The discipline of cultural studies in its popular
reception has seemed to move far beyond the themes it was concerned with in its
academic inception (Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies
he directed for a substantial time from the late 1960s is essentially the
birthplace of the field). Nowadays, criticism of popular culture has been
democratised and takes forms of, among others, popular blogs and magazines.
This is also part and parcel of criticism’s incorporation into the capitalist
world of mechanised production of writing. Academics must now produce a certain
amount of journal articles every year in order to keep funding commitments
afloat and thus, it seems, their jobs. In the same vein these often armchair ‘cultural
critics’ are obliged to publish what are increasingly trite pieces of criticism
of the latest books, movies, television shows, or whatever is intended to keep
the interested classes entertained, shall we say. It can only be a good thing
that such criticism is democratised – I hope people are now taking an interest
in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, etc.
But cultural studies has an in-built
idealism that makes it at times almost difficult to take seriously. Although
questions of materialism and production dominated the field at its beginning
(Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’ thesis was salient, as well as excellent
works by Stuart Hall, Benedict Anderson, and later Homi Bhabha on race and nationalism
at this time, among other interests too numerous to note – most works by
feminists, I have to say, were at this time – the second wave – inadequate) it
is increasingly concerned with a ‘liberal’ (although increasingly illiberal) politics
of representation that co-occurs with a shift on the Left (as those on the
political Left dominate this field of study and have largely been able to set
its parameters) from class politics to essentialist identity politics. As
identity politics has crystallised into its various forms over time (privilege
theory, moralist virtue-signalling, the oft-named ‘regressive Left,’ reactionary
Right) we see the emergence of its fundamentally illiberal character protrude
from what we thought were progressive beginnings. Indeed, movements for
emancipation being claimed retrospectively by identity politics were in fact
progressive and largely based on ideas of unity, solidarity, and mutual respect
for other human beings – ideas we should all share amongst each other.
Liberal anti-communists like to proclaim
the existence of the infamous ‘horseshoe theory’: that communism and fascism
are linked in their ideas of organic, exclusionary communities. This theory is
of course false and derisive in the usual, armchair-inspired way. However a
real ‘horseshoe theory’ has arisen recently and manifested itself: the
increasing authoritarian convergence of the regressive Left’s postmodernism and
identity politics, and the reactionary Right’s own identity politics of organic
nationalist identities. This new ‘horseshoe theory’ was made apparent in the
rise of what has been termed the ‘alt-Right’ from academic areas that the
critics of this term probably are not aware of. The Cybernetic Culture Research
Unit, run out of the University of Warwick, which produced ‘theory-fiction,’
with members ranging from the late Mark Fisher, to philosophers Sadie Plant, Reza
Negarestani and Ray Brassier, was run from 1997 by philosopher Nick Land. He
was deeply influenced by Deleuzian theory, particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of ‘deterritorialisation’ – destroying the boundaries, through a kind
of ‘nomadic’ writing, between disciplines which seem to be far apart. This is
why Land’s writing, along with his colleagues, meshed philosophy and the
natural sciences, however well – nestled with hints of the psychedelic,
drug-fuelled rave scene of contemporary London. Land and co.’s accelerationism
was a reaction to what they saw as the inert, complacent state of Left thought.
They saw in ‘cybernetic theory’ and science studies – inflected with ‘Deleuzianisms’
– a celebration of the acceleration towards capital’s supposed teleological
destruction, for better or worse. But for Land, this nihilism quickly turned
reactionary. As Fisher increasingly distanced himself from this scene towards
the distressing end of his life, Land embraced its apocalyptic tones. His
essay, ‘The Dark Enlightenment’, sought the birth of forces of neoreaction
compelled to indefinitely extend the power of capital, understood mostly in
terms of its technological force and supposed creative ability, and crush
democracy in its dystopic wake. The ‘alt-Right’ was formed out of this
fascistic ‘deterritorialisation,’ if you like, of the original Deleuzian-Left
position.
Influenced by the obsessive focus on
individual subject-positions by the new poststructuralists and postmodernists, identity
politics in cultural criticism is beginning to make advances in the opposite
direction to its progressive practitioners. The idea of ‘culture’ in cultural
studies, of course, is becoming increasingly ethnicised by race hucksters and
postmodern rip-off artists. Increasingly, as a consequence, the arguments of
identity are premised on evermore essentialist claims about race, gender,
sexuality and culture. I have already critiqued this imperative in my piece on
the Moana criticism through the
notion of ‘Polynesian exceptionalism’ – through making recourse to false
rehashes of postcolonial theory and the idea that ‘our’ narratives have been
erased (without, of course, inquiring about who this ‘our’ actually is and how
this ‘our’ might actually be subject to enormous division within the primordial
group presupposed), a claim was stoked upon Moana
that it represented a continuation of cultural theft by the West,
understood as nostalgic for the colonial era. What a ridiculously dramatic
assertion that was, and the reasons for why I have already outlined. Now, it
seems, it is the turn of the jazz film La
La Land to be placed under the microscope of tedium and pedantry that this
new school of chattering cultural bloggers subject every facet of popular
culture to increasingly.
