Lanham|Economics of Attention, 2

Three hopefully shorter posts now following chapter two of this book. First, some more thought on the "real" economic implications. In this chapter, Lanham continues his criticism of socialist, planned, "top-down" economics in favor of "bottom-up," iterative, emergence, "free" markets. He makes a good point about how avant-garde aesthetics, despite their general political allegiance to the Left, more closely reflect the bottom-up approach in terms of their practice and style (and certainly their relationship to the mainstream Art community).

However, I think some correction needs to be made here. Capitalism may offer us a vision of free markets, of small, individual, iterative choices leading to an emergent social order, BUT, in practice, it seeks to turn to the top-down approach. Corporations seek to dominante sectors of the market and plan their futures just as thoroughly as any centrally-planned socialist economy might. And in American capitalism anyway, the federal government plays a coordinating role in establishing and serving the common interests of these corporations. Just as socialist governments produce propagandistic art (attention structures) that send didactic messages from central planning, corporations have advertising.

The error here, I believe, is to establish this analogy: top-down is to bottom-up as socialism is to capitalism. Wrong. Both must likely contain both movements. The bottom-up expresses the emergent collective movement of the culture; top-down constitutes a collective attempt to name that movement. A better analogy, and one Lanham also employs: top-down is to bottom-up as consciousness is to the unconscious. Obviously both are necessary. The problem with both socialism and capitalism, if I may be so bold, is their continual attempts to squash or erase or at least dominate and restrict emergence.

In another framework, this pattern of oscillation becomes a central trope in Lanham's text, but on this matter of economics and ideology it seems to be missing.