saving it for right now: the commodification of experience

People take pictures of each other,

just to prove that they really existed,

just to prove that they really existed

– The Kinks

* cross-posted from my primary blog, http://praxismundi.wordpress.com/ *

These days I’m finding very few things that continue to annoy me. Once I stopped worrying about being so damn logical, it all began to sound less like noise and more like music. Still, there’s a couple pet peeves I’m having trouble shaking.

I was reminded of one of the big ones last Wednesday during a Pretty Lights show at the Key Club. It was about an hour into the show, after my high-velocity school-day consciousness had been dragged down and molded into a glitched out, down-tempo sort of configuration, that I started thinking about how concerts have changed in recent years. Some self-reflection was required. On the performers end, not much is different from when I saw Blink 182 in the seventh grade and learned that music that isn’t live is…well, dead. The shift has been with the crowd, or rather in what the experience means to the crowd.

It started with the digital cameras, a few scattered here and there among the savviest of the technophiles, seemingly innocuous novelties. Then they got smaller and cheaper. They became concert necessities, right below the tickets (the only kind of paper worth more than money) and the joints tucked into your crotch or your girlfriend’s bra. Then they started putting cameras in cell phones and things began to spiral out of control.

This summer I spent a couple weeks doing fieldwork on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona. Outsiders aren’t allowed to bring cameras. Neither are they allowed to record audio, sketch pictures, or take written notes. Nothing going but raw, unfiltered sensory input. They say it’s not only about protecting the Hopi culture from exploitation. It’s for our own good.

These days many concertgoers, some only a few feet from the stage, are watching the peak moments of the show through a blurry, pixelated LCD screen. Live performances used to be one of the few times when you had to stay in the Here and Now. Music being what it is, there was no other option than to BE in the moment, go with the flow, join the dance. If you tried to hold on to anything it’d simply pass you by.

Well, that’s no less true today. What’s changed is that now we have gadgets which give the illusion of encapsulating lived experience into a digital format. Of course no one thinks that the cell phone video that looks like a fight scene from Batman Begins and sounds like a dial-up modem actually is the concert. But it does stand for it, and the fact that we have the ability to create simulacra of our lives starts to change how we live.

Capitalism gradually converts everything into commodities, discrete items that are to be collected and owned. First it was material objects, then ideas (I’ll be expressing displeasure at the concept of “intellectual property” at a later date, stay tuned), and now lived experience has been reduced into a tidy package of capital, a building block for constructing our identities. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick primer in identity construction, with a pinch of Indian philosophy that I find improves the flavor:

* The true Self (with a capital S), or atman is the single point that connects all your life experiences. It has no extension in space, only in time, and has no attributes whatsoever, other than the fact that it is synonymous with the entire Universe. Buddhists might say that its only attribute is emptiness, which means the same thing. Some would call it the Soul. It never changes at all, ever. Normal people don’t identify with their true Selves.

* Normal people identify with their constructed selves (lower-case s). The identities of individuals are a collection of attributes, the answers you would give if someone asked you to describe yourself. Things like race, personality, favorite bands, hometown, interests, profession, physical appearance, horoscope sign, name, whatever. Three main factors contribute to the final product: (1) Biological Construction, through evolution, (2) Social Construction, through enculturation, and (3) Individual Construction, through conscious decisions. These processes construct a wall around the true Self, higher for some than others, but nevertheless keeping it out of sight.

We’ve reached the point where Individual Construction is all rage, courtesy of postmodernism and the Internet. People seem to be getting hints that there’s more to themselves than an outfit of adjectives that are deployed and discarded with the changing fashions. That might account for the global identity crisis that’s making our time the Age of Mental Illness. The trouble is that no one knows what to do about it, so they just keeping hoarding more adjectives. It’s the capitalist solution–turn the constructions into capital and accumulate as much as possible. Like anything else, the false self wants to survive, and its existence is contingent on continual re-affirmation.

The grammar of capitalism and the constructed self is constituted entirely by adjectives. First it turned nouns into adjectives, objects into descriptions of their owners, and social stratification based on material wealth was born (baby I’m a rich man). Commodification of experience submits verbs to the same fate. Being “well-traveled” becomes more important than the actual traveling.

Back to the cell phones. People have always constructed their identities by picking and choosing from the boundless supermarket of experience, but now we have proof. Proof to ourselves, and proof to anyone who visits Facebook/flickr/MySpace pages en route to constructing their friends’ identities. Now at every party we have to take periodic time-outs from partying for picture time. That way we can prove we had fun that night by taking the same picture with the same people and same faces that’s been taken a thousand times [note: I'm still ok with pictures of drunken antics, as long as they're funny the next morning]. The value of our experiences is migrating from the thing itself to what it signals, from the cheeseburger to the menu.

Thing is, the menu doesn’t taste very good. There’s very little artistic merit in 99% of concert snapshots these days. Hold up, I’m not being elitist, because the definition of art lies in the intention of the artist, and aesthetics don’t appear to be the intention in most cases. I’m all for “Concert Photography”–that’s an experience unto itself, whereas “photography at a concert” is rarely worth looking at more than once. I hate to say it, but you really need either an SLR, a tripod or a press pass to get decent shots. Photography as an art has been superseded by an imperative to possess. The potentially insidious narrative is that an experience is somehow less real unless it has been photographed, bottled up and objectified in a digital cage, and tossed into the solid-state attic of our SD memory cards.

In some ways its beautiful, the constellation of back light and liquid crystal that adorn the masses. But the stars don’t connect, and a closer look reveals a bastardization of the lighters they’ve replaced. That collective flame which carried crowds and performers alike into a moment outside of time has died, each light reduced to an individual Ego bent on capturing the experience for themselves.

Sorry for waxing so cynical and polemic, but I think there needs to be some opposition to a worrisome trend away from lived experience and towards simulation. The Here and Now is an important place for me, and I’m determined not to let it sink into the depths with Atlantis and the 1960’s. So leave the cameras and the phones in the car (don’t forget the tickets and a lighter) and get lost in the music. There’s a lot to be found inside.