A friend of mine pointed me to two pieces
in particular that were published about this movie. The first is Catalogue
Magazine’s “La La Land Is Everything That’s Wrong With Sexist, Boring ‘Cool Guy’
Culture”. The author, Kat Patrick (after having cited notorious anti-Leftist
Hadley Freeman, fellow Guardian-ite
liberal) begins the piece – I say begin because the first two paragraphs are
surplus material and ad hominem – by saying
“La La Land, in effect, is about a troubled handsome white man becoming an
owner-operator of a bar.” I presume she says ‘in effect’ because this is not
what the movie is about. It is in fact about a man, Sebastian, and a woman,
Mia, who both are in precarious circumstances – he wants to be a jazz musician,
she an actor. Patrick’s and Freeman’s pieces were about how Sebastian’s desire
to make Mia like jazz involved ‘mansplaining.’ Freeman described Sebastian as
an archetypal ‘jazz snob,’ arguing “you must respect their childish obsession
with (insert name of sports team) while they make fun of your interest in
fashion/romantic comedies/80s music”. Yet this is just one scene near the film’s
beginning. Had they watched the film any further – and I suspect they have yet
they are deliberately focusing on this one scene – they would have seen that
Sebastian, who is in love with Mia, makes compromises for her (by joining a
jazz-rock band he hardly cares for to look as if he has a stable career) and takes
interest in her acting aspiration, ensuring she attends an audition that proves
vital for beginning her career at the end of the film. Sebastian and Mia do not
actually work out – Mia is happily married to another man in the epilogue scene
– hardly a victory for the ‘Cool Guy’, then. Hardly what Patrick describes,
then, either.
The second piece is Out Magazine’s “La La
Land Is Not Gay Enough,” and is equally unconcerned with the movie itself; its
argument is albeit slightly harder to argue against. It stakes a claim on
behalf of gay people to movie-musicals on the basis of their camp appeal. The
argument is that the music and movie choices cited and alluded to in the movie
do not meet the author’s standards of what is camp – assuming, of course, the
movie actually had to do that. This is what makes the movie ‘not gay enough.’
The key implication made is that heterosexuality is dreary whilst gayness is
fun, buzzy, indeed ‘queer.’ While this may be borne out by historical evidence,
does it then follow that a movie musical is dreary simply because it does not
possess this elusive ‘camp’ element. Then there is the question of how ‘gayness’ is understood and
represented, whether it be of this canonical campness or otherwise, and the
further question of why. Is it
contextually appropriate for this movie to have ‘gay’ elements? Would it be
simply tokenising if this movie included a gay character? How would we know
such a character is gay – through overacting their gender-opposed masculinity/femininity
(stereotype) or being told after the fact in some post-mortem (a kind of retconning
– the J.K. Rowling way), both of which can be equally faulted for aberrant tokenisation?
This is the same spinning we saw with Moana.
Because that film was inclusive as could possibly be of so-called ‘Polynesian
stories’ (again with commitment to that primordial idea of universality), those
critics seemed to hit all the wrong notes when they criticised the movie for
not having done that.
Cultural studies in its popular bitesize
armchair blog-form is thus converging on a state of hermeneutic deficiency.
Critics are pulling analyses out of a hat based on historical claims made with
very little reference to their actual objects of criticism. Moana has very little to do with
colonial representations and nothing to
do with colonial nostalgia. It is tone deaf to criticise La La Land for being heteronormative, and the feminist criticisms
are equally answerable as they did not draw on the movie well enough. But the implication
of the politics of representation is that things have to be represented properly. All movies must have
diversity. All movies must represent all things. These claims should not be
stuck to as much as identity politics practitioners claim. While including actors
and actresses of different skin tones is encouraging and good, it is not a
strong political concern, especially when in Hollywood we are simply shoring up
a more diverse celebrity elite. Movies cannot represent all things. They have
to by their nature be selective in what they show. Read Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the work of Lacanian film
theorists such as Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan, or indeed any respectable film
theorist, who will tell you this. Identity politics is fast showing its illiberal
core, and it is high time the Left – who must be committed to a system of healthy
participation in reason free of the destructive forces of capitalism and
ascriptive inequality – abandons it as a political programme.
Links to mentioned pieces:
Catalogue Magazine https://www.cataloguemagazine.com.au/feature/la-la-land-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-sexist-boring-cool-guy-culture
No comments:
Post a Comment