Essay on Order and Disorder

[Footnotes are omitted from the Ptolemy Blog version of this essay.]

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE CLOSING OF THE VIRGIN MEGASTORE IN SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH AND APRIL, 2009

Events at the Virgin Megastore:

Several weeks ago it was announced that the huge Virgin Megastore at Fourth and Market in San Francisco would be closing. I have been a once-a-month visitor to the store, in particular to the Dance/Electronica section of CD’s on the second floor. While I was well aware that retailers selling music, movie DVD’s and pop clothing and paraphernalia of the gaudy/shabby/hip/pop variety over-the counter were in trouble, it hardly seemed possible that this particular store, squarely in the territory of those questionably educated and hip kids who appear to make up the preponderance of San Francisco youth could succumb to Internet purchasing, file sharing or the recession. With that news, I walked through the store on three separate occasions at the end of March. Nothing had prepared me for the upheaval that I saw and that increased with each visit. It was one thing, and expected, that the world financial structure might bend or break, but the creation and distribution of popular music and mass consumption films would surely hold fast.

Everything in the store was discounted at least 30 percent, and signs indicated that the sale of merchandise, and fixtures would continue until all items were sold. At the first visit the pre-established but not necessarily segregated categories of products were being maintained. Various genres of music – pop, rock, soul, rhythm and blues, dance, country, new releases - remained separated, although some of the categories were scattered in various places in the store, so that if a new release by Kelly Clarkson or Coldplay were passed by the target consumer with a cold eye at first glance, that consumer might buy on the third pass. If a division in a rack announced that the CD’s of the Beatles or Bob Dylan were in that spot, those CD’s were still there, and the names of the bands and artists were kept as tidy and alphabetical throughout the racks as they had ever been. Each listening post with headphones for sampling the recordings had six CD’s racked below, each DC carefully numbered so that a browser could listen to the music before deciding to buy or not.

By the second visit the order of the last few years was in disarray. CD’s and DVD’s in the racks were being consolidated by the staff to clear shelf space, and customers appeared to be inspecting the goods and putting the items back on the racks randomly. Everything was everywhere, in many cases every which way, and the rack labels were useless. The received order appeared to have been scrambled into chaos. The effect was disorienting to say the least.

What is order anyway?

Upon reflection the long-standing order at the Megastore had always been suspect. Let’s stipulate that, for example, two films on DVD, “Booty” a “comedy” from the hip black culture and “Bourne Identity,” a thriller probably appealing to white adventure seekers, would be found more or less adjacent on the rack for the eminently practical reason that both titles began with the letter “b.” Apart from that link, what on earth did the two movies have in common?

This question referred me to an ancient script, Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, a treatise so seminal to our current understanding of how the world is or might be organized that it would surely hold the answer.

Foucault begins his Preface (page xv) with a famous passage wherein he reports his amusement and then disorientation upon reading a passage from Luis Borges. Foucault claims that this passage breaks up “all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things” while subsequently threatening to collapse our “age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.” I hadn’t really spent much time figuring out whether “Booty” was part of the Same or banished to the Other, but I kept reading.

In the cited passage Borges purported to quote from “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” that said that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”

At an earlier reading of The Order of Things I had taken Borges literally, but I decided on this reading that Borges had played a game. Foucault continues: “In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. (page xx.)” Another revelation: Beethoven and punk rock are united in a taxonomy; that they represent music is incidental. If we follow Foucault, what “Booty” and “Bourne Identity” have in common, as it turns out, is being grouped only through a linguistic convention that many would argue doesn’t “really” exist, namely, that items with names starting in “b” are to be placed between items with names starting in “a” and those starting with “c.” It’s just that superficial and illusionary.

Foucault continues: “The fundamental codes of a culture – those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices – establish for every man, from the first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home.” At the other pole, scientific and philosophical theories try to explain why a particular ordering has been chosen by the culture. The domain between these fundamental codes and such scientific musings thereon “…is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyze. It is here that a culture, imperceptively deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, causes them to lose their initial transparency, relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists.” At this point, argues Foucault, “…the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state.”

Well, not exactly or in all cases. Rather than the slow changing of cultural expectations predicating Foucault’s analysis, here before my eyes American, and indeed worldwide, popular culture was transforming in a matter of days with a wrenching acceleration. What sort of “order in its primary state” might emerge or subjectively be made to apply from all of this? Writing in the late ‘60’s Foucault’s bias as an outsider on more than one count, being at the same time French, a lot smarter than everyone else and an early European participant in the American practice of cruising, was to claim that a fundamental order always exists but that our mores and standards form a superstructure that rarely if ever gets it right and, in any event, is always subject to major paradigm shifts.

Was the Megastore closing process evidencing the post-modern condition?

