Beauty Week 5: Imagine!

[imomus]

"The beautiful life" is a kind of utopia, a personal utopia you picture from time to time. It's set in the future, of course. The near future when you're in an optimistic frame of mind, the far future when you're gloomy, and, when you're suicidal, never. It's a series of hopes both personal and political, a series of glimpses of better ways of living, for you and for the world. It makes moot any division between politics and aesthetics.

In your daydream of "the beautiful life" you're living with a beautiful woman in an ultramodern city where cars are a thing of the past. Or you're living with a man, or in a commune! The thing about your city, though, is that it's full of lakes and forests and can barely be distinguished from the countryside. There's lots of cultural activity, the military has been eradicated, people have embraced collectivity, there are benign circles of trust spiralling upwards, everybody is "rich", but money no longer matters. There's no longer any metonymic representation: parts do not stand for wholes. The "designated particular" no longer asserts its universality. There is no God, so everything is sacred. Nature and culture are no longer opposites, and neither are communism and capitalism. Nobody locks their front door. In fact, there are no front doors any more, just an endless series of interconnected rooms.

Although lots of things (like the Post Office) are collectively owned, capitalism co-exists with those public goods. But it has refined and reformed itself. It no longer sells toxic stuff like weapons. The company is still called "Coca Cola" but instead of selling Coke, which shortens your life, it sells green tea, which lengthens it. Capitalism now wears the loose flowing robe of a Greek sculpture, wears a serene, contemplative expression. Imagine! And no religion too!

Although it contains moral and ethical elements, the beautiful life as it appears in your mind (perhaps in the moments before you fall asleep after sex, with your lover scratching your back gently and the sound of pigeons cooing in the background) is predominantly visual. It's beautiful because it looks beautiful. This is a world where you can judge a book by the cover, and where "only the shallow do not judge by appearances". But you're never misled, because the ethical goodness in things is encoded visually in them, and what you know to be ethically bad cannot look good to you.

You wake up the following day and decide to become a design writer.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think that when I weigh in against "moronic cynicism" and "guilty pleasures", it's because I'm basically agreeing with McCaffery and assuming that without such self-destructiveness and negativity in the consumer base, capitalism would be a much kinder and more wholesome beast. (In other words, if capitalism is toxic, it's our fault, and our responsibility to change our ways.) But on my Galbraith-leaning days I'd see "moronic cynicism" (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/121980.html) and "guilty pleasures" (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2005/02/19/) as something the system is actually selling us, endorsing, planning into its products. We only feel those self-destructive feelings because there's some advantage for the "planners" in the corporations to make us feel them. What might that be? Well, they want our consumption to be habitual. If we're hooked on smoking, sugar, heroin, oil, malicious newspaper gossip etc, we keep coming back for more. If they're "planning", as Galbraith says, they want us to be predictable in our consumption trends, and who's more predictable than a junky?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Galbraith's idea that the so-called "consumer economy" is actually a planned and imposed one is borne out by something David Byrne wrote in his journal recently concerning payola (http://www.davidbyrne.com/journal/current.php). Byrne points out that this is not just an economic question but an existential one. If our desires are being dictated by corporate "planners", who are we?

"My own experience with payola is limited and of course subjective. I’d heard of payola as I entered the music business professionally in the mid seventies, but naïvely thought it would never apply to me. I figured that it was a practice that was dying out and existed mainly around the disco, country music and R'nB worlds — which seemed not to be mainstream in those days.

Soon enough I began to hear stories, but still these didn’t apply to the circle of musicians I moved in. We could pretend that we were immune.

By the mid eighties, when Talking Heads had had some hit singles, the biggest of which was “Burning Down the House”, I got the news. “Burning Down The House” had some serious “indie” promotion money behind it. It got played on some college and other stations without financial prompting, but the jump to “commercial FM”, as I think it is called, was helped by cash and whatever else was used at the time — probably coke and women.

The band was in the midst of a tour, the one that was eventually filmed as Stop Making Sense. As we crisscrossed the continent (due to technical miscalculations this tour never really went to Europe) I could see that audiences were reacting more and more vociferously and positively to this relatively new song. How exciting! But as I began to hear rumors about the promo money being spent to help the song on radio all sorts of thoughts ran through my head.

I wondered if every pop song that had moved me on the radio, from when I was in my teens, had been paid for. Oh jeez! Therefore, other than a few free-form stations around at that time I was being treated like a Pavlovian dog — what I had believed were my subjective passions and discoveries were actually the result of a concerted program to pound certain tunes into my innocent brain. I had been totally manipulated! What I thought were decisions and loves that were mine and mine alone had been planted in my head by sleazy characters I could barely imagine. Free will? Hah! My entire past was called into question. Who am I? Am I not partly what I like? And if those things I like were not completely of my own choosing, then what am I?"

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

The phrase "moronic cynicism" reminds me of something I read in a Michael Stipe interview years back. It was really just an incidental remark early on in the interview that stayed with me. Apparently he and the interviewer passed a car with a 'Life is a bitch and then you die' sticker on the bumper, and he remarked that he hated that kind of "shop-bought cynicism".

Interestingly, perhaps, in another interview, I believe he told a story similar to David Byrne's above. He said that some time in his teenage years (not sure), he split up with his girlfriend, and, about to drive home, turned on the radio in the car and there was a love song playing and he thought, "Wow, this song is about me, about how I'm feeling now." And another song came on, and he had the same response. He changed the channel, and found other songs that also gave him the same response. And so on. And he vowed thereafter that he would never write a love song, because they were all manipulating people's emotions.

I'm not enough of a REM fan to know if he kept his vow.

The Beautiful City reminds me somewhat of Lovecraft's City of Aira (http://www.obscure.org/~vlad/lit/prose/iranon.html).

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Heh. I was going to post something similar. Capitalism, if read dryly, seems to be something that could be beneficial - perhaps even ideal - if we were evolved enough in our culture to handle it (and humanity as a whole most certainly are not). But again, capitalism by its own design encourages unethical hoarding of resources and doping/duping of the populace.

You could easily make the same kind of point about communism.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Or any other system that relies on ethics to keep itself within the lines. You always reach a point of reduction where people have to be trusted to make decisions.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

What makes speculating on these things tricky in today's world is that, at least since the 1960s, governments have been trying to map mass trends using algorithms, crunching the numbers on computers. It's all very fuzzy, but adaptive algorithms can provide astonishing accuracy in predicting future states of complex systems.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

centuries are for plumbers.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

currently witnessing the removal of victorian water pipes here in north london in my street. the down-sized cats are all sneaking round the man-holes as if they always knew about plutopia and wire magazine. and here we go, another helicopter with a quantas banner and nationwide and ultra light. don't say no to the dandy and the plumber.