Yogalattes

Exercise regimens, like diets and PCs, require updates. In the perpetual quest to obtain physical perfection, insider knowledge is coveted. Women must know the secrets of the Celebrity, a need met by the reduced, reused, and recycled content of magazines. This mirrored regurgitation of women’s needs and desires is published again and again under new faces, in new outfits. The audience of these periodicals is a population of women who have seemingly forgotten how to nourish and move their own bodies.

“Celebrity endorsements include super model Christy Turlington and Broadway and film star Alan Cummings.”1

Yoga (both the practice and the idea(l)) performs a tripartite function in that it conditions the mind, body, and spirit. Yoga enables urbanites to stay sane, stay fit, and stay connected: to themselves, to nature, to an imported spirituality, to the ancient wisdom of the East, to whatever aspects of the practice they choose to emphasize or neglect. With cheaper rates than a therapist, yoga’s convenience and wide appeal lies in the fact that its ancient wisdom can be crammed into an hour-long session with an optional spirituality component. According to one’s whims or busy schedule, yoga se$$ions may be added or dropped; the practice of yoga can be modified according to the customer. The yoga classroom (and the general fitness discourse) creates space for the hyper-competitive and individualistic strain of Americana to thrive without guilt.

“Coming soon on Discovery Health 'She TV' Magee Hickey has produced a fabulous 3 minute segment on how Yogilates helps a stressed out TV producer release her worries for awhile and get back in touch with her body and spirit.”

In addition to her dependency on the next endorphin fix, the compulsive exerciser is in constant need of new tips, increased efficiency, stimulation, and variation. Yoga has outlived other trends of the physical fitness industry precisely because it is not new—although it may be novel for American (sub)urbanites. Its long shelf-life is sustained by the telling fact that humans have been practicing yoga since Before the Current Era, which lends the latest, greatest ‘fad’ considerable historical weight, credibility, and status (and serves as a selling point). But even with its seemingly endless array of postures and variations, and the option to tap into an infinite spirituality, yoga is not enough for the insatiable American consumer and her average attention span. She wants quick fixes, instant results, fast returns on investments, and immediate satisfaction guaranteed. With her lotus-embroidered Lycra® workout top, spandex pants, macchiato in hand and synthetic yoga mat strapped on back (with a hidden compartment for cell phones, cash or credit), the modern woman requires an exercise routine that fits tidily into her demanding lifestyle. She wants to have her low-fat, sugar-free cake without feeling compelled to throw it up afterwards. She wants Yoga to Go.©

“FAQ: I'm looking for an exercise system that isn’t too straining or difficult so I can do it every day without interfering with my work.”

From fusion cuisine to the Prius and the Labradoodle, the trends show that hybridism is in. The emergence of yoga hybrids includes disco yoga, in-flight yoga, bed-top yoga, and Yogilates. Conceived in 1997, Yogilates is a registered trademark that represents the fusion of hatha Yoga and the Pilates Method, an exercise regimen developed in the early 20th century by Joseph H. Pilates. In combining the antique with the ancient, Yogilates provides Baby Boomers and GenXYZers with a necessary physical fitness program update.

“The mass media, fashion, and health and fitness world seem to understand that the combination of these two disciplines makes sense, and they appreciate its appeal to all people interested in health and fitness.”

Perpetually dissatisfied with their own bodies, women are in the market for a replacement: the Rock-Hard Body, the Celebrity Body, the Yoga Body, the Pilates Body (or the hybrid Yogilates Body). As Jazzercise becomes dated, white urban and suburban women are turning toward more exotic fare: belly dancing videos, pole dancing classes, and Carmen Electra's Aerobic Striptease. Here arises a perverse and privileged craving for the Stripper Physique—representing the exerciser’s voluntary reenactment of a sex-worker’s labor hours without customers or compensation. All of this within the comfortable, heterotopic space of your living room, turned health club, turned strip club.

“In addition to the Yogilates classes in top health clubs, yoga studios, and corporate wellness programs, Yogilates is now a recognized brand name that has caught the eye of the media and health and fitness world as few exercise trends have before. Vogue, Elle, Jane, Bazaar, Mode, YM, CosmoGirl, Child, Weight Watchers Magazine, the New York Times and the Village Voice have all run features on Yogilates.”

Today’s domestic goddess must incorporate a block of time for the maintenance of her figure, in addition to maintaining her family and home. Exercise is thus added onto her list of household chores. With the latest technology and fitness accessories, it can be performed entirely within the domestic sphere. From SELF magazine to Pro-Anorexia Blogs, Lifetime TV to the Home Shopping Network, eDiet.com to meditation podcasts, information technologies have arisen as the secret keys to physical fitness. This mediated process has created a population of fitness-info-addicts—displacing the impetus to know and command one’s own body and replacing it with the desire to intimately know and own a prototype, a model.

1 All quotes from yogilates.com

Human Motorola

Human Motorola

Finally, a profound change in the perception of work and the working body became incorporated in a single metaphor—the frequently invoked ‘human motor,’ a striking image that illuminates an underlying affinity between physiology and technology. This image originated in an equally new perception of the universe as an industrial dynamo, or motor, the accomplishment of the thermodynamic physics of the nineteenth century
[Rabinbach, 24].



