Earworms, Daydreams and Cognitive Capitalism

Priest, Eldritch 2018. Earworms, Daydreams and Cognitive Capitalism. Theory, Culture & Society 35(1): 141-162.

Almost all of us know what it's like to have a song "stuck in our head' or, more accurately, we know what it's like to have the refrains of a melodic shard or lyric splinter spread to the finer tissues of feeling that we call thinking and gently take us hostage with our fondness for patterns, flair for obsession and fundamental distractibility. Far from extraordinary, these repetitive musical thoughts, which have acquired the odd but agreeable handle 'earworms', nevertheless not only have a peculiar psychological status but also seem to occupy a strange ontological station. In many ways they are like hallucinations: real experiences without actual sense impressions. But earworms are also like daydreams: unprompted and aimless figments that seem to have you more than you have them. (Priest 2018: 141)

Here I have more than one connection points with E. R. Clay's (1881) psychology. In general, earworms have to do with unconscious mental events, which gives them "a peculiar psychological status", and in particular, they pertain to what Clay terms quasi-attention: "the concentration of mind that is caused by the attraction of the object" and "which resists the utmost efforts of the agent to undo". Since Clay's The Alternative is fundamentally about free will, earworms fit the description because they subvert any conscious attention to do away with them.

In short, instrumental technics, or perhaps we should say 'musical' technics, direct the ear toward an intensive dimension of sonic activity whose expression is not so much heard as it is felt, felt in sound as a quality of aliveness or abstraction of feeling that philosopher Susanne Langer (1953) calls a semblance of vital activity. This is key, for abstractions, insofar as they are perceivable, are felt. And as Brian Massumi notes, 'What is felt abstractly is thought' (Massumi, 2011: 110). But also, if what technologies and techniques produce are abstractions, and music is a kind of technology that produces an abstraction of feeling, then what is felt in music as the thought of feeling is non-sound, an extra-sonorous semblance of aliveness that appears in sound through a technical mode of listening. (Priest 2018: 143)

To borrow from Clay again, music gives us inabditive signs of the life and consciousness of others (music qua organized sound always presumes a - even more strictly, human - creator). Vocal music, writes Langer, has "words and the pathos of the human voice [...] added to the musical stimulus" (Langer 1942: 171). As to the abstraction of feeling, I found in my notes the quote "a tonal projection of the forms of feeling" (ibid, 183).

Offloading tasks associated with memory, for example, to technological devices, is thought to allow us to focus on the otherwise overlooked possibilities of present demands, as well as indulge in certain types of so-called 'non-functional thinking' that are not only pleasant but essential for mental health. However, the language of productivity that recalibrates 'that which was previously inscribed as and through negativity' (Callard and Margulies, 2010: 342) - namely, the apparent distraction of daydreaming is - formally resembles neoliberal capitalism's conception of labour that reconfigures our always-available general intellect and social skills as a form of work that we are, so to speak, never not doing. For both neuroscience and neoliberal capitalism, thought is no longer simply idle. A wandering mind 'consolidate[s] past experience in ways that are adaptive for our future needs' (Buckner et al., 2008) and in this sense is a kind of nondescript labour whose value lies in the ongoing production of an unspecified future producer. (Priest 2018: 144)

I'm currently "offloading" these passages in full knowledge that I won't be able to remember them with my organic brain but can store in my auxiliary memory (this blog). The topic of functionality and productivity brings me, once again, to the pragmatic issue of phatic communion, i.e. (social) speech qua a mode of action that does not directly serve practical aims but may include reflexion about practical matters.

In this my hope is to apply Clay's typology of incommunicative questions to the topicality (which I realize is as detestable a notion as positionality and addressivity, but "topic analysis" from journalism research sounds too crude for the occasion) of phatic communion. The typology includes mnemonical, judicial, vice-judicial and practical questions. The first two are easy because they are put forth by Malinowski himself in the garb of "personal accounts of the speaker's views [judicial] and life history [mnemonical]" (PC 5.4).

