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I’m going to be migrating this blog somewhere else, soon. Not sure where, not sure how. More essays. More topics, including work, hope, utopia, art, motherhood, gender, neurodiversity. Just in case you somehow ended up here and saw that it’s been years and years: everything has been seismic over here. All subterranean, barely a peep up top. Something’s finally beginning to surface, though. Here’s to incipient mountains.

Branding, Nostalgia, and Authenticity: Initial Thoughts

Dan Nosowitz just wrote an article about Madewell, a trendy J. Crew spinoff that bought its name and story from a defunct workwear brand. He chronicles how Madewell has made its mark trading in the most important vernacular of contemporary marketing: authenticity. Nosowitz quotes Jim Gilman, who wrote the book “Authenticity, What Consumers Really Want,” and who is apparently also a marketing consultant. Gilman proposes that as the consumer economy has developed, it has moved through four stages, which he calls agrarian, industrial, service, and experience.

I haven't read his book, but Gilman's conclusions seem pretty obvious. First, people focused on necessity and the product itself. You need to eat, you need to dress, so you buy food and clothes. As industrialization progressed, we had more choices in products, but it also took more labor to earn less money. People started focusing more on price and value. As the pace of modern life developed, so did technologies of convenience. Value became more complicated; now value had to account not only for how much quality you could buy for a certain price, but also how much time a product could save you. That brings us to perhaps ten or fifteen years ago.

Finally, as late capitalism starts cracking at the seams, a certain echelon of consumer started wonders what all of this so-called "value" actually means in terms of satisfaction. You save time, you get something for a low price, maybe you even find something of high quality. So what? It feels empty, it hasn't made you happy. You remember when you were young and things made you happy, and you want to feel like that again. Kids coming of age during this time don't even go through this thought process, they just come into the market looking for products that make them feel something, products replete with meaning.

And so we enter the era of the marketing story. Of course marketing has always been about telling stories, but at least for the things we needed, those stories were about quality, and then price and quality, and then convenience and price and quality.

Now, the stories are about the construction of a self-image. The leap from authenticity to self-image is etymologically confirmed, in a roundabout way.

According to the online etymology dictionary, authenticity comes from authentikos “original, genuine, principal,” from authentes “one acting one one’s own authority,” from autos “self” and hentes “doer, being.” So even though we think about authenticity in terms of being truthful, verifiable, or fact as opposed to fiction, actually it’s about defining oneself - really, about defining oneself as someone who can verify the truth, so as to engage in self-creation. It’s about how defining oneself can by extension define the world.

This gets at the core of what I’m concerned about in my dissertation in various ways. The problem of entangling self-creation with world creation is massively influential, and figuring out the motivations of people as they create themselves is, I think, key to finding out how they end up creating the world (or “authenticating” it by their engagement with it).

There’s also the issue of how authenticity is related to canon and origin - authenticity is largely about identity through time. So nostalgia - going back to origins, thinking about what is old, because what is old is closer to the origin and therefore more genuine.

Perhaps most importantly there is the problem of fact and fiction. Authenticity, again according to etymonline, “implies that the contents of the thing in question correspond to the facts and are not fictions.” Acting on one’s own authority, though, is not about facts, it is about subjective perception of the world. It’s about believing that one’s own perceptions are facts because they confirm what one thinks about oneself.

Even though authenticity is in part about signaling things to other people, about wearing the right thing and fitting in, the idea here is much more personal. It’s not about using the story of the brand to present yourself to other people, it’s about using the story of the brand to represent yourself back to yourself.

It’s about having lost the ability to tell our own stories. Children today play with toys that come with ready-made characters and backstories, so we should not be surprised that young adults play with clothes that do the same thing.

The problem is that authenticity is no longer a metric for distinguishing fact from fiction. Authenticity has become its own story. Think about how we consider “reality” in reference to consumer goods. It’s all about nostalgia - something “real” is solid and concrete. It is made of simple ingredients or components, sourced from nearby and recognizable places. It is natural. It would be recognizable to our grandparents.

This version of “real” or “authentic” also has a strong ethical tilt. Real is good. It conforms to tested values. Why is there an upswing in “simple and durable” and “working class chic” right now? First, because it lets people tell themselves the story that they are pragmatic and intelligent, appreciating things for their function instead of their form, rejecting empty luxury. It lets people imply that they are proud to be hardworking, and by extension, that working hard is valuable.

This idea of “reality” has very little to do with fact, it has to do with giving the impression of fact. Similarly, authenticity has to do with giving the impression not just of fact, but of historical validity.

The question becomes, how do we use this knowledge? I think it would be interesting to see if you could train the mass consumer, who is simultaneously incredibly cynical and incredibly credulous, to actually see the stories that companies are telling them.

