I was reading Katie Welch’s RT of a Seriouseats post about a Japanese restaurant.  What’s interesting about the restaurant is that it serves you what the last patron ordered.  It’s a kind of circle then.  You eat according to the tastes of the last patron.  And your choice defines what appears on the table of the next patron. 

It’s a funny little experiment.  And it reminded me how much we like things that happen in controlled accidents.  It posits a social interlinking, the cooperation of strangers.  And it makes us go “hmm.”  (See the post on culturematics below.)

Then I fell to thinking about being in a supermarket recently and listening to a mother interrogating her child.

She wanted to know that Bobbie wanted.

And because Bobbie was, like, 4, he really didn’t know what he wanted.

His mother pressed on. 

"Do you want the red one?  Or the green one?  Bobbie, listen to me.  The red one or the green one?"

Mom was insisting that Bobbie make a choice.  It sounded like cruelty.  But of course it isn’t.  It’s the way we rear our children. 

Because making choices is the way you are inducted into our culture and it is a good deal of what you do as a member of this culture.  (Assuming you have the good fortune of a disposable income.)

By our choices, consumer, spiritual, political, shall you know us.  It is the way we find, fashion, express and constantly tune selfhood. A good deal of our ideology of selfhood is tied up in the possession of preference and the exercise of choice.  (See Virginia Postrel’s excellent Substance of Style for more on this theme.)

Unlike most American social scientists, I actually believe respondents when they say these choices are meaningful and constructive of who they are.  Most intellectuals are way too skeptical to fall for that one.  You see, they have identity claims of their own to think about.  And believing the respondent on this one has the potential of making you look like a fool.  Better that you protect yourself from ridicule than make contact with the culture in which you are supposed to be expert.  (Bitter, oh, a little.)

Being a culture of choice has its consequences.  This is one of the reasons a single brand can generate so many SKUs (Stock Keeping Units).  It’s why in some restaurants people are expected to order off the menu…the better to show their individuality.  Even the exquisite choices of a large menu would be confining in a world where selfhood really flourishes (aka California).  Yes, it can look a little silly, and especially when it comes to tormenting Bobbie it can look a little cruel, but it is the way we do things.  It our thing.  Cosa Nostra. 

Back to that Japanese restaurant. It’s good fun.  It makes our meal a surprise.  It creates a little machine for making disorder out of order.

But I wonder if it isn’t also a little troubling, evidence perhaps of a cat amongst the pigeon. 

For we take these truths to be self evident:

that identify and selfhood matter

that identity and selfhood are about having preferences

that preferences are expressed, enacted, sharp-ended through choices,

I choose therefore I am.  (Or as I think Virginia puts this, “I like this, I’m like this.”)

So what does it mean that we are now prepared to forsake choice for accident.  (Check out the culturematic posts for more evidence of our love of accident.  I am not just resting this argument on a retweet about an ancient post about a single restaurant.  Honest.)

Accident might be the enemy of individualism.  If we are forsaking choice, we are forsaking the very apparatus we use to craft the self.  No?  Clearly, accident is better than ennui but I can’t help wondering whether it isn’t also the end of empire, a certain cultural regime that is.  If we cease making choices might we not begin to grow ever more faint, ever more Cheshire.   What happens to our individualism without choice?

Or maybe, and this is the more interesting anthropological possibility, we are finding new ways to invent the self.  It’s less about the choice we control and more about the accident we embrace.  And that would be really interesting. 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2009.  Culturematics: a device for making culture in two easy steps.  This Blog.  here.

McCracken, Grant . 2009.  Culturematic, media and marketing.  This Blog.  here.

Postrel, Virginia.  The Substance of Style.  On Amazon here. 

See the Serious Eats post here. 

When Rosie O’Donnell attempted a variety show recently, some thought, “this could work!”  Perhaps the best way to speak to diverse audiences on TV was to take a “pipe line” approach.  Lots of acts.  Something for everyone.  Ed Sullivan all over again.

And then of course Rosie tanked.  And people said stuff like, “well, it’s Rosie.  I mean, she’s difficult.  She antagonizes.  Really, she was the worst possible choice.  For variety, you need to go broad.  Rosie just wasn’t broad enough.”