Let’s look at this question from another perspective: It has been proposed that modernity - and it is a strong tendency of my American generation, at least, to believe that we are living in modern times - “takes place in the withdrawal of the real and according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable.” In terms of the Megastore I would essay that my (no doubt shared) concept of the Megastore I had been patronizing was an idealized mechanism of near perfect organization and functioning – go in, find the DVD, pay and leave with no questioning of the store or my role as consumer. I could conceive this, but, accepting Foucault’s theories, that was always “a withdrawal from the real.” What the store presented had always fallen short of that ideal concept. As the store imploded and dissolved what was presentable, i.e., how the Megastore was functioning even in “normal” times and later as it was closing, deviated more and more from the concept.

Going a bit afield, is there is a parallel between an attempted description of the dissolution of the Megastore and what could not be adequately described in that process with postmodern works such as the writings of Proust and Joyce? Perhaps. Jean-Francois Lyotard argues in the last chapter of his landmark book, The Postmodern Condition, that works by Proust and Joyce evidence an “aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents…”, in our case the unpresentable would be the disorder attendant upon the rapid, daily disappearance of merchandise and fixtures from the Megastore. Lyotard continues, “The postmodern would be that which … puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste which would make it possible to share the nostalgia for the unattainable;…” Form and taste were collapsing at the Megastore as the attainable increasingly diverged from the concept. The Megastore was becoming like a postmodern author, “working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.” The collapse was writing its own rules and establishing a new order – or not – as it was going along. It is unlikely that the phenomenon of the closing could be shoehorned into a unified, always applicable concept, otherwise describable as a concept representing “the whole and the one.”

Lyotard concludes with these chilling observations: “Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.” Presenting the imperfect cannot be reconciled to the ideal except by a “transcendental illusion” a la Hegel, “But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia for the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror [e.g., jihad] for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality.” Lyotard’s answer is a call to wage war on totality, i.e. the heritage of the Enlightenment itself.



What about some new ways of reclaiming order from confusion and entropy:

Establishing order within a given genre or territory was formerly the work of experts. Today it may be argued this is better made the work of the crowd.

Lyotard created opposites between artistic or philosophical domains that were relatively free in the marketplace, i.e., between experimentation and the avant garde and those over which government or capitalistic interests might control or shape, i.e., the social realism of the USSR, the suppression of degenerate art by the Nazis the cartoons of Disney or the conventions of commercial television.

Lyotard noted: ‘The Salons and the Academies, at the time when the bourgeoisie was establishing itself in history, were able to grant awards for good plastic and literary conduct under the cover of realism. But capitalism inherently possesses the power to derealize familiar objects, social roles, and institutions to such a degree that the so-called realistic representations can no longer invoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery, as an occasion for suffering rather than for satisfaction. Classicism seems to be ruled out in a world in which reality is so destabilized that it offers no occasion for experience but one for ratings and experimentation.”

When power is in the hands of capital, eclecticism rules, i.e., for the purposes of our argument, the Megastore while in its functioning state. Aesthetic criteria vanish for all that music and those movies, and “it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield.

Enter the new models now used to create rankings of and connections between disparate cultural productions, whether pieces of music, movies, artworks, artists or performers. In brief, these are the techniques employed by Amazon, You Tube, Google and “American Idol.” Chapter 8 of Crowdsourcing. for example, is entitled “What the Crowd Thinks – How the 10 Percent Filters the Wheat from the Chaff.”

“American Idol” put itself in the vanguard with Internet related creation of links and rankings at its inception in 2000 by soliciting and receiving millions of votes from its audience regarding the contestants who would be selected as the Idols. By 2006, 80 million votes were being cast, about the same number as were participating in U.S. midterm elections. “Voting became part of the culture of consumption.” Voting by phone or over the Internet is now a staple of granting the lay audience greater control over the production process. The filtering of winners from losers, whether performers or products, is accomplished by measuring ratings and downloads. YouTube uses a five-star system, a kind of Michelin Guide for the masses, all put into the hands of the viewers. “Only the collective power of the crowd has the manpower to create an effective filter, implying that panels of experts or smaller samples of voters could not filter with any comparable degree of accuracy or acceptance. Without this system, the author says that YouTube would be an undifferentiated morass of stupid pet tricks, although one might not rate the final products of the massive filtering substantially “better” than just that. The 1979 statement by Lyotard about ratings and experimentation quoted above appears prescient.

How did the inventory of the Megastore before the closing take shape? Initially, buyers for Virgin applied something like Sturgeon’s Law, which states that of all products created in a given field and during a given timeframe, 90% are trash. In many fields, for example in contemporary art, the formula must applied in series, i.e., 10% of 10%, or one percent of artworks produced in any given timeframe are worthy of serious consideration. But with the crowd referenced by Virgin, quality in the old-fashioned sense as noted above from the myriad of titles on the racks becomes suspect.

