Commodification and Pushback--Subcultures and Scenes · 26 November 2007
Bear with me here.
I’m back from utopia, where subcultures still hide in the hills and cityfolk come around looking for a piece of the enlightened ones, the creators, the real libertarians. Big Sur. You can feel the almost-serene pushback—a quiet self-preservation—from the people who get it as the San Franciscans in beemers come around for fine fine food and flickr-ready views. My guy Henry Miller (whose get-a-piece-of-me memorial library does its best to discourage women from inheriting him, what with all their sick, tired, parasitic man-on-man hagiography) has wonderful things to say about utopian subcultures and how terribly real they can get, but here is someone else who has interesting thoughts about NorCal enclaves. Wm Gibson via Warmhunting, from 2003.
You’ve been talking for a long time now about the demise of sub-cultures, that they’re co-opted by marketing forces before they become established. Can you give me an example?
Well, my model for that has always been how long it took to recommodify whatever it was that was happening in the 60s and sell it back to the people who were actually living it. It took three or four years. It was still relatively clumsy. By 1977, it only took about a year and a half for punk to be recommodified and sold back. And whatever was going on in Seattle with Nirvana — from its discovery it took about three months before there were models on the catwalks in Paris wearing clothing based on what these kids wore on Sentinel Hill in Seattle.What that says to me is that the future of that stuff is veal. It never gets to mature because it’s too valuable. And I suspect it’s because whatever that was was an organic function of industrial civilization. We are now post-industrial and we no longer grow bohemias in the same way. I’m wondering where they are? Where’s the new equivalent?
Well, utopians, bohemians, and ex-pats at heart: can we really get off the grid now? Has Gibson finally lost the pulse—failed to see that now subcultures engage in SELF-commodification (start a record label, trend-set in your own community, get yourself one way or another “on the magazine” as my brother the artist of information systems likes to say). Or are there still subcultures that are a refuge? Is ashtanga a place for self-production or, as the Miltonian might have it, for a kind of self-consumption? Is the market at our door?
Well, god knows plenty want to be ashtangis. Thanks, Gwyneth. But the funny thing is that once most people get on the mat they’ll never hack it. Boredom will get you if weakness doesn’t get you first.
So increasingly I swim in a soup of commodities and images and attitudes “inspired by” this practice. So what. It’s tacky, but do I have to buy in… and let my subculture be sold back to me as Gibson says?
One thing that’s coming up in the dissertation is that, as I see it, commodification in cultural fields is always partial. Yes, it is a pernicious devil of a tendency, but with apologies to my Uncle Karl there is always pushback. Not in a latent revolution: in the now. Yes the market gets the hell into our home lives and our relationships both to our families and to the land—there is always an economic side to these things. But at the same time, there is reclamation. Stillness, even.
There is the possibility of not re-buying—and not merely producing—ourselves. And I don’t think I have to go to some remote enclave place to get that. If I can show up and practice sincerely, finding community among the dedicated ones in a room full of all kinds of intentions and inside an entity leading the world in yoga commodification, as I did this morning, then there is definitely a self-contained-ness, and a power of non-grasping, that this practice generates. So interesting to practice contentment and stillness in a world that wants to package those qualities into things and sell them back to you as magazines and t-shirts. So interesting to see that there is a little bitty subculture that's not moved by it, sitting right there at the center.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, evolution
, having a body
, markets-networks-society
, self-deception
, social theory
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Whoa! What an interesting way to view it. Isn’t this “commodification” business limited to what you can actually sell? You can sell impressions of a thing but there is a vastness of things that don’t just march along with the buyers that shell out whatever selling prices are perceived affixed. The implication in what Gibson says is that any social phenomenon gets watered down to mere impressions and sold off before it takes root — before people really delve into things. That certainly appears to be a case but ONLY for superficial levels that bear commercializable qualitities. People that respond to phenomena might pass through any of a variety of states that are possible with respect to the phenomena themselves.
Yoga’s such a fantastic example of the contrast between cynical commercialism and certain realities. Some people buy themselves a mat and some right sexy pants and then hover at the spot where they got their nicest whiff of potential. Others dive in a little deeper; they might adopt some compatible circumferential ideas like veganism, grow some dreds and practice religiously. Still others go completely nuts and gradually process themselves as far through the ashtanga mindgrinder as they can get. People might buy some commercialized yoga impressions but the folks that really take the hook… well, they really take the hook. G doesn’t address this in the snippet you provided us. It causes me to believe he doesn’t get it. Dude needs a shot of yoga-borne clarity.
Posted by: Carl · Nov 26, 11:37 AM · #
this sent freaky little shivers down my spine. especially if i suspect recommodification as the poor zen monk ‘buying’ the reflection of the moon in the bucket of water. if samadhi, in part, is “cognitive liberation from the illusion created by knowing the concrete by means of the abstract.” then isn’t it so?
