The ’90s were culture’s last hurrah. I won’t bore you with the list of ‘cultural innovations’ that originated in the ’90s (ok here’s a few: rave, mashup, jungle, reality TV, Onion/Daily Show joke news, MMORPGs, indie rock, Britpop, crunk, grunge, hipsters). In a conversation with some friends we agreed on 9/11/2001 as the ’90s’ proper cutoff date (as 11/11-12/1989 was its proper beginning). The dominant form of radical politics in the West — anti-capitalist, direct action oriented anarchism — had its climax in the 1999 action in Seattle, and has been drawing on more or less the same operational principles. K-punk has been complaining about this for a while; see here for his latest:
Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?
Those of us who grew up in the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s became accustomed to rapid changes in popular culture. Theorists of future shock such as Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan plausibly claimed that our nervous systems were themselves sped up by these developments, which were driven by the development and proliferation of technologies. Popular artefacts were marked with a technological signature that dated them quite precisely: new technology was clearly audible and visible, so that it would be practically impossible, say, to confuse a film or a record from the early 1960s with one from even half a decade later.
The current decade, however, has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration. A thought experiment makes the point. Imagine going back 15 years in time to play records from the latest dance genres – dubstep, or funky, for example – to a fan of jungle. One can only conclude that they would have been stunned – not by how much things had changed, but by how little things have moved on. Something like jungle was scarcely imaginable in 1989, but dubstep or funky, while by no means pastiches, sound like extrapolations from the matrix of sounds established a decade and a half ago.
Needless to say, it is not that technology has ceased developing. What has happened, however, is that technology has been decalibrated from cultural form.
And just to drive the point home, here’s something awful that just came out:
Just execrable, really. All the latest tricks of pop music from the last two years: the beefed-up 808 beats, the vocoder/auto-tune gliss, the sci-fi aesthetic, the marketable female vocalist teamed with inoffensive hip-hoppers (all of which really date back to the ’70s or ’80s and electro), wrapped into a single iTunes ready package, the function of a product like this is to fill up the club, announce to hipsters that the latest phase is ‘dead,’ and prepare the way for Kanye to introduce the next mild remix of the pop culture of the last 50 years. I found this video here (a ‘culturally relevant’ blog), as part of a funny bit of consumer advocacy/tastemaking. The blogger, inspired by the brazen cynicism of the above, fantasizes about being naive enough to straightforwardly enjoy it:
Sort of just want to be ‘a stupid mainstreamer’ who gets pumped up when I heard a song like Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” or the song “Let’s Get it Started.”
I want to be a white person
who ‘gets jacked up’
whenever a black person in ‘cool clothes’
comes out, waves their arms
rhymes into a mic
and tells the crowd to ‘get on their feet.’I will go home
buy this popular song on iTunes
listen to it when I ’start my workout’
to ‘get fucking pumped up’
then choose a slow song 4 my ‘cool down’
What this ‘poem’ recognizes in its very act of critique is that there is no such thing as ‘straightforward enjoyment’ of this song, which is objectively tired — either you admit it or you don’t, or you don’t listen to pop music enough to care either way. Setting aside fan loyalty to the band (theoretically possible), it’s not a song that inspires partisanship; even to those who profess to like it, it can be nothing more than a mass product; enjoyment of it is strictly culinary. As per the norm of modernist criticism, the loss mourned by both k-punk and ‘carles’ of hipsterrunoff is the attitude that would deny this ‘general’ or ‘common’ complacency toward culture a position of normative authority.
What has already been noted is that this narrative of cultural vacancy is overwhelmingly white, (probably) male, not a little techno-centric, and elitist in a way that feels quixotic (all registered ironically by the latter commenter and not at all by the very earnest k-punk). ‘Cultural form,’ when used as the scoring rubric according to which the ’00’s are lacking, should not be confused with a mere empirical analytic. Built into this notion are the aesthetic criteria for determining excellence, the potential for the emergence of masterpieces, and the legitimacy of criticism, criteria which only make sense within the history of European bourgeois aesthetics (see Francis Mulhern on the authority granted to culture here).
There is a left version of this among critical modernists like Fredric Jameson, where a culture is expected to go beyond the ideology of the New and produce the means of criticizing, or at least ‘mapping’ (though the visual metaphor is not really apt) its context; the equivalent of a masterpiece here would be anything from which a critic could derive knowledge beyond the fact(s) of the object itself, and could come from virtually any cultural sector; from popular entertainment to the avant-garde. A Jamesonian masterpiece is didactic, albeit in a special, often ‘unconscious’ sense. A masterpiece within postmodernism — a general situation where masterpieces are impossible — would have to be some sort of throwback, somehow outside of its own time. Which, or so I like to fantasize, is why Jameson became a theorist and not a novelist.