I've thought a lot recently about the vice-judicial variety of questions, which - like Clay's quasi-attention - has to do with the subversion of free will, and is "conversant only about agenda". By this Clay means judgements that are not true judgments because the subject does not compare the opposites of a proposition (whether something is true or not) but is taken to a judgement without actual evaluation. This is in my opinion at the heart of political ideologies, which as-if make up our minds without our conscious involvement; we must only recall our position or the position predisposet to by our political leaning, and a vice-judgment is made.

But the true matter of vice-judgments - being conversant about agenda (literally "the things that must be done") - makes it resemble practical questions in terms of judgements. The point I wished to arrive at here is actually much simpler and relies on the everyday observation that when people small talk they also discuss practical matters, that is, the things that must be done. An easy illustration involves the representative anecdote of talking about weather: it is not only an observation (it's raining) or judgment (it is going to rain) but a sign-post to practical action (it is going to rain therefore I should get an umbrella or find some shelter). According to the verbiage presented in the above quote, it amounts to wandering minds consolidating past and present experiences for future actions.

But the recursive form of earworms complicates the image of endlessly productive thought. Unlike a wandering mind whose obliquities give it an 'inspired' profile, the earworm's autism purges it of value, of function, for it can only be exchanged for another iteration of itself. (Priest 2018: 144)

The keyword here is "autism", which signifies inward directedness. The same argument, in different terms, goes for phatic communion. Whereas Malinowski writes only that "the bonds created between hearer and speaker are not quite symmetrical" (PC 5.5) immediately after describing the topics of personal views and life history, he falls short from calling this form of discourse egocentric, but this is clearly the case, as was caught by Jean Piaget, whose term collective monologue embodies this aspect more vividly.

Instead of "autism", which has negative and medical connotations, I'd propose Clay's incommunication for the purpose. This also vies well with the French incommunicatif. The argument is minimally similar because this egocentric, incommunicative (self-directed) nature of phatic communion is exactly what "purges it of value, of [communicative] function". Instead of communicating (transmitting information) to another person, someone engaging in phatic communion is in many cases communicating with him- or herself, reflecting on personal issues in the guise of social communication. For more down-to-earth examples, Dell Hymes' illustrations of mothers talking about their children and anthropologists about their own fieldwork perfectly fits the case.

It can't be that melodies are significantly more 'catchy' now than they were, say, 300 years ago, or that we simply remember things better than we used to. (Priest 2018: 145)

Why can't it, though? More people have access to music than did 300 years ago. Not only that there are more people and there is more music but even the poorest can now afford devices that play music whereas a live orchestral concert was an expensive and relatively rare commodity before. It also seems to be the case that we have indeed became better at creating catchy music. One example that immediately comes to mind is Del the Funky Homosapien reading How to Write a Hit Song: The Complete Guide to Writing and Marketing Chart-Topping Lyrics and Music (Leikin 2000) when writing "Clint Eastwood" for Gorillaz. Likewise it seems to be the case that people nowadays are better fed, better cared for, and may indeed be simply better able to remember things. Recall, for example, how adding iodine to salt had the unintended consequence of raising the national IQ by 3%. I'd think that people nowadays are healthier and better educated than people 300 years ago would be an incontestable notion.

And because the accelerating tempo of novelty production (or its stimulation) 'prevents any significant period of time elapsing in which the use of a given product, or assemblage of them, could become familiar enough to constitute merely the background elements of one's life', thinking is becoming synonymous with 'patterns of acquiring and discarding' (Crary, 2013: 44, 45). A general aesthetic equivalence between media content not only 'circulates to habituate and validate one's immersion in the exigencies of twenty-first-century capitalism' (Crary, 2013: 52), but also promotes a form of attention that is characterized by its flitting from one budding occasion of awareness to the next. While attention of this sort often goes favourably by the name of 'multi-tasking', it is more accurately described as thought in the mode of distraction: thought as wandering attention. (Priest 2018: 146)

This hits a little bit too close to home in musical terms. When I was a kid and received a cassette as a birthday present I listened to it on repeat for a long time, learned the titles of the tracks, memorized its content thoroughly. Whereas yesterday I downloaded some 40 top dream pop albums of 2017 and can barely distinguish bands like Beaches, Beach Fossils and Beach House (I wouldn't dream of learning track titles for all those albums, they play on the background on shuffle).

