my satisfaction through comfort food and a general bettering of mood from the sustenance and this huge nebulous topic of affect.  Let's just say that I'm not sure if I understand affect any better, but I completely gorged myself on all sorts of gastronomic delights trying to figure it out.  Here is what I am thinking at this point:

AFFECT = MESSINESS

It is overlapping, moving laterally and backward, connecting bodies and surfaces, potentially uniting others against some others, and sticks and slides.  While it is not contained within objects or bodies (not just human - could be land, thought, etc.), they can be inspired by or infused with affect (Ahmed).  Emotion seems too familiar in our everyday language to fully grasp what it means in terms of affect; "emotion" is a contained idea and seems like a closed definition whereas affect reopens this notion of connectivity and psychic fusions that are lost in the colloquial renderings of emotion.  Rai's phrasing "ontological reworking of ecologies of sensation" honors this reconsideration of emotion's power in making changes to our reality. 

Returning to Highmore's article, when we talk about affect we are talking about the guttural pulls that undermine all the ego and super ego socialization and ideological influences.  Although affect is not separate from or uninfluenced by these things, it marks a return to the physical body - blood, guts, wet, smelly, warm, REAL body.  When we experience anything it is not through a singular sense; everything is connected.  So let's say you sit down with me and my stew and I graciously offer you a bowl, you accept, and here is what follows:

• You grasp a warm bowl in both your hands and hold it because it is too hot to eat.
• Steam will rise from the stew both allowing you to smell the peanutty undertones and kissing your face with another kind of heat.
• You will look into the bowl and see a thick, rich orange with chunks of sweet potato, speckles of green celery, and a smattering of red bell pepper.
• When you finally take a bite, the secondary texture of chopped fresh peanuts will interrupt the initial smoothness of the stew.  Finally, a zing of lime that is only apparent after you swallow will overtake your exhale.
• The mouthful of stew will warmly travel down your esophagus and into your tummy, eventually warming up your whole body.

Now that's just me breaking down the physical sensations, perceptions, and registers that  you might feel.  Highmore considers this arena of sensorial perception and sensual expression beneath an umbrella term "social aesthetics" that highlights all the entanglements between bodies (121).  Now sharing a bowl of stew would be something that brought us together, but that isn't necessarily an interesting affect conversation (just the sign of an amazing afternoon).  Highmore mores the discussion to DIStaste.  Distaste is "revolt, physical nausea, vomiting, and retching...it's signaled through a register of affects sliding from condescension to disdain to scorn, and contempt" (124).  This pertains to schismogenesis, or the intensification of cultural differences or rivalries upon a period of closer contact between two distinct cultural groups or cultural factions (127).  As Gregory Bateson wanted to know, why don't cultures actually melt into this metaphoric melting pot when they are alongside one another?  In fact, oftentimes, the rivalries between two cultures will escalate.  The reason boils down to....

ETHOS - "the expression of a culturally standardised system of organization of the instincts and emotions of the individuals" - like so much that we talk about in cultural studies, or at least when we're lackadaisically throwing around "social construction," it needs to be recognized that just because something is abstract or on the surface or imaginary does not mean that it does not have real life, concrete elements and effects.  This is true of gender, ethnicity, so on and so forth, up to and including ethos, which can be linked to class.  Ethos includes the ways we do things, our forms of perception, affective intensities, and more.  Highmore refers to it as the "distribution of the sensible" (128).  It's due to the particular ethos of a culture that groups will rub one another the wrong way at an almost instinctual level; the differences between these core, everyday emotions and practices are too much to handle - blending or melting is not happening.

Ethos can be changed, but it requires sensual, affective pedagogy.  I highly recommend checking out the story about a lad eating the spiciest vindaloos when he was out "going for an Indian" (133).  After sending back the dish because it wasn't spicy enough, Javed, the restaurant owner, added the chilis that the English man insisted upon regardless of the fact that it ceased to be an Indian dish anymore - the meal was something else both in ingredients, taste, and experience.  The young Brit returned later to discuss what happened to his back end after consuming all the explosive chilis and this is a scene of sensual pedagogy.  I'm not doing it justice because it's straight up so good without my stamp on it.