Posted by: eor · Nov 26, 12:19 PM · #
O god. I wasn’t even thinking of cutting through spiritual materialism, but you both are taking it there. To a “spirituality” or being-there that is non-metaphysical. And an understanding that commodities are less-real, if concrete, reflections.
Those words are perfect and righter than me. Are they you or Trumka?
As for Gibson, the penultimate novel featured a hero who did pilates because yoga commodification—the feel of the product—made her cringe. Too faux-spiritual. But in the most recent book, he breaks down and has the elusive accidental badass character get in to the zone for his final act of subversive heroism by, ever so sexily, doing asanas. Maybe Wm got his shot: I hear ashtanga’s all over Vancouver.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 26, 12:43 PM · #
it’s ganesvar misra, the pretty recent indian philosopher. i’ve never even read him but he’s all over the place in a wittgenstein piece in “namarupa”, issue 4.(isn’t 4 EXACTLY when he’d take his effing walk every day? or was that heidegger? i think it was. let’s go to vancouver.
Posted by: eor · Nov 26, 01:06 PM · #
I thought it was Kirkegaard? Though LW was anal enough to make it clockwork like that. Will have to break down and read Issue 4 finally. I usually just look at the pictures.
Definitely Vancouver.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 26, 01:11 PM · #
AYL was really quiet this Sunday. I wondered why until H pointed out that this year’s teacher trainings have just started.
Posted by: V · Nov 26, 01:16 PM · #
wish i were there, too, my favorite city. you are right, Kgaard.
Posted by: eor · Nov 26, 01:45 PM · #
just the pictures? unh huh, i know you.
Posted by: eor · Nov 26, 01:53 PM · #
Hm, veal. There’s something about empowerment going on with that. A real ashtangi would never relinquish his/her authentic experience of the practice for a simulacrum thereof. Never. As a wiser person once said before me, “the yoga will not be televised.”
Posted by: jlafitte · Nov 26, 05:11 PM · #
I just re-read the last several paragraphs and realized I was trying to tell you what you had already written. Sorry. I need to work on my reading patience.
Posted by: Carl · Nov 26, 05:12 PM · #
haha, fear me, I am computered once again! not to be off topic, but a word on dissertation defenses (the processing of which will probably require a leap into the unknown future followed by a like amount of guesswork, stepping back to the present from that leap): my experience with the defense is that it is where, when and how the committee pulls you by force—very much a birthing experience—back to reality, away from the nose-to-nose, eyeball-to-eyeball, mode of living with dissertation into which we all must sink. Be careful paralleling, even metaphorically, asana/yoga with dissertation. Make sure you can see the line, because to the degree that yoga is lived/life, dissertation is STILL only “dissertation life,” like a very intense suture between soap opera TEXT and soap opera viewers. The separation will come, and it can be visceral. Email, of course, to come. Enjoy the yoga, enjoy the soap! Heh—mischief, mayhem, soap. Aw yeah.
Posted by: patrick · Nov 26, 07:20 PM · #
That was damn brilliant, Patrick. Thank you.
I am off to eat soap.
I mean off to make ice.
I mean, um, uh, yeah. Long day in dissertation life.
The yoga will not be televised.
The yoga will not be televised.
The yoga will not be televised.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 26, 07:59 PM · #
so lovely.
Posted by: eeyore · Nov 26, 09:39 PM · #
As my 100 photos of Kyoto’s cliche photo ops upload to flickr, I’m thinking about how loaded the term “commodification” is – especially what is it beyond a glorification of a mythical individuality over the mundane reality that we can’t be that much different than the several other billion people we share the planet with.
One other thought – I suspect that the demise of subcultures has more to do with technological advances in communication and transportation than with changes to human behavior. “Commodification” on a small scale just doesn’t get the label because it’s not been writ on a large enough tableau, but the same basic interplay is going on: “Yum. That looks good. Can I have some?”
p.s. You might consider a rule banning people from posting on less than six hours of sleep and after drinking two lonesome beers in a hotel room far from home. It would dispense with drivel like this.
Posted by: Tim · Nov 27, 12:31 AM · #
I agree with Tim. The change is merely the speed in which we co-opt trends, sanitize them and sell them to the masses. The good news is that marketers get bored quickly, so the yoga trend should be fading soon enough.
I’d guess that yoga became very popular after 9/11 because it provided spirituality AND exercise to a frightened yet time-starved society.
Posted by: cody · Nov 27, 07:19 AM · #
Yeah, the impulses are smaller and faster. Makes using a big, industrial-era concept like commodification a little awkward. And I guess that’s why I find it to be a never-fully-complete process.
Interesting on the yoga-9/11 connection. This is how anthropologists of the future will see us—yes?
Tim, jet lag is lonely. The last good drug I ever took was an Ambien westbound out of Budapest. Highly recommended as your travels to Japan become frequent.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 27, 09:59 PM · #
Yeah, I scored some ambien, but the doc said it could be addictive so I’ve not been taking it every night – wish I had last night though. 2:15 a.m. right now. Four hours till mysore :(
Posted by: Tim · Nov 28, 09:13 AM · #