Approximity
Metonymy and its discontents
[I feel like I should warn you: this is a long one. I was really in the mood to write through these ideas, and spent longer than usual doing so. It needs some polish, and probably some further development and organization, but this is the rare post that dips directly into some of the ideas that I’m working through in my manuscript.]
I’ve gotten in the mood to spend some quality time writing on my book, just as the summer season turns to thoughts of the fall semester. Not that I haven’t been working on it before now, but I’ve always been a mood writer. What I try to do, when I’m not “in the mood,” is to read, take notes, and generally prepare myself for those times when the mood does finally strike. I find that it more often strikes when I have other things brewing—I’m not great at turning downtime into productivity. But I’ve got major meetings every single day this first week of August, and so my brain’s perking up and encouraging me to get writing. Because of course it is.
Anyway, this week, I’m thinking about metonymy, which is a word that may be familiar to those of us in the rhetoric biz, but remains a bit niche for the general population, I suspect. Metonymy is what we call a trope, a figure of speech (and thought). The best way I have to explain metonymy is to pair it with another trope, one that’s much more familiar to the average reader, namely, metaphor.
Metaphoric discourse, put simply, is when we explain something in terms of what it is not, when we draw on the resources of one phenomenon to provide insight into another. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? or my love to a red, red rose? Metonymy is a little trickier—it’s associational—and draws on ideas associated with the thing itself. We explain something or describe it in terms of things that are (closely) related to it. So for example, we might say “Hollywood” to refer to the movie industry, because many major studios are/were located there.
If we encounter a business person, we could describe that person as a cog (in the capitalist machine) or a vulture, if we want to wax metaphoric, whereas we might call that person a “suit” if we want to be metonymic, regardless of whether or not that person ever actually dresses that way. Our discourse is rife with metonyms: the English word cash comes originally from the French casse, which was a case or a box used to hold money. Or consider the way that we append the suffix -gate onto anything to connote scandal, to draw associations with the original.
It’s true that the difference between metaphor and metonymy is a bit blurrier than I’m letting on—describing someone as a suit does carry with it some metaphoric connotation, of dryness, emptiness, inflexibility, etc. There are a number of synonyms for money (lettuce, cabbage, e.g.) that feel metaphoric, but are rooted (metonymically, at least at first) in the green ink that the US used in the 19th century to discourage counterfeiting. To make it even worse, metaphors (if they are used frequently) begin to acquire associative force, sometimes to the point of naturalization. Nietzsche compared this process to coins that lose their embossing, settling into our discourse as “truths.” Think of phrases like “carbon footprint” or “angel investors,” where metaphoric intent begins to naturalize into common usage.
Metonymy functions through association, which can be largely arbitrary, but it acquires its power through repetition. One of the most obvious examples of metonymic reasoning that we have are commercials. No one truly believes that drinking a particular beverage or eating fast food will make you beautiful or exciting or sexy, but advertisements aren’t trying to persuade you consciously. Instead, they’re trying to establish associations (and reinforce them)—they want you to think about beautiful people having fun whenever you think about their product.
Associations like this aren’t part of our conscious thought, and that’s why they can have such a strong influence over us. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, describes System 1 thought (the “fast” one) thusly,
The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future.
It’s been many years since I ate any sort of fast food, outside of very occasional drive-through beverages, but when I think about it, McDonald’s is the place I think of, because that’s where we went when I was growing up. The power of associative thinking is also the key to memory palace construction—by making associations between ideas and a space that one knows exceptionally well, recalling those ideas is a matter of simply traversing that space mentally.
These associations, as Kahneman explains, structure our perception and while they don’t pre-ordain our behavior per se, they tend to be pretty reflexive unless we take the time to slow down and consider them more consciously (which is the “slow” System 2). Associative thinking is unconscious, intuitive, unintentional, largely effortless, and influenced by experiences, emotions and memories. There are days where I’ll drive up to the office and have virtually no memory of how I got there—that’s because my route is so well-traveled that it’s become automatic. It’s also why we can’t remember whether we’ve locked the car or turned off the stove.
