“… whoever embraces slop owns the future.” - Justin Smith-Ruiu
“… the very fact of our discussing these matters implies curiosity, and curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form.” - a character in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister
Throughout the BBC Office, Ricky Gervais’ David Brent demonstrates how much he wants his interlocutors and his audiences to buy in to the fact (i.e. his fantasy) that he’s effortlessly tuned in the the “vibe.” He instinctively guards against self-knowledge, and tries to impose responses on those around them. That’s probably what they’ll say, you’re probably thinking this, he’s going to appreciate that. He ventures forth language for other people, language he imagines himself and others will experience. To a journalist, he supplies copy:
Popularity, even celebrity, is the framework through which he experiences himself.
I pointed out something similar in a previous AO installment: David unself-consciously projects his fantasy of viewing his ego-ideal from the third person, as if in a celebrity profile:
“If I make them laugh along the way, sue me. And I don't do it so they turn round and go ‘Thank you David for the opportunity, thank you for the wisdom, thank you for the laughs.' I do it so, one day, someone will go ‘There goes David Brent. I must remember to thank him.’”
Crucially, in this fantasy, David is imagining himself not as the recipient but as the observer of this hoped-for result or consequence of his fantasy’s actualization. Surveillance fantasy.
“What do I mean when I say that the movies provided a transcendent frame? Think of Annie, in Sartre’s Nausea (1938) who, trained up on movies, could only conceive her own life as a series of what she hoped to be “perfect moments”, where the idea of perfection was entirely shaped by cinematic representations of it. Think of all the people whose sex lives can only be experienced as sex scenes, and for whom the fulfillment of sexual desire is to that extent the fulfillment of a desire to be the star of something. Think of all the times music has moved you as you were driving late at night on an empty highway, and the only sense you could make of being moved in this way was to imagine that your life, at least briefly, had been given a soundtrack.” (Justin Smith-Ruiu, “Star Systems”)
This last observation of JSR’s calls to mind a 2010 commercial that struck me as a little weird when I first saw it, because of the phrasing of the voice-over: “This moment reminds me of “Sweet Disposition” by The Temper Trap.” Hold on, what? Shouldn’t that be the other way around? Shouldn’t the song remind you of moments—of experiences, sensations, places, people? (AdWeek published a piece about that very song as a ubiquitous piece of commercials and movies back then; fifteen years later and it’s still in commercials.) Perhaps there needs to be a third line added to the meme “I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod.” I will not have a sweet disposition. There’s no need to think of one’s life as a succession of one-perfect-moments that remind us of songs that advertise things. Because if one internalizes that need, this is the end game as I see it: sunk in the kitschian sink, the slop bucket: we learn to experience our lives as certain types of movies, except those movies, however hyperpalatable, are imitations of imitations of imitations.
This isn’t only a matter of how people view themslves as individuals. In the New York Magazine piece from a few weeks back, one of the interview subjects phrased something in an interesting way, interesting in the way the Rhapsody commercial guy was interesting. He said, “I think we are years — or months, probably — away from a world where nobody thinks using AI for homework is considered cheating.” What a grammatical double layer: nobody thinks something is considered cheating. I do not have the argument fleshed out but on an intuitive level I am convinced that there is a rhizomatic connection between (1) this agency-avoidant manner of speaking, and (2) Rhapsody “Sweet Disposition” guy, and (3) the scenarios outlined in the block quote from Smith-Ruiu above, and (4) David Brent from The Office. These all seem to embody aspects of a new discipline of selfhood that is rooted in, let’s call it for now, an a/v spectatorial dissociation.
(Tangential, but related: think about all the talk about how “hot” is an adjective that used to be something one person said about another’s appearance based on a feeling elicited in the observer. But now, at least among some cohorts, it’s a label one ascribes to oneself on the basis of one’s confidence, as if assuming the role of that observer. This kind of slippage seems highly unlikely without a technological apparatus that allows one to experience oneself, on demand, from an “objective” position. [Tangential to the tangent: this might be the closest anything in Attendance Optional has come to some of the ideas I tried, clumsily, to explore in my doctoral research on early video technology.])
