I’m in southern California, talking to people in their homes about their homes.  It’s an interesting world and an underdocumented one. 

Some respondents tell me they have "followed their bliss."  As I understand it, this phrase stands for the notion that we are best served when we devote our lives to the cultivation of an enthusiasm.  Prosperity, happiness, satisfaction, all of these will follow if we put first things first. 

I like this idea. I may even have, in a low key way, lived this idea.  But I’m not sure I get this idea. 

This isn’t the way markets are supposed to work, is it?  Don’t we think that the market satisfy our wants and needs because people have responded not to bliss but to opportunity.  The market are responsive precisely because they are driven by self interest, not self expression.  Market, our best form of dynamism, is created by people trying to figure out what we want, not what they want. 

Now, there is a pretty simple answer here.  People will use a decision tree that look like Mazlow’s hierarchy.  If they have no choice, they will take any job on offer, bliss be damned.  The more prosperous their circumstances (private and or public), the more plausible is a self expressive career, instead of a self interested one.  In a wealthy society, filled with wealthy families, it is possible for lots of people to follow their bliss (in proportion to their privilege).

But this still leaves us with a problem.  We are living in society that changes shape, not according to what the consumer wants to buy but what the producer wants to sell.  This is the "long tail" development that Chris Anderson has documented so well.  It is also the "plenitude effect" that some anthropologists have labored to discover.  But these new markets are clearly dispersive in ways that old, opportunity, markets are not.  It’s not clear that they will work the same way to canvas, shape and express public taste and preference.  In fact, the very idea of "emergence," so beloved of economists and complexity theorists, is thrown into question.  Will things emerge…and how? 

Now, it is right to say that I am jumping the gun.  Most people live in opportunity economies, not expressive ones.  (I am put in mind of that old Leno joke: that Jerry Brown did have supporters for his run for California office, but unfortunately most of them were trapped in Biosphere II.)  On the other hand, expressive opportunities are expanding, and it’s not a bad idea to get a leg up on this topic.  I believe that Burning Man is probably a great place to study this topic, and I believe Robert Kozinets at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business has done important work of this topic.  (References will have to wait till I get home.)

A last point: bliss economies, we might say, were invented by tiny artistic communities.  Follow your own creativity, the world will just have to catch up.  And this is a simple, not very threatening exception to the rule when it is confined to communities as small as this.  But the bliss economy, perhaps especially here in California, has gone wide.  And now it is a larger problem with larger implications.   (On the other hand, this could all be crap.  I am in California and I am having the dickens of a time thinking clearly.)

Thanks to Jason Kottke, the mystery of the McDonald’s drive-through has been well aired, much debated, and, no, not yet solved. 

Today, another mystery. It’s not so concrete, but it is, for anthropological purposes, a worthy puzzle because it may well be proof that fundamental cultural change is taking place.  

Here’s the mystery: fiction, specifically the novel and the short story, is losing its authority in our culture.  It may also be true that non fiction is rising in its authority.  The mystery, most compactly, most mysteriously: why is non fiction eclipsing fiction?

A contrarian would say that this is old news, that the “decline of fiction” is merely a belated recognition the facts of the matter.  Literary fiction has been in eclipse for some time now.  But it was so preferred to television and films as a cultural form that the elites conspired to give it a “free pass.” Writers were lionized. Best sellers were touted.  Reviews were featured.  It didn’t much matter that every literary novel was outsold by lots of romance novels.  Literary fiction demanded special treatment. It was given an elevated status. (And this is why Jonathan Franzen objected to being included on the Oprah list. It was treatment not special or elevated enough.)

But let’s say that is a contemporary development.  What are the factors that encourage the decline of literary fiction?  There are many factors and I am looking forward to any and all explanations.  

Here’s mine. Literary fiction succeeded too well. It helped to create a world that turned on it.  

In the avant garde view, the author is a little like that Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men. He (or she) is a creature who answers to higher loyalties, contends with forces that ordinary people would prefer not to think about, serves as a heroic figure protecting a middle class Guanatamo from the Cuba beyond. Oh, ok so the comparison is odd but I like it because the actual contrast is as telling as the formal similarity: the novelist wishes to escape the very middle class standards Jack Nicholson struggles to defend. (Hey, I am in California as I write this, and it’s having an effect, apparently.)

The novelist had a simple charge. He was to take up what Trilling called the “adversary intention” and this meant  

detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture the produced him.

And halleluiah, it worked. The novelist so loosened “the habits of thought and feeling that the large culture imposes” that we became as a culture newly productive of every kind of social difference. Many creatures, not just adversarial ones, emerged in the world. A veritable plenitude was unleashed. Every imaginable creature of social life sprang forth.  

