Once, while passing through Seville, I came upon a pair of backpacking college students.
We stopped at a bar inside the train station, shared some bread and jamon and wine, and chatted while waiting for our connections.
“What have you been doing in Europe?” I inquired. I recall that I was genuinely curious (after all, backpackers must have many tales and adventures– from hostels to trains to strange encounters with foreign lands).
One of the two, a pony tailed woman named Julie from Texas, was very outspoken and jumped right in.
“Well, first we did Austria, then we did Prague, then we did France, which was fun, and then we are gonna do Morocco!”
Something struck me as strangely perfect as our chat was interrupted by the loudspeaker calling their train:
What does it mean to do a country?
Can you consume a country?
Can you consume your own country? Or just Others?
Is experience quantifiable?
Over the years, I have had asked these questions many different ways to many different friends, and always been impressed how difficult they are to address.
Generally, there are 2 main sides to the argument for Knowledge as Consumption.
1. Time is limited, so to “do” a place or culture means to see and experience particular aspects of that place or culture in order to know and understand it. Experience is therefore aligned with knowledge of culture or place as an object. A subject knows this object as discreet set of boundaries understandable and finite, as a thing.
Experience = knowing, knowing as consuming.
In other words, it seems that countries, in a sense, like any experience, can be consumed at the great fast food joint of life.
All the Marxist talk of Mcdonaldization seems to apply here:
“McDonaldization seems to equally involve commodification and rationalization, to commodify food production and to rationalize its production and consumption so as to increase profitability.” [Douglas Kellner]
To follow this, we could say, the commodification of experience allows it to be compared for exchange, such that we could easily imagine Julie saying “I’d trade Paris for Barcelona, or Morocco for Prague.”
But what, then, in the consumption of a country, is the profit? What do we “get” when we “do” a country? Is experience (or anything that takes place over time) inevitably instrumentalized into exchange value?
Doing a country means that you are a tourist, a global flaneur walking through the arcades. As Benjamin has pointed out, capitalism has expanded the privilege of the flaneur to a growing middle consumer class, and normalized this privilege to the point of extinction of category itself. This leveling of the role of the flaneur into a middle class has been discussed (ad nauseum?). In a sense, the playing field of experience has been reduced to a shopping mall. Just as, at least in the United States, almost all middle income people can think about getting a Macchiato from Starbucks, so too can the tourist prefer their churros over croissants. The flaneur, the dandy, is gone, and as the tourist impulse has created a new globe-traveling middle class in the 20th century (and now the 21st), so too has the privilege of the dandy tourist been evacuated.
However, a real question is, if the seeer-as-knower-as-consumer is “getting” something, what is the “profit?” Perhaps the profit is the ability to consume and see more as an individual. In this model, individual experience as quantifiable knowledge is seen as a good thing, to enable the exchange of ideas in a marketplace of determined and instrumentalized experience-objects. “My trip to Paris was better than my trip to California. I want more Paris and less California.” On the one hand, this quantification allows for a certain kind of judgment of epistemological claims based upon empiricism. We find this problem as the quintessential modern debates about aesthetics and experience (al la Greenberg and others), and it certainly cannot be addressed adequately here.
However, we can say that there is some kind of judgment that can result from this leveling-out, both of the playing field of the flaneur as traveler as well as the knower-as-consumer. One can judge experience as “better”, “worse” etc. based on specific individual criteria, usually based on a language of implicit mono-cultural understanding: “the food was bad, but the weather was great” or “the people were cold, but the music was fantastic” are example phrases of cultural comparisons based on such travel-experience.
2. The second argument dovetails with the first. Is this quantification ‘bad’? As Brett once pointed out, he prefers a “pleasurable” online experience with a better product (browser) than to one, which does not provide a “rich” and “enjoyable” experience.
The critical points of interjection seem to float around three very broad and difficult terms:
1. Experience
2. Judgment
3. Knowledge
Is it wrong for me to judge my knowing of Paris against my Knowing of Barcelona? By what criteria should we reduce experience in order to know it? I am plagued by these questions as I struggle to come up with a language for articulating sound. I struggle with these issues as I come up with the sounds for language. I struggle with sounds. The sounds of struggle seem to everywhere these days.
I do know that when I hear that someone “does a country”, the sounds of struggle seems to be missing from my ears. Can experience be fungible, and is this desire for the fungability of experience a desire to repress or sublimate struggle? Does the plasticine sheen of the exchange commodity of consumed experience level the field, or are we again forced to acknowledge the combined and uneven development of experience, that some have and some don’t.
This is, it seems, the precarious zone that post-structural critique leaves us in, the area of relativism. Does judgment itself fail to do its job? Has judgment been hijacked for the purposes of better exchange?
Maybe a visit to the Whitney ISP show up now at Artist’s Space will help, or the curatorial program exhibit on coming up at CUNY grad center, called “The Price of Everything…perspectives on the art market” will point some new directions. However, for now, I have to confess, the trend seems to point to complete branding of the bodies of experience as both inevitable and largely accepted by both the left and the right. Freedom of choice is equated to the starbucksification of nation-states? Experience as consumption. Consumption as pleasure. Pleasure as freedom.