The work performed by any mechanism, from the fingers of the hand, to the gears of an engine, or the motion of the planets, was essentially the same. With this semantic shift in the meaning of ‘work,’ all labor was reduced to its physical properties, devoid of context and inherent purpose. Work was universalized [Rabinbach, 47].

At all moments of the machinated body, it is important not to amputate the prosthetics attaching the 19th century automated working body (proto-cyborg, integrated production line) to today’s info-compa(u)table body (modern cyborg, the cube farm). Capital’s liquid form follows the malleability of matter (technology) from the conversion of heat into use: the steam engine, the steel factory, conductive copper wire, the cooling units of heat-densified fiberoptic traffic. [Kazys Varnelis, Centripetal Cities...] The myth of a post-industrial body is that information technology has rendered us immaterial and invisible; we just need magnifying glasses, or perhaps laser pointers. ‘Traditional’ automation has moved offshore, the same shores that allow us to put the post in our industrial complex. In the ever consolidating information economy, American cyborg workers, whether in front of academic Apples or Applebee’s restaurant touch-screens, “[Our] engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of a post-industrial society” (Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto 154) and their sacrifices are nimble-fingers in microelectronic sweatshops.


[Designed in California. Assembled in China]

HACK THIS BOYS, or, Slightly Digressive Research on Electronic Circulation, or, The Latest Control Revolution

(NOTE: the following is convolute material from Agorachronotistics—as yet this remains in a fragmentary form and should not be quoted from.)

Two tendentious questions requiring further research:
1. Have media theorists, globalization theorists, and recent Marxist writers (Hardt and Negri, for instance) underappreciated the role played by electronic movements of finance capital within the global economy?
2. Do ideology critics tend to pay too much attention to consumption and not enough attention to circulation (or, how come no one reads Capital, vol. 2, or, how come our Brother Blog seems so hung up on retail)?

A DERIVATIVE DÉRIVE, or, A DÉRIVE THROUGH DERIVATIVES

The credit card is the only kind of electronic money taken into account by Marshall McLuhan in his chapter on “Money” in Understanding Media. McLuhan acknowledges that money is a kind of language, and he places extraordinary emphasis on its role in producing and sustaining the symbolic order within media cultures. But he does not anticipate the widespread use of electronic technologies for circulating wealth—everything from ATMs, direct payment and payroll, electronic retail, or (most influentially in geopolitical financial terms) stock, currency, and derivative trading.

As the anthropologists Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee remark in their compellingly readable Financial Deriviatives and the Globalization of Risk, the vast majority of wealth now exists in electronic form. The internet enables not only news, pornography, and useful information. It is also the foremost of the communications technologies that have fundamentally reshaped the global circulation of capital:

The conditions of connectivity, which permit someone, living almost anywhere, to download medical information to help diagnosis for a relative in need of medical care, to read a report on human rights and political detainees that the state would better like unread, or to correspond regularly with a friend living overseas, are also the conditions of encompassment and domination by circulatory capital and the infrastructure of the metropole generally. (47)

Derivatives, in other words, are a direct result of a globally integrated network; they are in fact a vast network unto themselves, constituting the “planet’s largest market” (46). Lee and LiPuma ask us to

Consider that according to the crystals of economic history, [the $100 trillion] derivatives market is approximately the same as total global manufacturing product for the last millennium. Or that deposits of that magnitude must be electronic, notional, and virtual because the amounts being circulated exceed the total quantity of the world’s currencies. (47-48)

Lee and LiPuma derive the figure of $100 trillion from the International Bank of Settlements 2000 report. In the interim, the derivative market has more than quintupled in size to $516 trillion. This would compare to a US annual gross domestic product of $15 trillion and a total US money supply also of roughly $15 trillion. (An accessible non-scholarly synopsis of the derivatives market is available at marketwatch.com current derivatives market) Perhaps physical money has lost much of its power, and is now merely a fetish by comparison to the electronic means by which wealthy individuals and corporations transfer money and finance capital. McLuhan calls paper money the “poor man’s credit card,” but the credit card is merely an instrument of individual borrowing. Individuals are hardly relevant to this largest of all markets: derivatives are primarily the province of large corporations and hedge funds. They transcend national boundaries, and they elude direct investment by all but the most intrepid (or wealthy) of individuals. McLuhan notes tamely that

Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it translates and reduces one kind of work to another. Even in the electronic age it has lost none of its power. (133)

McLuhan doesn’t consider whether the money he speaks of could take an electronic form, or if the acceleration of circulation enabled by electronic transfers of wealth might influence society. Indeed, one can hardly blame McLuhan: derivatives did not exist in 1964.

