90s – Eruditorum Press

90s

March 22, 2013

You’ll Go Blind

Jack Graham90s, channel 4, pornography, post-industrialism, postmodernism, TV4

I just rewatched a Channel 4 documentary series I originally saw first time round back in 1999. Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation. I remembered it as fascinating, and it certainly was… but not for the reasons I remembered. Watched now, it’s fascinating for its intense and suffocating provincialism. I refer to a provincialism of time and cultural moment. To be cruder: the series reeks of the stale atmopshere of the 90s. I don’t just mean that it’s dated.

After two decent episodes dealing with the Victorian creation of the concept of pornography (i.e. as a closed-off anteroom of culture, only to be studied… and perhaps enjoyed… by responsible, educated males) in the wake of the unearthing of Pompeii, and the revolutionary porn writing of the Enlightenment, the series starts dwelling on 20th century visual forms, from the photograph to the internet.

The last episodes are particularly mired in the stagnant and repellent atmosphere of their era. All the hallmarks of the late-90s intellectual milieu (during which I endured acres of trendy theory at University) are there. The social and political cynicism masquerading as consumerist utopianism. Utopianism itself stripped of all noble and liberationist inflections and fused with a kind of gleeful dystopianism, reflecting the way that the post-Cold War intellectual landscape, with its End of History vibe, saw the future horrors and joys of unfettered capitalism as being equally inevitable… and then celebrated this with a knowingly sick grin of elitest contempt. The countdown to an apocalypse of banality and boredom that was supposedly hiding just around the millenium. The dyspeptic, misanthropic celebration of supposedly new and bleeding edge trends that are (perpetually) said to be just about to change/destroy social life irrevocably. The putative change to a post-industrial economy, the putative unravelling of social life and the rise of the ubiquitous selfish individual (phenomena that, in as much as they were real, were not actually new).

The series is stuffed with comment from entrepreneurs or capitalists (without the word or topic ‘capitalism’ ever being properly mentioned), or from ‘social critics’ who generalise about what ‘we’ are becoming (with ‘we’ implicitly standing for all humanity while actually referring to a tiny sliver of the urban upper middle classes in the developed West). It’s enormously telling that, in the midst of scads and scads of pontificating about the meaning of things from the P.O.V of the producer or the consumer, there is hardly any attention paid to the P.O.V of the worker, of the… if you’ll pardon me… working stiffs getting screwed. Anyone who has read Eric Schlosser’s excellent Reefer Madness will know what this TV series left out. At one point, a theorist is talking about how internet porn (which is solitary, private and interactive) takes the ‘imposition’ out of the equation… even as the camera shows a semi-naked woman gyrating around on a bed, being given orders by paying customers who are watching her on their monitors. Nobody’s ‘imposing’ on her then. I guess she’s economically independent but does that job purely for the lulz. …

October 6, 2011

Enterprise & Initiative

Jack Graham60s, 90s, beast below, bourgeois ideology, capitalism, individualism, liberalism, matt smith, self-actualisation, star trek3

Star Trek is liberal bourgeois to the bone.

Show me more of this Earth thing called “shopping”

The Federation is supposedly post-capitalist, post-money, etc., yet it has many of the important hallmarks of advanced capitalist social organisation. A highly organised and stratified division of labour, a deep separation between workplace and home life, work shifts, career promotion, private nuclear families, a socially-separate education system providing training and qualifications, a professional liberal media, massive military expenditure (of resources if not money), hierarchical political and military arrangements combined with liberal ideology, a separate political class, etc. In one of the films, someone even mentions “opinion polls”. So, the Federation clearly has what looks like a capitalist state, capitalist superstructure and capitalist social arrangements. What of the economy? Well, they still have privately owned and run restaurants, for example, though supposedly people run them for the love of it… and in DS9, the Federation people mesh perfectly into the economy of Bajor, with its Ferengi businessmen, etc… to the point where you have Federation officers trading goods and paying credits for booze. When they want to make a ‘darker’, grungier version of their utopia, they take characters from the utopia and cast them amongst the money-using barbarians on the frontiers. But the Utopians have little difficulty dealing with the money-users in a natural way, whatever their occasional disdain. The facile nature of the pretence that the Federation is post-capitalist is revealed by the ease with which the Federation types merge into Quark’s bar.

Meanwhile, capitalism is turned into a kind of quaint pathology, espoused as a blatant and impudent ethic of acquisition, by a race that it’d be easy to mistake for a bunch of submerged Jewish stereotypes (even down to ballbusting mothers). The utter misunderstanding of capitalism – indeed, of all human history – is best expressed in the scene where Quark, tired of being endlessly patronized and insulted by the holier-than-thou humans, compares his culture with the culture of Earth, pointing out that Ferengos (or whatever the silly place is called) has no history of things like concentration camps. The implication is that humans must blame their own species-nature for the horrors of the 20th century… which fails to notice the role of competing capitalist imperialisms and fascist reaction (against socialist challenges to capitalism) in creating the wars that lead to concentration camps. Capitalism itself is absolved, since it has been practiced by the Ferengi and lead to no comparable horrors, merely social eccentricities. Even the sexism of Ferengi culture is seen as a mere cultural malformation, with DS9 repeatedly showing female Ferengis achieving liberation through their equal ability to participate in ruthless trade, etc., whenever they manage to trick or force the men into giving them a chance. Capitalism is thus so entirely acquitted of any involvement in patriarchy that it is instead offered as a way of defeating it. This is entirely consonant with the heavily peddled ideas that free markets will eventually result in populations of free individuals, that the liberty of trade is the liberty of people, that liberalisation of market economies brings liberalisation of societies, that personal self-promotion is the best way to overcome cultural disadvantages. …