Everyday Life (Seeing Like An Affiliate Marketer Part 10)
In the 1950s, Henri Lefebvre proposed that romance novels so shaped our collective understanding of love that an anthropologist could exactingly study our everyday life by reading romance novels and delineating the ideologies of love contained therein. I don’t know if romance novels ever held such prominence that one could find the entirety of everyday life hidden inside. Lefebvre never pursued his proposed analysis of romance novels, instead electing to study and critique everyday life through other vantage points.
The affiliate marketer, I think, would serve as a better synecdoche for analyzing society’s unspoken ideologies. For one, each article posted by an affiliate marketer is an argument, an argument that the reader ought to purchase something. They are pieces of cultural criticism designed for mass market. And in an argument (and in cultural criticism this fact is more acutely apparent) things generally accepted as true are relegated to enthymeme, that is, relegated to an unstated logical proposition, and hunting for these enthymemes reveals those things we accept but leave unsaid. Romance novels, on the other hand, have all of the subtleties that exist in art rather than argument, like irony and characterization, and therefore require subjective interpretation not necessitated by arguments. Second, affiliate marketers are less gendered than the feminine romance novel, with the encyclopedic affiliate marketer discussing products relevant to all genders, and individual boutique affiliate marketers available for more gendered fields like parenting and consumer tech. And finally, it offers a wider view into what’s constitutive of everyday life: our everyday lives broadly bifurcate into our work life, and our various consumptions conducted during leisure time. Maybe this is cynical of me, but I don’t think that romance, sex, eros, the constitutive parts of pornographic fiction, have as much bearing on our lives as the all-encompassing world of consumption. Romance factors little into my day, but daily I give half my life to consumption, and so the affiliate marketer is the main encyclical of modern life in a way that I doubt the romance novel could be.
And I think that Lefebvre, though wrong about the specifics of romance novels, was right that a certain genre of publication may so well reflect our society’s unspoken ideologies that an intensive study thereof could yield great insights into the logic of everyday life. The reason that Lefebvre proposed such a study was that how we conduct our everyday lives defines our well-being just as much as our material reality. Lefebvre liked Karl Marx, but opposed the Stalinists and Leninists, who during Lefebvre’s lifetime had become synonymous with Marxist critique. What Lefebvre treasured most in Marx was his analysis of how our material realities lead to the structures and rhythms of our lives, which lead to our personal and spiritual well-being, to our alienation or our fulfillment. He believed that Marxists in the USSR, as well as his Marxist colleagues in France, had lost sight of this end, and could not see how a lack of analytical study of alienation inside of everyday lives had led to a Marxism with little merit.
One requires a science of how our everyday life functions if one wishes to assuage the alienation of today. And I think that, in affiliate marketers, I have glimpsed many facts about our everyday lives. I have seen that hobbies as small as commenting on a big news website can get monetized and lead to revenue for the parent company that never gets back to the hobbyist writer. I have seen how a desire for optimization makes us blind to what truly matters, and instead has us wasting twenty minutes of our life reading up on something as trivial as pasta sauce. I keep coming back to affiliate marketers because in them daily I see some new facet of everyday life, new assumptions laid bare and shown to be baren, and in them I see many of the ideas that I hold, that people I know hold, that lead to nothing but alienation.
And I like sharing these discoveries with my readers. I like adding value to this world. I feel a moral duty to supply as much benefit as possible to as many people. So, while jokingly I might ask forgiveness for spilling so much ink on the long history and present of such an odd genre, I don’t think I have anything for which to implore forgiveness. Instead, I’m going to say you’re welcome. Congratulations for having so many useful new ideas about the alienating burdens of modern consumption sent directly to your inbox. Congratulations on having such good taste.