To be continued, with thoughts on cynicism, comedy news, and apathy.

Triteness: On the cynical sophistication of readers and the height of the authenticity bar

Try to talk about the stars, the scent of roses or grass or sudden rain, the sound of a child laughing or a lover whispering, the sunset or the ocean or her eyes or a dream, joy, beauty, belief, or death. Do it without guileless simplicity or purple garishness, without dying metaphor or wilted cliché, without cheap manipulations or maudlin pathos, without pretentious novelty or postmodern meaninglessness. Do it without referring to a scene in a movie or a TV show, without echoing or noticeably undermining a major classical artist or poet, without the sterile prettiness of a postcard or the adolescent hyperbole of a collage. Be musical but not sing-song, intelligent but not academic, recognizable but not banal, emotional but not sentimental. It all boils down to

NEVER BE TRITE.

Seeming trite in any of its guises is death for a piece of writing; it suddenly rings sophomoric and thin. We are trained to sneer at the simpletons who take conventions at face value; a certain set of images has become so symbolic that not only the symbols, but the things themselves have lost their currency. This means that there's a certain set of Big Emotions and Beautiful Things that are now almost prohibitively difficult to discuss outright in serious writing.

As someone who has always read like breathing and who has also taught composition, even certain cadences and grammatical structures feel trite. And it is definitely a feeling, the strange sickly opacity of a badly smudged window.

The contemporary craving for authenticity only makes all of this worse. The emotions that clichés once described still exist, their intensity heightened by unspeakability. A rose that someone grew, a noncommercial rose, still smells as sweet. Our faces are tired from sneering.

The writer's fear, then, is double-edged. The imagined audience is bored of cynicism, but too cynical for earnestness. It craves beauty and honesty, but can usually only stomach them via nostalgia - TV reruns, greatest hits, dog-eared books. It's as though the imagined audience senses that this world is rapidly becoming too hostile for love and generosity to be believable, but desperately wants art that brings them back from the imaginary.

I don't have a solution. Perhaps my gap between taste and capability is too high, or perhaps I'm a perfectionist. Perhaps I'm actually right about culture and we're entering into a terrifying period in which the gap between our craving for authenticity and our ability to believe it can only widen. All anyone can do is try to continue to write.

On Regret 2

Although I usually find "learn from your mistakes" types of platitudes ineffective, I find a tremendous sense of comfort in this one, from the inimitable Proust, in the character of Elstir, in The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower:

"There is no such thing as a man, however clever he may be, who has never at some point in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory. He should not find this absolutely a matter for regret, as he cannot be sure he would ever have become as wise as he is, if indeed getting wisdom is a possibility for any of us, had he not traversed all the silly or detestable incarnations that are bound to precede that final one. I know there are young men, sons and grandsons of distinguished men, whose tutors, since their earliest high-school years, have taught them every nobility of soul and excellent precept of morality. The lives of such men may contain nothing they would wish to abolish; they may be happy to endorse every word they have ever uttered. But they are the poor in spirit, the effete descendants of doctrinarians, whose only wisdoms are negative and sterile. Wisdom cannot be inherited -- one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course which no one can follow in your stead; no one can spare you that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things...I can understand that the image of what we were in an earlier time might be unrecognizable and always irksome to behold. It should not be rejected for all that, as it is testimony to the fact that we have lived, that in accordance with the laws of life and the spirit, we have managed to derive, from the common constituents of life...something which surpasses them."

The implication here is not that mistakes can be redeemed or converted into lessons, nor that regret and embarrassment about the past should not exist. Rather, the sense that one has done things to be regretted is the marker of not only becoming wiser, but also having lived more fully. The passage makes clear that the person regret tries to push us to be, the person with no regrets, is vacant and rather pathetic. Regret is also, then, a marker of our humanity and our limits, and there is thus something weirdly joyful in it.

The Myth of the Real Artist

The real artist must make art. In fact it goes beyond the positive, beyond need to make. It encompasses even the neutral. The real artist can't not draw, write, or make music. The implication is that the real artist will always find a way. A profound and sometimes inexplicable self-confidence about the necessity of the art is a hallmark of the real artist.

The artist who procrastinates, stays in bed all day, engages in hobbies, or spends time with friends instead of just doing the art obviously doesn't love it enough. It is possible to be a lazy dabbler; a real artist is too driven for laziness.

The real artist is willing to work at perfecting a craft for years and years before attempting to release art to the world. The real artist knows that such patience is the key to making truly great art. The world is already glutted with mediocre and bad art and media, and the real artist refuses to contribute to this problem.

The real artist neither needs nor has time for the often pretentious and self-congratulatory critical apparatus that tends to surround artwork. The real artist focuses on being an artist, not a critic or a scholar.