But now Jay Leno’s variety show is tanking, too.  Clearly, the problem with Rosie’s show wasn’t Rosie.  Apparently, broad isn’t working either.

So what’s the problem exactly? 

The problem is that Leno’s show sprang from automatic thinking.  It said, “Well, if our culture is fragmenting, let’s turn out TV that’s got something for everyone.”   Mass marketers found an excuse for more mass marketing!  Of course they leapt at it.

Automatic thinking is often stupid thinking, and this is especially moronic.  It manages to forget much of what we know about the world.   Like the fact that viewers are getting better at watching TV.  Like the fact that culture is getting better at culture, as Emily Nussbaum noted recently.  Like the fact that we are increasingly intolerant of bad TV unless its actually Slanket bad. 

And that’s the trouble with variety.  It is simple minded where we are smart.  It’s undiscriminating where we are exacting.  It jovial where we are skeptical.  The trouble is that it is various where we now prize a point of view.  Jon Steward is about everything in the world (or at least in the news), but this variety is always examined from particular point of view.  Each news story is not there to cover off another constituency but to exclude all other perspectives except Stewart’s own. 

It’s not a bad idea to have a pipe line.  It’s not wrong to embrace variety.  It just can’t look like variety, a bundle of diverse elements tossed liked a salad.  We are happy to consider everything at once but only from a single point of view. 

Jay Leno is worth talking about here.  After all, we know that this guy was once the comedian’s comedian.  When David Letterman was still funny, he told us that Jay Leno was his hero.  Then Leno dumbed himself down to make himself the king of late night.  He turned cerebral Jack Parr’s invention into the tele-visual equivalent of Ambien.  Jay’s being doing variety for years.

The old variety needed a genial host like Ed Sullivan.  The host was the common ground, the circus net, the continuity, the trusted supplier.  But new viewers don’t need these qualities anymore.  They much prefer someone with a brain used to sharpen a single point of view.  We may or may not embrace the point of view.  We may actually dislike the point of view.  But without it, the show in question turns to pointless, irritating mush, a exercise in the exhaustingly obvious.  (Think about the medical dramas before and after House.  Think of detective dramas before and after Homicide: Life on the Streets or perhaps something earlier.) 

This doesn’t seem like a fabulously complicated or original act of media criticism, except that it appears not to have occurred to anyone at NBC.  This brain trust doesn’t know the new truth of marketing.  Mass marketing is over.  Agreeable marketing is over.  Inclusive marketing is over.  Variety as variety is dead.  You are now particular or you’re a bore. 

References

Nassbaum, Emily.  2009.  When TV became art.  New York Magazine.  December 4.  here.

Technorati Tags: Jay Leno,slanket,NBC,marketing,programming,culture,TV,late night,Emily Nussbaum,Jack Parr,variety

“I phoned him multiple times.”

“The building has multiple exits.”

Not so long ago, the “multiple” in these sentences would have read “several.”

“I phoned him several times.”

“The building has several exits.”

Somehow, while we were not really paying attention, “multiple” stole into our language and displaced “several” in a bloodless coup. 

The question is why.  I think we can blame police language, as in the “victim was shot multiple times.”

And I think we know what’s happening here.  Police spokespeople like to dress their remarks in extra dignity and they do this by reaching for their “best” vocabulary.  People become persons or perpetrators.  Guns become firearms.  And they are not fired; they are “discharged.”  The victim has multiple wounds.  It just sounds more official, more commanding, more large and in charge.  Don’t worry.  Your city is safe with us. 

In the case of “I phoned him multiple times,” the speaker signals a certain impatience.  As if there is an absolute limit to the number of times we should have to phone someone and that limit has been reached.  Damnit! 

Why should we want to sound more official, more in control?  Why should we want to sound more bureaucratic.  Especially when the rest of the culture is becoming both more informal and more playful.  Why, exactly, would we want to resemble police spokespeople.  I have no answers here.  Only vexing, cultural questions. 

When I am at the post office in my little town in the Connecticut (and I’ve been there often the last couple of weeks), I notice that when my turn comes and I step up to the counter, the person behind me in line vectors off to the side so that they can see the postal employee serving me. 

In fact, I think they are actually staring at the postal employee.  I am not sure what the motive is, but some of these people give off a tang of self righteousness.  It’s as if they are insisting on their right to see and be seen. 