At some point in the future, all the ways people have been theorizing about slop will seem quaint. With the benefit of hindsight we’ll know what fears were exaggerated and which consequences were unanticipated. I don’t want to dwell too much on it until and unless I become interested in interesting questions about it; in the meantime, I want to pay as little attention to it as possible. Too much of it is extremist kitsch, pabulum but heightened. Slop reconfigures the already known into the appearance of novelty, to diminishing returns.
Not to skate too near to grooves worn well by Kracauer and Adorno 80+ years ago but there is an approach to culture, which is consonant with algorithmic taste-making but also with a lot of “fan” culture, in which someone wants more of the same. I know what kind of romance book, epic fantasy trilogy, or true crime podcast I like, and I want something that scratches exactly that itch. But just different enough to be new.
I once stumbled upon a subreddit discussion about (I think) romance novels, and the way people expressed their tastes in the comments seemed strange to me, like I was learning about an entirely new type of reading. The readers debated whether certain things in the book should only happen after the book hits 30% or 40%, and so on. (The reference to percentages rather than page numbers indicates, of course, that these books are being consumed on e-readers, which may or may not have further implications; I don’t know.) I admit I cringe at the prospect of treating literature with this “have it your way” mentality, but to be more open-minded about it, I’ll say this approach to fiction evinces a certain vernacular formalism. There is a sense that this is where things should go, this is the appropriate tempo during this section, this is the appropriate texture for a scene or a character. This type of character should be likable, this type of character should be unlikable, and that type of character should be mostly unlikable at least until a sufficient point in the narrative that a subplot makes them newly “relatable,” and so on. Deviations, departures, shocks, and surprises—particularly stylistic shocks and surprises—are harder pills to swallow in this framework. But the people like what they like.
There is a connection between this mode of cultural consumption and the way that it also helps produce people’s identities. “Stans.” Fandoms and alignments, woven into a blanket of signals for others who will pin you down on the basis of your (public) tastes. And thus we experience ourselves, we “self-fashion,” on the basis not simply of our loves and our allegiances, but of our anticipations of how others will interpret and respond to those things.
“We are, you see, social animals who also evolved from a world of natural perils and predatory enemies; we are naturally disposed simultaneously to entrust ourselves to the community we belong to and to fear what lies outside its discernible boundaries. The whole progress of humanity toward an ethos of civilized accord across great distances and despite great differences has been achieved by the gradual and agonizing expansion of our circles of sympathy beyond the limits of the immediately familiar. When we fall back upon our atavistic instincts, we are predisposed to believe what our fellows tell us and to disbelieve what strangers say. And then also we are, depressingly enough, organisms, and our minds operate at only the speed and with only the capacity available to them through the neural complexity and electrochemical processes of the brain. In the ‘information age’, in which the sheer algorithmic velocity of communication within ever more integrated circles of association outpaces the workings of our feeble analogue intellects by an effectively infinite degree, it is only natural that delusion of even the most preposterous kind can easily become a widespread contagion.” (DBH, “Swimming in Circles”)
What's next? I don’t know. A kind of samizdat of the attention economy, which I've mentioned before, or a shadow network of preserved (“throwback”) selfhood antithetical/orthogonal to the New Self, the New Flesh? I have been collecting these notes and started to write them out with the idea that they would organize into something more like a thesis. That ambition dissipated soon enough. It takes me too long to write these—not because I’m spending long hours agonizing over research or diction (obviously not!) but because I don’t quite have enough bandwidth in my life to support writing sessions of any real substance.
Still: more to come here, some personal news, and also, I think, I want to write a little more analytically about some films soon. I hope whoever’s reading this is safe and well.