“Yet once this initial disjunction between the present and the New is granted, the inevitable stages of a decline, the progressive decadence of an inauthentic modernism, follow logically enough. For the New, and the break it stages with tradition, now quickly unmasks itself as a commitment, not to the present but to the future. It thereby generates spurious narratives about the development of art in general, in which the discredited bourgeois value of progress is secretly or not so secretly installed in the aesthetic realm.” (Jameson, “Transformations of the Image”)
He goes on to attack the anti-theoretical pseudo-aestheticism that tends to replace the rejection of (pseudo) modernism, and which feeds into the “nostalgia film” and the spurious, neo-Romantic ‘return’ to beauty, religion, and folk culture. The point is that there is no simple alternative direction being offered; it’s an impasse, its causes more or less identified. Which is why k-punk’s use of Jamesonian motifs have always seemed to me to fall within the latter’s critique of postmodern pastiche. It is only possible to assert Jameson himself as an arbiter of taste if the untimely irony of his style is erased, if the Adornian dialectics are dropped out and he is turned into a kind of Spinozist. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but would necessitate the abandonment of any pretension to critical theory and the very notion of cultural politics as a quasi-autonomous sphere of activity.
The avant-garde modernism of forms is not an ‘alternative;’ it is the historical background of our current situation. In a properly Spinozist universe, if the public intellectual can’t or won’t engage directly in left politics he must become an adman.
But let’s return to the argument about the disjunct between technological and cultural development. YouTube, blogs, and the rest of the Web 2.0 apparatus are mere technical platforms according to this logic: the means of production of cultural form and not forms themselves. This entails a rather strange relation between culture and technology, where changes in the latter are supposed to catalyze changes in the former without determining them, and the depth of cultural change is to be evaluated solely from within the inherited cultural discourses: those of art, music, and pop culture criticism. A new technology is not a new cultural form. Culture’s “decalibration” from technology, then, indicates the failure of new ‘technological’ products to meet ‘cultural’ criteria. By this I mean criticism cannot read any of these new objects as even potentially masterpieces without straining credibility.
Jameson’s theory of postmodernism names this cultural failure and connects it to developments in capitalist political economy since WWII and the rise of consumer society. What I want to suggest is that the ideological discourse of novelty and innovation should be understood to include the actual development of new technologies. For the past 30 years at least, technological innovation has been tied to the fluctuating demands of financialized consumer capitalism. Like the television, the iPod is both a technical and an ideological product. On what basis could theories of cultural innovation even theoretically be divorced from those of technical innovation, or financial innovation for that matter? Culture’s calibration with technology is postmodern ideology.
The shift over the past 20 years or so is in how we are now trained to experience both technological and cultural development, and how the ‘innovations’ themselves are designed to look, feel, and function: not as a series of revolutionary shocks a la Toffler and McLuhan, but as a numb, predictable wave of tweaks and ‘updates.’ Cable to wireless; iPod to iPhone; MySpace to Facebook; Blogspot to Tumblr. As velocity increases, change of every kind is normalized, routine, invisible. Ray Kurzweil, the Toffler of our day, gives us the fantasized radical telos for all this high-speed incrementalism: “what will the Singularity look like to people who want to remain biological? The answer is that they really won’t notice it, except for the fact that machine intelligence will appear to biological humanity to be their transcendent servants….there’s a lot that, in fact, biological humanity won’t actually notice.” It’s capitalist common sense that the promise of ‘authentic’ change on the modernist model is how various competing interests perpetuate themselves. Every attempt to read it otherwise is just another ad.
We aren’t living through the breakdown of culture’s dependence on technology but its culmination, the near-fusion of content and form and the omnipresence of culture as novelty. It’s therefore pointless to expect new ‘cultural forms’ to emerge from new media, where it’s all about the platform. With Web 2.0, McLuhan’s “medium is the message” slogan is now true on the most banal level. We may have, gradually, inched our way past the context in which ideas like ‘cognitive mapping’ and ‘new cultural forms’ had purchase as critical aesthetics, centered as they were around distinct works, around individual, intellectual comprehension and consumption. Mapping now is distributed among multiple ‘works’ — instances of participation — each of which is unthinkable on its own. This new connectivity has a variety of possible uses as well as risks, most of which are illegible to 20th century aesthetic theories incapable of acknowledging anything not a celebrity masterpiece, war, or revolution.
Traditional cultural (and political) practice of course continues at all levels, continuing to demonstrate, despite what the hipsters say, that the trajectory of mass culture is not destiny. And this whole chain of reflections was inspired by the apocalyptic troika of economic, ecological, and energy crisis, the awareness that the bourgeois progress narrative in all its various generic forms is a destructive and suicidal fantasy, a junky dream. Seeing these imminent disasters as a challenge for ‘culture’ to regain ‘symbolic efficacy’ is to remain enlisted in its reproduction. The full-color, hi-def imagination of real alternatives cannot precede the behaviors that actually discover them. That’s because the other worlds, the ones outside whatever features one might hate about capitalist popular culture and its various ghettoes of self-righteous self-loathing, have always already been here.