Metonymy itself isn’t really a trope that’s deployed with particular mindfulness. Marketers might be able to rationalize why “sex sells,” but more likely, they rely upon their intuitive sense of making their commercials (and their products) attractive (unless they’re intentionally going for the opposite effect). We don’t watch commercials to engage with them intellectually, although we could; we’re more likely just to let those associations wash past us. But if we hear/see them often enough, maybe they begin to take root (ba-da-ba-BA-BAAA). Once they do, those associations can be tapped by others to influence us; as Kahneman explains, System 1 thinking “links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance.” If someone presents us with an idea that taps into our associations, we are susceptible to it—it confirms our held beliefs, makes us feel as though we’re right, and doesn’t summon up the (potentially uncomfortable) process of self-examination.
(In other words, if you get enough people into a particular space, all of whom feel angry about the way that the world works (or doesn’t) for them, a stable genius might be able to tap into that rage and channel it towards campaign donations and votes, even though he’s far more emblematic of the problem than its potential solutions.)
Metonymy is not a problem to be solved, though. It’s one of the central ways that we make sense of the people, places, and world around us. We can edit ourselves, shift our perceptions and our structures, even though it can be a painstaking process. Metonymy is not destiny—far from it.
And yet, another piece of the puzzle that I’m working on in my larger project is the way that digital platforms are machines for generating metonymy. Byung-Chui Han argues that “The content displayed on a smartphone, which demands our constant attention, is anything but self-same; the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible.” The firehose of social media blasts past us, encouraging us not to linger on any one piece of information for too long. Han describes this as serial, extensive communication—there’s no larger plan to the order of a social media feed. It’s additive, cumulative, and it suffers from what danah boyd and Alice Marwick described as context collapse. Without any broader context to situate communication, all we’re left with is a constant, endless series of associations. Virality, as I mentioned in my “Clognition” post, is taken as a sign of importance, when all it really signifies is a (fleeting) moment of simultaneity. It can be a new playlist/album dropping, a TikTok challenge, something truly idiotic from a politician or celebrity, or an argument about dress colors. The point, from the perspective of our platforms, isn’t to linger on any of these things but to keep scrolling to find the next thing. They encourage and reward shallow attention; the media that require more than that have struggled to survive, measured as they often are by the standards that our screens have imposed upon us.
Context is important: when we move from text to context and back, it allows us to situate the things we say and write and hear and read, to construct narratives, to pay attention, and to understand. Jenny Odell argues that “we need distance and time to be functional enough to do or to think anything meaningful at all.” Even today, it’s still considered a viable defense to claim that one’s statements were “taken out of context,” and sometimes they are. In other words, we need context, more than our social media supply us with, and we need to be alert to the ways that those media erode our ability to pay attention and generate meaning. Odell suggests replacing FOMO (the fear of missing out that social media engender) with NOMO, the necessity of missing out. Context establishes boundaries, crucial distinctions between here and there, or now and then, that provide us with cues for understanding.
Metonymy, the trope by which we make sense of things associatively, is constantly at play, linking up everything that we encounter. It’s all text and no context. Kahneman uses an example where he places the words “bananas” and “vomit” next to each other on the page, and then explains how we process them via System 1, which “treat[s] the mere conjunction of two words as representations of reality.” Short of sealing ourselves completely from the world, we are constantly, effortlessly associating everything that we perceive with everything else. Metonymy requires nothing more than proximity; our associative minds will connect them before we have a chance to evaluate the connection. Most of those links will fade, of course—I hadn’t thought about that example for years before picking up Kahneman’s book again this week. (Perhaps, having written about it here, the example will stick with me a little longer now.)
What happens, though, when we’re in “proximity” to everything everywhere all at once? I think doomscrolling is one answer to that; I think conspiracism is another. While I don’t think that either of them represents a particularly healthy way of dealing with the world, I do think that they’re legitimate strategies for making sense of the way that the world reveals itself to us online. But this entire post was prompted by a third strategy, one that for some reason, I found myself reading a lot about this week, and that’s the particular world of the influencer.
