Cancelling Cancelled Culture
As far as Mark was concerned, the idea that the future could be different and would be different has been suspended. Despite the coming of the internet and the proliferation of social media, the gloomy prognosis is, effectively and culturally speaking, we're living the long 90s. The USSR fell, markets are everywhere and, to pinch Frederic Jameson's much quoted line , it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. The permanent present is postmodernism on steroids. Everything has become utterly fragmented, our ontologies are centred on the individual, consequently meaning there is no point everyone can cohere around. Decentering and contradictory cultural flows are the moment. No wonder even Twitter tribes are identity anchors for some. Therefore in retrospect, the postmodernism debates of the 80s and 90s only identified the trends and tendencies that have come to fruition since the turn of the century. And so with the splintering of culture, so the broad characterisations that were possible in prior decades no longer pertain. The cultural conformism Adorno and Marcuse worried about has become something more insidious: the generalisation of individuated choice within a limited, market-driven purview.
Two very brief points. One confirming and inviting further investigation of the genesis and sustenance of capitalist realism and its culture without a horizon, and a critical, more hopeful note against overstating it.
One of the consequences of Thatcher's dismantling of the post-war settlement was the virtual liquidation of the industrial working class and the break up of its communities. Capital was relieved of its responsibilities to provide decent standards of living and acquired a footloose mobility that pulled manufacturing plant out of the UK and exported jobs to the low waged economies of the East, and got stuck into speculating for short-term profits. The production of socially useful use values did not offer the same rewards. The superficial dynamism of capital found its dizzying corollary in the hyper stylised cultural churn of the 80s: neoliberal yuppie culture with its wine bars and shoulder pads, the rise of the geeks and the nerds, the cultivation of the irreverent spirit, the mainstreaming of queer cultures and diasporic influences, these all grabbed (analytical) attention, but this movement masked the solidification of something else. While class was in ferment and undergoing the process of recomposition, in another sense it was grinding to a halt. Just as Thatcher's housing revolution bequeathed a crisis two decades after she left office, remodelling the social in capital's image and working to inculcate bourgeois habits meant class seized up too. Officially concerned politicians have made careers presiding over social mobility commissions and banging on about aspiration, almost as if the reason why the professions are dominated by the literal children of professionals is because working class people aren't ambitious enough.
The rest is for another time, but when it comes to cultural production the same applies. While the internet has afforded new outlets for music, entertainment and the ghastly "influencers", this goes hand in hand with celebrity culture and the gate-keeping roles still played by the big ents companies. And what do we see here? The former has also seized up, with either the offspring of the famous becoming famous or, increasingly, younger actors, singers, and screen writers getting disproportionately drawn from privileged, affluent, and bourgeois layers. This is partly thanks to the decimation of arts education in schools, but also the punitive work policies overseen by successive governments. As Tony Blair courted the cream of Britpop and desperately sought inclusion in the Cool Britannia moment, his workfare approach to social security meant budding working class talent were forced into jobs at the expense of perfecting their craft. In an ancient NME interview, Richard Ashcroft said in his experience the dole worked as a sort of arts subsidy and gave The Verve space to do their thing. New Labour in its pledge to eradicate youth unemployment ensured this avenue of social mobility was shut down. And the consequence? Fewer people from working class backgrounds are entering the halls of cultural production, which are becoming increasingly hallowed, and so the children of the well remunerated are filling it instead. The consequence is a certain narrowness in mainstream cultural production. If the privileged are telling the stories, certain tales will never get told. The future is cancelled because they, as beneficiaries of the system, cannot see beyond the eternal present.
What went before was no golden age as it came with its own sexual and racialised exclusions. Nevertheless, the post-war period and rising affluence did see real social mobility (often wrongly attributed to grammar schools), but no more. The upper echelons of all walks of life are increasingly restricted to those who start from positions of economic and social advantage, and this is as true of key figures on the left as anywhere else.
A reason to be gloomy then? No. I do wonder what Mark would have made of Corbynism's success at the last general election and the optimism it stoked up on the left. Because it is easy to overstate cancelled culture and negated futures. As I write, the left wing Labour Party is a mass organisation that reaches into every community and every social circle in the land. It is truly a beast which, when mobilised, is a factor in electoral politics in and of itself. And it has transformed consciousness. For the first time since the 1980s socialism is mainstream and even communism is abroad. A new generation of leftist thinkers and writers have broken through and built large followings, the sorts of strategic debates about class and identity politics that exercised many a dusty academic tome in the 1990s command mass participation, and there is an upwelling of working class youth movements. The inner city origins of dubstep, grime, trap and deep house predate Corbynism and, arguably, helped lay some of the groundwork for it. These are as much moments of cultural production from below as punk, the Chicago/Detroit house scene, and acid house were. This does not prevent its co-option and repackaging by big capital (after all, Wiley has a MBE), but it demonstrates the continued vitality of the subaltern and the impossibility of its horizons getting swamped and subsumed by the mainstream in all aspects. The experience of becoming the classed other to cancelled culture always carries the promise of its negating the negated future of capitalist realism to itself, and exploding its reach as the infrastructure of a generalised counter-hegemony and alternative to official cultural production.
The cancellation of cancelled culture? We could be heading that way. The increased reliance of capital on immaterial labour, the movement away from "classical" surplus extraction to new vectors of capitalist exploitation, and all in the context of the attention economy introduces a new dynamic of tendency in class relations. The growing dependence of capital on labour's cognitive and social capacities as opposed to the physicality of bodies, the fact the increasingly dominant force of production - the mass employment of human brains - is hired and not owned by capital, the skills and knowledge labour acquires in the immaterial "production" process exceeds work and effectively becomes part of the common social store, able to be deployed elsewhere for payment or enjoyment; and the intangibility and, often, infinite reproducibility of commodities makes warehousing - the control of supply - exceptionally difficult. Capital has to and is developing new forms of capture to hold all this down and sustain the class relations underpinning it: the production of neoliberal subjectivity, the dissemination of capitalist realism, the stripping back of workers' rights and inducing greater precarity into labour markets, are all effects and responses to the tendency to capitalist self-cancellation. Yet all this does is increase the bind - constricting cognitive labour has the knock on of reducing the capacities of the immaterial labour on which it depends, which knocks on to surplus extraction and profits, while letting it be increases the potentials of it becoming something other than a vector of capitalist exploitation.
Politically our job is to critique and contest the encroachments of capital and its logics, increase the possibilities of cultural production against the market and bourgeois culture, and organise to mobilise for our party, our institutions, and our ways of being and becoming. The cancellation of cancelled culture, of reclaiming, rethinking, and restating the possibility of a better future is entirely doable. After all, they need us. We do not need them.
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