The real artist is fraught, or even paralyzed, by the difficulty of making art. The real artist is filled with terror when faced with the blank page, the canvas, or the silence. Profound self-doubt is the hallmark of the real artist. Constantly trying to improve, the real artist nonetheless never reaches a state of satisfaction.

The real artist is willing to work incredibly hard to gain recognition or to find a way to make a living by being an artist. Recognition and money, however, are never part of the real artist's motivation - they are simply a means to continue making the art.

The real artist cares nothing for what other people think - the real artist is an iconoclast. The real artist probably dresses in weird or messy clothes, or forgets to shower, or behaves a little strangely in public. This is because the real artist is too concerned with the needs of the art to pay much attention to anything else.

The real artist is a profoundly disciplined worker. The real artist works on art for at least several hours almost every single day. The real artist will spend this time on art even in addition to a full-time job; claiming to be too physically, intellectually, or emotionally exhausted from work just means that the art wasn't important or urgent enough be invigorating.

The real artist knows the importance of networking, and attends openings, readings, and concerts. The real artist is part of the "scene," but the real artist is actually completely above the "scene," because caring too much what other people think belies desperation, and besides, the real artist is totally fulfilled by the art itself. Inside though, the real artist is desperate for approval, and is only pretending not to care.

If an artist who is a woman has children and then slows or stops her output of work, she was probably never a real artist anyway, or at least the children have emptied her of her art. In most circumstances, a woman cannot be both a real artist and a good mother - she is either an irresponsible eccentric, ignoring her screaming children in a dirty house as she works, or she is a "mommy-artist," creating shallow paeans to the beauty (and occasional charming trials) of mothering. A women who has either the privilege of wealth or an inordinately supportive family structure, however, is capable of being both a good mother and a real artist.

The real artist, not caring what anyone thinks, may make art that does not have a big intellectual or aesthetic project. The real artist loves the process of creation and the beauty of the product, which may result in pretty, popular, charming, and/or marketable art. As long as the art comes from internal drive rather than as a calculated reaction to cultural and market forces, the person is a real artist.

A real artist is anyone who creates real art. Real art is what a real artist creates. Because art negotiates the borderlands between fact and fiction, reality in the context of the artist is entirely a matter of semantics.

The real artist is always right on the edge of sanity. The real artist lives in a different world than everyone else - more intense, more brilliant. Often profoundly depressed or anxious, the real artist would be blunted without feeling the depth of these emotions. For long periods of time, the real artist might be too depressed to create any art. These periods are, however, absolutely essential for the real artist, providing an emotional depth that the subsequent art would otherwise lack.

If an artist who is a man has children, the failure to structure his life such that his family does not interfere with artwork demonstrates a clear lack of dedication. A man who is a real artist is probably single; if he were forced by the economic requirements of family to be either a breadwinner or a house husband it would fatally interfere with his art. A real artist must be free; a family is the antithesis, the absolute opposite of freedom for the real artist.

Some things that should definitely (not) be included in the category of real art: interior design, tweets, pop music, video games, instagram photos, horror movies, fashion design, comics, fan fiction, graphic design, young adult fantasy novels.

The real artist is willing to risk rejection to begin to make a career in art. The real artist may feel uncertain about a piece of art, but recognizes that this uncertainty is a part of making art, and that this feeling will probably remain forever, so it's better to call the art "good enough" and begin trying to disseminate it rather than futilely trying to perfect it. The real artist doesn't wait to create a masterpiece before looking for an audience, but instead knows that without at least the beginnings of an audience the creation of the masterpiece is less likely.

In this day and age, the real artist does not require long years of practice to master a craft. The traditions within craft have been pushed to their limits anyway, so mastering them would be regressive and unnecessary. The real artist focuses on conveying a point, which does not always require impeccable skill with a traditional artistic medium.

The real artist is highly historically and critically aware. Researching contexts and philosophies relevant to the art is an essential aspect of the real artist's work, as well as maintaining a generally high level of intellectual education and cultural awareness. The real artist knows that art created in a vacuum is often closed-minded, redundant, or overly self-indulgent.

The real artist, understanding that art is part of the delicate human ecology encompassing birth, death, love, and loss, prioritizes close human relationships. The real artist with children will spend time teaching and playing with them, and will gain valuable insights from this time. A family can easily succeed with two real artists; what they might lack in financial security they will regain in fulfillment.

The real artist may try to work every day, but is actually at the mercy of the muse. The real artist carefully cultivates craft, but requires a bolt of inspiration to put that craft to good use. If overly physically fatigued, worried about money, emotionally exhausted, depressed, or distracted, the real artist finds it difficult or impossible to create art.

Real art is beautiful, and therefore the real artist only creates beautiful art. The definition of beauty is another matter.