The argument about attention here calls Charlez Suckerman's phatic violence to mind because he took what I call the "minus-phatic" (essentially, distracting) viewpoint on Jakobson's phatic function: linguistic means to grab attention can also be used maliciously to distract, annoy and abuse. It looks like something like this turn-around is occurring or should occur with regards to social media, which, true, can foster ambient awareness and continuous co-presence, but can equally distract and offer unwanted stimuli.

Just yesterday Drew Gooden (on Youtube) talked about why he detests Facebook: it feeds him images from people he might have been aquainted with a decade ago, whose face he may but name may not recall, with is doubly annoying if the content shared by that person is shallow garbage (he criticized the trend of making funny still images into 20second videos just to put ads on them). There are bad actors in our economy of attention.

In other words, the abstract aliveness we hear in the technical object of music (e.g. a melody, a chord progression, a song...) is given by the mechanization of its expression (technological playback) a functional autonomy that connects to audition through the negative relation of not-listening. (Priest 2018: 150)

The technical term most closely related to my conception of minus-phatics is interference. This is associated with the critical nucleus of phaticity: that it is a type of speech many consider unwanted or obtrusive by nature, fixing to avoid it at all costs (e.g. the statements to the effect of "I don't like small talk"). Also, there is a negative relation of not-listening already inherent in the original definition: "the hearing given to such utterances" is not very intense, amounting to the observation CollegeHumor embodied in their video "Everyone Is Waiting To Talk About Themselves": that people enjoy talking about themselves more than listening to other people talk about themselves. Small talk requires a skill for inoffensive "not-listening".

Entertainment's diversion is the sytematic bracketing of the hesitation that consciousness is, and this bracketing is how 'sensation passes without obstacles' (Flusser, 2013: 110). Sensation of this sort, the free-flowing sort, is essentially pure 'information', or, more accurately, it is a sheer fluctuation in the force of existing that refuses to take expression in anything more elaborate than the experience of its own occurring. (Priest 2018: 151)

Firstly this calls to mind the metaphors of fluidity - that phatic communion or small talk is a "social lubricant" that oils the wheels and cogs of social interaction. Secondly it calls to mind the autonomy or reflexivity of Jakobson's meta-functions, i.e. that poetry is a message that draws attention to its linguistic construction, a metalingual message operates on the code (language about language), and the phatic function brings attention to the fact of communication (the establishment of contact), or, to put it in the common phrase, phatic communion is "talking for the sake of talking", that is, nothing more elaborate than the experience of its own occurring.

Where there is simply input and output - sensation as information - there is only swallowing and shitting: no memory, no digestion, no gathering up of awareness in a difference that makes a difference. (Priest 2018: 151)

Nice use of Gregory Bateson's definition of communication. Phatic communion is ideally of the same sort: an act of communication that pretends to be communication while actually making little to no difference (a useless piece of information is a difference that makes no difference, an insignificant gesture).

Pure sensation is a technological achievement effected by the way the entertainment apparatus continually focuses our energies and attention towards a fractalized specious present, a 'now' that is really 'a next' that signifies 'a now' over and over again. (Priest 2018: 152)

Haha, unexpected! I started this post off with E. R. Clay, having no way to predict that it would, in passing, contain his most famous notion. "Specious present" (Clay 1881: 152) is the one term in his 100-page attempt to formulate scientific terminology for the nascent science of psychology that made it into William James' Principles of Psychology (1890) and gained wider circulation. It's almost funny to meet his idea here without citation or relevant context about time-consciousness. It also gives off the impression that the author has merely compiled an array of neat-sounding philosophical jargon from a variety of sources without any real regard to authority and consistency. This is what I'm afraid of when reading new philosophy - it may actually based on a tradition reaching a century and a half but remains invisible because uncited.

