gadget love

Music: Nick Drake: Way to Blue (1994)

Yesterday I started feeling down, for good reasons of course, but at some level for inexplicable ones. I very much dislike the inexplicable blue ("IB"), you know, the inexplicable tear? This time of year is hard on everyone, I realize. It would be nice to have some sun today, I guess. Must be Seasonal Affect Disorder or some such unpleasantry.

A hard series of meetings happen this week at school: graduate admissions, the vision thing (e.g., what do we want the department to be in the next century?), strategic planning and so forth. So research is taking a back-seat to other obligations. Regardless, I'm still trying to push through the February blues and managed to write a small bit on the iPod essay this morning. Here it is:

Any cursory review of popular media stories about the iPod reveals that the device is at the intersection of a number of different rhetorics: first and foremost, the iPod concerns sound insofar as it is a delivery mechanism for music; second, it is a profitable technological commodity that has become a desirable possession (seemingly) independent of its use; and third, as we have already suggested, the iPod seems to function as an occultic device of discrimination based on those who do and do not enjoy it in public space.[i] The three dimensions of iPod rhetoric are suggestive of a musical experience, a desirous form of consumption, and a public politics that are somehow intricately related. The concept that immediately seems to link these dimensions of iPod rhetoric is fetishism, or the attribution of magical or sexual powers to an object that it does not itself truly possess: The iPod delivers musical bliss, it promises consumptive fulfillment (and unforeseen profit), and it creates social groups of insiders and outsiders. In this sense, the iPod is the haloed center of a significant kind of cultural work, and the device betokens something more than itself-a "something more" or beyond the iPod than the iPod.

The "something more" of the iPod speaks to its character as a gadget and the desire that gadgets stimulate. Catherine Liu explains:

Gadgets are miniaturized prostheses-and fit into the available orifices of the consumer body: they resist decorporealization insofar as they provide an imago for the ideal organ. Palm Pilots, Blackberries, refrigerators that send email, robot vacuum cleaners, iPods, and customized cell phones require psychic docking ports that allow data to be attached to bodies in motion.[ii]

The "gadgeteer," continues Liu, is someone for "whose attachment to new technologies trumps his or her attachment to sex or other strenuous activities."[iii] Adorno argues that gadgets betoken a false sense of empowerment among "persons who do not any longer feel they are self-determining subjects of their fate."[iv] The libidinzalization of gadgets is thus party to a soul-deep, science fiction fantasy of immortality and omnipotence, the ability to replicate or extend oneself without (or beyond) embodiment. In this respect, Laurence Rickels argues that "gadget love" is simply the contemporary iteration of fetishism as such, the public desiring of our "high tec" times.[v] Gadget love is a metonymic surrogacy for sexual organs,[vi] a kind of lust for machines that participates in a larger, cultural fantasy of "overcoming of a crisis in reproduction though the self-replicating prospects of immortality . . . ."[vii] One of the reasons the iPod has dominated discussions about popular culture, then, is that the device is plugged into a larger, cultural, "psy fi" techno-fantasy self-extension and control.

The fetishistic appeal of the gadget is twofold. First, though its look, feel, and use gadgets cause desiring for "something more" in the gadget than the gadget itself. Walter Benjamin once described this "something more" in the context of technological reproduction as the "aura," . . . .

Notes
[i]For popular literature on the iPod as a musical device, see______; for literature on iPod as a fetishized, commercial gadget, see _____; finally, for a discussion of the social politics of the device, see ______.
[ii] Catherine Liu, "A Brief Genealogy of Privacy: CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother." Grey Room 15 (2004): 113.
[iii] Liu, "A Brief," 113.
[iv] Adorno, Stars Down, 74.
[v] Laurence A. Rickels, Nazi Psychoanalysis, Volume III: Psy Fi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 129-207.
[vi] Catherine Liu, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 36-37.
[vii] Laurence Rickels, "Nazi Psychoanalysis: Response to Werner Bohleber." American Imago 52 (1995): 356.