Not surprisingly, the non-specialist faces daunting challenges in trying to account for the influence of derivatives on the global economy. Lee and LiPuma argue that is in part because derivatives by their nature resist representation:

…the culture of derivatives posits itself as a space lying beyond the power of representation, one that is discernible only through quantification, grasped objectively as the necessity (emanating from the thing itself) of reducing all event structures to forms of differential equations, and subjectively as a kind of mathematical intuition embodied (as a quasi-genetic endowment) in those who master the financial practices. This culture of finance appears in academic and inside publications as well as newspapers and electronic media. It also appears in the organization, day-to-day operation, and distribution of money and power at investment banks (and nonbank banks), electronic trading sites, and hedge funds. Ironically, its own social determination and specific historical character lie in its unconscious refusal to recognize the socio-historical construction of the (derivative) object or (participating) subjects. (65)

The electronic movement of money and power is in some sense completely visible (detailed global financial transaction statistics are freely available at the International Bank of Settlements website; their annual report in some ways reads like a gross parody of the UN Human Development Report). And in another sense the electronic movements of money and power are completely invisible—in that the electronic transaction is always a fetish, i.e. it takes place electronically between infinite nodes; it naturalizes its own existence; and it largely divorces itself from the actual means of production. It seems at least indisputable that Lee and LiPuma are right when they suggest that

The culture of circulation of derivatives, especially those that regulate exchange rates and capital flows, structurally reproduces existing forms of global asymmetry and, more importantly perhaps, introduces a new form of structuring and structural asymmetry that owes its coherence to a set of ideologically impregnated conceptual schemes. (173)

Deleuze and Guatari make a similar point in stronger terms when describing the overwhelming influence of markets on the current global order. Perhaps they should have the last word:

In capitalism only one thing is universal, the market. There’s no universal state, precisely because there’s a universal market of which states are the centers, the trading floors. But the market’s not universalizing, homogenizing, it’s an extraordinary generator of both wealth and misery. A concern for human rights shouldn’t lead us to extol the “joys” of liberal capitalism of which they’re an integral part. There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery" (Negotiations 78).

PS

Or perhaps D&G shouldn’t have the last word:

PPS
Please don’t ask me to define a derivative. As many times as I’ve memorized Lee and LiPuma’s definition of a derivative as “the generic name for any security whose value is tied to an underlier,” I still find the derivative to verge on the indescribable—to verge on the banal, or the hopelessly general. The derivative is the post-script which ignores the letter which has come before the signature. The post-script lies beyond writing, after the labor of writing has been done. The derivative is underivable from experience; it is a sign within a language without etymology. The postscript is the post-crypt of the labor of communication, where the letter dies as afterthought, its signature effaced—now a dead letter, part of a postal crypt. There are potentially as many varieties of derivatives in cyberspace as there are varieties of human beings in cyberspace. Or, as Lee and LiPuma put it, “there are as many kinds of derivatives as there are forms of connectivity” (192).

Sunday, March 16, 2008 5:19 p.m.

Kindlebild 1.0

Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” is not an inventory of books—instead it is an inventory of activities involving the buying and selling, handling and arranging, valuing and remembering of books as physical objects. A scholar or serious reader is now likely, even without a Kindle, to buy the majority of her books online, and to have no tactile interaction with books during the process of buying them. The Kindle completes the process of the consolidation of the sale and distribution of books. New and used, Amazon dominates by ease of use. The efficiencies of scale at Amazon must be monumental; the Kindle increases those efficiencies, now that publishers will in effect deal with a Wal-Mart of bookselling, which will control the book trade at the wholesale as well as the retail level. Transmission costs will be reduced to a nearly insignificant amount. Paper and the fuel to deliver books will be saved. Amazon currently packs books clumsily and wastes immense amounts of cardboard in shipping. The labor hours of bookstore workers will be saved, as will the labor of postal delivery.

Perhaps in terms of efficiency there is no argument against books as kindling. To resist the electronic book is probably a futile form of nostalgia. Even so, the Kindle, like most cutting-edge technologies, is merely a temporary incarnation of a larger set of ongoing operations. There will be competition. Perhaps Apple or Microsoft or Sony will come up with a better electronic reader. The Kindle is an expensive technology, primarily because its content is proprietary. As in the case of the iPod, this probably won’t be an obstacle to its success. The most important question will be the ownership of content. Kindle users pay Amazon directly even for books which are out of copyright. Why pay to read a newspaper when one can read it for free on any laptop? When will someone hack the Kindle, and enable it to access free content? Or does wireless transmission preclude this possibility? Wireless networks, after all, are pay-as-you-go. With rare exceptions (bootlegged wi-fi and pirated music), there are no free rides in the technology world. Cell phones are cheap; cell plans are not. The Kindle, like the Blackberry, is effectively an installment plan technology. By its own logic of efficiency, the Kindle is likely to put itself out of business.

As for the physical codex, it will doubtless always survive, but perhaps in smaller numbers. The increasing prevalence of electronic reproduction (from JSTOR to Googlebooks) will likely raise the cost of the physical codex. The codex was arguably the single greatest tool in the spread of literacy and social change over the past six centuries. Even if the Kindle will distribute information more efficiently, so far there is little evidence that it will distribute that information more interestingly, more equitably, or more convincingly.

Saturday, February 23, 2008 2:27 p.m.

PS