stefanod

Why does sex play such an important role as a metaphor of moral panic? Sex seems dangerous because it crosses the borders of our bodies. Anthropologist Mary Douglas argues that the whole, inviolate body often symbolized the sanctity of society. In sex, people’s bodies are penetrated, they leak bodily fluids, and they might lose this sense of inviolation and wholeness. Sex therefore becomes a metaphor of people’s fears of other kinds of boundary violation. Sex often seems to be pollution, which Douglas defines as “matter out of place”, especially people, actions or substances which do not conform to the rigid categories set forth by society. More recently, theorists such as Ann Stoler have shown that fears about sexual trangression concern wider fears about social and especially racial boundaries.

The fear of sex tends to erupt when social boundaries are threatened, when plague threatens a city, when subaltern people demand their rights, when politicians need an enemy. For instance, when local uprisings or nationalist movements challenged imperial authorities, the fear of the “black rapist” emerged. This did not mean that there was an actual upsurge of indigenous men attacking white women; rather, the image of the black rapist became a metaphor for fear that colonized people would attack imperialism.

These anxieties about sexual boundaries sometimes explode into “moral panics”. Moral panics happen when moralists, activists or journalists concoct hysterical popular stereotypes of those they consider sexually deviant, and blame them for a crisis in society. They stir up popular concern through sermons and speeches, and demand action, such as expulsion or even execution… Moral panics are not necessarily a response to changes in sexual behaviour, but metaphors for these wider fears about social boundaries.

Part of the cruel genius of capitalism lies in its ability to make all activity within it seem natural and inevitable. What we describe as “consumption” can be seen from orbit as an incredibly complicated interchange, created by elite institutions, enforced quite literally with the threat of violence, propped up by states and coercive governments, and generally as far from a state of nature as is possible. Yet the steady accumulation of monetary exchanges over the course of life conditions each of us to see consumption as an inextricable part of our being.

Given the emptiness of the material conditions of their lives, the formerly manic competitors must come to invest the cultural goods they consume with great meaning. Meaning must be made somewhere; no one will countenance standing for nothing. So the poor proxy of media and cultural consumption comes to define the individual. In many ways, cultural products such as movies, music, clothes, and media are the perfect vehicle for the endless division of people into strata of knowingness, savvy, and cultural value. These cultural products have no quantifiable values, yet their relative value is fiercely debated as if some such quantifiable understanding could be reached. They are easily mined for ancillary content, the TV recaps and record reviews and endless fulminating in comments and forums that spread like weeds. (Does anyone who watches Mad Men— I’m a fan— not blog about it?) They are bound up with celebrity, both real and petty. They can inspire and so trick us into believing that our reactions are similarly worthy of inspiration. And they are complex and varied enough that there is always more to know and more rarefied territory to reach, the better to climb the ladder one rung higher than the person the next desk over.

There is a problem, though. The value-through-what-is-consumed is entirely illusory. There is no there there. This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Internet writ large is desperately invested in the idea that liking, say, the Wire says something of depth and importance about the liker, and certainly that the preference for this show to CSI tells everything. Likewise the Internet exists to perpetuate the idea that there is some meaningful difference between fans of this band or that, or Android and Apple, or that there is a Slate lifestyle and a This Recording lifestyle and one for Gawker or the Hairpin or wherever. Not a word of it is true. There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.

This endless posturing, pregnant with anxiety and roiling with class resentment, ultimately pleases no one. There are a vast number of websites and blogs devoted to media, culture, and fashion. When was the last time that you read one and emerged refreshed by the joy and authenticity of expression that you encountered? How many pieces do you have to read before you accumulate the satisfaction necessary for a single genuine smile? Yet this emptiness doesn’t compel people to turn away from the sorting mechanism. Instead, it seduces them into drawing further and further in.

This is why the resentment machine is concerned with resentment. The bitterness that surrounds these distinctions is a product of their inability to actually make us distinct. Nothing is so endlessly provoking to us as those who are most like us, and the reality is that there is little to separate the cultural signifiers of postcollegiate middle class upwardly-oriented-if-not-upwardly-mobile Americans. But, again, people feel there is nowhere else to turn, so they invest more and more of themselves in what they consume. Faced with the failure of their cultural affinities to define an authentic and fulfilling self, they double down on the importance of those affinities, and confront the continued failure with a formless resentment.

The savviest of the media and culture websites tap into this resentment as directly as they dare. They write endlessly about what is overrated. They assign specific and damning personality traits to the fan bases of unworthy cultural objects. They invite comments that tediously parse microscopic distinctions in cultural consumption. They engage in criticism as a kind of preemptive strike against those who actually create. They glamorize pettiness in aesthetic taste. The few artistic works they lionize are praised to the point of absurdity, as various acolytes try to outdo each other in hyperbole. They relentlessly push the central narrative that their readers crave, that consumption is achievement and that creators are to be distrusted and “put in their place.” They deny the frequently sad but inescapable reality that consumption is not creation and that only the genuinely creative act can reveal the self.

This, then, is the role of the resentment machine: to amplify meaningless differences and assign to them vast importance for the quality of individuals. For those who are writing the most prominent parts of the Internet— the bloggers, the trendsetters, the uber-Tweeters, the tastemakers, the linkers, the creators of memes and online norms— online life is taking the place of the creation of the self, and doing so poorly.