I read about several of them, but a couple of my stacks called attention this week to the profile of MrBeast that was published last month in the New York Times, likening the YouTube star to Willy Wonka. I don’t have anything in particular to say about the profile. It does a good job capturing the dynamics of the economy that MrBeast has exploited (quite meticulously), explaining the YouTuber’s charisma and popularity, and articulating the discomfort that some folks have with the charity-for-clicks model that drives his content. As someone who grew up with Gene Wilder’s Wonka, I found the comparison apt—there’s an inscrutable amorality (not immorality) at play here that comes, I think, from the cycle of content, charity, contests, and clicks, without any sort of endgame or goal. Indeed, the profile closes by suggesting that MrBeast “seems compelled not by a narcissistic desire for fame or fortune on the one hand, nor by a purely charitable impulse on the other, but by the very same adolescent compulsions that shape his videos: How far does this go? How big can this thing get? How many zeros?”
Writing about the profile, Matt Webb makes the point that this “economy” is very much driven by proximity: “MrBeast randomly gives things away…which is arbitrary and amazing and also kinda led by proximity to MrBeast.” There are lots of ways to perform that proximity on the Internet - tagging folks on FB/Instagram or Twitter, posting in their subreddit, etc. Even subscribing to his YT channel is enough: “subscribers are often chosen to be the participants in his contests and recipients of his beneficence.” I’ve seen the video where “he finds people streaming live on Twitch to zero viewers and gives them thousands of dollars.” He’s expanded into physical channels as well; he has a brand of chocolate bar, and “for months now, at Donaldson’s request, fans have been acting as volunteer brand representatives, tidying up the supermarket displays and posting photos of their acts of service to social media and the MrBeast subreddit.”
There’s something about this that rightly makes some folk uneasy, the same way that evangelism does, and Webb puts his finger on it for me:
The random-yet-efficacious cause-and-effect is simultaneously how one trains a dolphin, and also the end point of this give-and-take evolutionary cascade is how we end up with gods. Capricious benevolent variable-interval operant conditioning gods that you pray to (or tweet at) for intervention re your cataracts. Gods or billionaires, same same.
I don’t know that this dynamic needs a term, but the one I’m mulling over is the title for this post: approximity, which is meant to capture not only the metonymic structure of the relationship between influencers and their fans (adherents? believers?) but also the fact that this structure is parasocial, carefully constructed (despite its presentation of authenticity), and asymmetrical. So, approximate plus proximity equals approximity.
Approximity might just be crucial to understanding the way that influencer economies emerge online. It captures the “rich get richer” model that scale-free networks enable, which itself blends nicely with the endless growth mindset typical of many of our country’s richest citizens. The point of obscene wealth (and/or power) is to get more more more, and influence-as-economy has increasingly become the most visible path to that. And it’s no accident, either, that the “flywheel” of content and views that the most popular tubers can’t ever stop—they generate Han’s “quick succession of bits of content” and their audiences become part of the succession themselves, both literally in the case of comments and subreddit posts and figuratively, as part of what Vincent Miller describes in the NYT profile as “‘audience commodity,’ the idea that media consumption is essentially a form of labor, because people spend time creating a valuable commodity — an audience — that is then sold to advertisers.” What Webb describes as a “performed” proximity is also part of the content that the audience is exposed to, a boundless cycle of consumption/production that never stops, because it is predicated on that ongoing performance.
I want to be very clear: I’m not passing judgment here. But I do believe that this model of success is one that emerges very specifically in the context of metonymic social networks. Whether that’s a bad thing or a good thing, I do not know. I’m of a generation that struggles to understand this phenomenon, I think, even as I’ve circulated around the edges of multiple fandoms, subscribed to a small cross-section of Patreons and Twitch streamers, etc. Influencer culture and celebrity is a carefully manufactured phenomenon that monetizes access, proximity, and authenticity in ways that I personally find a little off-putting. At the same time, I recognize (and begrudgingly respect) the skill and talent involved in gaming this system (particularly in an economy where the system has been gamed so heavily by corporations, billionaires, and their politicians, mostly to the exclusion of the generations that have followed them. Social media themselves emerged as an alternative to the heavily articulated and gate-kept systems that frustrate many of us, so it shouldn’t surprise us to see folks finding an alternate route to success there. As Webb suggests, publicly tidying a YouTuber’s brand display may not be all that different from buying a lottery ticket, and who among us isn’t at least a little intrigued by the prospect of unearned fortune?
I think that’s all about I have this week. There’s always more to say, but this has gone on long enough, and I’ve got meetings to prepare for. Peace.