In the age of streaming services which grants quick and nearly unlimited access to movies, music and television series, the cost of such instantaneous and ubiquitous access might be the desire to fully immerse oneself in the entertainment itself.
By 2019 streaming services made up the majority of music revenue for the first time ever. It is somewhat surprising, then, that after three decades of the lowest sales ever for vinyl records, the number of purchases started to go back up in the last 10 years, reaching around the same figure in the late-90s in the United States (50 billion). Mind you, this slight bump in vinyl sales happened alongside the ascendency of streaming services to the throne of the most-used music medium.
And this correlation isn’t confined to just music, even DVDs have seen a (very) marginal rise in purchases in the last few years, with whole communities being formed online with their community’s identifying feature being their shared preference of purchasing film in physical format.
I don’t think this phenomenon isn’t surprising at all but explaining why requires a little crash course in post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
While neuroscience and popular forms of cognitive-process-oriented psychologies have discredited psychoanalysis for half a century now — which they’re partially warranted to do in some respects, but altogether these approaches are far too dismissive — psychoanalysis has had the most enduring and, I think, accurate understanding of human desire. And not just desire in sexual terms, but also everyday banal desires like entertainment.
Psychoanalysis has always understood itself as a theory of the social, and while you can run quantitative analysis on human social behaviours, it’s hard to derive sound theories of fundamental aspects of the human psyche and society from those as they are geared towards analytical conclusions that new data can always throw into dispute. Psychoanalysis has always drawn its strength from grasping the highly specific characteristics of human behaviour as observable in consistent cultural codes. And of course, early psychoanalysis’s discovery of the talking cure was fundamental to modern therapy and psychology for the insight of the power of talking. And co-extensive with the discovery of the talking cure is that a fundamental human quality unlike other biological beings is our capacity for language with discrete, figurative units that orient us in the world and provide us with identity.
In that vein, post-Freudian psychoanalysis in Europe primarily focussed on the human being’s unique capacity for symbolic structures that impose themselves on both the conscious and unconscious mind. This approach reached its climax in the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theories of human desire which changed post-war philosophy and has endured in the academy and clinics today.
Core to Lacan’s theory of desire, building off the work of Sigmund Freud who understood humanity as being founded on a fundamental “discontent,” is that human desire is fundamentally related to lack. We desire what we lack. When we have what we want, we can thereby no longer desire it. Lacan theorized that this fundamental lack that characterizes human behaviour and emotions emerges from the gap that language creates between the symbolic world we all must navigate the moment we begin to speak, and the real world which words are always failing to capture in its (imagined) wholeness.
The conception of desire being founded around a fundamental lack gives reason to all the strange ways that human beings deliberately delay pleasurable experiences to derive even more pleasure. This dynamic Lacan terms surplus enjoyment: enjoyment in the very enacting of formal obstacles to the objects we desire. Hence, foreplay, appetizers and even the psychic dynamic behind the safety of long-term low-risk investments; it’s a low return, but I derive pleasure from the knowledge that the low return ensures a stable return over a long period of time.
When considering why vinyl and DVD have made a comeback in recent years alongside the market dominance of streaming platforms, bringing in such Lacanian ideas of desire might point at an answer: the easy access to exactly what we desire ends up thwarting that desire.
The same dynamic of instant access diminishing the desire for the object of want can be perceived in trends in young people’s dating habits. In an age where young people have myriad software to connect them with romantic partners with the swipe of a thumb, data shows that Gen Z is engaging in less sexual intercourse than any generation before.
To get back on topic, let’s consider the vinyl again for a moment. When I play a vinyl, there’s a whole physical preparation I have to engage with, which means more preparation in space and time potentially inducing a more attentive engagement with the content of the medium through the medium’s higher requirement of consumer labour. Likewise, if I want to hear a specific song on vinyl, I have to do some labour to place the record player needle to the right groove.
Moreover, because of the extra labour involved in listening to specific songs on vinyl compared to just swiping and clicking on a mobile phone, the chance that the listener will just opt to play a whole album is higher. This may especially be the case when considering that album art is often tailored into the vinyl experience with the vinyl cover and backside being there to display the album art. Engaging with the visual art of an album helps build an interest for the holistic album experience as you get to experience it across more than one medium.
Additionally, when listening to music on vinyl there’s the potential for further surplus enjoyment in knowing the track you’ve had an itch to listen to is within the album’s setlist, which might enhance your experience listening to it as there’s buildup and a contextual sonic coherence added on to the experience through the tracks before and after it.
By contrast, it is much more tempting to go straight to a song you want to hear and avoid the album experience on Spotify or Apple Music when it’s a matter of several touches to a screen. Not to mention the album art is often limited in content and compacted to a tiny screen on streaming services, removing the fullness of the multi-media engagement that a vinyl allows for.
For the sake of clarity, let’s call this surplus enjoyment procured from the physical barriers to enjoying an entertainment commodity which is the result of it being primarily in an analog or discrete-object format (meaning a discrete object must be engaged with to consume a digital entertainment commodity) analog-objectual enjoyment, or AOE for short.
Now, it would be somewhat reductive to claim that one should just stop using streaming services due to the insight of AOE.
Streaming services are certainly here to stay for the foreseeable future. Being able to stream a film, TV series, song or podcast whenever you have an internet connection is incredibly helpful when life’s busy or when you don’t want to commit to buying or renting a piece of entertainment but want to test it out. One caveat to the convenience of streaming providing instant access to vast quantities of entertainment materials with just an internet connection and a compatible monitor is that now that there’s more competition in the streaming market, there are less products per individual provider which causes consumers to purchase multiple subscriptions for the same amount of access as in the past.
Again, streaming isn’t going anywhere, especially given that the 2020s — largely thanks to COVID — have seen our societies become even more digital in the spheres of work, communication and entertainment.
But perhaps the earlier mentioned spikes in people buying AOE-inducing technologies in the streaming era should signal to all of us, retrophile or not, that purchasing analog or object-dependent digital entertainment products can be a more enjoyable experience not through AOE and making us more present and aware of the media we consume.
The corollary lesson of a phenomenon like AOE is that putting a little work into consuming entertainment products and appreciating the radically heterogeneous analogue and object-based technologies needed in the past to consume them connects us to the fact that there’s always been a whole reproductive-distributive labour process on top of the artistic labour needed to make the entertainment in the first place. Said second-order labour is harder to detect with the homogeneity of how we interact with fully digitized streaming products: swiping, pressing and maybe toggling for inputs into some kind of digital screen.
All in all, a seemingly unharmful way we can become more attentive, appreciative, desiring and enjoying towards entertainment in a streaming-dominated world might just be experimenting with the physical technologies of the recent past.