They must see the transaction happening at the counter because, hey, it’s standing between them and service.  So they have to make sure it’s all going to plan.  They want to scrutinize the postal employee in case they are slow or incompetent.  And I think some people come to the post office with the assumption that things will go badly, that the place is a ship of fools, a den of incompetence. 

And post patrons need to be seen because, well, this is America and we will be eclipsed by no one.  We will not wait quietly well someone dares waste our time.  We will be counted.  We will be seen.  That’s where that self righteousness comes in especially, as if people are saying, “Don’t you know who I am?”  Because we are not just time poor, we are time proud.  No one is going to waste our time.  That would be diminishing and Americans will not be diminished.

The contract of American life is that we will be given our due, that no man or woman can make plausible and enduring claims to be greater than ourselves.  Oh, someone might flash by in an expensive car.  We might even accept this as a legitimate act of superordination with our own fleeting envy or admiration.  And certainly certain groups systematically find themselves on the short end of the bargain.  Esteem is withheld from people of certain ages, classes, genders, and ethnicities.  But by and large and in principle, every American has the right to acknowledgement and respect uneclipsed by anyone else.  You may not be serving me, the notion seems to be, but by God you will not neglect me. 

So why would anyone imagine that the Post Office was a place likely to deny this fundamental right?  Is it because it’s a big bureaucracy that provokes this suspicion?  Is it because it is a government institution?  Is it because the post office is a place that threatens someone to make us all submit to the tyranny of rules that constrain what we can or can’t send through the mails?  Is it that in an age of Etsy customization, we are obliged, with some exceptions, to use uniform stamps in uniform denominations?  Talk about being elipsed.  Why, the place feels like a conspiracy designed to drive us into eclipse and perhaps obscure our very selfhood!  The nerve.  Don’t they know who we are?

It’s lovely to see the way postal employees solve this social problem, by narrowing their focus so that it’s a tiny field occupied only by them and the person at the counter.  They have found a way to shut out the presumptuous next in line.  And sometimes, I like to prolong this delicious bond by asking time consuming questions like, “Do you have a 63 cent stamp?  What about a 64 cent stamp?  Ok, what about…”  Just kidding.  I wouldn’t dare.

  One symptom that identifies kids on the Autism spectrum is the flapping of hands.  Kids with Autism and Asperger’s flap their hands a lot.  It’s their way of combating commotion in the world. You see, these kids have an order disorder.  Their world is a sensory and conceptual salad.  Flapping reproduces in their hands what’s happening in their heads.  It’s a distress flare, an act of protest, and the “handiest” way to will “all that” away   

Which brings us to Monk, the USA Network series that ends tonight at 10:00.  Monk is the defective detective par excellence.  He is imperiled by germs, dentists, sharp or pointed objects, milk, vomiting, death, snakes, crowds, heights, mushrooms, elevators and blankets.  No trace of Noir tough guy mastery or heroism here.  Monk is self absorbed, vulnerable, and, yes, clueless.  Noir detectives take on bigger themes.  The world for Monk is all about Monk.  (I know the show says he has OCD.  But anyone who knows anything about autism knows this character rides the spectrum like someone in a Neal Stephenson novel.)

Monk has an eye for detail and a need for order.  And criminal investigation is a kind of gift for him.  It’s an act of restitution from the world, an act of apology for being so refractory, so difficult.  Crimes introduce a highly managed form of disorder, perfect for sorting.  And crimes submit with great grace to “solving.”  People can be arrested.  Laws applied.  Sentences passed.  And, clank, a fantastically clear outcome: someone goes to jail for 917 days. (“Why can’t they round?” Monk wonders.)  Monk can never make everything in the great noisy world orderly, but a murder?  Dude! That is so easy.

So tonight, if you are not in a mood to add to the disorder of the world, you know, at a noisy restaurant or an energetic dance club, how about staying home and watching the last episode of Monk?  I suggest blanket and a cat.  Cocoa possibly.  It will be a small, tidy evening, perfect for celebrating the departure of our imperiled king of order.  Don’t forget to flap your hands good bye. 

References

Cowen, Tyler. 2009. Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Dutton.  here

McCracken, Grant.  2004.  The Monk in Nous.  The Blog Sits at the Intersection of …  June 25, 2004.  here