Many of the links applied by museums, artspaces, curators and critics, for example, to artists or works of art – or pieces of music plus performers and composers – to create a collection, an exhibition or a concert program come out of the perceptions of and from networks of peers and experts that operate much the way that Google ranks links to an item one is searching for on the web, namely, how many other Internet addresses reference or feed into the link under consideration. It follows that the opinions and criteria of experts, a very small sample of an audience, are now in the age of Google being encroached upon or displaced by judgments of the Crowd, i.e., consumers of the cultural productions in the field, both by the number of times a particular cultural production has been cited and how many sources have cited or valued it.

To propose one example, before what now appears to have been the art market decline of the fall of 2008, the function of experts had been substantially usurped by the large number of collectors in the market and the sheer wealth expended by persons invidiously were referred to as “the hedge fund guys,” who bought what they wanted and paid what they wanted, usually with little or no advice from the professionals.

Add “tagging,” which are the names of categories of products applied by members of the Crowd as they buy or comment, and entire taxonomies formerly the province of experts are changed or swamped. Henceforth, one is advised to refer to “folksonomies.”

Back to the Virgin Megastore:

At the end of my last visit to the Megastore, I ascended the long escalator to the Dance/Electronica section on the second floor only to find that all the racks had been emptied. It was like going to New York harbor and finding that the Statue of Liberty was missing. Upon inquiring, the last sad sack at the cash counter lamented that all remaining contents had been taken down to the first floor “in the rear, by the elevator.” Dutifully I descended on the down escalator. There was not much left. CD’s of this genre to my taste such as Stephane Pompougnac and his Hotel Costes series, Buddha Bar (8 Bis, Rue Boissy d'Anglas 75008 Paris, France), or Berlin techno by Ellen Allien, Paul Kalkbrenner, Sascha Funke or Modeselektor had long since vanished from the racks, preempted by women and men of good taste who had preceded me.

As I cruised the disheveled aisles I decided to list what I was seeing in all its apparent disarray and overflowings. Another issue emerged: Was I seeing everything without bias, or was it inevitable that my eyes were registering mostly the titles that I already recognized? If so, that was involuntary but unpreventable. Here is what I saw and recorded on my iPhone memo pad more or less in sequence:

Franz Ferdinand
Rod Stewart
Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
Pearl Jam
B spring
Deadmaus5
Marianne Faithfull
Raphael Saadiq
Middle Cyclone
The Eagles 71-99
AC/DC
Stallone First Blood
Ghandi
Bee Gees
Jamiroquai
Jewel
The Clash at Shea Stadium 1982.
The Doors
Duffy
Spice World
Patton
Schindler’s List
Gloria Estefan
Britney Spears
U2
The Bourne Identity
Mamma M
The Chronicles of Narna
Mummy
Booty
Animal House
Rush Hour
Friday the 13th
House Bunny
Treasure of Sierra Madre
Radiohead
L.A. Mothership poster
Star Trek
Para Siempre by Javier Solis
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Quarantine
The Great Ziegfeld
John Wayne, The Searchers
Casino Royale
Blackchristmas
Batman, Gotham Knight
An American in Paris
House of Games
Stargate Atlantis
Starter Wife
Bellboy II
Dirty Harry
Righteous Kill, Al Pacino and Robert Deniro
All about Eve
Rosa Parks Story
Builders of the Lost Ark
Swing Vote
Strangers on a Train
The Exorcist
Bucket List
Get Smart
Rocky
Dreamgirls
Princess Bride
Hud
Snakes on a Plane
Hard Candy (Madonna)
Shanghai, the Sex, the City, the Music
He'd Kandi
Thievery Corporation’s Radio Retaliation
Smooth Grooves
Best of Trance, Hits
Destination Marrakesh
Paris (Nothing French)
Sister Bliss

In Foucault’s formulation, had I at last “come face to face with order in its primary state?” Devoutly wishing not, I struggle to find some way out of the morass. Or should adopt Foucault’s pose that “I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once again stirring under our feet?”

“Stirring” 40 years ago. “Erupting” today.

My struggle lasted about five minutes, whereupon I sucked it up, strode out into the bright sunshine, crossed to the bus stop island in front of the already fading Megastore on Market Street, blinked a few times and took the Number 9 bus home.


Themistocles G. Michos
San Francisco, California
April 7, 2009




By the same author(partial listing):

“The Mayflower Compact, a Historical Fantasy in Three Acts,” play (1986)

“Thanksgiving in Space,” a play in two acts (1987)

“A Theory of Presentation (or Why Ezra Pound, Richard Serra and Ronald Reagan Are the Same Person),” essay (1990)

“Jesse Helms Tours the Polke Show,” essay (1991)

“How Ulysses S. Grant Discovered the Twentieth Century,” essay (1991)