On Regret 1

I have a friend who's always telling me that the mind cannot actually think in negatives. The classic "don't think about an elephant" problem - the mind always first conceptualizes the thing one is trying to negate, leaving smudges and a ghostly outline instead of clean absence.

In the case of regret, the wish not to have done, the outline solidifies into a leer. The gentle touch of a stranger at night, speaking threat and stone into the skin. A tongue that runs wetly from the throat up to the hollow behind the ear, strings of spit dribbling down the breast. The chill of helpless stillness as small shiny things that chitter and burrow find the soft places. In regret, we are all Hans Christian Andersen's Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, a filthy statue in the Marsh King's court.

Part of regret's insidiousness is its sheer stupidity. A lack of self-confidence is not even pathetic; it's merely banal. Boring. Regret is a malignant form of self-doubt, it is uncertainty that has metastasized into the past. This is why horror tropes are strangely apt for regret; it is uncanny, unheimlich. Memory should be hidden away in the safest of places. Instead, becomes a very specific sort of monstrosity, terrifying in its intimacy. Profane.

It's, Like, Approximation Culture

There's the like as filler that proliferated most in its association with the "Valley Girl" California stereotype in the 1980s (everyone is, like, so mean!), the to be like or to be all like that indicates speech (she was all like, "just shut up"). (The recent Facebook "like" and "unlike" have to do with enjoyment/approval, and not approximation, so I won't really discuss them here). Many people view the heavy usage of like as a bad habit, the kind of unprofessional language that disqualifies its speaker from the ranks of proper grown-up intelligent people. I believe, however, that it goes far beyond youthful slang, that it instead demonstrates a shift in how Americans think about certainty, commitment, and approximation.

Like is not functionally similar to um or uh. Those filler sounds signify absolutely nothing except perhaps for their function as filler: "I'm thinking" or "wait a second." Like, by contrast, signifies similarity, approximation, or even simulacrum. It actually undoes the certainty of a statement, undermining responsibility in the same way as prefacing a statement with "I believe" or "I think." It says, "it appeared to me that this was the case, but I might be wrong." Consider the above example, "everyone is, like, so mean!" It basically says "everyone behaves in a way that appears similar to meanness."

Different locations in the sentence have slightly different effects. For example, "we could, like, go to a movie" versus "we could go to, like, a movie," or even "we could, like, go to, like a movie." The first case says that we could do something like going to a movie. The second case shifts from doing to going - we could go to something like a movie. The last case is the most uncertain, the like serving not only to punctuate and fill but also to break up the sentence, enabling an interlocutor to interject at any point. It says "we could do something like going to something like a movie."

The use of like to indicate speech similarly approximates. "She was like, shut up" emphasizes the reporting of the speech instead of the speech itself: "She said something on the order of shut up." It emphasizes narrative over occurrence, both privileging and exonerating the storyteller as the one who gets to determine semblance but who is also admitting that semblance isn't necessarily reality.

The use of "to be" as part of this construction is key. It's not that "she said, like, shut up." Instead, "she was like, shut up." The speaker thus identifies the sentence's speaker with her statement; the speaker in a sense becomes wholly the statement, especially with the addition of all, or even the shortening of the sentence so the like implies the all, going from "she was like, shut up" to "she was all like, shut up" to "she was all, shut up". The speaker in this report is not a fleshed-out character, she's a function of her reported words. The semblance of like here implies embodiment; to be like is not to be, but to be wholly or all like is very similar to being.

It becomes even more fun with the addition of trajectory. Usually, the speaker "is all like" many things over the course of a report, one after another. At each moment, the speaker is constituted entirely by a single statement. She is a link in the chain of statements that makes up the story, and then the next link, and then the next. She is not a cohesive character; her likeness is sequential. "So first she was like, shut up, and then she was all like, you can't tell me what to do, and then she was all, okay I'm leaving."

On a broader cultural level, I think this has a lot of possible applications and implications. There's the contemporary distrust of media and reporting, the feeling that everything is manipulated, photoshopped, distorted, or trying to sell something. How can one commit to anything but semblance when nothing touched by media is what it appears? There's the rise of self-promotional confessional culture: the blog, the status update, the tweet. Everyone has a story to tell all the time, and the structure of the telling ensures that the focus of the story is the teller and the reportage instead of the subject. It also broadens into the question of the experience of the world in the age of such reportage. I know that I'm not the only one who, directly after or even during an experience, catches myself crafting the status update I can use to summarize it. We transfer ourselves into these little stories; the construction "I was all like" gets at a very complicated experience of remembrance and identity. It's almost Proustian in its intensity, except that where Proustian memory forces the speaker to drag the heavy chain of the years along with him, this new form englobes each experience within the droplet of its own story, a self-identical wholeness that enables something of a release. After all, it was just a story, a likeness - so one does not have to remain too responsible for or to it.

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