But the virtuosity displayed by an earworm's occasion is, paradoxically, unruly. Unlike the performance of speech, for example, whose regulability signifies a degree of agency or volition and embodies a sense of self-control, the earworm's performance of memory is always suffered. It is a habitual virtuosity, an automatic competence that befalls the performer. Like phatic utterances - 'Some weather we're having', or 'uh-huh' - that issue from us automatically to establish and sustain the mood of sociability of a conversation rather than express information or spur contemplation, getting songs stuck in our head is something we're so skilled at doing that it seems to happen to us. (Priest 2018: 154)

Finally the passage that made me take up reading this paper. Though I now realize that "phatic utterances" - just like specious present - is here echoed without an inkling of history, with reference neither to Malinowski or Jakobson, though appropriating points from each.

The first part of this definition of phatic utterances is Jakobsonian: automaticity (of performance) and establishment (of contact) stem, by proxy, from Gardiner's (1932) second-hand treatment of Malinowski, having to do with the mechanization of speech ("set phrases") and "establishing contact" (which is much more succinct than Malinowskian tropes of bonds and fellowship).

The second part on the other hand veers towards a Malinowskian construction: "the mood of sociability", which phatic utterances esthablish (curiously, instead of "contact") is a functional paraphrase and telescoped version of "a pleasant atmosphere of polite, social intercourse" (PC 9.4). It is also curious that "sociability" is a singular value while Malinowski writes of "sociabilities" (e.g. phatic utterances). It looks like sociability is in a sense essentialized.

While "expressing information" is an odd construction, because expressive and informative functions are distinct in most functional linguistic schemata, I do enjoy the negation of "spurring contemplation", which is a neat paraphrase of Malinowskian tenet that words in phatic communion "are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessarily arouse reflection in the listener" (PC 6.4). In the modern philosophical terminology in this paper, phatic utterances are consumed but not digested (received but not reflected upon).

Lastly, this must be the first time I've noticed the process orientation in this negation of reflection. This is exactly why paraphrases are useful - not suprring contemplation sheds a different kind of light on this point. This point being that besides words in phatic communion not having "meaning which is symbolically theirs" (PC 6.3) they also do not invoke the faculty of reflection. Unlike poetry or good literature, which can make a common phrase sound deep and significant, the everyday use of such phrases hides their inherent meaningfulness (in formalist lingo, automatizes them). Such is the case with parallelisms or old bits of wisdom, which may contain a very contemplative core but gains usage as something thrown out there casually to move the conversation forward.

What neuroscientists have observed is that the resting brain, the barin not currently engaged in a goal-directed task, exhibits a network system that is rife with endogenous activity that researchers classify variously as 'mind-wandering', 'free association', 'self-focused attention' and 'introspection'. In other words, the resting brain is not resting at all but is extremely active, more active in fact (which for neuroscientists means more lighted brain regions seen during fMRI tests) than it is during task-related activities (see Greicius et al., 2003). (Priest 2018: 155)

I first heard about this from the Youtube content creator What I've Learned, who called it the default network and associated it with the "monkey mind" in Eastern philosophy. This is the stuff of phatic communion in its incommunicative aspect and jives well with the overall theory that when people engage in social intercourse in a leisurely setting they let their minds wander (observe obvious things), associate freely (random tid-bits of this and that) and focus on theirselves (on their own personal views and life-histories).

This paper must have been written in a hurry because the referenc for Greicius et al. 2003 is missing from where it is supposed to be. I'm assuming that the first google search result, "Functional connectivity in the resting brain: a network analysis of the default mode hypothesis" (Greicius, Krasnow, Reiss & Menon 2003) is the correct one. I'll have to look into this at some point to find out whether there's more to the story of if it's a pop-psychological factoid appealing to philosophers like the one about mirror neurons (many find a one-off neurological finding as a suitable explanatory mechanism for nearly anything).

All in all, this was the first paper from 2018 that I read in 2018 and it was pretty enjoyable, a hopeless but happy reading with a few stumbles of citation and general sense of word-foam, but then again this sort of farting higher than their asshole (with novelty terminology like psychotechnologies, schizophonia, and hyperfication) is expected from Theory, Culture & Society, our modern Social Text.