Bad luck for the novelist, at least the one animated by an adversarial intention.  Fiction may be suffering eclipse because it needs a tidy bourgeois society, something to push off against. Without this “larger culture,” the novelist cannot play the heroic figure who identifies its dishonesties and excavates the deeper authenticities to which lives should be devoted instead. No, when the alternative world is lots and lots of diversities and the middle class world continues to dwindle, the heroic novelist’s own favorite way of seeing the world is put in peril.  

It’s just not fair. In fact, it’s a little like patricide.  The culture created by the novelist has turned on him (or her).  The adversarial novelist claimed to hate the smug, self righteous, self satisfied creatures of the middle.  But now it turns out you can’t have a margin unless you have a centre. You cant be an iconoclast unless you have a tradition.  Bad luck, old chums. There are, of course, Middle Eastern societies that could surely use your heroic contemplations.  But I am certain you are not nearly so heroic as that.  

References

Donadio, Rachel. 2005. Truth is Stronger Than Fiction.  New York Times, August 7, 2005. 

Trilling, Lionel. 1965. Preface. Beyond Culture: Essays on literature and learning. New York: Penguin Books, p. 12

Sanneh offers a paean to summer in the Times today. It’s about “the song of the summer” which this year happens to be by Mariah Carey.

Sanneh does his characteristically elegant job describing the song “We belong together,” the artist’s  return to grace, the state of the music industry, and one or two trends shaping contemporary taste (e.g., the “thug love duet”). The song of summer is expertly contextualized, and the Times manages, for once, to get this right: to take contemporary culture seriously and help us see what it is and why it is…while it still is (active and extant).

The song of summer is a telling cultural institution. I am pretty sure no such thing existed in 12^th century France or even 19^th century America. And I believe I can say with some confidence that nothing of this kind exists in contemporary North Korea. (Though I understand there is a large and active Kelly Clarkson contingent there.)

Any song of summer is a little miracle of consensus. Somehow we choose, in our mysterious way, that this is the song of summer. And this is no mere popularity contest, a simple designation of “the song we like best.”

No, the song of summer will have many responsibilities heaped upon it. It must be the sound that, on early hearing, manages to communicate the impossible riches of the summer to come, and, by August, it must be the song that is already giving off a “world we have lost” nostalgia. And twenty years hence this song must be capable of allowing today’s 14 year old to recall with archival perfection her favorite blouse, what her sun tan lotion smelled like, and a general “sense impression” of the world that was the summer of 2005.

This is a lot to ask of a tune. But “We Belong Together” is that cultural operator that will make this summer a “culture of the moment” within a larger cultural system that so streams with change and discontinuity that the very idea of consensus and compartment is implausible. (And we think divas are paid too well!)

So I started wondering if there was somewhere in blog land, a post that would capture the power of the song of the moment for someone who was 14. I didn’t quite find anything, but I did find this. It was written yesterday by a teenager in Lubbock, Texas.

Ok so ONCE again…SO many people are demanding another blog…well A person but it still counts. And so i figured i would do a little sumation of the summer. Let’s see i arrived in Lubbock the day after graduation so basically ive been here for eternity and at first i seriously thought i would die from being so bored. Like i havent seen my parents all year or whatever, but really after the first week being here i felt pretty caught up!! I love em and all and im glad i get to see them now..but seriously its been ALL summer.

[…]

but THANKfully ashley came and stayed with me a week! I was so happy!!!! WE had so much fun…so many things happened like everyday. For example, getting trapped in a dimly lit, sketchy (love that word!) hastings parking lot at 12;30 am by this hispanic stalker guy. he completely blocked the exit with his car and I was so close to hitting him. I braked really hard and Ashley and i both look at each other and scram(past of scream). And being the stalker that he is…stares us down like pieces of meat. And finally when I realize i need to reverse (after being so traumatized) he follows us out the other way…tailgaitng us for a mile down the road. My house was only like 2 blocks away but i knew i couldnt go home b/c then he would know where i live!! (those lifetime movies taught me well ;-]) I dont know how but we lost him…WOW what a relief that was the scariest thing ever.

Yes, this girl can write. It is prose straight out of speech, but this is harder than it looks. Let us close this glass-bottom glimpse of someone’s summer and the kind of thing that is going to return from memory with Proust like perfection, when in 2025, our blogger hears “We Belong Together.”

And so just as we are leaving at like 10pm we walk to the car and i see this guy with his hood up..so you know you HAVE to ask if he needs help. And he was like "i could use some plyers" SO i was like plyers…plyers.. I had this roadside kit my grandpa gave me that i never opened. But I proceed to look for the plyers he needs and I reach for what appears to be plyers. I said "OH here they are! But why does these have a rope connected to them???" He said "those are jumper cables."

References

Merey Moo. 2005.  untitled post. BloggyBlogBlog.  Aug. 3 entry.   (tiny editorial changes made)
 
Sanneh, Kelefa. 2005. The Summer Buzz: Cicadas and Mariah Carey. The New York Times. Aug. 4, 2005, here.